What's Wordsworth?

NO! I Do Not Mean The Poet
Was he a poet?  One of those rather soggy chaps who hied around the Lake District, bleating about flowers and butterflies and transient peripatetic weather phenomena?  Or an author?  Ink-stained thumb and forefinger from dipping his quill pen into an inkpot?
     Well I'm not talking about him, so it doesn't particularly matter, does it?
     What I do mean is, what are words worth, when one has a picture or painting or photograph?  Take, for example, this vision of the heavens at 7:10 a.m. this morning:

     The camera on my phone doesn't really do it justice, as this particular rainbow was one that could feel justifiably proud of itself.  It was a big rainbow, arcing from horizon to horizon.  The force majeur of Nature at work, you might say, feeling that even if you were getting as soggy as the Lakeland poets, there was a bit of buttery brightness about the world of a morning.
     Then you have The Metro.  In their case a picture is worth 75 words.  Let me illustrate the point:

Pun-ishment

     The article consists of describing what you, the reader, can already see: damage to a car.  They don't know anything else, who the driver was, if they were injured, if there was a passenger

DOG BUNS!  Just realised I've not made a pot of tea tonight - My god my standards are slipping this presages the collapse of Western culture as Rome before the barbarians at the gate -

 - or any other facts, and the picture is a bit rubbish too, but!  or in the case of The Metro, of course! it takes up half a page.  Which is all that matters to them.  Less Wordsworth than Nerds-worth.

"Steel Tempest"
This is a fillum I caught a little of on the "Movies for Men" channel, and a couple of the names in the first credit sequence seemed familiar.  "Cromwell Productions", and "Director: Bob Carruthers".  
     The film itself is mostly in colour, with black and white contemporary inserts from 1944 thrown in, alongside modern stuff rendered in black and white - not a bad mix, it wasn't easy to tell the two apart.  Filmed from the German perspective during the Battle of the Bulge, the uniforms and equipment and vehicles all looked spot on replicas, there were Hanomag half-tracks and Marders and a Sherman tank to boot.

The Coal-scuttle Helmet
Not a big hit with the ladies

     Then the other shoe dropped - Cromwell Productions used to do military documentaries about the Second Unpleasantness, with re-enactors and military kit and vehicles.  Every so often you'd get Bob Carruthers holding forth with exposition and wireframe graphics and military jargon.  These programmes appeared on The History Channel when it was still around.
     Now, "Steel Tempest" dates from 2000, so Conrad wonders if it was a film-length advertising piece from Cromwell, in order to persuade THC to book a series from them?

Bob Carruthers: Invisible football expert as well

A Short Photo-Essay
How to radically gut your pumpkin.

Pristine

     The unsullied pumpkin, all unaware of what fate lies in store for it*.

"Let the instruments of torture be shown"

     Yes, that is a timber saw.  It takes the top off in seconds flat, and is far more efficient than a knife.

Decapitated*

      One quick saw and Hay Pesto!

Scoured clean -

     The seeds are all taken out with the ice cream scoop

Then scooped

     And the flesh is gouged out with that same ice cream scoop

Grate!

     After food-processing the sh1t out of it, we then get about a kilo of grated flesh all ready for the Halloween Pumpkin Cake.

Plum And His Slang
This P G Wodehouse chap wrote across the years and then some!  I'm currently reading "Picadilly Jim", which was published in 1918, and that's after finishing "Stiff Upper Lip Jeeves", which was published in 1963.  
     The slang, of course, takes a bit of work.  I don't wonder that some bright spark ought to come up with a Plum glossary, so that all us of the 21st century are able to understand the argot of the bright young things of a century ago.
     For example, "V-shaped" has come into my ken again.  From context one can tell that it means "things of ill omen", but does it crop up on a Google search?  No it does not!  Nor is there any entry in "Brewer's".  It might be in my "Dictionary of Phrase and Fable" but that's buried under a ton of other books, so no recourse to that today.

Hmmm.  Can't see the ladies weeping over this, exactly

     "Beasel" is another word I've looked up before.  It actually means "a shy and diffident young lady", except that Plum is applying it to the madcap plotter and borderline anarchist Stiffy Byng, so it must be ironic.

Odd, that.  I'd have called him an Owl.

     Then there is Bertie's heartfelt plea about being given a "Stoup of Malvoisie", which had Conrad baffled.  Here "Stoup" refers to a bowl or receptacle, and "Malvoisie", as you can guess with Mister Wooster, is wine.

Bertie's fond imagining

Well, we're well over the word limit, because I sat and worked-up stuff in Cafe Costa this morning, and this is after only 40 minutes.  I still have that cake to make, you see, and all I've done so far is the pumpkin.

More anon!


* Heh-heh!