BOOJUM!: A Look At A Book

That's Not Strictly Accurate
We're talking multiple books here; over 770 of them, in fact.
For yes, your humble scribe got his act together last night and began updating his list of Military History books. I had a lot to add, since I've been buying them for a couple of months and they do sort of stack up after a while. Art?

There's at least 30 books in that shot. Some I've already read, some you'd only use for reference, some are waiting to be read. Thus it was with some interest I read the title of a page on the Beeb's website. Art?

Guilty. O so very guilty.

"Bibliomania", it transpires, is obsessively purchasing and collecting books, although it has been downgraded slightly to a passion rather than a problem. What can I say? "Good books do furnish a room".*
Meanwhile, look what else turned up in the post on Friday:

That cover on the left is pure come-on
(There are no zombies)

Not sure where I saw these first, but I Googled 'Captain Britain' and was interested. These are volumes 2 & 3 of the trade paperbacks and I presume volume 1 would have explained the background a bit more, but it's only available from South Canada at the moment, and a bit pricey.
See? I can't be a bibliomaniac, can I, or I'd have bought it. Just waiting till a cheaper copy comes up, or payday, whichever is sooner.
As you can guess from the title, this is set in Britain, and is a somewhat uneasy mix of yer standard superhero stuff and the supernatural.
And now, time to see if the motley can keep down a gallon of semi-cooked oysters!

Of Atom Bombs And Archaeology
Earlier today I mentioned a sci-fi novel where Atlantean-era cultures destroyed themselves with nuclear weapons, and argued that any such event would have left a profound archaeological footprint.
Of course, there is nothing so daft that some tin-foil beanie wearing bafoon will not believe it. Shape-shifting reptilianoids are controlling the weather, gold prices and the availbility of bite-size Mars bars? - someone, somewhere, will buy that.

Suddenly in short supply, it seems ...

Finland does not exist and is a joint conspiracy between Japan and Russia?** Adolf Hitler is alive and well and living under the South Pole, exerting influence via mind control lasers?** A flying saucer crashed at Roswell and the South Canadian government covered it up?**
Then there is the one about Mohenjo-Daro. You probably won't have heard of this archaeological site, from the Indus Vally Civilisation in what is now India, but it was easily as advanced as the Egyptians or Mesopotamians. Art?

The excavated city

The bampots claim that it was destroyed by an atomic explosion, as Atlantis was in "Triplanetary". Their evidence appears to be 37 bodies, which are claimed to have been left unburied "as if there was nobody left to bury them".
Take a good look at the picture above, and notice the city spectacularly unaffected by any explosion, nuclear or otherwise. The radiation count is at background, those bodies were buried, there is no crater, there is no geological record of any fallout - need I go on?
Bah!

"Selenophobia"
Which, you will not be surprised to know, is "Fear of the Moon". "Selene" being Greek for "Moon"
Here an aside. I wonder how they promoted the 2009 film "Moon" in Greece? Did they use the Roman alphabet on posters? Translate it into "Selene"?

Excellent film, by the way

Anyway, imagine you're a prominent president of a nation armed with nuclear weapons, and you suddenly suffer from Selenophobia. What's your logical next step?
Why - ATOM BOMBING THE MOON!

Ha! Take that, Moon!

I realise this is a tissue-thin excuse to drag out one of my favourite lines, and I don't care. Plus, all the selenophobes out there like it.

You Can Never Get Too Much Of A Bad Thing
Bad things, in this case, being giant spiders, and you will argue until your tongue suffers chronic muscle fatigue that spiders are not bad, without convincing me.
For all their innate horridness, it seems that people enjoy being terrified by giant spiders, and you need look no further than the very low-budget "The Giant Spider Invasion" of 1975. Art?