Sherbet Or Plutonium?

Or You Might Spell It "Sherbert"
Okay, now that you're hooked, Conrad will do what he oh-so-frequently does and change the subject.
     First of all, let me say that I'm pleased and happy to be here.  That means another day dawns full of hope for humanity*, because the machines have not taken over.  
     Yet.
     Last night I posted about the thin end of the wedge and how it's already here in the shape of intelligent washing machines.  Art?

     There it sits, looking perfectly innocuous, performing all sorts of hideously complicated calculations about washing weight, temperature, colour balance, axial tilt, the speed of rotation of the earth, Avogadro's Constant and so forth.  UNTIL IT GETS THE SIGNAL TO RISE UP AND TAKE OVER!

     No, Anna, no!  The machines taking over is a bad thing!  We do not want it!  You, because you're a human being and me, because I intend to take over the world when my starship invasion force gets here.

"Stranger Things"
Even as I type I have the 10 minute version of the theme tune playing in the background.  Conrad loved, loved, loved this series.  In fact if someone had sat down and said "I know - let's design a television series specifically for Conrad," they would have produced something pretty damn close to ST.  The soundtrack is excellent and pretty Anglophile - you get Bowie, Joy Division, Peter Gabriel, The Clash.

Yes you are seeing correctly

     That above is a mock VHS cover by a chap called Steelberg, just to be a bit different.  Take note of the Eggos because they're an important plot point.  Art?

Observe closely!

     El, a.k.a. Eleven, is mad fond of these and risks capture in order to steal boxes of them, which she gorges uncooked, although given her abilities she might be able to whistle up a bit of pyrokinesis and toast them.
     Why is this significant?  Because the last thing we see, a month after things end, is Sherrif Hopper leaving food, including Eggos, off in the woods.  HMMMMM!
     
And Today The Coincidence Hydra -
Actually this was yesterday, but I'd already written a lot.  I was in the kitchen, feeling like a fifth wheel, because Wonder Wifey had set up and plumbed in the new washing machine all on her own -

As it was on Friday afternoon

     Not only that, Degsy had single-handedly wrestled the old machine into the Murdermobile and taken it to the tip.  Art?

125 kilos of awkward

     My eye fell upon the slow cooker, and a thought popped into my head: make goulash soup in order to remain relevant and avoid redundancy.  Well, we didn't have any beef or red wine, so the plan to prep the slow cooker that night and set it off next morning went out the window.
     Then, returning to my PC, I checked out the "Science Matters" blog, herein the link:

http://blobthescientist.blogspot.co.uk/

     Bob posts high-quality stuff daily that makes BOOJUM! look nonsensical and silly, which is good, because that's what we aim for.  Scarily, Bob had chosen the subject of slow cooking.  I'm not going to nick his words, because that's intellectual property theft, but he makes the point that food prepared over a long time on a low heat tastes quite wonderful.  Especially when compared to microwaved food.

The Vileness Of Custard
Of course, being BOOJUM! we never let consistency or logic get in the way, so Conrad can point to custard being a significant exception to Bob's assertion above.
     It has taken until his fifties before your humble scribe has gotten around to liking custard, not on it's own but as a base for ice cream-making.  This is because of school dinners, where the accompanying jug of custard had always formed a repulsive skin, more like an edible scab in appearance than anything else.
     Anyway, when your modest artisan was a catering assistant, he had to clean out giant heated vats that had contained, respectively, porridge, gravy and custard.  The porridge was a bit hard to remove, the gravy was easy, and the custard had baked into a skin on the vat's inner surface.  It required a metal paint-scraper to get rid of it.
     Custard: pus of the devil!

Like this, yet more so

"Fizzle"
Now we get to the meat of the matter.  This word sounds quite innocuous, doesn't it?  The kind of noise you might get when eating sherbet, right?
     WRONG!  In the distorting mirror that is the blog, we are referring to a sub-optimal nuclear detonation.  Several of the Operation Grapple tests experienced this, and Conrad strongly suspects that the last Nork nuclear test was a fizzle, too.
     I remember Jeremy Hardy mocking the French testing their nukes in the Pacific a few years ago, along the lines of "So they went BANG?"  Well, yes, Jeremy.  A thermonuclear weapon is a complicated thing and you want to know if it will indeed go BANG before the Ruffian hordes cross the Polish border, and that the BANG will be as big as you intended.

Nice chap, thoroughly sound  comedian, shockingly unaware of the Teller-Ulam fission-fusion-fission warhead concept

Finally
I think Edna is concerned about the machines, too.  She looked anxious this morning.

     - unless - it couldn't be those yoghurts, could it?


*  That's you lot