I Zing The Body Eclectic

 - With Apologies To Ray Bradbury
I don't expect the younger readers amongst you to know who Ray Bradbury was, since he was an author, who wrote for a living, writing things called "books" and also "short stories" in a science-fiction/fantasy/mythic/poetic milieu.
     He had a big thing for Mars, although the Mars of his imagination, rather than boring old rust-coloured planetary desert Mars that NASA has revealed.
     I know you skeptics don't believe anything unless proof is provided, so here's a link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Bradbury

     And then we move on to the real Intro.  More of the Body*.  So far we've had ample contributions from Oscar (the Brain, or so we hope), and the Liver, who ran roughshod over my precious blog and personal reputation.  Now, I did traduce Stomach as being a monomaniac on the subject of food, food and more food, but he's come back with an insurance bond and the promise of good behaviour, so I'll allow him a little screen time.  Please don't expect anything very clever, you're definitely not going to get the Gettysburg Address from an internal organ.

<sigh>  Art, my Tazer is ready -

     Stomach here!  I promise to be good.  Multi-syllabic, even.  Please do not electrocute Art The Coal-Eating Sloven, I will be happy to consume him later on with a dash of tartare sauce and some greens.  You must have greens in your diet, variety is important.  Take me, for example.  Gravel?  My favourite!  Spent nuclear fuel rods?  Yummy!  Pond-scum decorated with dead frog?  Wonderf - wait a minute, wait a minute, what's this you're trying to sneak past me?  TOMATO KETCHUP!!  Get out of here!  I've a good mind to 

Okay, enough acid stomach, let's move on to a proper article.  Quickly now, I can hear stomach growling!

The Metro
1)  Well well well, talk about Coincidence getting into the wrong tent.  Doing the paper's Cryptic Crossword, what is 1 Down?  BOMBASTIC.  And what's this?  Reading "With Rommel In The Desert", Schmidt** and Rommel go to meet one of the more senior Italian generals.  Surname "Bastico", and after his manner and the meeting, what do Rommel and his adjutant dub the hapless Italian?
     Yes, Bombastico.

The General.
Well, he does have a natty cap.

2)  One of the Prose Comic's journos was singing the praises of a physical diary, the techno-Luddite.  Well, you'll get no argument from your humble scribe, also known as your dinosaur correspondent.  If it's not written down, it doesn't exist for Conrad.

Thus

3)  The Metro's crossword appears to have gotten rid of their 2 comic strips, which is not a great loss as they weren't particularly funny and one was quite crudely drawn.  I did add a note about Tomorrow's Cat Litter Liner having improved in quality, but it turns out the crossword clues they used yesterday actually date back to 2004 and The Scotsman.
     Food for thought.  No, Stomach, not that kind of food!

Cake!
Thanks to our oven, the Gas Mark needs to be adjusted upwards by 2 from whatever the recipe says, to ensure you bake the batter properly.  This also means you have to turn the tin to prevent the edges scorching, and tent the whole with tinfoil to prevent the top suffering.  The increase in temperature also means that your cake will tend to stick to the bottom of the tin unless you line it with paper.

     Did I line it last night?  No I did not!  Forewarned from last week's partial-debacle, I sliced up one end of the cake whilst still in the tin, wangled those two slices out, which gave enough room to use a palette knife to slide under the sponge and release it from the tin.
     All of which was worthwhile as it was a very nice cake, so much so that I had a piece.  Which is passing rare***.

"Pink Floyd Sew Rat"
We must be going back thirty years to another crossword, this time in the New Musical Express back when it really was a force to be reckoned with in the world of modern music, rather than The-Metro-In-Colour that it is nowadays (ten second pause to mourn how the mighty have fallen).
     I'm also quite slyly chuffed at being able to re-use an old screenshot.

One of these days ...

     That title was a crossword clue in the NME, and could I get it?  I could not.  I had all Pink Floyd's albums and scanned their titles and tracks and still didn't get it.
     Then, of course, the penny dropped.  Who is the Floyd's bass guitarist, singer and composer?  Why none other than Roger Waters.  Waters.  The anagram of "Sew Rat".

Thank you and goodnight!

What's that?  Conrad's kidneys were promised?  Tomorrow!  Tomorrow, gentle reader!

*  Whose body?  MINE of course!
** The author.  Not someone I conjured up at random.
*** No insults about SpongeGob, thank you