Tea America: World Police

Go On, Admit A Grudging Regard ...
... for someone able to keep coming up with these puns.  Since I have today off due to working Saturday, I've already had two pots of tea - English Breakfast and loose-leaf Darjeeling.  However, I'm not going to post two news posts today, and there'll only be one new one tomorrow, since ETA at The Mansion will be about 18:00.2

Fats Waller playing the organ.  Just to see if you're paying attention

     Talking of "Team America", do you recall that they poke fun at the Sulky Fat Lad - or was it his dad?  One sulky fat Nork dictator is much the same as another.  A Nork in charge, anyway.

See?

      We'll come back to this.  Oh yes.  But not today - word count, baby, word count.
     That brief Intro over, let us kick the motley out into deep waters!

Pub Quiz
Of late Janet, the landlady* at "The Pleasant Inn", has been making the quiz questions harder.  This means that we no longer get a team declaring and winning after only 5 or 6 questions, although it does make the individual games longer; Game 3 last night took a good half-hour to run before we got a winner.  Thus no card game, and a later arrival back home for your humble scribe.
     What I'd done was take that day's Manchester Evening News in, specifically the puzzle pages, in order to hit the last 8 Cryptic Crossword clues whilst waiting for my partners to arrive.  Normally I'd get the free Friday copy at the entrance of Arndale House - except no work today, so I had to get into Mos Eisley sorry Royton and buy one.
     Thanks to a bit of help from Rosie, I did get 14 words on Wordsquare - where 12 was classed as "very good" - and I can't find the bit of paper I wrote them on.
     So you'll just have to take my word for it.

"Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" By Robert Heinlein
Just finished this, for the first time in decades.  Oh dear - it suffers from that problem that many sci-fi works of the Fifties experience - SLIDE RULES!!
     Here an aside.  Conrad is probably of the last generation that bought and used these devices, before they were supplanted by cheap electronic calculators.  They might still use them in North Korea, in lieu of an abacus, but your modest artisan is willing to be folding money that they're the only ones.

My edition

     Anyway, Ol' Bob gives up a couple of pages to his lead narrator extolling the virtues of the "slipstick", supposedly at a time when there are multiple bases on the Moon and a couple on Mars.
     That it's one of his juvenile's is also evident in the rather didactic calculations about distances in astronomy and the speed of light.  Really, Rob, if I wanted a set of notes like that, I'd read a notebook.
     Give Ol' Bob credit, however, he does mention the novel "Three Men In A Boat" and the tinned pineapple incident, which generates almost enough kudos to counter the slide-rule.

The tin in question

     Excuse me, it is now past 6 o'clock, which means time for BEER!

A Lesson From The Past
As you surely know by now, Conrad is an Olympic-level bore when it comes to military history.  This propensity to inform you about the gear-train of the Panther tank (a howling weakness more deadly than anti-tank guns) or why they're called dum-dum bullets, and to do so without the slightest provocation, is one of his more charming aspects.  Or it's why people hate him so much.  Take your pick.

This charming - er- "man" for want of a betterword.

     So!  People today outside Canada - or, as I prefer to call it, British America - are generally unaware that the Canadian army made significant contributions to the British Commonwealth's war effort in the Second Unpleasantness.  They were even more significant in the First Unpleasantness.  British American soldiers were not looked upon with fond regard by their opponents, because they had the dash of the South Canadians in attack, and the doggedness of the British in defence.  Also, they were a bit wild when off-duty.
     Now, on this day in 1944, the 2nd Canadian Division liberated the town of Dieppe.  You may recall the utter disaster that overtook this division in the ill-fated Dieppe Raid, and there's a scandalous story behind that. Here's a photo from a ceremony held a couple of days later.  Art?

     Those three men in the middle, with the red stripe on their caps, are the Officers Commanding of the Canadian 2nd Division, the Canadian 2nd Corps and the First Canadian Army.  They are present at the graveyard of the men killed in 1942.
     Field Marshal Montgomery, that peppery little self-promoter, wasn't happy that these men were absent from the chain of command on 3rd September 1944 and wanted to know what they were up to and where, exactly, they were.  When informed, he wisely kept his mouth shut and said nothing.


*  Well of course.  I didn't just pick a name at random.