For Peat's Sake!

<narrows eyes warningly>

Yes, that is exactly what I mean; no NO NO! it is not a typographical error.  Have I been wasting my time gloasting over my facility with the English language o'er these past few weeks?  

     Here an aside.  Nobody seems to know quite who the "Pete" is from the expression "For Pete's sake", though there is some speculation that this may be a rather overly familiar use of Saint Peter, the patron saint of fishermen.  

Maybe?

     Conrad wonders if the "sake" isn't actually Japanese rice wine, and the exclamation is due to the fact that Pete, the dullard, hasn't served it at the right temperature -

     There I go, veering off on a tangent.  How typical!  What I really wanted to talk about was not saints or trout or deep-sea trawlers - although which side would Saint Pete have been rooting for in the Cod War? - <ahem> but -

BOG SNORKELLING!

     Yes, this is a real sport, one right up there with Worm Charming and Pylon Spotting.  A trench is dug in boggy ground - hence the 'peat' of the title - 60 yards long, which then fills up with water.  Competitors then have to swim a length each way, and the fastest wins.  Simple, hey?

     Not so.  We are not talking about clean, clear water here; we are talking about dirty, muddy, root-filled, dank, dark-brown swill which requires competitors to wear not only a snorkel but goggles as well.  Art?

Quite.

     The recent unseasonal, atypical, unusual, counter-intuitive and lots of other similar nouns weather put this year's Bog Snorkelling World Championships at risk, because the water in the excavated channels - dried up.

     O noes!

     Fortunately normal service was resumed and torrential rains filled the ditches in.  Phew!  That was a close one!

How refreshing.

     Let's see if the motley can Bog Snorkel, and to help it along, we'll add in a dozen ravenous pike, too.

Swim, motley, swim!

Auntie Beeb, Your Grammar Is Off

As you know, Perfidious Albion invented football, hovercraft and television, but that doesn't mean that this country is actually proficient with any of them.  Take today's sideline on the BBC website.  Art?

One can only wish there had been ...

     This is a consequence of trying to keep captions within a certain text limit, but at this point brevity is competing with sense.  If you don't quite get my drift, I think Art can provide a suitable illustration?

Ouch.

     Serial killer or no, I think you'll agree he's got a spike in him.

     5/10, Auntie - Must Do Better!

Well, Well, Andre Morrell

This might take a bit of explaining.  Okay, it will take a bit of explaining.

     Andre played the character of Professor Bernard Quatermass in the television production of "Quatermass and the Pit", surely one of the most spooky and unsettling television productions ever, for all that it's 60 years old.

     Ol' Quatty, you see, was head of the British Rocket Group, a man determined to get men into space (no PC nonsense about female astronauts in 1955) despite the accountants and politicians. Art?

Brave old world of 1955

     He also, incidentally, saved the entire world three times over.

     Now, back to the present.  Conrad, ever nosey, was looking for rocket designs as proposed by Werner Von Braun, that rocketry chap with a somewhat dodgy past.  WVB, too, was determined to get men into space and because he worked for NASA he managed it in real life.  He designed a little bit of kit known as the RM1, which we see below approaching a space-station.  Art?

Hmmmmm.  Seems - familiar somehow.

     In fact this RM1 design is only scraping the surface of WVB's rocketry designs and proposals, and we may well come back to them in the near future.

And In A Blatant Commercial Shilling Dig -

Darling Daughter now has Cats! amongst the hand-crafted designer artworks that she offers for modest sums in return.  Where do you think I got my Great White Shark necklace from?

Jaunty tom-cat a-strutting

     If you are interested, pop along to her FB page, and for the lazy amongst you (a figure I suspect to be in the region of 95%) here's the link:

https://www.facebook.com/sallyscuriosities/

     Once again, an order from DD will prevent your descendants from a life of servitude in the uranium mines, or being rendered for parts in the organ banks.  Your choice - no pressure!

Aha!

I said it seemed familiar, didn't I?  

A bit more streamlined and atmosphere-capable

I Mutter Of Butter

Just Not How You Expected It
Normally, if your humble scribe mentions "Butter" then there's a long description of how he made a cake with it, and how unfair it is that he can't stuff at least half of it into his gaping piehole once it has cooled down a little.*  Today, however, I am using the word in the Cryptic Crossword sense, where it would be "Butter (4)".
     You may have gotten what the clue means, or you may have cheated and gone to look on Wordplay, so I shall stop being coy and sat that we're talking about goats here.
     Get it?  A goat?  That butts people?
     These ones are in the public eye because they are now understood to prefer happy people.  Aunty Beeb, that fount of all that's fit to read, explains that goats can distinguish between a happy face and an angry face, and they prefer the happy ones.  Art?

