Using My Loaf

A Touch Of Idiom
If any of you out there reading this live in the benighted blasted barren borderlands that are not part of the Rink of Eden,* then you have my sympathies, and since you may be slightly baffled by my title, I shall explicate.
     First, an aside.  I popped into the Co-Op in Royton on the way home from work, only to discover that they had no bread left.  None whatsoever.  Art?

Only the locked doors prevented the tumbleweed getting in

     It was the same in Lidl next door.  An assistant in the Co-Op explained that they were getting deliveries of bread, it just flew off the shelves the instant it came in.  I joked that I'd better get busy making my own loaf.  I can, you know, it's just been years since I did the old yeast-'n'-knead.  What madness stalks the land that - well, it confirmed my well-plotted semi-breakdown of society when the Zombie Apocalypse arrives in my novel <Mister Hand moves in to hurry matters along> in France.
     Getting back on track, there is a phrase in English that goes something like "Use your loaf", meaning to utilise one's intellect.  Quite how the human cerebellum came to be associated with a piece of leavened flour is a story for another day (code for "I have no idea).
     So!  Let us call upon that semi-human sloven Ace, for a bit of illustration is needed.  Art!

Chocolate and Coffee Loaf

     This was an experiment: I was using a recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook, which tends to have ones that are more fiddly than other cookbooks, but which are worth the fuss, since they are very good.  For this one I was using gluten-free flour and a magic bullet - xanthan gum, which is actually a powder, and which you add to GF flour to mimic the action of gluten in wheat flour.
     It worked! as you can see from the above.  It's well-risen, which is good, as the batter was spectacularly thick and tried to climb out of the mixing bowl.
     Of course, since it was a chocolate sponge, your humble scribe wanted nothing to do with the horrid confection.  Other folks seemed to like it, however.**

The embodiment of braininess

   Now, time to throw snowballs made of frozen nitroglycerine at the motley! and move on

Conrad: Late To The Party
I have recently taken up the musical stylings of one Warren Zevon, a South Canadian singer-songwriter-player who, alas, passed away in 2003.  I must say, his songs, even when delivered in a sprightly, poppy style, have very dark lyrics indeed.  Normally when Conrad analyses a song the composers cringe under a desk, but there's no danger of that for Warren.  Even if he weren't dead.

Warren, in better days
(You know, being alive and all that)

     Take his classic "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner", which I vaguely remember hearing on the also sadly-missed Alexis Korner's radio programme.
     Here an aside.  Yes, two in one blog post - don't you know it's rude to count?  The Thompson sub-machine gun - Art?

Thompson M1 wartime iteration

     - led to the nickname "Tommy Gun" being coined, applied beyond the weapon itself.  Alexander Solzhenitsyn used the term when referring to the PPSH41, as does Field Marshall Slim in his memoirs, when he means the Sten gun.

Norway - only exporting the very finest Thompson gunners

      Okay, back to Roland.  He's a mercenary, fighting in Biafra in the Sixties, and WZ makes mention of the Congolese - another African conflict with mercenaries - and the Bantu, and Johannesburg - a city of apartheid South Africa.  It's all period-correct, partly because WZ had fallen in with an ex-mercenary in Spain in 1974.
     Not, you have to admit, your average pop song.
That's bread and bullets - we're beginning to sound like a 19th Century revolutionary slogan.  Let us alter literary trajectory and explore the fascinating world of EXPOXY RESIN FORMULATION RESEARCH!


Only kidding.  Let's see, yesterday we had a mention of the Alvis Saracen, an ugly and intimidating piece of kit that functioned as a battle taxi.  It was actually derived from -


Saladin
Not the Ottoman emperor, but an armoured car.  It was quite the beast, being 11 tons in weight and mounting a rather big gun for a vehicle whose purpose was to sneak around and spy out the land and the enemy.  If we cattle-prod Art awake -

Nobody is going to bother that it's over the lines there

     A six-wheeled monster that did well in the desert, the one above is actually owned privately by a South Canadian citizen, and yes, the 76 mm gun and Browning machine gun are both real and functional.  One rather suspects that they park where they like, and that other road users politely defer to it at roundabouts.

(or not)

Well well, we've been so very martial today that I think we need a bit of effete decoration to balance things out.  How about a pretty flower?

Hmmm.  Probably poisonous, too.

     Fate seems to think otherwise.  Er - happy gambolling lambs?

Maybe not.
Oh well.

     And that's it for today, for I am typing this in the Dark Tower, at work.  In between phone calls, of course, as your humble scribe has a tremendous work ethic.***  This being-at-work lark means I won't be able to post BOOJUM! properly until I get home, which will be in the early evening.  Possibly later if I detour to try and find some of that rare and precious bread stuff that is so in demand at present.



*  Garden, Pond or Rink - all titles weather-dependent.  Britain, if we're being formal.
**  People are weird, eh?
***  This may be a lie.^
^  Okay, it is a lie.