Double Trouble

Thank You Sophie
No, no, not that Sophie - she's the expert baker - this Sophie, whom Conrad sits next to at work.  The Pusheen fan, remember?

Pusheen.  Obviously.  I mean, it's not Sophie, is it?

     Anyway, there I was, grinding through hundreds of e-mails, sanity stretched close to breaking point*, when I mentioned to Sophie that I'd watched a Czech animation she'd recommended.  From there, logically enough, she mentioned Richard Ayoade (Mos from "The IT Crowd") and a film he'd directed called "The Double".

Richard

     As you already know, it takes very little for Conrad's mind to go off on a flight of fancy, very little indeed, and "Double" was enough to do it.
     Hence this post.

Doppleganger
Yes there is a double here - this is German for "Double-goer" and means another person who is the spitting image of yourself.  In the more sinister folklore of Central and Eastern Europe they weren't merely a duplicate, they were your evil duplicate who sought to destroy and replace you.
     Some twenty years ago your humble scribe was the doppelganger of Robbie Robertson, musician and ex-member of The Band.  Here's a still from the film "Carny":

Perhaps I flatter myself a tad.  But only a tad.

     Maurice, the office cleaner, caught sight of a clipping of RR I'd stuck to the office wall and was terribly confused.
     I've also seen "Carny" and it's extremely peculiar to see yourself talking in a Canadian accent.  
     To date I'm not sure if I or RR is the evil twin seeking to take over the other's life.  

Double Diamond
Conrad remembers the tagline from the adverts "Double Diamond works wonders!" which is an odd assertion to make as it's a beer, not a superhero serum, although some chronic wine-bibbers might disagree.
     Anyway, a picture of the scamp:

Oh no!

    Oops.  They appear to have inspired Daredevil as that's his logo.  Art?  Different evidentiary picture, please.

Wild claims indeed

     -  but at least it's not shockingly sexist.  It's still around, in a small way.

Double Dutch
Meaning incomprehensible language.  Why the unfortunate Dutch?  After all, Hungarian sounds a lot more complicated, and Russian uses a different alphabet.
     Apparently the phrase was originally longer - "Double Dutch coiled against the sun", meaning something done in a clumsy or incorrect way, and we've pared it down from that.


     Ha.  Sometimes I amuse even me.

Double Cream
Admit it, you've never wondered about double cream before, have you?  To you it's just a dairy liquid to pour over your pudding.

I prove my point

     NO! NO IT IS NOT!
     If I may elaborate, double cream has a much higher fat content than single cream, almost 50% as opposed to less than 20%.  It is thus able to stand up to the rigours of baking or boiling that single cream would curdle at.  You can also whip it into a solid form, which can then be sweetened with icing sugar and piped onto cakes as a filling.  Brought to the boil and with chocolate added, it becomes the versatile ganache.
     So.  Useful for a lot more than merely drizzling over your pie.

Double Tap
Now, this one is rather less pleasant than chocolate decoration, so you may look away now if of a nervous disposition, or if you lack Conrad's (rather worrying) obsession with guns.
     To those in the business of rendering bad guys dead by filling them with high-velocity projectiles, the phrase "Double Tap" means shooting said bad guy twice, usually once in the upper body's centre of mass to immobilise them, then another shot to their head.  This is very likely to mean that they no longer take an interest in the world around them**.  Hrm.  Art?  Be subtle, please.

Not quite what I expected.  Still SFW thankfully

"Double Deckers, The"
This was a children's television programme from 1970 that featured seven kids whose HQ was an old double decker bus that resided in an abandoned scrap yard.

And here they are

     A couple of the cast went on to bigger things - Brinsley Forde to be lead singer of the reggae band Aswad, and Peter Firth to become an established serious actor.

Double Time
Nothing to do with The Doctor.  Another military item, although a lot more innocuous than Double tapping.  Normally soldiers march at a certain pace that gets them from A to B efficiently and without wearing them out.  However, if an emergency arises - you need to get your platoon back to barracks before the canteen runs out - then you proceed at double time, i.e. twice as fast as normal.  Also known as "At the double", which is what some of the servicemen in "X The Unknown" were doing before the Mobile Mud Monster strikes.

"Double time, men, before they run out of haggis!"

* What do you mean, "How is that different?"
** Being dead will do that.