A Laughing Fellow Rover

No!  Nothing To Do With The Martian Love-Bug
Nor dogs, nor sinister white inflatables that can bounce in slow motion and roar.  Art?

Let Rover come over

     Yes, that is from "The Prisoner", which Conrad suspects was really a dramatised version of real events, you can't fool me.  
     Here an aside.  The Rover units seemed to be the most useless mobile sentry cum guard imaginable, because they are simply giant balloons.  So what if they are filled with exotic gases?  Stab them with a sharpened pencil and they become a rather rubbish white bin bag.
     Anyway, enough of what we are not.  Oh, yes, the Martian one.  Art?

Life on Mars

     That one on the right is about the size of your average family car.  Heaven only knows what the Ice Warriors made of it when it first arrived!
     Enough of what's not.  This Intro comes courtesy of your humble scribe's mind, wich is as retentive as flypaper and just as unpredictable in terms of what's retained.      What I recall is a character (possibly Tupe Morgenson) from "The Sands Of Valour" making facetious allusion to "Laughing Fellow Rovers".  Art?

Best novel of the war in North Africa, bar none

     The phrase stuck.  However, I couldn't just trot it out without knowing it's provenance, for it might come with attached negative connotations.  Dubious parentage, don't you know - possibly a reference to some sinister Nazi marching song, or "Lilli Marlene".*      It turned out not.  The phrase comes from the poem "Sea Fever" by John Masefield -
     Here an aside.  Conrad cordially detests poetry and was always grateful that he never had to study the Sonnets of Shakespeare or he would have gone STARK STARING MAD.**  You cannot consider the doggerel that he produces for colleagues or BOOJUM! as anything having even remotely similar DNA to poetry.  In the same way that a pebble may resemble an egg, and you can even boil it, but you certainly can't eat it.  Art?

                          Sea Fever                          Sea Sick.  The two are different
     In  strange way the use of an ocean-going metaphor is appropriate when considering the desert war in North Africa during the Second Unpleasantness; with a paucity of landmarks steering by compass applied to both environments, except in the desert you used a sun-compass, since the close proximity of iron or steel in the vehicle you were driving would throw out a normal compass.   Art?

The article in question

     We appear to have rather waffled on about 'Rover', laughing or otherwise, so we'd best press on with the rest of the blog.
     Time to throw the motley into a pool of dihydrogen monoxide!***

You What?
Whilst standing at the bus stop this ante meridian, your humble scribe was struck by how quiet the birds were, as compared to yesterday.  Yesterday they had a great deal to say, at length and with plenty of volume.  It sounded like nonsense to me, though it might make more sense if run through a translator.

This is a hoax, right?  Right?

     Why the difference?  The only obvious change was the brisk and chilly breeze blowing straight up from Lesser Sodom ('Royton' if we're being formal).  Had our feathered friends picked up something in the wind?  Something like - an approaching horde of the living dead?
     They might have done, but my bus arrived before the zombie flock, so we'll never know.
What Were They Thinking?
 - if they were thinking at all.  Another thing that arrived in my mind before either bus or zombies was the memory of a verrrrrry sinister advert from a good few years back.  Art?

They're behind you!

     The conceit behind the advert is that the disgusting collations of minced tumour flavoured with essence of foot ("Mattesson's Fridge Raiders") were so delicious that people turned into slavering monsters desperate to rend the chap above into a mixture of chops - until he turned round to face them, whereupon they were all smiles and the fangs were put away. 
     WHAT THE HELL!  it was extremely scary.  Conrad is not sure if it was played after the watershed, but any children who saw it are now traumatised delinquents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5PNVS-O8No

     The link, if you want to spend a sleepless night wondering if those fierce-fanged folk are going to come into your kitchen to sneak a peek at your fridge contents. 
     Hang on - did Danny Boyle see this and get inspired to make '28 Days Later'?


*  The British and Teutons alike were fond of this song.  What the Italians thought is not recorded.
**  How far he would have had to travel is another moot point.
***  Yeah, yeah, it sounds terrifying.  It's actually water.