Cool Hand, Luke.

No!  This Is Nothing To Do With Paul Newman
Although I seem to remember that the titular film did have something to do with eating hard-boiled eggs; if I recall correctly, it was as many as possible.  Conrad himself has managed to down 10 hard-boiled eggs in 100 seconds, with the advantage of a large cup of carbonated beverage to help wash them down.

I was right!

     People were worried afterwards that I would be <ahem> 'egg-bound', which appears to be an euphemism that one's bowels are on a go-slow thanks to being entirely tied up with egg. Not so.  Not so at all - although delicacy forbids any further details.

      If you wish to know, I did it as a charity event, and prepared the eggs the night before.  Sadly, I cannot remember how much we raised.  Must have been entertaining to watch, though.
     Right!  Back on track.  The 'Luke' in today's title refers of course - obviously! - to Luke Skywalker, he of central mythic resonance in the 'Star Wars' universe.  Starting his journey arc as a naive farmhand, he ends up as the Great White Hope for the Rebel Alliance against the Empire.  Art?

Luke: he's right handy

  Well, I think it's a cool hand, Luke: others may differ.
     That brings me to what I really wanted to say.  The medical skills of this Empire and Rebellion really aren't much to write home about, are they?  That prosthetic hand doesn't look much better than what Hom. Sap. (i.e. you lot) can manage now.  What about advanced surgical techniques that allow the regrowth of limbs or organs?  Huh?  Sheesh - in "The Expanse" they have such technology, and that's only a couple of centuries hence.  

There's never a planet around when you want to blow one up, is there?

T

     The Empire:  "We can blow planets into a thin plasma haze, O my yes!  But - you're missing a finger?  Sorry.  Beyond our paygrade."

I need to apologise in advance if today's layout is a tad erratic - once again the dreaded Formatting Cursor has arrived, meaning that wherever it falls gets formatted into a picture, mucking up my deathless prose and generally making fresh nonsense unreadable.  The only way to avoid the effects are to start again from scratch, and since this Intro is about halfway towards count, That Is Not An Option.  Art?



     To make up for all that wibble, have a couple of pretty flower pictures.  Yes, they are the same one twice over, I couldn't be that bothered to pick two different ones.


Philip K. Dick, Where Are You When We Need You?
I don't know if PKD is regarded as something of a futurologist, that is, one who predicts the future, but the present is beginning to resemble something he wrote, which worries me - one of his persistent themes was Hom. Sap. getting the tar blasted out of itself thanks to global warfare.  World War Terminus, for example, which is present in Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

Problems with right hands, again ...

     What prompted this speculation was an item about self-driving cars and the worry here is two-fold.  Firstly, if a human is no longer necessary to drive the car, what's to stop them doing away with you us all? and I can only see the cars getting smarter, not dumber, whereas with humans -

The thin end of the wedge, matey, the thin end of the wedge!

     Secondly, it is only a small leap from self-driving cars to self-flying planes, which is where Skynet comes in, and you know how that ends ...

Finally - 
I need a short article to make it up to count, so I had a look at Rhenium, then at Technetium, in case they were Excitingly Dangerous! elements.

The River Rhine, after which Rhenium is named.

     Not a bit of it.  Quite horribly dull.  You're not even at risk of being clubbed over the head with Rhenium, because it's so incredibly rare.  It currently goes for £1,700 per pound, so there's no prospect of chucking the motley into a swimming pool of the stuff because it would cost upwards of £50 million to fill even a small pool.  Not only that, it has an incredibly high melting point, being just a smidge under 60000C.

And with that, we are done -