No Touching The Sides

Normally We'd Be Talking Food
As Conrad usually wraps himself around fodder with considerable alacrity, so much so that it does not, indeed, touch the sides.  However, I am instead referring to that pertinent Latin phrase "Noli Me Tangere" which means "Don't touch me", a phrase that rings very true with your humble scribe.  British, don't you know.  Not into the touchy-feely happy-huggy stuff.  Manly shake of the hand is good enough for us, none of that effete Continental song and dance.  No touching the sides, back or front, ta very much.

At no point do they touch!

     "Er - quite, old chap.  Um - exactly what are you banging on about now?" I hear you query.  "Apart from stomachs."
     Okay, let's look at that word "Tangere"; it comes from the Latin "To Touch" and from this we derive that splendid word "Tangent" - meaning "Not touching", in the sense of going off in a completely different direction to that expected.  
     Which, as you may have guessed, is what we do here at BOOJUM! all the time.  Having demonstrated this three times over, let us now proceed to another purveyor of Tangent As Art Form - The Flophouse.

The Flophouse Masticates "The Spirit"
It means "To chew" in case your smutty minds were wondering or wandering.  A little background here: the Flopsters are Ethan, Dan and Stuart, and they do a podcast where they skewer films that were either commercial or critical flops, or both.
     
     http://www.flophousepodcast.com/

     A link.  Doubtless this will boost their site traffic enormously, and they owe it all to me.  Please discuss how much in royalties I will receive in the Comments.
     The podcast I was listening to was about "The Spirit", a film directed by George Miller from 2008.  It does not score well - only 4.8 on IMDB, which is kind of below "Meh" as a rating.  It made back possibly $25 millions on a budget of $60 million, and the Flopster's opinion is that it's pretty rubbish.

Will Eisner's original "The Spirit" - little-known but high quality

     "Oh great, a bad film review," I hear you quail.  "What fun."*  
     Tangents, folks, tangents.
     At one point the hero of our film, The Spirit, is dangling by his overcoat from a gargoyle, which the Flopsters immediately take offence at.

The Miller version - so-called as it's been ground to powder

     "His overcoat has to be least fifty feet long!" cavils Elliot. 
     "He's Spawn's cape on his back," he also observes.
     Dan and Stuart immediately pick up on this reference, riffing on Tod McFarlane, the creator of "Spawn" - who is a comic book character, not a slice-of-life graphic novel about infant frogs - and they insult him roundly, 

The bod of Tod

before moving swiftly onto Rob Liefeld and a Levi Jeans commercial he did - Rob Liefeld being another comic book artist so they do at least maintain a theme here - who states "I draw comics in my 501 jeans".  They then riff on Rob Liefeld's drawing style, about how his characters always have gigantic shoulderpads, and as Elliott says " - and put some pouches on a belt around his thigh" because Conrad remembers just these criticisms of RL elsewhere on the internet, and that he cannot draw feet to save his life.  "Foot-level mist exists everywhere", as Elliot aptly notices.

We rest our case - do you see any feet here?

     There you go, a sequence of wild tangents that have nothing to do with The Spirit but which are FAR more amusing and entertaining.

Yesterday's Haul
Being on an early shift, Conrad ducked into the Oxfam bookshop on his way to the bus stop, and was justly rewarded by a clutch of books as below, all for the remarkably modest sum of £14.95.  Art?

Okay, I admit it, not a lot of variety

     Those two Osprey titles alone, if new, would have cost £26.  That one on the "Underworld at War" is a corrective to the "Gun Button to Fire" as both concern the British in the Second Unpleasantness, one being them at their worst, the other at their best.  As for "Martin Chuzzlewit", I do like me a bit of Charles Dickens and his Victorian verbiage; if you are lucky I shall grace you with some of his language.  
     Speaking of which -

Elementary
Conrad still binge-watching the first series of this, and if you want to know why there is an absence in your viewing, akin to the current shortage of courgettes thanks to bad weather in Southern Spain, then you've not seen the very easy-on-the-eyes Lucy Liu on the big screen because she's been doing "Elementary" for the past 5 years.  Art?

This is as racy as you get.  The other photos were FAR too NSFW

     I made notes whilst watching, because that's the kind of person I am**, and scribbled down "Prurient", "Avarice", "Shirked" and "Volition", exactly the kind of words I would try to include in everyday conversation.

Thank you and goodnight!


*  That squeaking noise I'm hearing had better not be you tiptoeing to the back door.
**  Uncanny, un-natural and liable to extremely loud sneezes.