X X X

I Mean The Theme!
Which is around the letter "X", yes again, so put your tongues back in, you dirty-minded slavering rascals.  I know we've already had X as a theme, well there were more posts to post than time allowed last time, so we have a repeat performance before moving onwards - or should that be backwards? - to "W".  Yes, your humble scribe already has a theme on the next letter of the alphabet ready to go.
     Why?
     Why not!  Besides, whose blog is it?

This IS so to do with "X".
EXtreme ice-cream - three different types for breakfast!

X Ray
To the professionals who wear uniforms, get to carry guns and blow things up, this is code for "terrorist".  We shall instead be looking at the form of radiation.  
     X Rays come in two varieties, "soft" and "hard", ranging in wavelength from 10 nanometers to 0.1 nanometers, the shorter the wavelength the higher the energy and the harder the ray.  The higher wavelengths come after the ultraviolet spectrum of radiation, although don't expect them to give you a sexy beach tan as they're stopped by anything thicker than tissue-paper.

NO!  Art, I'm getting my Tazer -

     The lower, harder, wavelengths won't tan you, either, and are more likely to roast you like a chicken, actually.  These are the ones used in medical radiography and airport security scanners; doesn't it give you a  warm fuzzy feeling* to know that?  
     You might also care to know that, to a dark-adapted human eye, hard X rays are visible, as a faint blue-grey glow, except that this kind of knowledge risks the roast-chicken result.  So you'll just have to take my word for it.

Art redeems himself

X Men
I'll be brief on this as, thanks to film, everyone knows who these folks are.
     Who are they?  Mutants.  Who masquerade as perfectly normal human beings at Professor Charles Xavier's School For Gifted Children.  When first we meet them in comics, there are but four of them - Scott, Hank, Angel, Blobby and someone else I can't be bothered to look up.
     I bet their parents were well pleased: five pupils in the whole school means a wonderful teacher-student ratio.

See?  He really is blobby

Xylene
A handy dandy chemical compound first extracted from wood tar, now produced by the millions of tons the world over.  It is used in inks, rubbers and adhesives, as a cleaning agent and as a base solvent for other chemicals to be added to.  It removes the natural oils from skin, allowing other agents to get to work on it.
     It is also highly flammable, but not that poisonous.  
     Hmmm.  "Worthy but dull" is Conrad's judgement**.

I Googled "Xylene" and it was either this or a chemical diagram

X Box
A child's toy.

An ex-box.  Close enough

Or something.

X-Wing
Ah, now you're talking!  The cool fighter from Star Wars, as opposed to the clunky and unappealing Y-Wing, or the TIE Fighter, which looks like a liquorice ice-cream sandwich.

Wings: locked

          Now, the X-Wing deploys it's wings in the "X" configuration before going into action, which obviously - obviously! - makes one wonder about their deflection.  This is the point at which fire from the guns intersects.  With machine guns or cannon the deflection point is several hundred feet or yards*** ahead of the fighter, so with the particle beam/laser/generic blaster bolt of the X-Wing, is this figure going to be several miles ahead?
     I'll get back to you on this.

Wings: Unlocked.
Ready to dish out destruction!

X Ray Spex
NO! Not the spectacles that allow you to see through people's clothes!  Get your collective mind out of the gutter and remember that BOOJUM! whilst being vituperative^, excoriating^ and misanthropic^, is not salacious^^.

All clothing lined with lead

     I refer, of course - obviously! - to the punk band, who were a bit like the Roxy Music of the punk scene, in that they just arrived, blew people away and were completely different to anything else going on at the time.
     Here's a link to their classic "Oh Bondage Up Yours"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogypBUCb7DA

     My spidey-sense tells me that Poly (Singer and lyricist) was not entirely certain about the appeal of bondage.

Xerox
Photocopiers, computers, deadly dull stuff.  NEXT!

Why are office photocopiers so huge and heavy?
So you can't take them outside and do THIS to them.

Xanadu
This is taken from the poem "Kublai Khan" by Coleridge, which I haven't read and ain't going to - remember!  Conrad hates poetry! - and is Colie's version of "Shangdu", which was KK's summer home when he was on holiday from empire-building and enemy-killing.
     Also, the first to mention that dreadful film will be spitted like a roasting turkey ...

A wild boar shot dead by Hamburg police.  Honestly.
You couldn't make this up, could you?

     I know that's nothing to do with Kublai Khan or Changdu, but - whose blog is it?


* Actually this might be the x rays at work.  Get behind this lead shielding.
** At which Xylene runs sobbing from the room.
*** NO! No blithering metric measures, BOOJUM! is proud to use IMPERIAL ones. Ta.
^ Nasty
^^ Rude