My Country, 'Tis Of Tea

I've Used That Before
Still, it's a good pun and bears repeating.  Now, as you know, Conrad is as British as a badger in a bowler hat on a bicycle eating a bacon butty on a brown barm,* and to this end he is obviously quite interested in tea.  Well, if by "quite interested" we mean "quite obsessed to the point of having whole cupboards bulging with the stuff".
     Who'd have thought that some hapless Chinaman accidentally dropping some leaves in his cup of hot water all those millenia would have such consequences?  Still, he (or she) can console themselves with the thought that nobody has gone to war over tea.  Yet.
     Okay, Art?

Tea!

     These three are the caddies and packet that arrived yesterday from Ahmad Tea: a caddy of Darjeeling, a caddy of Jasmine and a whacking big packet of Cardamom.  All loose-leaf, of course (tea snob speaking).  I didn't plan this but in the background you can see two packets of Sainsbury's Darjeeling tea bags (!)**, in front of a tin containing English Breakfast, and that tin atop the bread-bin is full of Lapsang Souchong.
     Hopefully these accumulated supplies will enable me to last out until the next Darjeeling harvest is in.  Fingers crossed!
     Time to put the motley on rocket skis and send it roaring off across the Arctic wastes!

One of history's happiest accidents

How To Earn Conrad's Frothing Nitric Ire
As you ought to know by now, the Codewords in the M.E.N. (the daily rag for the area surrounding Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell) have gotten harder of late.  Oh for the days of yore when they gave you THREE letters to work with ...
     Anyway, yesterday they gave you "L" and "U", and I worked out which number corresponded to "E", rendering an answer as "LE_E_E".  It stumped me, and I had to resort to my crossword dictionary and my Collins dictionary to resolve it.
     The answer?  "LEXEME" Really?  REALLY!  Never heard of it.  A technical description goes like this: " a lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word"
     Dog Buns!  In fact, Dog Buns!!
     Crossword?  RAGEword!

Conrad in an apoplectic rage

More Of That Museum
You know, the Duke of Lancaster's Regimental museum.  Oh, you didn't think you were going to get off that easily, did you?  Not a bit of it.  I think we'll skip the Peninsular and Waterloo years for the beginnings of the First Unpleasantness.  Art?

     Beginning at the top, what you see are a couple of hats and a balaklava (a name taken from the Crimean Unpleasantness, actually), said woolen item not being stylish in any way, yet essential in cold weather.  On the shelf below are some caltrops - the pointy metal things - which would be liberally scattered about during mobile warfare to deter cavalry, or clumsy infantry.  Below that is an officer's uniform, a cap and an early-model gas helmet.  Also a branch from a famous tree on the Loos battlefield - "Lone Tree", so called because - gasp! - it stood alone.  On the bottom you can see a couple of shell cases, and entrenching tool, and that thing looking like a giant metal nipple <can we say that here?  We can?  O good> is actually the fuse from a detonated Teuton shell.

Only the lonely

     I was going to go on and on and on about "Journey's End" but I think that's enough of the First Unpleasantness for one day.  You may politely thank me for my mercy.

There will now be a break as your humble scribe goes off for his lunch.  I can hear Wonder Wifey and Edna prowling around downstairs, so it's only polite to go say "Hello".

"The Inedibles"
How about this as a pitch line to a Hollywood suit - 
CONRAD:  Hey, a family of superheroes whose bodies taste so disgusting that no monster would dare bite them!
HOLLYWOOD SUIT: What about bullets?
CONRAD (thinking fast): Er - yeah - that could be their secret weakness, a susceptibility to bullets.  What do you think?
HOLLYWOOD SUIT: Security?

"The Incredibles"
I have set myself up with a task, which originated out of a question about both 'Incredibles' films, namely - what year are they set in?
     It bears looking at, because what don't you see?  No mobile phones, for one thing.  I don't think anyone mentions the internet.  As I recall, when the Omnidroid showed up in Municiberg, the Army/National Guard responded with what looked like Fifties military kit.
     "It's only a film, Conrad," I hear you huffily object.
     Whilst I acknowledge that it is indeed complete fiction with no real-life counterpart, the designers and storyboard artists must have been given a direction to begin from, mustn't they?  I've not read anything that puts either film in a given decade, so I am going to try and define it myself.
     At the very least, it will keep me out of mischief.

Proof I am not raving.
(at least, not yet)

*  This is a lie.  Don't believe or trust the dishonest alien swine!  <the brutal truth courtesy Mister Hand>
**  Feel my pain.