James Brooke Bond

I Have To Apologise
For being something of a hypocrite.  If you have been following the blog recently then you will have noticed my charity case de jeur moving from weasels - a.k.a. Our Misunderstood Friend - to sharks.  Hard to come up with an attractive aphorism for sharks.

"They don't always bite your hand off"?

     Anyway, I have started to plough a lonely furrow, attempting to uplift the shark's image in the eyes of the world.
     That is, until I came to check that title.  I felt that it had been used before, and indeed it had, although only within the body of a blog, rather than a title.  I shall append the link that you may gaze with awe and wonder/puzzlement and derision/baffled incomprehension (delete where applicable).

https://comsatangel2002.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/remarks-on-sharks.html

     In there I cruelly describe our fully-fanged friends as - er - a set of teeth with an appetite attached.  I was leading up to a description of the sharks used on-set in the James Bond film "Thunderball", and the occasion when a live one got into the same water tank as Sean Connery, who broke speed records getting out of the pool.

Fearful expression not acting

     Which brings me onto the subject of today's title, it being a brand of tea.  Art?

Unsure why red.

     Okay, enough about sharks, let us now move onto LITHIUM WAFER BATTERY DESIGN!
     Or not.  Okay, roll that barrel into the seething whitewater rapids after letting the snakes loose, and wish the motley our very best*.

Banjul!
The way Conrad's mind works is a source of mystery and wonder, not least to Conrad himself, who is frequently surprised by the stuff that floats to the top.  The cream of the crop or the scum of the mind, depending on your perspective.
     Thus it was with the above word.  What is it?
     To put your minds at rest, it's the capital of The Gambia.  And yes, that is it's official name.  Quite why they insist on "The" is a bit of a mystery, like Yngwie J. Malmsteen, as there aren't a lot of Yngwie Malmsteens out there in the first place, and nor are there a lot of Gambias that might confuse geographers
     Anyway, The Gambia is one of the world's oddest countries, geographically speaking.  Art?

Distinctly odd!

     Banjul visible at centre left.  The country's boundaries were negotiated between Perfidious Albion and France in the late 19th century, and as you can see, they were defined by the path of the River Gambia.  Conrad suspects either or both parties in these negotiations were drinking heavily at the time.
     There you go, BOOJUM! educating you one fact at a time.

Daily Edna Update
I was going to leave this out, which would undoubtedly have gotten me into trouble.  Let us pad out the article a little longer, then.  Edna has finally accepted that there are alternatives to this:

Human-shaped cushion is comfy

     Which is a good thing, as it's terribly difficult trying to type anything over her snoozing carcass, and I couldn't reach my books, nor yet the DVD for TLD.  Here she is in the smaller dog-nest.  Art?

     Here she groggily awoke for a few seconds to see what human foolishness was going on, before retiring.  Probably tired, she's been getting three walks a day and it shows.

Conrad: Sharp-eyed And Pedantic
I have been busy the past couple of days, going over my notes for Goofs in "The Longest Day".  As per usual, about a third are absolutely, undeniably correct, about a third are explicable with a bit of hand-waving or imagination, and about a third are just plain wrong.
     However!  Conrad has spotted several goofs that nobody else has.  This pleases my shrivelled soul no end, RATHER!  I mentioned the tyre tracks made by the camera vehicle in the opening scene.  Well at about the one hour mark we see a Teuton anti-aircraft gun firing horizontally - in other words, at anything but aircraft.

How it should be done

     Another telling goof concerns the French Commandos firing a Bren gun, with the wrong type of magazine.  Art?

Note that nice straight magazine

     One of the most distinctive things about the Bren gun was the curved magazine, which had to be designed thus to accommodate rimmed British ammunition.  Here's a real proper Bren gun mere minutes before.  Art?

Note curved magazine

      An interesting Goof, non?  In real life the British army had changed from it's old rimmed bullets to rimless NATO standard ones, which meant from the late Fifties onwards, Bren guns (soul-lessly described as the "L4") had a straight magazine.  I suspect there was a shortage of the older models available, and the film armourer on TLD reasoned that the gun was only on display for a second and nobody would notice anyway.
     WRONG!

Finally -
Here's one I made earlier.  This is the "Pot Noodle It's Not" recipe from my Diabetic's Cookbook.  Art?

     Despite scaling it down by half, there's still enough to feed six people, or three Conrads**, so I know what's going to be for tea tonight, tomorrow and Friday, too.



*  Don't worry, they're not poisonous.
**  Okay, okay, I'm a big greedy rascal.