More Of Strife And Folly!

Yes, I'm A Terrible Person
(But we knew that already).  Your humble scribe is delighted that the ballfoot game season has started again.  Not because I have any interest in the game itself; for all I care they could walk onto the pitch and toss a coin to see who wins.  

Or - a penguin, instead, for the raw theatrical power.

No, what I feel absolutely gleeful about is the Comments section over on the BBC's website pages about sport.  These pages are known as "Have Your Say", usually abbreviated to HYS, and usually consist of 33% technical posts about a particular ballfoot game, 33% gloating about it and 33% ladling poisonous invective at each other, players or managers (frequently all three together).*
     To elaborate a little: the manager of Manchester United is called Jose Mourinho.  Art?

The chap himself, as cheerful as he gets

     Somewhat rashly, Mr. Mourino made a cutting remark last week about not being able to "buy class", which said remark came back and bit him squarely on the ass.** This is because his team were beaten by humble Brighton and Hove Albion, and the HYS about this ballfoot game is nearing 2,000 comments.
     I'm loving it!  Every schadenfreude-filled moment of it!  <pauses to come down from his unseemly exhibition of delight> and now let normal broadcasts commence.
     Okay, can the motley outrun a horde of cannibal mutant hedgehogs with poison spines?  Let's find out!

Run, motley, run!

"The Rockford Files: Irving the Explainer"
We - the metaphorical "We" since I'm not going to have you lot sitting behind me looking over my shoulder - are now onto Season 4 of TRF and I recognise bits of several episodes, including last night's "Irving the Explainer".  The plot was horribly convoluted, to the point that Jim Rockford had to hire a logician to work out what was going on.  There was the Surete to begin with, and a French painting worth millions, and a Nazi-sympathising film director from the Thirties and Forties, and an unsolved murder, and a woman who wasn't whom she (and Jim) thought she was and these two - Art?

Sinister Teutons!

     Who might be ex-Abwehr agents, or simple criminals, or agents of the East German Stasi - as I said, all very complicated.
     And do you know, the whole thing was directed by James Coburn.  Yes, that James Coburn.

James' Garner and Coburn, and some lightweight in between

You What?
Conrad went to see "The Incredibles 2" last week and will mercifully refrain from giving you a blow-by-blow account of the entire film - maybe next week.  No, what I want to talk about is a bizarre short animation that played before the main feature.  Did it have a name?  Let me quickly check - aha - "Bao".
     Briefly, it's about a Chinese woman making steamed dumplings, who accidentally creates a sentient one.  Art?

Hmmmm.

     The dumpling then grows up into a snotty teenager who is about to leave home, so the lady -
     Eats him.  Down in one.  Then she breaks down, except her son comes back as a grown teenaged human being with a girlfriend and they live happily ever after making dim sum.
     Wait - what?
     I hope this never happens to your humble scribe as he is putting together a cake batter <shudders in horror>.

Because this -

Oh, OXA!
Yes, we are back to some of the frankly rubbish designs bodged up by Perfidious Albion during the grim, invasion-expecting summer days of 1940, when it was better to have something crap now, rather than something good - oh, say mid-1941.
     Enter the mighty "Lorry, 30cwt, Anti-tank".  "cwt" for those of you not familiar with odd Imperial measurements, is an abbreviation for "one hundredweight", and there were 20 of them in a ton.  No, I don't understand it either, nor why they didn't simply say "1.5 ton" instead.  Anyway, Art?

Quiver in fear, Panzers!

     This was a Bedford OXD truck with an armour body, and the "anti-tank" bit was supplied by a Boys anti-tank rifle.  Art?

Enormous -

    - and entirely useless at knocking out tanks.  It would be a brave or foolish man indeed who took on the smallest of tanks in his OXA.



*  The missing 1%?  Posts removed for breaking the rules.
**  Forgive the South Canadian argot, except it rhymes.