Thank You, Oscar

I Think
No!  Not the film award - although ...  As you regular readers of BOOJUM! are aware, Conrad gets an occasional input from Oscar (his subconscious, so-called because of his Wild nature) or Steve (his memory, so-called for no good reason).  "The sleep of reason produces monsters" goes the quote, although I have always found that rather ambiguous, whilst the sleep of Oscar or Steve produces random irrelevance.
     Today, for instance, we have the word "Calyx", which swam up out of the septic soup that is your humble scribe's mind on waking.
     I wrote it down and have just looked it up.  Either it's a botanical term, meaning the petals of a flower arranged in a whorl,  or it means "a cup-like structure".
     Okay, so I drink a lot of tea at the weekend.  From a cup.
     There you have it.  Art?

Art?  I see no cup!

     And I am now off to make a large cup of exceedingly strong coffee.  Catch you in a minute ...

... and here I am, back again.  I'm having the coffee now since if it gets imbibed later, I'll be twitching like an electrocution victim until the small hours of Monday.  Whilst this might be amusing for any outside observers*, it would be a lot less so for me, having to get up at 7 a.m.

"On Thermonuclear War" By Herman Kahn
Conrad is now 154 pages into this compelling tome and is at the point where Ol' Herm is discussing how weapons systems must not appear to be too dangerous, lest they scare people too much.  How you sugar-coat a 5 megaton warhead that will destroy 30 square miles of whatever it hits is a challenge for the public relations companies the Pentagon hires, and isn't actually what I meant to discuss.
     No, because Ol' Herm makes a distinct crack about rendering systems not being too terrifying by ensuring that no "unauthorised behaviour" takes place.  Which, as I noted, is the plot of "Doctor Strangelove" pared down to a single line.

One of the best film quotes ever.

     Another thing that Ol' Herm mentions as if it were established fact is the "train mobile Minuteman" system.  This is exactly what it sounds like; a train pulling boxcars that actually conceal Minuteman nuclear ICBM's.  The system was being trialled when Herman wrote his book, but it wasn't taken any further, so he seems to have assumed it would get budgeted approval.
     "But Conrad!" I hear you cavil.  "Southern Trains can't run anything on time!**"
     Ah, but the TMM would have been run by Strategic Air Command, who are considerably more able than First Bus or Southern Trains put together, multiplied together or raised to the nth power together.  In times of crisis these trains would lumber off to a firing site, which could be anywhere along the entire South Canadian rail network.  They were supposed to look like any other train, although the presence of 36 Air Force Police armed with automatic weapons might have made people the teensiest bit suspicious.

AFP attempt to remain low-profile by avoiding gunplay

Oh Dear.  Oh Dear Indeed!
As you may already know, your humble scribe is getting on a bit - in 10 days time I shall hit the 55 orbits-round-the-sun mark - and as such have to squeeze as much into my day as possible, consistent with writing BOOJUM! of course.
     Thus a new internet distraction is a terrible, terrible thing.  Terrible! 
     Personally, I blame Degsy.  He was the one playing broadcasts from The Sci-Fi Movie Podcast, which I made the mistake of checking on-line.  Twenty minutes later I have discovered that Kevin Smith, the film director, is a MAJOR fan of "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension".

The villains of the piece

     Any response on your part that smacks of ignorance of TAOBBAT8D will be met with deadly force - no, sorry, that's the Air Force Police, isn't it?  I shall be very cross indeed!
     Peter Weller (who played Buckaroo) and John Lithgow (who played Professor Emilio Lizardo) both confessed to Kevin that they had no idea what the film was about after reading the script -

Oooh!  Oooh! I know!  I know!  Ask me!

     Did I say how terrible this is?  TAOBBAT8D is only one film on the website and there are 149 others present.  149!
     As I said, TERRIB - what was that about Lord John Whorfin?  And Christopher Lloyd corpsing during the torture scene?  Now, what sold it for me was mention of "Yoyodyne" <cont. Page 94>

Also, Kevin claims to be developing a Buckaroo Banzai television series.  Kev, you'd better not be yanking my chain.  Old but still dangerous, that's me.

That's me, squeezing Anna dangerously.
(We think I was trying to smile)

*  The white vans are still out there, you know.
**  "Doctor Strangelove" screenplay by - Terry Southern