The QueeNessie Is Dead

Did You See What I Did There?
A cunning The Smith's reference, and also - hang on, given the Curse Of Conrad I need to go check something - phew yes Queen Betty Mark Two is still alive - hang on, better just do another check as well - phew yes Ben Folds is still breathing.  
     And also a reference to 'Nessie', which you would know better as The Loch Ness Monster.
     Which has nothing whatsoever to do with ATOMIC DEATH WEASELS!
     (If the Syfy Channel want a treatment for this as a potential film, my price is a very modest £75,000).
     Yes, that's right, ATOMIC DEATH WEASELS! whom I invoked as a possible reason for not posting my usual words of - excuse me, Words Of Wonder - yesterday, and I also wondered if Google - 

Atomic death weasel brings this right up

     Here the Coincidence Hydra sprang into action for the first time today, because there really was a case of Atomic Death Weasel.  Not, as one might imagine, a radioactive mutant monster ten feet tall shooting laser beams from it's fingertips.
     No, this was a weasel that burrowed into the Large Hadron Collider, that device that has so far not destroyed the world*.  It whizzes atoms and stuff around at terrifying velocities, smashing them into each other and seeing what bits fly off (sorry for all the technical jargon).  Except our intrepid weasel got itself fried to a crisp, causing a power outage that shut the LHC down.

I appear to have started a trend

And Now Of Nessie
You should by now have realised that Conrad is both a poisonous old pedant, and a skeptic of the darkest hue.  I shave daily with Occam's Razor, frankly, and was thus delighted to see a couple of programmes on television about "History's Greatest Hoaxes", one of those being about Nessie.  I can't find any pictures of the beardy young biologist, except he looks an awful lot like Tom, the well-mannered young man who is Darling Daughter's swain.
     Nessie, she's easier to picture.  Art?

The Surgeon's photo

     "Help!" I hear you wailing.  "A giant sea-monster!  The Bogeyman is true!"
     SIT DOWN AND STOP BLUBBERING**!!

Yes, the Bogey man is real - JUST NOT THE WAY YOU THOUGHT!

     For a start, our young paleobiologist states that Loch Ness is a relatively recent geographical feature, certainly not more than 10,000 years old, so the idea that remnants of a dinosaur colony dating back 65 million years are paddling the icy depths are utter bosh***.  Secondly, he confidently stated that Environmental DNA can and has been used to sample the loch's waters; no evidence of Scary Monsters.  Then we had another chap, Steve Feltham, who's been monster-hunting for decades and now believes that giant catfish may have been added to the loch back in the late 19th century.  These things would mature and grow, their population peaking in the Thirties, before they start to die off and monster sightings begin to decrease.

Steve.  Not naive.

     Then we have Adrian Shine, another chap who's spent decades searching the loch, and who now states there is no monster.  He also possesses a magnificent beard.  Art?

It looks like a human sporran

     It was great stuff!  Hence that title.

Help!  Help!  The Postie Has A Machine-Gun!
"Postie", for those of you not familiar with Anglo-Saxon vernacular (a.k.a. slang), means "postman", which those in the land of the Fee and the Grave have subsumed as a "mailman".
     Well, whilst checking up on "Mailbox baseball", I came across a South Canadian organisation titled the "United States Postal Inspection Service".  So my title is a bit of a click-baiter, as these chaps are actually inspectors rather than postmen.  But it's not all wrong.  Art?

I don't think you'd argue about stamp prices, would you

     As federal law-enforcement officers, these chaps are entitled to carry firearms, and the organisation actually existed before South Canadian thanklessly threw off noble and enlightened British rule independence.  They are responsible for maintaining the safety of well over half a million postal employees, as well as the mail itself, and they regularly work with Customs and the Border Agency.
     Conrad is surprised that there's not a television series about USPIS, either a reality one or a dramatic one - NCIS-with-parcels.
     Edit to add - there is a recent series called "The Inspectors", but it sounds fearfully PC and is probably seriously light on bang-bang shooty-shooty action.
  
Oh, And That Photo?
"Here's one I made earlier."


*  Phew!
**  I know, two exclamation marks is pushing it.  But you were sounding hysterical.
***  This is like "tosh" except worse.