The Fiendish Fish Of Mister James Blish!

Not Really, It Just Rhymes,  Except Perhaps -
Plus last year I got some big traffic hits when using fish in the blog title.  Anglers searching for like-minded bloggers in the blogosphere?  In which case they will have had an unpleasant surprise when they read BOOJUM!  Heh!
     Anyway, James Blish, who wrote one of Conrad's favourite sci-fi novels, "Cities In Flight", was also one of the first people to novelise Star Trek.  You see?  You see how it everything is joined together?  <desperately tries to think of a fish-based pun for Star Trek> AHA!  and who was the first commander of the Enterprise?  Captain Christopher PIKE*!

NO!  Art, I'm getting my Tazer -

A Scale model of old Pikey -
D'you see?  how clever I am?  Fish?  Scales?

     None of which has anything to do with the Intro today, well, apart from phasers, which are a staple of Star Trek.  You see, after today's earlier post about "How to prove murder when there are phasers set to vapourise?" I wondered about vapourising a person with a phaser.

Hmmm.  Looks a bit painful

     Thankfully for me, since MI5, UNIT, the CIA and GSG are all watching me, phasers do not exist so I can't be accused of planning mayhem.
     Anyway, as you can see above, that's someone getting turned into glowing vapour by phaser fire.
     <Mister Hand intervenes in the interests of honesty>
     Well, no, it's not but pictures of people getting zapped are a bit rare.  This is someone getting turned into glowing vapour by phaser fire:

Hmmm.  Not quite as painful but every bit as final.

     Now, I used this earlier today so don't think ill of me**.
     Okay, so you are a ravening villain with a phaser set to "Obfuscate" and you obliterate your sworn enemy.  What, I ask you, happens when you've successfully turned the Red Shirt into something that adds to the beauty of the sunset?  Why, your phaser beam keeps on going - at the speed of light - until it hits the next target, turns that one into filler for an e-cig, then keeps on going ... 
     I think you see my point here.  Given the sluggardly nature of human reflexes, your phaser beam will have destroyed everything in a direct path to the limit of the horizon before you manage to turn it off.
     Oops!
     I did think that, to avoid huge class-action lawsuits (for whilst the Federation may be a paradise, they are bound to have an infestation of lawyers), there must be some kind of detector in a phaser that picks up the miniscule amount of energy reflected off the target before it gets smoked.  When this feedback stops, so does the phaser.  Simples!
     Unless, of course, it gets damaged, or corrupted or, you being the wielder and a raging homicidal maniac to boot, you disengage the safety.
     Of course, I may be over-thinking this a bit ...

Conrad, cogitating.  Either thinking about Twinkies or Atomic Death Rays.

An Embarrassment Of Riches
Yes by Jove, Michael Gove.  As you already know, Conrad has an un-natural lust for the Twinky bar, and if this were South Canada you might say he was <ahem> "Hinky for the Twinky".  

Conrad's treasure trove.
Okay, it has low market-capitalisation value, but you can eat it.

     What you may not know is that he is equally focussed on the mince pie, and since this is the UK, we can indeed say that he "Has an eye for the mince pie."  I got two boxes as they were going cheap.
     So what I plan to do is chop up all the Twinkies and mince pies, chuck them in a big bowl, stir them up a bit and then scoff the lot.

My Hero

Dear Auntie Beeb
Really, you ought to stop asking silly questions like this one.  Allow your humble scribe to illustrate -

A question Conrad asks himself every day

     The thing is, your gifted author doesn't just sit down with one book at a time.  No, he has a whole spread of them on the go all at once.  For instance -

Most of the current reading list

     I wonder if, being pedantic and hair-splitting to the nth degree, I ought to keep a list of which books I have read and finished? I may get back to you on this one.

Oh The Irony
One thing that Conrad does when dogsitting is watch television programmes.  This might strike you as Not Really News - in which case I strongly advise you to avoid The Metro newspaper - yet it matters to me as I don't do it all that often.  Even when I do I've still got a pile of books and my notepad at the ready.
     Which came in useful today.  There is a channel still broadcasting called "True Christmas Channel", which is either a bit behind the times, or fantastically ahead of them.  What did it have as a programme today?
     "The Calendar Girl Murders".
     One feels that the "true" in "True Christmas" has somehow entirely missed the point of the season of peace and goodwill.

This would be right up their street.

* Sometimes I impress even me with how clever I am.  Like right now.
** You can think ill if you like, I really don't care.  I'm horrid that way.