" - We're Gonna Find Out Who's The Thing ..."

Ah, Yes, A Quote From One Of My Favouritest Films
(We shall pretend the 2011 version never existed).  This is the scene where Mac gets ready to test drawn blood with a red-hot wire, in case you were wondering, and SURPRISE! the resulting revelation is not what you were expecting.

Mac and the moment of truth

     This has very little to do with what I actually wanted to gloast about this afternoon, although John Carpenter is involved in both*.  You may not know it but John is a consummate musician, whose parents were both professional musicians, and I think his son is also a talented muso as well.  Ironically, "The Thing" is one of his films that he didn't do the score for.

Obviously a big fan of "Frozen"

     "Come on, Conrad, what are you up to?  Mister Carpenter's a busy man, he needs you to conclude this and move on," I hear you say.
     Well, apart from your sympathy for the Maestro, which is well placed, allow me.
     John is now touring, in promotion of two albums he's done, "Lost Themes" and "Lost Themes 2", as well as playing the odd film score, too.  Back in April your humble scribe attempted to book tickets for the gig at Manchester's Free Trade Hall; to no avail.  The website didn't work, despite turning the PC off and on again - where have I heard that before? - and after a long and venomous rant, Conrad damned the FTH to perdition and back by way of Venus.
     Then, by strange coincidence he came across a totally unassociated post on Facebook that mentioned the Victoria Warehouse and the John Carpenter gig thereat.  It appears that the FTH gig was cancelled and all the tickets reallocated to the Warehouse, meaning they were all up for grabs, and I got one.

Quite an appropriate setting, don't you thing?

     SO, Yah Boo Sucks to you, Free Trade Hall.  The gig's not until October and sadly it's on the 29th, not Halloween itself <sad face>
     Now that we've got that out of the way, the motley can commence!

Hmmm
A promotional item from work, where my Enormous Anonymous Employer is undergoing a major re-branding exercise.

     White and blue smarties.  Conrad is not entirely sure about these; after all, how many items of confectionery do you see that are blue?  For that matter, how many pure white items of confectionery do you get?  That, I presume, is the Titanium Dioxide in action.  And you thought they only made aircraft with it!

The Haul
One of the benefits of doing overtime on a Saturday is that it places me in the vicinity of Church Street Market Bookbuyers, since it's normally closed by the time I tiptoe past on my way home.  What did we acquire yesterday?  O I thought you'd never ask!

There's a story here

"1812" was a bit of an oddity; the first section had been inserted back to front and upside down, meaning I had to peel it off the spine and turn it around, with the pages now bound on the right-hand side.  The physical act of reading will be a bit of a strain**.

"On Thermonuclear War" By Herman Kahn
This time round your modest artisan is not merely reading the text but annotating and studying it rather closely.  This would probably be condemned as cruel and unusual punishment by some folks, although not by Conrad, he loves it.

Conrad: the very image of "loving it"

     At this point we have reached the point where HK is analysing what he calls "Credible First Strike Capability".  The critical aspect of this is not simply being able to devastate your Sinister opponent with H-bombs up the wazoo, but rather in being able to survive and sustain the retaliation that follows your first strike.  If you look prepared (even if this is a sham) then the Sinisters will - probably! - avoid excessive provocations.
     Rather poignantly HK provides a table of casualties versus likelihood of retaliation, which, three years after this edition was published, were viewed rather differently vis-a-vis the Cuban Missile Crisis when the figures were no longer theoretical.  Having looked into the abyss, both sides were thoroughly frightened and drew back.

As George Said To Me The Other Day -
No!  Not George Formby.  George Orwell.  Or Eric Arthur Blair, if you don't want to go in for pseudonyms.  There may be some of you out there inclined to dismiss George as a lefty swot who wrote books, but he put his money where his mouth was and put his life on the line fighting with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War.
     Which brings me to this:

     That paraphrases one of George's sayings:  "People sleep soft in their beds at night because of rough men who stand ready to do violence" and he's not far wrong.
     I can get away with this as it's a saying decades old.

Right!  I'm off to check the Beeb website and see how the Pondscum Olympics are getting on***.


*  Thus a tangent that returns to track.
** Don't worry, I'm sure I'll cope (said in a manly voice)
***  Note how I carefully avoid defining exactly what this is.  Devious, eh?