When Labradors Go - Completely PSYCHO!

It's A Metaphor
I had to think of something fluffy and harmless, and the Labrador dog is a shoo-in for that - one hundred and eighty pounds of drooling good nature.  You'd be ever so surprised if one of them went for your throat the instant it saw you, nicht war?

LOOK OUT!

     It's the same with Osmium.  We touched on this element earlier today, and really it's not that exciting.  Extremely hard, very brittle and with a fantastically high melting point.  Oh, and super-expensive, too, it being one of the precious metals, which is why my Schaeffer fountain pen was so pricey - it has an Osmium nib.  
     Now, if you consider - what's that?  You don't know what a pen nib is?  
     WHAT!  Good lord aloft, you do know what a pen is, don't you?  Yes?  Phew!  For a minute there I was worried.  Okay, Art?

His nibs

     Okay, in my rather strained analogy, I was trying to compare Osmium to a Labrador.  The thing about Boring old dependable Osmium is that, if finely divided, it spontaneously ignites, just like that.  If that weren't bad enough, some of it will form Osmium Tetroxide, which is terrifyingly toxic stuff that will poison you by inhalation, ingestion or skin contact.  In fact, it is lethal at doses too small for you to detect at the time; you just die mysteriously a few hours later.  And it vapourises spontaneously, too.  Altogether, not something you want to keep at the back of the kitchen cupboard!
     There you go, the source of this evening's title, and quite a mangled metaphor.

About Those Numbers Stations -
Earlier I introduced you to these mysterious stations that broadcast formatted batches of numbers, without speculating what they were for.  Of course I cannot simply let that lie, you know what an obsessive completist I am.  So -
     Oddly enough, nobody 

has ever upped and confessed to running a numbers station or why they did so.  What we can do is speculate intelligently about what we suspect.

Your humble scribe, looking suspicious
(One of his default states)

     The obvious explanation is that these short-wave messages are coded instructions to various spies out in the field.  They use a one-time pad of coded numbers to interpret the message and Hay Pesto! James Bond gets ready to off some unfortunate miscreant who has bothered Perfidious Albion.
     I mentioned "The Lincolnshire Poacher" today, a British numbers station that broadcasts from one of the big British bases in Cyprus - you did know that Perfidious Albion has maintained bases there since 1960, didn't you? - at two in the afternoon, so regularly that you can set your clocks by it.  As one of the numbers station watchers explains, not all these messages are real, but they broadcast every day at the same time so you can't analyse their traffic and relate it to anything happening in the world at that time.  

A poacher.  In Lincolnshire,

     No doubt some of these messages are going out to assets on the ground in the Lebanon or Turkey, about what's going on in Syria or Iraq - but any eavesdroppers have no idea which ones. 
     Perfidious Albion - five hundred years of practice have made us pretty good at it.*

Good lord aloft!  It's chucking it down outside!  Conrad grateful he took Edna for walkies earlier this afternoon when it was still dry.

Hungarian Rhapsody
After all, why should the Czechs get all the musical appreciation? I did mention the Honved earlier today - strange how we're revisiting all this afternoon's posts - which was the Hungarian army in the Second Unpleasantness.  More completely it's "Honvedseg" and I lack all the diacritical marks to correctly spell it.  During the Second Unpleasantness it was the Royal Hungarian Army, or Magyar Kiralyi Honvedseg, so calling it 'Honved' is easier.

Hungarian Turan tank

     Now, the Honved was involved in war against the Sinisters, although only after Operation Barbarossa had started.  As one author amusingly put it, the Magyars kept the biggest and best part of their army at home, to keep their real enemies in check - 
     - the Romanians!
     Yes, you see both countries panted with desire o'er occupying Transylvania, and the Hungarians had generously been 'given' it by the Teutons - who were always generous dishing out what wasn't theirs in the first place - and thus removing it from Romania -
     - which is a whole other subject for another day.

It's the motley!
(Perhaps)

*  Perfidy.  Look it up.