The Spy Who Loved Tea

James Bond!
More British than a badger wearing a bowler hat brewing Brooke Bond in a brown pot whilst eating a brown-bread bacon butty bolstered with brown sauce.
     Which has nothing at all to do with ALTERNATING AUDIOMETRIC INPUT ANALYSIS!
     Actually that sounds dull.  Let's ignore it and move on to our daily sitrep about Edna, our surrogate furry daughter.  Here we see her relaxing in her preferred dog-nest.  Art?

Made up of Awwww!

     When I leaned in and asked if she wanted to go walkies, there was a transformation of startling rapidity.  I took this to mean "Yes".
     Her other preferred position is hunkered down on your humble scribe's lap, which makes doing anything but sitting there rather difficult.  I had brought my Collins Dictionary down for a little light browsing*, which was made especially difficult when Edna decided the time was right to grace her Human-shaped Cushion with her presence.  Art?

Conrad:  able to be sat upon

     Luckily my cup of tea was full (see above for confirmation) and that sustained me for a while, until I had to get a refill.
     Dog-sitting: it's a responsibility <heavy sigh>

If This Is Thursday, You Must Be The Coincidence Hydra
One fascinating way of wasting endless hours, which your modest artisan classifies as "research", is by cruising the enormous number of entries on the website "TV Tropes".  The title is a misnomer, as they now encompass film, comics, web content and literature.
     They define a trope as "A story-telling convention", so it may be cliched or not.  Herein the link:

http://tvtropes.org/

     Yesterday Conrad was reading the entries under "Guns Don't Work That Way" - excuse me, Edna is whimpering, which I think is her hinting that she's hungry - back in minutes five - aaaand I'm back.  Under one entry was mention of Phineas Gage, and here is visual proof for you skeptical lot.  Art?

Read it and creep

     Okay.  Fast forward a few hours to "Stranger Things 2" and episode 3 and WHAT THE HECK IS THIS!?

A spooky coincidence, that's what

     Phineas Gage, again.  What's going on here?  Can we have a bit of impartial analysis about all these mysterious coincidences?  Let's wheel in an expert on the subject.

"It's the aliens, Conrad.  They're subverting reality."

     Well I had to ask.

Vegetarians, Look Away Now
Conrad is currently catering solely to himself, which lead to the following item being selected at Iceland earlier today.  Art?

     Just for a change.  I shall be having them tonight, with oven chips (overstocked on these at present) and some petit pois.  I've never had ostrich before, although as I recall the mayor in "Eight-legged Freaks" does dine on them in splendid isolation in his failing mall.

The World's Most Boring Hobby, Continued
No, we are not talking about LITHIUM WAFER BATTERY DESIGN! as Conrad suspects this is a very niche market.  

Wa-hey!  Lithium  wafer battery!

Instead we are talking IMDB FILM GOOFS AUDIT! as regards "The Longest day".  I have nearly completed my assay of the listed Goofs; there are some present that I wonder about bothering with.  One would require digging out my copy of Cornelius Ryan's work, a major undertaking.
     I shall here append an example:

16:00 In the early scene between Generals Gavin and Cota, the sentry pacing in the rain outside the Quonset hut walks through a shaft of sunlight several times; also, his shadow is clearly visible.

There is no shaft of sunlight.  His shadow is indeed visible.  Not sure what the point here is, unless to point out the erratic nature of our <ahem> British weather?  Don’t forget, the illumination might well be artificial if it’s dark outside, as it so often can be during the British “summer”.

     There is a time-stamp at the beginning of the quoted Goof, since the list on IMDB is all over the place.  Once I feel happy about it, I'll put the whole lot in time sequence**.
     Further to this, allow me to add-in a still from the film.  Art?

You can almost smell the briney deeps

     That chap in the black beret, right of centre at the bottom of the screen, is actor Kenneth More, playing Colin Maud, the Beachmaster at Sword beach on D-Day.  He gets one of the film's great lines:

     "The sooner you get off this beach, the sooner they'll stop that blasted shelling.  It's very bad for the dog!"

     Indeed.  English sang froid at it's finest.     
     Incidentally, you can see some of the reasons why this film cost $10 million up there on screen; a literal army of soldiers, all wearing the correct costume, armed with period weapons***.  Tanks, trucks, bulldozers and DUKWs, in quantity.  The Beachmaster is at a control point for beach traffic, complete with radio link to ships offshore, a megaphone to broadcast instructions to the incoming troops, an officer manning an Aldis lamp for critical messages and an orderly making notes of the traffic arriving on the beach.

Colin and Winston (the dog)

*  Everyone does this, right?
**  And after that, who knows?
***  For the most part - see yesterday's blog where I caught them out.