The Beak Shall Inherit The Earth

Sorry About Starting With Such A Terrible Pun
But then, you wouldn't be here if you didn't appreciate a bit of wordplay.  Okay, a lot of wordplay.  Which is highly appropriate as I am repeating last week's experiment of composing BOOJUM! whilst watching "Elementary", and as you are surely aware of Holmes' aphorism "The game's afoot!" so we can all be players together.
     Hmmm.  Unlike that other episode, they have actually moved location to Britain, specifically London, where they do the obligatory tour of the sights - Buck House, the Guards on parade, Trafalgar Square.
     Anyway, jumping from one stream of creative thought to another, are you familiar at all with that splendid post-apocalypse television series "Life After People"?  It's great.  Perhaps gloomy to the rest of you, great to me.  It takes the conceit of every single human being vanishing instantly from the surface of Planet Earth (for the sake of argument we shall treat Conrad as an honourary member of Hom. Sap.) and follows that to it's logical conclusion.  Things fall apart, the weeds take over and domestic pets end up ruling the planet.

Great!  No problems with the commute to work, then

     Including parrots.
     Yes indeed!  According to Anna, who knows about these sorts of things, your average African Grey - I do apologise for continually using this breed but I am not up to speed on parrot species - your African Grey lives from between fifty to eighty years, which is a healthy lifespan.  Typically Anna had to inject a dose of grim reality by mournfully considering that Ben* might outlive her. 
     Thus - ZAP! - all humans disappear.  Then the parrots escape.  Parrots who are able to mimic human speech.

"Who's a pretty boy, then?" - can't be answered as they have no benchmark to judge by

     "Life After People" puts forward the proposition that the human voice will not vanish until all the parrots who can replicate Received English have all expired.
     Thus! Today's blog title.  Not bad, eh?

Well, it's taken 30 minutes to type out that, so once again watching television is enterta

"Z Nation"
I need to add the proviso that my notes refer to the 13th episode, so I may add a coda tonight or tomorrow covering the last episode.
     Well now.  This is the penultimate episode of Series 3, which focusses almost exclusively on Addy, in terms of Our Heroes.  Also Lucy and The Man.  
     Remember when I mentioned that Nat Zang, who plays 10K, had been having a torrid time of it?  So had Anastasia Baranova.  She plays Addy, F.Y.I.  I didn't just pick her name at random.  She begins the episode with an incipient black eye and a badly-cut nose, and ends up being beaten black and blue. 

"Just wait till I see my agent ..."

 Minus Lucy, but plus Doc (who has an amusing flashback riffing on "Back to the Future")**.
     Only one episode left!  Don't worry, they don't have to resolve all the plot threads in a mere 42 minute scramble, it's been renewed for another season.  This may be tricky to pull off as we now have 4 different factors at play here:  Zona, represented by The Man; Our Heroes; Murphy's little empire; Lucy on the lam with zombies.  This seems a little unwieldy in terms of structure and potential drama via conflict, so I suppose September  
2017 will see.

Doc being dapper
(Hey, it can be the end of the world - you still gotta look good!)

"An Underworld At War" by Donald Thomas
Another interesting coincidence strikes again.  When I say "interesting" of course I really mean "what are the universe, quantum mechanics and causality all trying to tell me?"
     DT mentioned a novel set in the early days of the Second Unpleasantness, "Never Come Back" by John Mair.  Conrad remembers seeing this as a television adaptation many decades ago.  The novel itself came out in 1942 and was the only fiction Mair ever wrote, despite being very well received (George Orwell approved).  

A rather sparse presence on the internet

     There was a very good reason for this, which simply wasn't apparent back in the Eighties before the internet when you had to rely on the printed word alone.
     "Tell us!  Tell us, Conrad, for we are eager to know!" I hear you say.  Pausing only to warn you that sarcasm is inevitably punished, I shall explicate.
     Mr. Mair never wrote any more novels because he died in 1942.  He'd joined the RAF and was killed in a training accident, of all things.
     So, now I know and so do you too***.

Letting The Side Down: Performing Poorly At Persiflage
In reality there is only one side, as there are simply not enough alien spies wearing human camouflage to merit the formation of many teams, that therefore imply the presence of many sides, so Conrad is being 2-dimensional rather than an icosohedron.
     I am talking about my performance at the MEN's Cryptic Crossword and the Gogen puzzles.  Seven clues unsolved in the crossword and it required no less than 3 letters being provided from the solution to solve one Gogen puzzle; I've been staring at the second one for twenty minutes without daring to place a single letter.  And this is me stone-cold sober, too (Day 28 of being Sober For January, thanks for asking).




*  Her parrot, not a male acquaintance, just so we're clear.
**  But don't forget, people, drugs are bad.  Especially Z-weed.
***  Please note the absence of any puns in bad taste.