The Catcher In The Wry

The Ghost At The Feast
 - and Edna, lurking at one's elbow.  Conrad threw together a hasty meal last night, nothing particularly fancy: sliced chorizo, pitta, chilli cheese dip, pickles and a pecan plait.

     EXCEPT IT WASN'T A PECAN PLAIT!  It was actually chocolate chips rather than pecans that deceived me, along with the semi-opaque wrapping.  Disgusted, I gave it away.  You can see it, lurking maliciously at the edge of my plate.
     "Hello there!" said Edna.  "I couldn't help noticing that you have some sliced chorizo sausage there."
     Conrad gravely regarded her.
     "I don't want to impose," added the Wunderhund, "But, if you experience any difficulty in coping with that chorizo, I would be delighted to help."
     Conrad continued with his cool gaze.
     "Just putting it out there as an option," she finished.
     Conrad finished off the chorizo.

Further Of Food
Conrad has to occasionally suffer the slings and harrows of curious colleagues whilst dining at work, because he does not subscribe to conventional wisdom concerning what goes with what.  Thus, Alex, quoth yesterday: "That's weird".
     NO IT WAS NOT!
     Allow me to elucidate.

Now, just what is heretical about that lot?  And be careful how you answer.

Today's Theme Is - Mercury
Because there's lots of room with a topic like this.  First up,
Cinnabar:  This is a mineral, mercuric Sulphide, and the name derives, like all too many things, from the Greek "Kinnabar".  It is bright red in colour and is the principal source for the metal mercury.  It's also the source of the dye vermillion.  Which used to be ground up for treatment as a pigment, so one imagines this is why some artists of times gone past were a bit potty.

Grind with caution

Mercury:  The metal itself, symbol "Hg" as it used to be called "Hydagyrum".The only metal to be liquid at room temperature and extremely toxic with it.  It has a ferocious reaction with aluminium, which is why many airlines ban it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Ilxsu-JlY

     There's a link to mercury destroying an aluminium strut.
Mike Mercury: The test pilot who flew "Supercar" in the eponymous Gerry Anderson television series.  It's one of his earlier efforts so you may not be familiar with it.  I shall give you pause as the following picture is, frankly, rather frightning.

Sinister!

     His eyebrows appear to almost encircle his head, which probably makes for a good warm seal if he has his hood up.  But then we'd not be able to see his elaborately coiffed hair, would we?
Mercury Rev:  A South Canadian band.  I only have one of their records, the breakout "Deserters Songs", which is well worth getting and one of the few contemporary records I know of that features a musical saw.

That's enough for today.  We will return here in future, though, count on it.

"Martin Chuzzlewit" By Charles Dickens
This is a considerable contrast to the last Dickens I read, which was "A Tale Of Two Cities", which, believe me, is not a comic novel.  Murder, arson, mass murder, manslaughter, infant death, political imprisonment, permanent deafness - it's hard to find a laugh in it.
     Whereas MC is considerably lighter in tone.  I confidently predict that it will not end with the lead character getting himself guillotined.  Only 50 pages in so far, as the Introduction and Foreword take up a lot of room.  We have been introduced to the fabulously wealthy Mr. Chuzzlewit, who is being pursued by a pack - I use the word advisedly - of greedy, grasping relatives all interested in getting their sweaty digits on his money.

Project Daedalus
I came across this, or, rather, re-discovered it last night when chasing up pictures of James Blish's "Spindizzy" in order to add hilarious captions to them.
     "More Greeks, eh?" I hear you comment.
     Not really.  It was a sophisticated engineering study carried out in the Seventies by the British Interplanetary Society - which sounds exactly like it was invented by H.G. Wells - to design a spaceship capable of interstellar travel.  Art?

Daedalus, with Saturn V for scale

     They restricted themselves to current or near future technology, and it had to make starfall within a human lifetime.
     As you can see, it's frikkin' enormous, the first stage massing 46,000 tons, and even the comparatively small second stage hit the scales at 450 tons.  It would have to be assembled in orbit and you'd need to harvest tens of thousands of tons of Helium-3 from the Moon to serve as fuel.
     The kicker is, thanks to using nuclear fusion for propulsion, it would manage to accelerate to 12% of light-speed.  Which would probably trip a few speed cameras.

1st and 2nd stage.

