Totally Rocking It

Here's A Thing

No!  don't expect a running gag about John Carpenter or Ben Grimm*.  No, your humble scribe is deftly dodging his way out from the frumious jaws of the Coincidence Hydra.  This, you will recall, is the ferocious beast that longs to do nothing more than sink it's fangs into the very tenderest and choicest parts of Conrad's anatomy.  I must taste good, it's always visiting.

The Coincidence Hydra

     "Er, quite," I hear you query.  "What does this have - oh it's about Pink Floyd, isn't it?"

     No, not really, although Pink Floyd's bassist was called Roger Waters and there is that Doctor Who dramatic reconstruction "The Waters of Mars", and this is about Mars.

     No!  Not the chocolate bar, the planet.

The Doctor

     Okay, having introduced Mars, let us now jump to a wildly different topic:  zombies**.  Several years ago Conrad penned a long work about the Zombie Apocalypse that THOSE PURBLIND FOOLS at Gollancz were fools enough to reject, the fools.  The mechanism for creating the shambling undead was a rather lightly-described micro-organism that originated on -

     Mars!

Ace!  NO!

     NO!  The planet!  Look, forget about chocolate mars - sorry, I mean bars.  Focus!  No!  The concept not the Dutch rock band - Good Lord, what have you been bingeing on today?

     My rationale was that a meteor hit Mars several billion years ago, when there was still a vestige of life present on the Red planet, and that various bits of Martian flotsam were blasted out of that planet's gravity well.  These bits then float around in space until some of them intersect the orbit of Earth, one piece in particular coming to rest in Antarctica. Sadly for all humanity, this particular rock contains dormant Martian bugs.  By a long series of events these get weaponised and then loose - at which point my novel THANK YOU GOLLANCZ begins.

     Rather to my surprise, because I made the above up out of whole cloth, this kind of event is not only possible - it has happened.

     Which is, frankly, a bit of a worry.

     

      Quick, lay in a call to Lieutenant Dee Edmonds and his callsign, courtesy of OPERATIONAL CRISIS RESPONSE NORTH WEST

 Even So
You may be familiar with that phrase "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day" although this appears to have been coined in the days before digital and twenty-four hour timepieces, which can only be right once a day, or none if their battery's gone flat.  
     "Quite so!" I hear you respond.  "Can you be quick, as we have cupcakes with our coffee today."
     Okay, remember the monkeys with typewriters, who would accidentally put forth the entire works of Raymond Chandler (it is him, isn't it?) if allowed to biff away on the keys for long enough?  That's the sort of concept I'm aiming at here.  
     Because The Metro has - partially and temporarily, I assure you - redeemed itself with an article in their "60 Seconds" feature about Jason Isaacs, better known to you as That Bad Guy From Harry Potter.  Well, yes, except there's more to him than that.  He plays a hard-nosed South Canadian officer in "Black Hawk Down",

Jason as a Colonel

 whereas in complete contrast he plays the moustachioed boss of the exorcist team in "Skeletons", where he's frightfully British.  He also comes across as a very down-to-earth chap, who is intolerant of Precious Luvvies With Issues.  The series he mentions, "O.A.", has promise.  We shall inspect and report.

Jason as The Colonel

Serendipity In Plaid
Inspired by those regular content-generators The Flop House, riffing on an animated film called "Guardian Of The Highlands". 
     Those South Canadians seem to have a soft spot for the Scottish Highlands, or a romanticised version thereof (don't mention the Clearances!) evinced in films all the way from "Brigadoon" to "Highlander".
     Here an aside.  Conrad finds the haggis scene in "Highlander" to be hilarious.  You had Christopher Lambert, who is French, explaining to (SIR!) Sean Connery, Scottish but pretending to be Spanish, about what a haggis is, exactly.  Conrad, FYI, likes haggis.
  Then we come to "Guardian Of The Highlands" -
     No!  Not Rob Roy!

More to scale

     Here another aside.  I'll pepper this post with all the asides I wish, it's MY blog, before you start to quibble.  Richard Todd playing Rob Roy?  Rob's (excellent name by the way) claymore was 9 feet long.  The handle alone was a yard long - yes yes I know it's called a hilt I wanted to see if you were paying attention - and you can't persuade me that Mr. Todd could lift a sword that large, let alone run into battle with it.

Sword with puny human for scale

*  There I go, establishing my pop culture credentials straightaway

**  "Ghosts of Mars" cannot be cited here.