Where To Begin - Or End?

None Of That "Sound of Music" Nonsense -
 - about beginning at the beginning.  I've never seen the film, never intend to and do not feel any poorer for this omission.  What I mean is how, when cruising teh interwebz, one thing seems to lead to another.  Take the case of "Ice Station Zebra", which I mentioned in passing whilst clerihewing away at Alastair MacLean.  I Googled for a picture and got the cinema poster - 

With a British hero (Pat, on the right)

     - which you would kind of expect, except - what's this?  An odd-looking photograph entitled "Underwater Ice Station Zebra" came up amongst the other picture results.  Art?

What on earth is this?

     It isn't immediately obvious, so I clicked on a link and this begins to sound more like ISZ that ISZ did.  Okay, that's film canisters that you see there, sitting on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean at a depth of over 16,000 feet.  How did they get there?  They were ejected from a Key Hole HEXAGON spy satellite in July 1971 - those wicked South Canadians in action, don't you know.  Normally they came down in a 'bucket' that deployed parachutes, and the whole thing was snagged in mid-air by a specially-adapted C130 aircraft. Art?

Thus

     This is probably beginning to sound more like James Bond than ISZ, but that's a real photo of the aircraft in question.
     The third 'bucket' suffered parachute failure, the whole thing hitting the Pacific at about 500 miles per hour; except there wasn't any debris.  So the South Canadians, whom one cannot accuse of sitting on their behinds, promptly hired special deep-sea research vessels to locate and retrieve the bucket.
     Well, they did just that, but that enormous impact had shattered the thousands of feet of film and the reels literally fell apart en route to the surface.
     Still, Patrick McGoohan - the film's hero - is still British.

"Sins of the Fathers" By Lawrence Block
For those of you who don't know, this is the first Matt Scudder novel, hailing from 1976, at a point where Matt is still a practicing alcoholic.  At one point he is trawling through microfilm copies of the "New York Times", because this is well before teh interwebz. Art?

Microfilming

     He comments that it's tricky to research this way, because it is oh-so-easy to get distracted by other news articles, which is where we came in.  An interesting coincidence, wouldn't you say?

A Small Town In Germany
This is a 1968 novel by John Le Carre, which I haven't read.  
     "Don't you feel like a hypocrite, commenting on this when you've not seen "The s-"
     SILENCE!  Enough!  Stop interrupting!  I'm not talking about JLC's novel, I'm talking about a commentary on it from - that coincidence hydra is nipping at my nethers now - the New York Times, by journo Richard Boston.  The "Small town" is actually Bonn, so now we have three cities named.
     None of which has to do with what follows.  Yes, back to the usual wild tangential ravings, do try to keep up with these mental athletics, it's good for the mind*.

Boston!

     Ol' Rick mentioned a name I'd not come across before, alongside James Bond and John LC, that of "Adam Diment", who seemed to be something of a wunderkind amongst the spy thriller mileu.
     "Odd," mused your humble hack.  "I don't recognise the name."

Kept small because of lingerie

     That's because he only wrote 4 books and then vanished in 1972, never to write again.  His reasons for such a disappearance are unclear, although a more recent contact said that he disliked the fame bit of being rich and famous.  His books were going to be reprinted, but I can't be bothered to see if they have or not because - 

Each Step Is The Inevitable Consequence Of The Preceding One
Well of course it is, it couldn't be the consequence of the subsequent one, could it?  Unless you're whizzing about in the TARDIS**.  Adam Diment's vanishing reminded me of "The Wonderful Death of Roger Stone", a short story by Ray Bradbury about a literary wunderkind who suddenly stops writing, when he could have gone on to become as big as Hemingway or Faulkner or J. P. Martin.

Pause in the presence of greatness, gentle reader.

Finally - 
If Edna comes looking for my lap to perch upon, then I know the human occupants of The Mansion are either busy or have a laptop upon their lap, which <adopts Edna's point of view> IS PRETTY CLOSE TO A WAR CRIME AND THE HAGUE SHALL KNOW OF THIS - yet today she outdid herself by lying on my right arm, preventing me from entertaining my adoring public.  My fans.  You!  <sighs and gives up>.  Art?

*  Maybe.  
**  In which case, lucky you.