     

It's A Gas

Actually -
 - your humble hack being a hair-splitting pedant of the worst kind, "It's" is three letters and an apostrophe rather than being one of the four states of matter.  Yes, four: solid, liquid, gas and plasma.
     Yes, we are back to discussing poison gas again.  Don't look surprised, it's old ground for BOOJUM! and we're not going to be covering the news and assertions of assassinations, in fact we are going to be looking a long way back, all the way to the Fifties and one of my favourite sci-fi novels:  "Earthman, Come Home".  

The "spindizzy" in action

Which is an ambiguous title, I admit; is it a plea or a statement?  Regardless of intent, it was written by James Blish.
     In ECH Ol' Jim has invented technology that allows a city-sized object - like a city - to sit on the surface of a gas giant planet.  In amongst cruising the galaxy.  To what end?  That's speculative, as we never get a definite answer from those doing the planning for this deed, except that the purpose is nefarious, whate'er it may be.
     One character, however, posits an explanation - a bridgehead created by floating a city on the surface of a gas giant would allow the acquisition of unlimited amounts of poison gas.
     Well, yes, but -
     Ol' Jim was hot stuff at conjuring up Wagnerian space-opera themes and technology, not to mention maths (there are pages of this in "They Shall Have Stars" that convinced the credulous that the Dillon-Waggoner graviton polarity generator was indeed possible),

 - and yet ...

 but a little hazy on chemical warfare, one feels. ECH was written in the Fifties, when nerve agents like the "V" series were making modern warfare ever more unpleasant.  The prospect of star-spanning super-cities waging war by using the weapons of centuries long gone stretches the imagination too far.
     Mind you, Ol' Jim does work in a dig that means these citizens of the far future aren't certain if the First and Second Unpleasantness actually happened or not ...

Did this happen?!?!
(Yes)

Picture The Scene
An image of domestic tranquillity, Edna sulking on the carpet, the Atlantic falling from the heavens outside, Conrad watching television, notepad to hand.
     Yes, really.  For one thing, I like to be prepared whilst watching "Elementary" because only that way can I properly capture the vocabulary used.
     Here we go: "Illicit" - for which read illegal.
     "Retrenching" - standing back to reconsider one's position
     "Wastrel" - a cad and a bounder.  One who is, and is up to, no good.
     "Sobriety" - bandied about a lot.  A state of not being drunk, a condition Conrad hopes is your default state.  Also used to refer to Sherlock not being bombed out of his head on drugs.

Your trenching needs de-drenching

"Pecadilloes"
Go on, guess.  Without Googling!  No, they are not a variety of canvas footwear.  No, they are not a form of canoe.  No, they are not seasoned smoked Spanish sausages.
     They are a minor transgression in the big scheme of things, like you Googling for the answer.  As a word it came up during the very first episode of "Father Brown", and one can easily imagine the good Father forgiving one of his parishoners a trivial misdeed.
     Me, not so much*. 

Pecadilloes?

     
Wait, What?
One of the persistent programme choices at The Mansion, when your modest artisan is not hogging the controls and bingeing on "Elementary", is that annoyingly watchable programme "Pointless".  Conrad NEVER sits down with the intent of actually watching it, yet as inevitably as nightfall, he does.
     Although I have to wonder what the advertising people think of this quiz show's demographic.  The advertisements all seem to be about incontinence or bowel problems and other ghastly stuff that you might imagine the elderly to be stricken with.
     Please, not whilst I'm eating.
     Thank you.

A continent.  Which is as close as we're getting, thank you very much

Behold The Beast
There is no sound present here, so you will have to imagine a loud purring coming from Jenny.  Having sneaked her way out of the kitchen, dodged Edna - our dog, I hasten to add, in case you were a little puzzled by that line about her sulking, found the door to My Sekrit Lair open and ventured inside, she has now taken up what she fondly imagines is the Victoriously Triumphant Doze Pose.  Really, she exudes smugness. 

This is not a bad thing, to be honest.  Conrad much prefers her static on the covers rather than roaming around my Mancave, being inquisitive and knocking over my Historical Miniature Replicas**.



*  I bear grudges.  And I did warn you NOT to Google.
**  Which, and I'm not going to repeat this, are NOT "toy soldiers"

Thomas Pynchon's "The Meaning of Life"

Admit It, I Fished You In
Although it was only there to get your attention, I do wonder what a $150 million film directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Ethan Hawke would be like.  It would, inevitably, feature Yoyodyne (Propulsion Systems), Pig Bodine, be principally set in the Cotswolds (Tom being a bit of an Anglophile) and feature intelligent plants trying to achieve Singularity.  There would be an incredibly long cast list, conspiracies galore, Paul Anderson on scriptwriting and pop culture references.

