It! The Tearror From Beyond Space

Stretching It A Bit
But then, that's pretty much business as usual round here.  Hello, greetings and welcome to your daily dose of drivel.  That might be over-selling it a bit, yet we shall press on regardless.
     Sadly for me, I have left my trusty notebook at home, and am typing this at work, freeform, so to speak.  Fortunately my frothing imagination, like my nitric ire, is never still and we do have stuff to play around with.
     Like ORGANIC CRYSTALLOGRAPHY STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS!
     Actually, no.  Although I did once glance at a book on Crystallography - which am a proper science and nothing to do with those kooks who cuddle a geode and claim it gives them immortal life, shortly before keeling over dead* - and, much to my surprise, found that they made reference to Maurits Cornelius Escher.  You are guaranteed to already know the works of Ol' Mo, as they adorn every squalid student squat worldwide.  Art?

One of my faves

     Conrad is not much of one for art, certainly none of that chocolate-box stuff, indeed his tastes run toward the early Italian futurist movement, and lithography, which is where Ol' Mo certainly strikes strongly.  I believe that the crystallographers referred to Ol' Mo because of the intriguing way his lithographs tessellate together so well, which rather reflects the internal structure of crystals.

Sic

     Where was I?
     Oh yes.  Having devoted an entire paragraph to something I had absolutely no intention of elaborating upon, I think it is time to put the petal to the meddle and race off, abandoning the motley.

The 6th MG
Yes, back to the British Americans in the First Unpleasantness, and the brave beefy bouncy boys of the <takes a deep breath> 6th Canadian Infantry Brigade Machine Gun Company.  You can see why I abbreviate it.
     I have been reading their War Diary entries for July and August 1917, and whilst you and your compatriots might view this as torture-by-reading, it is fascinating to anyone as unhealthily obsessed with the First Unpleasantness as your humble scribe.
     For one thing, the company travelled around quite a bit, to different billets at different villages across France.  The myth of soldiers stuck in the trenches for months on end is just that, a myth.

The British Americans going forth to spread sweetness and light

     The second point is that these chaps were exceedingly adept and skilful in the deployment and use of their Vickers machine guns; given this, and that the Vickers is an enormous brute of a gun, they were positioned somewhat behind the front-line trenches rather than having to slog forward with the infantry.

A Canadian with his faithful pet
(N.B. it's the wrong way round on the tripod)

     The third point that comes across is the absolutely enormous expenditure of ammunition that this unit got through.  Over the span of two months, they fired well over a million rounds of .303 ammunition, mostly at the Teuton-held town of Lens.  They really did not like Lens.  It got daily doses of 30,000 or 50,000 rounds, repeatedly.
     All that ammunition had to be carried from the brigade ammo dump, by sweating infantry probably cursing how profligate their gunner comrades were; 4,000 boxes-worth, for your information.

"Gaudy Night" By Dorothy Sayers
Conrad has been tucking into this detective work by Dot.  Properly I should have typed out "Dorothy L. Sayers" except there can't be that many Dorothy Sayers, certainly not that many who wrote detective novels.

Lord Peter and Harriet, by-products of Dot's pen

     It was written and published in 1935, which raises some of the problems associated with the works of P. G. Wodehouse, in that it makes cultural references that are fairly anachronistic.  One can accept the customs and practices of the fictional Shrewsbury College at Oxford, but who or what is "Epimetheus"?

Epimetheus
Apparently he was the brother of Prometheus.  More Greek for you to speak, and embarrass Windbag Willy Shakespeare with.  "Prometheus" means "Foresight" in the original Hellenic, whilst "Epimetheus" means "Hindsight".  He was tasked with allocating various values and qualities to the diverse creatures of the world, but ran out of the higher ones before getting around to Hom. Sap.
     Which explains a lot about you.

For Example -
First Bus have been living down to their usual execrable standards of sevice, because yet again they cannot tick all three boxes - Turn Up On Time, Be A Double-Decker and above all HAVE A PAPER THAT CONTAINS A CRYPTIC CROSSWORD!
     As I am fond of relating, if these pikers had been in charge of the wheel, we'd still be using sledges** and tow-ropes.  

The wheel: dangerously novel in the eyes of First Bus

*   Radioactive geode.
**  STONE sledges