I Gotta Beef With You

Ah, How Effortlessly And Convincingly I Slip Into South Canadian Argot!
Admit it, you were fooled, weren't you?  Of course you were.
     In fact I was lying, I don't have a beef with you, I had a beef with myself.  Brisket beef, to be precise.
     For Yes!  I have finally made that Black Country dish 'Groaty Dick' - no sniggering at the back there - that variety of 'meat porridge' which is also known as 'Groaty Pudding'.  You see?  Entirely SFW in the same sense that there is a sweet suet pudding known as 'Spotted Dick'.  Art?  A picture for these dirty-minded rascals.

     It's pretty basic stuff; cheap beef, leeks, onion, a carrot, a pint and a half of stock and a measuring cup of barley groats.  Bung it in the oven for about four hours and Hay Pesto!  It's done.  I got to use up those packets of Polish Barley Groats that have been hanging around at the back of the cupboard for months.  What one might call win-win.
     The only problem is that there's a lot of it, and Wonder Wifey can't even look at it, thanks to the barley, so your modest artisan shall have to eat the lot.*  
     Okay, time to see if the motley can be seriously injured by a nail gun at a distance (we need to see if "The Equalizer" was telling cinematic fibs or not).

A bad guy somewhere is going to have the worst day of his life.
(And have it in the rain, too)

This Ram Ain't No Lamb
D'you see?  My ineluctable mastery of South Canadian slang <hastily looks up "ineluctable" to see if it means what he thinks it does and it's in the same kind of desert > once again impresses all who read it.
     You may remember some weeks ago I went on about a very particular car stunt as seen in the episode "Second Chance" of 'The Rockford Files', although I didn't have a photograph of it, and there was only an aftermath shot available on the internet.  
     Lucky you!  I found the episode and got the relevant photographs, so now you don't have to settle for a paragraph of breathless text and a stock photo.  Art?  Less anthracite, more expedite!

1

     Our hero, trapped in a dead end, gets his Pontiac behind a rubbish skip on wheels and accelerates forward.  That will be James Garner doing the stunt driving there.

2

     The miscreants have parked across the road, blocking Jim's exit - or so they think.  See that skip accelerating!

3

     His improvised battering ram has now smashed the offending car aside, without Jim's own car suffering any damage, thanks to the now-separated skip.

4

     Jim is now away and clear, with the bad guy's car reciprocally badly dented, facing the wrong way and hemmed in by a rubbish skip.     To comment - I've never seen a car stunt like this done before or since, which is why I made a point of getting photographs.  Presumably it's a tricky thing to get right, as you can't easily control the direction of the rubbish skip, nor how it behaves on or after impact, and having large metal objects like that hurtle around in confined spaces at thirty miles per hour is - dangerous!**

Conrad Is Not Sure About This
The BBC's website has a rather clickbaity sidebar that only appeared this afternoon, which I shall bamboo-skewer Art into illustrating.  Art!  Less coal more goal!

Hmmmmmm.

     Your humble scribe doesn't need any pointers about becoming a genius with a Cryptic Crossword, I'm there already.  If there is any doubt about a clue or spelling or syntax or exactly where the grave accent goes, I do have some help - the Crossword Companion, the Reverse Dictionary, the Thesaurus, Webster's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.
     No, the question is, can the BBC's help enable some of you out there to also become fiendishly adept at doing Cryptic Crosswords?  I would not be happy were it to become so, because in the words of Syndrome, "When everyone's super, no one will be super."***

"Oh NO!  I left a sock in my underpants drawer!  QUELLE HORREUR!"

"Hey!" complained the blancmange.  "I protest - "
(and then it got eaten)

Finally -
Just to get us up to count, and to add in a bit of rhyme, I thought we'd have a look at some strange jams, so have a gander at <shudder!> Bacon Jam.  Art?

Each to their own

     Just imagine that on your Saturday morning toast - fat, salt and sugar all in one concentrated artery-clogging package - save time between heart attacks!
     Oh, and there was this intriguing poster, which I must check out later on - 

A fruity little comedy?

      - and with that, we are GONE!


*  Feel my pain
**  But entertaining.
***   You've got to admit, "Syndrome" as a supervillain name has all the charisma and threat of a plate of blancmange.