O Frabjous Day!

How Unsurprising
The spell-checker - a sadly-afflicted South Canadian iteration - didn't recognise "Frabjous" as a legitimate word.  Well, it wouldn't do, would it?  It can't handle the correct spelling of words like 'Harbour' or 'Centre', so an entirely artificial word - oooh no thanks!
     It comes, lest you be unaware, from that splendid work of nonsense rhyme "Jabberwocky", by Charles Dodgson, better known perhaps as Lewis Carrol.  You know, the same feller who wrote "The Hunting of the Snark", which features a mysterious and fatal creature called a Boo -

Actually you don't.  It's a well-known fact that the Boojum is invisible.  Or something.

     But we digress.  I know we always do, I just thought I'd remind you, in case you were confused, or bored - though if you find you've been sat in the same position for seven hours, unblinking, then you're probably dead, not bored.
     Dog Buns!  Another car doing seventy outside my window.  And now a tractor doing twenty, followed by a string of very slow cars with angry-looking drivers.  How does that line from The Doors go?  "The cars roll past my window, Like the waves upon a beach"*.  Well some of these cars go past like a frackin'** Tsunami.

Hades welcomes careless drivers

     I apologise for the sidetrack getting sidetracked.  Where were we?
     Oh yes.  "O Frabjous Day".  It's a line that gets said with large amounts of glee, you see, and Conrad is absolutely chuffed to bits*** at finding a website titled "The Poison Garden", which is all about poisonous plants to be found lurking in parks and gardens across the UK.  It's long and detailed, and - you want the link?

http://www.thepoisongarden.co.uk/default.htm

     There you go. The chap who writes it cautions against screaming hysterical tabloid fear at KILLER EELS! the potentially harmful plants in our midst, as the risk of being poisoned is actually exceedingly low.  But it's fun to theorize.  Art?

Parsnips, a.k.a. the DEVIL'S CARROT!!

     Seriously, handling gone-to-seed parsnips in bright sunlight is risky indeed, and can lead to serious burns from Furocoumins present in the foliage.  Not likely to be a problem for your humble scribe, as he hates the horrid things.
      Okay, time to strap the motley onto a hospital trolley and tow it behind a lorry on the M62!

I Beg Your Pardon
Last week I blithely put down a reference to "HOTOL" as if you all knew what it was, which is the kind of assumption that annoys the irk out of me when other authors do it.
     I was looking to the future, since HOTOL actually got scrapped at the end of the Eighties, thanks to political foot-dragging, money issues (the Treasury, ever ready to take and never to give) and perceived competition from the M8s.
     The acronym is for "HOrizontal Take Off and Landing" which you might be forgiven for thinking is the conventional way to do it.
     Wrong!  O So Very Wrong, because we're talking about a British re-usable space-plane here, one with the lifting capacity of the South Canadian Shuttle but at a lot lower price tag (oh, I see the Treasury's ears perked up at that).  Art?

Going like a cat on a HOTOL tin roof!

     The whole thing was a lot of untried concepts and technologies, which made other countries reluctant to get involved, all the more so because the M8s already had the Ariane rocketry system in use.  A relict of the original project are still trying to get it off the ground, so to speak.  Plus, look at the design of the thing - how on earth could it take off horizontally with a fuselage like that?
     Art?

A launch trolley the solution.

     Of course, this immediately raises questions about copyright and fair use of Intellectual Property Rights, because who else used a rockets-sled for a Horizontal Take Off (and Landed Horizontally, too)?

A moment's silence for futurologist Gerry Anderson, please.

     My contention was that, by 2165, HOTOL would be a matured technology in common use for sending things into or back from orbit.
     We shall see, eh?  Watch this spot in 47 years time.

Naked Mole Rat, Take A Bow
As in a motion on stage, not an archer's weapon.  Not only would the smallest of bows be too large for a NMR, there wouldn't be room underground to loose an arrow.
     For the NMR, unlovely though it be, is a tunneling creature, and also the only mammal known to be - Poikilothermic.  Art?

Beautiful.
(To another NMR)

     That is, their body temperature is not stable, but can accommodate changes in the environment and allow the NMR to still function where a normal mammal would - well, keep over and die, to be honest.
     They may be ugly little bumbletucks, and that you can't deny, yet they are mighty amongst rats as a species because they live for up to 30 years, or about 15 times the normal ratty lifespan.  One wonders where a certain ring supposedly melted in the fires of Mount Doom has gotten to ...
     Oh, and they beat off cancer with a big stick, too.  In fact they are disgustingly healthy for all that they live in hot, arid desert regions of East Africa, which then brings me onto the subject of Stookie Glanders ...
     But that is a tale for another day.

Perhaps tomorrow

     For the shades of night are drawing in, and your modest artisan has to get his afternoon stroll into Royton done, just to ensure the joints don't stiffen up and lock into place.  Otherwise that horrid crack about being stuck in one position for hours and hours will come back and bite me on the Dog Buns!


*  Or similar.  I'm quoting from memory and my memory's what it used to be.  Or should that be "Not"?
**  Like "Frickin'" except worse, as it causes earthquakes.
***  Idiom for "Highly pleased" <You too can talk like a native!> courtesy Mister Hand