Balloonatics

I Know I Steal Ideas -
 - or, if you are a literary critic, "pay homage to" ideas, and today's title is no exception.  It derives, if my creaking memory serves, from a Biggles short story of the First Unpleasantness, where he and his rival Wilks, of 287 Squadron, are competing for crates of whisky.  They are judged by how many Teuton observation balloons they can shoot down, hence the title; because the canny Teuton ringed his observation balloons with flak guns and machine guns and the Flaming Onion device, an attack on them was a prospect only the mentally challenged would accept.

Indeed they are - Teutons beware!*

     Here an aside.  The edition I read was intended for a young audience, so the references to whisky were all edited out and 'lemonade' was substituted instead; it did not work.  Even at age nine I realised grown men would not risk life and limb for carbonated swill that I can no longer drink thanks to diabetes thank you so bl lemonade.

You see?  I am not raving

     Anyway, back to another theatre of conflict, the Second Unpleasantness, and Operation Outward.  As mentioned yesterday, this was an apparently bonkers scheme by Perfidious Albion to sabotage the Teuton war effort with massed balloon attacks.
     Don't laugh so, it doesn't become you.
     These balloons were launched by the thousand, making their way across Continental Europe to Germany thanks to simple height-regulating slow fuse mechanisms, and the wind.  Thanks, wind.  Yesterday we introduced the balloons that carried incendiary devices; today we look at those which merely dangled wire beneath them.

Sorry for re-using this but there are literally NO other photos available!

     Yes, simply a single length of thin wire that trailed several hundred feet below the balloon, several hundred yards in length.
     You cannot imagine the havoc these simple devices caused the Teutons.  They were intended to foul electrical and power cables, and they did so incessantly - as I said, these things were launched by the tens of thousands.  They repeatedly caused breaks in power supply, caused local fires, destroyed insulators on pylons and in one case caused a power station to burn to the ground.  This last cost five times the entire expense of Operation Outward.
     We shall come back to this.  Oh yes!
     And now let us hurl the motley into the tiger's enclosure!**

Tigers absent

Comments
I'ts a good job that your humble scribe is firmly convinced that these lines he types are, if not deathless prose, at least in suspended animation for a while.  Because I get so little feedback, you see, in terms of Comments.  You know, in the "Comments" section.

Comets.  Close enough.

     It wouldn't kill any of you to leave an appropriately flattering Comment, would it? Instead I get random weirdoes.*** The last one was in an Arabic script and I have no idea what it means.  Constructive criticism?  Foul-mouthed ranting? Pimping timeshares in Ulan Bator?  Who knows!
     Conrad is not saying he'll actually pay attention to what you put, but he would like to bask in a bit of beatifying banter.  Thanks in anticipation.

What The Devil?
Now, before we tackle cake, let us look at names.  I know why a comet is so-called - the name derives from the Latin "Coma" for "hair", because the tails of comets as observed in antiquity were  thought to resemble hair.  Hate to see the amount of shampoo they'd need ...
     Anyway, say hello to two sandwich sponges that are going to end up as a Devil's Food Cake.  Art?

     They do exhibit one of the failings of gluten-free flour, a drop in the centre.  I try to compensate by adding a little more raising agent (bicarb and Baking powder), but you have to be cautious with this, as too much will make the batter march out of the tin.
     I can't tell if I'd trimmed their edges at this point; thanks to our idiosyncratic oven the edges were rather dry, meaning I ought to have tented them halfway through baking to prevent this.  Maybe next time.
     The sunken centres will be camouflaged with a meringue filling and coffee icing, so nobody will be any the wiser!  Bwah-ha - unless, of course, they read this. Ah.  Yes.
Bluedot Festival
Conrad has absolutely no interest in standing for eighteen hours in a muddy field, getting hit by lightning and slowly sinking into a slough of not merely Despond, but actual pond.

Slough of Despond or Creamfields?  Only you can tell!

     However, a poster caught my eye as I descended from the Great Steel Beast (a.k.a. the bus), as it featured The Chemical Brothers, The Flaming Lips and Future Islands, all of whom are excellent and whose albums I have.
     Interestingly, the venue is one Jodrell Bank, also a site where Siggur Ros have played. Art?

Oracular and spectacular

*  This edition sold for more than £10,000
**  Don't worry, it's empty, and the tiger's entrance is loc - did we remember to lock the tiger's entrance?  Well, we'll see.
***  I know, I know, the pot calling the kettle black.