Hot Dog

No! I Am Not Talking -
 - about South Canadian snack foods (a.k.a. "Death awaits only slightly delayed"), although anyone who came up with 'Hotdog On A Stick' not only has an imagination but business acumen to boot.

 - and a love for the primary colours

    Here an aside.  There's an Eels song with the line "The kid in the mall works at Hot Dog On A Stick; his hat is a funny shape, his heart is a brick" and you know what?  That's exactly correct.  Those are some odd hats.  Anyway, back on track.
    What I refer to is the unseasonably sunny weather that we here in the Allotment of Eden are experiencing, weather so far from the norm that it's normal function, that of breaking conversational ice between strangers at parties, has been subsumed.
     No doubt the Ruffians are involved.  It would make the perfect deniable cover, wouldn't it - everybody else is busy watching the World Ballfoot Game Cup so the Ruffians have an opportunity to sabotage our weather in revenge for losing the Crimean War - 

- from where the phrase "thin red line" is derived

     So, our four footed Wunderhund, Edna, has been much stricken by this warm weather.  She has, after all, a fur coat that she can't take off, though she thoughtfully leaves bits of it around the house.  Here she is simultaneously protesting about the heat and enjoying the sun.  Art?

Edna, hard at work

      After expending all those words over a dog lying on the floor - hey, don't knock raw creativity at work! - it's time to put the motley in a bat suit and throw it over the cliff edge!

More Of The "Uknown Story"
You can hear the sneer in my voice, can't you?  "Unknown" my hairy white posterior!  If you keep up to speed with BOOJUM! then the story of Polish pilots in the Battle of Britain is jolly well known, Empire Promotional article (an euphemism for a double-page advert) be damned.  Art?

Not here it's not!

     The producer trots out an explanation for the Poles success in air fighting that is novel: they had been used to fighting in open-cockpit biplanes in Poland and so had "amazing spatial awareness".  There's a lot more to it than that, matey.  Meet the pilots of 308 Squadron.  Art?

     308 was another fighter squadron, initially flying the noble Hurricane before moving on to the mighty Spitfire.  I'll tell you why they scored so highly, matey.  Shall I bullet-list this?  O go on!

1. They were flying a very good aircraft, after having flown not very good ones, and they were thus at least on a par with the Teuton flyers.
2. They had already fought in Poland, then after escaping to France had fought with their air force, and after a second escape were now into their third campaign; they were often a lot more experienced than their RAF pilots.
3. Polish pilots, and Polish soldiers generally during the Second Unpleasantness, were not kind and forgiving chaps who treated warfare as a sport: their job was to render as many Teutons as possible as extremely dead as possible, The End.

     In addition to their 'spatial awareness'.

A super-duper bally Bosche shooter
(a.k.a. a Spitfire Mk. XVI)

Not Quite Cheating -
 - if perhaps sailing rather close to it.  If you recall anything about Conrad (me!  the author of what you are now reading; tall, white-haired and with an expression of permanent suspicious dislike) then you know he cannot let the day go by without tackling a crossword, two if possible.  The problem lies in crosswords in papers that are out of sequence, because if I gets Monday's paper but not Tuesday's, how do I solve those clues that eluded me?*  Art!

Behold!

     My Crossword Companion on the left.  Here's the clue "She expects to be well groomed (7)", and it began with an "F".
     Initially I thought it must be to do with grooming an animal of some kind,  possibly a horse - but that yielded nought, so it was off to the CC.
     "Fiancee" the answer, which was quite witty.
     As the title says, not realllly cheating, just - er - using all available resources.  Yes.  That.

Planet Killers!
Over on the 'Space Opera' Facebook page, someone asked what readers favourite planet killing weapon is.  This was very instructive for me, bringing up new and interesting ways to destroy a planet.  The classics were there:  the Death Star, LEXX, the Doomsday Machine from an obscure Sixties series called "Starry Trex"; and also some new ones that I was unfamiliar with yet will go check up on.
     Of course I had to get my own take in print: one of the Thermostellar Bombs from 'Dark Star', the only fictional film that star documentary-maker John Carpenter ever did.  Art?

Not to be taken lightly!

     I further theorised that they were nine-stage Teller-Ulam thermonuclear devices, with a yield in the multi-petaton range, or big enough to crack unstable planets like dropped eggs.  1 petaton = 1 thousand trillion tons of TNT.



*  What an onerous life I lead, eh?