Vanadium!

Yes, Vanadium
It sounds like a province of the Roman empire, doesn't it?  "Far Vanadium, clad in pine forest, enpimpled with mountains and full of gruff hardy Teutons who drink lots of beer."
     Sorry, WRONG!  It's a metal.  Atomic number 23, silvery-grey, malleable and ductile, and it just happened to pop into my head this morning.  Thank you Oscar and Steve*.

The majestic wooded ranges of - no, hang on a minute -

     You can't actually say anything very interesting about it**, except that it was named after the Scandinavian goddess of beauty.  Quite why a dull grey material evokes a sense of beauty is a moot point. Scientists - peculiar chaps, what?  Anyway, since I hate to leave anything well alone once picked upon, I wrote a pome about it:

"Vanadium!  Vanadium?  What the heck is this?

A boring kind of metal, I'd give it a miss.

Vanadium, vanadium, it doesn't explode or radiate.

It toughens steel; blog content it don't generate."

     And with that anticlimactic Intro out of the way, the motley may commence ...

A Look Back In Ambrose
As you should surely know by now, Conrad is not at all reflective or self-aware and if he were a computer would probably be a Commodore 128k.  Generally his mind has all the depth of a desert stream and the activity of a bottle of water***.  Thus it is with some interests that he posts what went up on BOOJUM! 3 years ago.
     "A cynical ploy to boost the word count!" comes your critique.  Well - partly.  Not wholly - after all, wouldn't you like to know what was going on in your mind 3 years ago?

BOOKS
Collected another 8 books from the Post Office Sorting Depot, which came in two giant parcels that most definitely would not fit through the letter-box.  This means my military history collection now approaches 400 books, as opposed to the 500 I had before the Giant Book Cull of 2010. 

What's that?  Of course I haven't read them all!  Collecting them is an end in itself!  The bitter fork-prod of irony is that now I'm working I can afford to buy the books, but don't have time to read them; whilst on the dole I couldn't afford to buy any but had ample time to read them. 

There are people who go into a decline and turn into urban fossils when they finish working because they have nothing to fill their empty haunted lives with; well I have hundreds of books to read, thanks, so bugger off anomie!

ICE CREAM
If anyone read yesterday's post (I don't flatter myself that this figure =>1) then let it be known that the ice-cream turned out rather successfully.  Extremely solid but without a lot of ice-crystals.  Sophie, wise lady catering consultant at work, states that adding liquid glucose prevents the mix from becoming an utterly immovable block.  I shall try this next time.  First, of course, we have to finish this lot of ice cream.

DEATH
In other late-breaking news, Ambrose Bierce is 172 years old.  Mr Bierce has successfully cheated the Grim Reaper for over a century now.  Speaking from his New Mexico canyon hideout, he refused to share the secret of immortality with the rest of us, because the rest of us are, in his words "jackasses".  Thank you Ambrose.  I baked this cake for your birthday but you aren't getting it now.

Toodle Pip!

     On reflection, perhaps you wouldn't.  Moving swiftly along -

Ambrose Gwinnet Bierce.  Not sure about the hairdo, Amb, but that's a splendid moustache

"Preacher"
Well, now.  Episode Three.  So we have identified the two odd Brits as being - well, as being beings NOT OF THIS EARTH!  
     Though Conrad wonders, would they not have blended in better with an American accent?  Mind you, the lead cast are all British, so maybe they feel right at home.
     Also, love Cassidy's description of the preacher himself, Jesse Custer, as "a wrecking crew".  Absolutely spot-on.  He drinks, he smokes, he punches people ever so hard, and we now know an even darker secret about him.  See the footnotes because it's a SPOILER!^

Swagger, poise, and knuckles of cast iron

Posting A Bit Late Tonight
For a very good reason, Darling Daughter is up to visit as it was Father's Day yesterday, and in the Mansion we laugh at calendars.  Conrad sat and shovelled a plateful of curry that she'd help make down his gullet, then watched "Game of Thrones", where I infuriated everyone with a constant stream of questions.  Art?

Darling Daughter somewhat amused by being snapped.

     She had, of course, brought a card offering.  Art?

      - and added an amusing script to the interior.  Art^^!

Do you see?

     Being Conrad Dad I had to point out the "your" was mis-spelled, and Sal acknowledged that she'd run the thing past Tom last night, and he'd pointed out the error.  She was going to correct it and forgot, then was going to warn me, and forgot, and then caved in and allowed me to mercilessly mock her on BOOJUM! which she doesn't read anyway and so will never know about.  Tee hee!



*  My subconscious and memory respectively.  They usually earn their keep -
** - but not here
*** Still water, at that.
^  He murdered a policeman.  Well, apparently.
^^  We're making him earn his keep tonight, eh!