The Bus Is A Bust

Today Was A Touch Of Trauma
Not a lot, just a touch.  Sufficient unto garner a little bit of sympathy, nicht war?
     Your modest artisan's presence was required in the office today, in person and most concretely, because <long dull description of work that goes on and on and on and - O you get the picture - redacted by Mister Hand>.  Which meant travelling in on that cheerless chariot, a First Bus.

First Bus prototype

     O joy unabated.
     The thing is, I cannot adequately take or make notes on the bus, due to a ghastly combination of poor suspension on the bus and Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell's gutters, which seem to be maintained by one man with a teaspoon of tar, a pinch of gravel and a street map of Nizhny Novgorod to locate the potholes.  Art?

     I don't think you need to be told where the bus journey begins.  This looks like a spider had a bath in a bottle of Quink and went for a jog.  Conrad embarrassed at his penmanship, as he now looks more like bumble-scribe than humble scribe.*
     Now to dip darts in curare and see if the motley can dodge 'em!

Mondegreens
This is one of those things that takes a while to develop, so bear with me, bear with me.
     Okay, a "Mondegreen" is the term given to misheard song lyrics, after a song about "Laid him on the green" was heard instead as "Lady Mondegreen", whom I think sounds far more interesting than some bloke sleeping on the grass.

Lady Mondegreen being a saucy wench.

     We now jump to that seminal hum-along pop classic "Anarchy in the U.K." by those laughable scamps The Sex Pistils Pistols (nothing flowery about them!)**, and the line "I wanna destroy passers-by -"

I'm sure they didn't really, nice lads that they were and all

     Your humble scribe always heard this as "I wanna destroy PONSONBY!!" though I was never clear about why Mister Ponsonby had earned such vitriolic calumny.  A civil servant who hadn't processed his GS13588 form properly?
     But what's this!  In sorting out his book collection, Conrad found all three volume of "The Grenadier Guards in the Great War".  Art?

Who are they written by?

     None other than F. B. PONSONBY.
     I rest my case.***

A Bigger Bang
As you should surely know by now, Conrad simply loves big explosions, and the bigger the better.  You can't get much bigger than the one I mentioned in passing a couple of days ago: a hypernova.  There is a more formal name for this phenomenon: "Superluminal supernova", which doesn't have the same cachet.
     It is believed, because there are umpteen theories about what causes a hypernova, that the collapse of a star some 40 times or more the mass of our Sun is what dunnit.

BANG!

     When these things pop, whatever the mechanism, they go off with between 10 to 100 times the energy of a normal supernova, and I never thought I'd ever write "Normal" when describing a supernova.  You really don't want to be in the neighbourhood when one of these detonates.  However, all those heavy metals that you like to make into bracelets and rings and bling things?  Produced in supernovae.  So, the next time you put on your jewellery THINK OF THE EXPLODING STARS!

Interstellar murderers!

About time to go downstairs and see about getting some lunch.  Okay, a lot of lunch.  I'm hungry!

Two By Two Birds With But One Stone
So far today we've had astronomy, which is one of the supposed staple contents of BOOJUM! according to the default Facebook blurb; the other two are tanks and zombies.  I now plan to cunningly combine those latter two in a single post <rubs hands gleefully as this is as exciting as Conrad ever gets>.  Art?

Rick Grimes flees

     Here we have a scene from one of the earlier seasons of "The Walking  Dead", where Rick (our iconoclastic BRITISH hero) gets the heck out of Bodge (similar to "Getting out of Dodge except due to a mistake), because the tank had a zombie inside.  Do you doubt my word?  Art!

Quizzical-looking zombie if you ask me.

     The thing is, that there tank is a British Chieftain tank, and you're not fooling me by painting it white, matey.  I can show you a more conventionally camo'd one.  Art?

FV4201

     They've taken the thermal jacket off the barrel, and one of the smoke dischargers off the turret for TWD, yet it's still a BRITISH tank on the streets of a South Canadian city.
     It crops up elsewhere.  I suppose if you pay for a supporting British thespian armoured fighting vehicle, you want to get your money's worth for it.  Here we see it in "Zombieland", port rear.  Art?

I've not watched "Zombieland" for a good while.  Time to revisit?

     Conrad can only suppose that nobody is allowed to get their hot sweaty hands on an M1 Abrams tank (the only major tank not present at Bovington Tank Museum, too), so producers and set designers and dressers go for the next best thing.  After all, how many hair-splitting tankophiles out there will ever notice the difference or bleat in a blog about it?
     Well, you know one who has.

Now that we've covered astronomy, tanks and zombies, as well as colossal explosions, I wonder what else is left to traduce?
     
     Hmmm.  I do wonder at Hom. Sap. at times.  All I did was Google "Atomic Zombies" and this came up - Art?

Indeed.

     A quick check on IMDB shows that it comes with a budget of £15,000 - none of that dollar nonsense here - which is less than the catering bill on even a modestly-budgeted mainstream film.  Not only that, it scores 5.1 on the ratings scale, even though it has 0 reviews or synopses.  Conrad is not saying that the film's makers have been logging onto IMDB and upping the score for their own product, yet it's a distinct possibility.
     Damn.  I might have to actually watch it to check up.  What have I gotten myself into?



*  Feel my pain.
**  Botanist joke.
***  I'm not sure what it is, quite, except I'm resting it.