Strychnine Come Dancing

I Know, I Know
     That's reaching in terms of rhyming; well, I have to work with what I've got, not what I want.
     This typing is going to be in two parts, since the BBC have, treacherously and most definitely against tradition, set up their flagship dramatic reconstruction "Doctor Who" for broadcast on a Sunday evening.  So, here beginneth the first part.
     Now, we all know that Conrad abhors musicals, that he would be pathetically grateful for having two left feet, and non-genre television leaves him cold.  Ergo, I do not have to watch "Strictly Come Dancing" to know that I'd hate it.  HATE IT!
     "But what, O Odious One, does that have to do with the extremely bitter alkaloid poison Strychnine, derived from the Strychnos Nux-Vomica tree, native to Southern India?" I hear you ask.

Because both make me retch?

     Pausing only to worry at your knowledge about poisons and acknowledge that I can indeed be considered a source of odium, I shall explicate.
     Because I would be as likely to ingest strychnine as I would sit down and watch SCD, and because there is a rough similarity in pronunciation.  First of all, strychnine is very bitter and thus unpleasant if ingested on it's own.  Secondly, it is lethal in small doses.  That's two strikes against it, with things being weighted toward the second.  Oddly enough, both cautions are equally applicable to SCD, at least in my case.

Watch what's in yer cup, matey

     Interestingly enough, strychnine used to be sold over the counter as a rat poison over a hundred years ago, available from any chemist's, meaning that a great many people's exit from this mortal coil was hastened onward.  The terminal symptoms resembled that of tetanus, i.e. said victim being contorted into the most ghastly shapes, and that's what their deaths were ascribed to.  Once the sale of rat poison got tightened up, ageing relatives slept a bit sounder.

Mind you, there was still Thallium ...

     Okay, time to harness a polar bear cub to the motley, then turn them loose near it's mother!

     Nearly time for the dramamentary to begin.  Better slip out of my Sekrit Layr - 

The Wargaming Proceeds But Slowly
For Lo! Conrad is a slow worker.  I have now put labels on nearly all the units of Perfidious Albion, there's just a handful of XIV Corps bases to label.  I notice that I've got a couple of 1/300 scale scratch-built Newton 6" Medium Mortars - not difficult to bodge up at this scale - and wonder should I add them in as well?  These were the Medium Mortar batteries ("X" and "Y") in a British infantry division, crewed by the Royal Artillery because they were humongous great things.  Art?

A Newton about to deliver the good news

     Mind you, Perfidious Albion already has 28 bases of artillery.  We shall see.
     I shall also be playing the first few moves verrrry slowly, as it's literally years since I've played "Square Bashing" rules.

Conrad Was Startled
Actually, first I was complacent, then I was startled.  I refer, of course, to the BBC's pages on the subject of "Science".
     Here an aside.  Why do they also have a separate web-page for "Tech"?  Surely that's a subset of "Science"?  Rather a limited one, too: all modern technology seems to be about to this author is endless babbling and boasting from mobile phone manufacturers.
     Anyway, there I was, perusing the pages, thinking "This is news?" - a prehistoric piranha and a photograph of two monkeys - and also "I have to work with what I've got, and frankly it's not a lot"
     UNTIL!! I saw the sidebar title "Headless Chicken Sea Monster Caught On Film"
     How could I resist?  Art!

Quite close to the description

     I think you can see the similarity, but if Art can put down his photo-album of Mara Corday -

A headless chicken
(Or a K'Zool Warrior, if you're Arnold J. Rimmer)

     I did think it was going to be another blurry film of something undetermined at sea, which the believers would all jump up and down at, shrieking "The smoking gun!  The smoking gun!"  whilst simultaneously thinking "Praise be, thirty years of cryptozoology has not been a complete waste of time".

<ahem>

     And with that, we are done.