Goats at a goat sanctuary
(Goats being - er - massively persecuted?)

     Goats are a bit of a mystery to me.  You see, there are no goats within miles of The Mansion; and whenever Conrad approached them at urban farms when taking Darling Daughter to one, they would shy away.  I wonder why this is?

Completely baffled

     Do let me know in the Comments if you can fathom this out.
     Here an aside.  If you can, do try Gjetost, which is a Norwegian cheese made from goat's milk, being very sweet and also brown in colour.  Hard to get hold of at the local supermarket - those Norks don't want to let the precious stuff out of the fjords!**
     Now to see if the motley can cross a lake of molten lead before it's paper sandals catch fire!

The Horror! - Of "HOMONYM"
Yes, yes, another rant about Codeword and how they are, really, walking the line as regards definitions.  I wonder if the problem is with the compilers?  After all, normal crossword compilers each have their own signature style, which you as a solver have to adapt to, so the same may apply to the Codeword creators if they changed a while back.
     But honestly - "HOMONYM"?
     The concept is simple: two or more words that are spelled or which sound the same but mean completely different things.

                                               You get the picture

You What?
Conrad has just been reading about some miserable embezzling miscreant, who got a richly-deserved criminal conviction and prison sentence for stealing a total of £98,000 from an old dear of 97 years age.
     The snivelling thieving bumbletuck tried to claim, as her defence, that said old dear "had spent all the money on sherry".
     O Rly?  I am sure the judge did what I just did - fiddle about with numbers and guesstimates on a calculator.
     Here an aside.  I would rather go thirsty than drink sherry, for your humble scribe considers it to be an affront to the taste buds.  I once rashly made a milkshake with sherry, and the toxic taste is with me still.

Only good for soaking dried fruit prefatory to putting in a cake batter

     Anyway - if we assume a relatively expensive bottle of sherry costs £20.00 and contains 1.5 pints of liquid, then our old dear would have gotten through 4,900 bottles of the stuff - how many skipsworth is that?  In terms of volume, that's 7,350 pints, or 918 gallons.  Or, to put it another way, 3.25 tons of the stuff.

A 3 ton tanker.  This one holds water.  Unlike the thief's defence!

     Now, that's expensive sherry.  I did discover a dirt cheap brand in Tesco's at £3.95 per bottle, in which case our old dear would have drunk 18 tons of it (!).

 - or this much.

     No wonder the judge didn't believe the thief.

Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before -
You won't need to, this one has probably only ever existed in the mind of your humble scribe, since it resembles a skip full of rubbish that gets routinely churned over every few hours before having another tranche of flotsam and jetsam added.
     Okay, there is a film currently on release entitled "The Happytime Murders", which is rated 15 because it will include swearing, violence, potential puppet nudity and drug abuse.  Art?

One of these  two is not human

     Thing is, a similar tack has been taken before, by that mighty Antipodean polymath Peter Jackson.  True, his film didn't have human beings, but it did have an 18 rating, and Harry the Hophead Frog.  Oh, and a hippo with a machine gun.  Art?

Er -

     Yes, I know that it looks as if Heidi is going to off herself with an M60 but I'm sure that it's just the angle and the lighting and - change the subject, Art -

Ah.  Yes -

     - Harry the Hophead Frog - um - in an homage to "The Deer Hunter"?
     Just goes to show, Hollywood, that you're a day late and a dollar short.***

I think it's about lunchtime.  See you! 

Finally -
Because it would be nice to hit the ton in terms of word count, and because this ought to make sense after you see the link on Facebook, have a look at this peculiar craft.  Art?

The aspect of a water spider

     This thing was dreamed up and constructed by some bright sparks from Silicon Valley, it seems.  It gives a very smooth ride at up to 70 m.p.h. (whatever that is in knots) thanks to those great big sprung arms. Art again?

Yours for only £3,000,000 and change

*  Thank you diabetes, THANK YOU SO MUCH!  Also, yes, I am a greedy rascal.
**  Possibly.  Possibly not.  Go ask your Norwegian consulate.
***  Actually 19 years late and £24 million short.