A Brew To A Kill

Why Yes, I Can Probably Keep This Up Forever
That's the thing about films, they keep making them, so there will never be a shortage of titles to mock and parody.  I might have to trawl the obscure, the foreign and the micro-budget ones, yet there it is.  And branching out to include coffee-based puns has at least doubled my scope.

A brew to a fill

     - the "fill" in question being a cup, naturlich.
     Okay, one of the ways that Conrad idles his time away, yet also keeping his wits sharp, is by doing various crosswords and word puzzles of a Saturday or Sunday morning.  The Metro is good enough for the early part of the week; for the latter part, the Manchester Evening News has it's own Cryptic crossword, plus a Codeword, a couple of Gogen and a Wordsquare.  I usually complete the Cryptic, yet fail sufficiently often to have purchased this mighty tome.  Art?

     1,835 pages long, and it already helped solve a clue (7 letters) "Answers that are dispensed with", which I might not have gotten myself.
     NO!  It's not cheating, merely getting - er - a little extra-curricular support.
     Well, I think that constitutes enough of an Intro.  Let us put the motley into a spacesuit and kick it out of the airlock!

Shakespoke
I confess to not having done one of these for a while, so Bill's over-swollen cranium is probably back to normal size.  Let us trim his ego with the shears of satire*!

"Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war!"

Tut, Bill, combat hounds aren't used any more.

Instead they're used to sniff out IEDs,

And are very good at detecting these.

     Here an aside.  The Sinisters - actually if you're an animal-lover and especially of the domesticated wolf you might want to skip this bit - prior to the Second Unpleasantness were keen on using dogs to attack enemy tanks.  They strapped a box to the dog's back, then conditioned them to find food beneath tanks.  End result: dogs, when released, would dash underneath tanks to get fed.  When war broke out for real, the box was substituted for a mine with a vertical contact and Fido was sent off to fight the Teuton invader.  The problem was, although they did blow up a few Teuton tanks, they tended to get panicked on the battlefield, and since they had been trained by diving beneath Sinister tanks, they reverted to this behaviour ...

This is not going to end well!

     Back to Bill-bashing.  Ahem!

"Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war!"

Oh, shut up, Bill, you aggressive bore.

It's not the done thing, you aggressive prat.

Speak peace unto the nation, and all that.

     Hmmm.  There you go, something you won't see every day, BOOJUM! being all philosophical and stuff.  Probably something I ate.

Tooting Bec
If you are unlucky enough to live outside the borders of the Allotment of Eden, then some of our placenames may seem strange to you.  Frankly, some of them are strange to us, also.
     Take Tooting Bec, for example.  Quite why I was remembering the unofficial history of UNIT whilst walking the dog, I cannot explain**.  art?

That's their Mission Statement right there

     I may be a bit biased, as they are always noseying into my doings, but they seem to have their fingers in a lot of pies.  Anyway, apparently there is an account of their doings - again, unofficial - entitled "A Yeti In Tooting Bec".  Which is where your humble scribe wondered where on earth the name came from.

The Tube station

     The name derives from post-Domesday, when the area was owned by the French abbey of Bec.  The 'Tooting' part has nothing to do with horns or trumpets, but is instead derived from a local tribe, the 'Totinges'.

A Meeting Of Minds
You may be familiar with the comedian Al Murray, who is probably most famous for his character The Pub Landlord, a Little Englander of the worst stripe.  One of his funniest routines is to challege his audience to name a country, upon which he will come back with an anecdote - usually correct! - about how the Allotment got the better of them.
     This, of course, has nothing to do with the University of Wolverhampton, which is where Prof. Gary Sheffield has tenure.  His seminal, indeed iconoclastic, "Forgotten Victory" is what got your humble scribe interested in the First Unpleasantness.
     However -

Al on the left, Gaz on the right

     Here they both are, at a ceremony at the UoW.  They both went to the pub later, which rather startled the real pub landlord -


*  Okay, I'll admit it's slander, not satire, unless his lawyers are reading this.
**  I can do no better than say "My mind at work"