Paul T. Anderson, who has probably met <gibbers with excitement> Thomas Pynchon

     Which is where the blog really begins - the above is just a flight of whimsy.  Many months ago I re-read Tom's novel "Bleeding Edge" and noted down all the words or phrases that struck me as incongruous or unusual or just plain inexplicable.  Some of this would be due to date, as BE is set over a decade ago.  For others, Tom's meaning has to be dug out, mined out of teh interwebz, if you want a mining analogy*.
     So let the motley, with a new set of valves and go-faster stripes,  begin!

Bleeding Edge: Conrad's Explanations
I know, I know, I could just go look up the wiki for BE.  Where would the entertainment be in that?  You might as well have an electrically-powered gadget that rapidly heats water to boiling point, instead of hanging a cauldron over a log fire in the inglenook.
     Here are the terms and clarifications.
     "Stochastic Crossover":  This is predictive methodology used in stockmarket analysis, in order to determine whether the value of a stock is going to increase or decrease.  I think.  It's a complicated subject, but a real thing and  given that our heroine is an accountant, quite relevant.  And real.  You always have to check with Tom.

A stochastic, crossing over.

     "P.o.I.":  Person of Interest.  Not the excellent television series but a potential suspect, who hasn't quite got to being an actual suspect, if not for want of trying.  This is yet ANOTHER example of that swinish Coincidence Hydra sinking it's fangs into my fesse, as I wrote this down nearly a year ago and only posted about the programme earlier today.  Or it's a Hawaiian dish made from the taro root.

Reese.  No - hang on -

     "Papa Doble": This is a cocktail, a variation on a daiquiri, as consumed by Ernest "Papa" Hemingway in large amounts.  It consists of ice, rum, grapefruit juice, lime juice and cherry liquer.
     "Maven": I'd seen this word used before and never quite understood the context.  Well, it refers to a trusted expert in a specialism, who seeks to pass on their understanding to others.  It comes from the Yiddish "meyvn" which translates as "expert", which makes sense as our heroine is Jewish.
     Here endeth the lesson for today.

Close enough

A Film Review
I see that "Patriot Day" is now out at the cinemas, however, given the horribly unpleasant nature of the film, Conrad Is Not Going There.  Instead -
     "John Wick: Chapter 2": I've seen the first one and doubt this can hold a candle to it**.  What I liked about the first one is that Mr Wick is pretty damn dangerous but he's not superhuman.  At one point he gets injured badly enough to require ad hoc surgery, after which he ignores the advice given him by the sawbones ("choose a different line of work" would also be quite high on my list of good advice given).  He also manages to get caught, and requires a bit of deus ex machina third-party help to escape.

John!  You've lost so much weight ...

     "The Founder":  Oh my, once again Hollywood utterly fails to appreciate the requirements a blog author has in terms of generating content.  "The Founder".  Founder of what?  Where?  When?  There is Michael Keaton on the advert, which is good, I rate Mike - I can call him that as we're such terrific friends - and he did play that charming rogue Beetlejuice***.  BUT WHAT DID HE FOUND!  
     That's all for films today.  Is that a sigh of relief or disappointment that I hear?

"Look what I FOUND," said the Sandworm

Bart Gets Biffed
Conrad has less than zero time for the extremely silly Apollo hoax conspiracy theories that float around out there.  I know man went to the Moon because it's where I park my spaceship and I know the environment.  Bit of a commute, I agree, but it keeps it safe from nosey parkers^.  
     Anyway, Bart Sibrel.  Whilst working for a television station he trespassed on the property of an astronaut, and got fired for it.  You or I - okay, you - might think "Time to move on".  Not Bart.  Oh no.  He has since carried a grudge against all astronauts, although it's not clear if he also hates cosmonauts.  Probably, on the grounds that they all trespass beyond Earth's orbit.  He has a modus operandi of stalking and ambushing ex-astronauts, loudly declaring that they are thieves and liars and that they'd better swear on a Bible that they went to the Moon.

Buzz is back on my Christmas card list

     Well, he made a mistake picking on Buzz, who got extremely annoyed that his grand-daughter was also being harrassed; he hauled off and socked Sibrel a good one on the jaw.  (bear in mind that Buzz is twice the age and half the size of Bart).
     Now, the law may be an ass at times, and an idiot at others, but it came across for Buzz, because Bart's charge of assault was thrown out of court.  Way out of court.  221,500 miles out of court.  Which is far enough to reach the surface of -


*  As in "Against The Day"
**  Do you see - oh you do
***   Sandworms, eh?
^  UNIT, I'm looking at you.