Back With A Bang

Yeah, Baby!
Enough of that peace and goodwill nonsense, because conflict is dramatic and compelling (as long as it's someone else's conflict)!
     Now, rest assured that we're not going to be suffering over a photo essay of What I Got For Christmas, because I'm typing this at work and I can't upload photographs from my phone here.  What, did you think it was because I'm such a nice guy?*
     Okay, let us now cast our minds back to the Russo-Japanese War, because I did threaten you with this topic earlier this month.  Probably the biggest war you've never heard of, it's also fair to say it was the first major war of the twentieth century (Boer War aside) and the last of the nineteenth century.

Someone is about to have the bad hair day to end all bad hair days

     Why so?  O I thought you'd never ask!
     What was lacking, for one thing.  No heavier-than-air craft.  The Sons of Nippon did have observation balloons, and that was it.  No submarines either, though there were torpedo-boats.  There were cavalry - our Ruffian friends had their world-famous Cossacks, still - as in the days of Napoleon.
     What they had is also important.  Barbed wire, trenches, machine guns and rapid-firing artillery.  The siege of Port Arthur in many ways presaged the trench warfare of the First Unpleasantness.


     There you go, a useful map.
     I may go into specifics later, so a cut to the chase - the Japanese essentially won themselves to death; they defeated the Ruffians in every battle, yet their casualties were enormous and by the war's end they'd practically run out of reserves.  Not so the Ruffians!  O no - once they had completed the last section of the Trans-Siberian Railway, near Lake Baikal if memory serves, they started to move in their reserves from European Russia.  This meant the Sons Of Nippon had to make do with a very meagre set of results.  One might say that the Japanese won the war, the Ruffians won the peace.

Boots, boots, boots.
(Also guns, hats and uniforms)

     Now, shall we see if the motley can swim faster than a shoal of hunger-crazed piranhas?

Make Mine Morrison's
it is a contention I hold that whomsoever is in charge of what we call "General Merchandise" at Morrison's Rochdale branch is an aficionado of bad films.  As evidence, I offer up "Alien Siege", which I noticed on the shelves yesteryon.  Art?

Hmmm.  Cheeky.

     Since I had lost my itemised shopping list, and was thus without anything to write upon, your humble scribe had to rely on his (very) fallible memory.  Which worked!
   There was another one that popped up in the DVD section a while back - "Patient Zero", which again, if Art -

Matt Smith, Natalie Dormer and Stanley Tucci

     Apparently PZ is a black hole of suckiness, according to the online opinion over on IMDB, and it only scores 4.2.  How did they manage to get a cast like that, though?**
     The thing is, these thing's DVD case feature most striking cover art, which is where all the money and creativity to - notice that rather naughty mimicry of the Marine Corps raising the flag on Mount Suribachi for AS.  The film only scores 2.32 over on IMDB, which also translates as "Should have saved your money". 
     Hence Conrad's practice of making notes about a title, rather than pouncing with both hands.

Conrad, pouncing with his hot sweaty hands.

Buses
O don't get me started.  Actually, TOO LATE!  I have started so I shall finish <Frothing Nitric Ire to the fore>.
     We are now into the dog days of the holiday season, when First Bus's normally unreliable public service vehicles run to a timetable that is made up by throwing dice at random, cross-referenced with peering into goat entrails and divining the tea-leaves at the bottom of the cup. 

The dastards in question

     They may be running a Saturday service, or a normal service, or not running at all past a certain time, or all three simultaneously, which you might think impossible - but not for First Bus.  I might get home by 7:00 post meridian tonight, or not.  That bus driver this morning was quite prepared to whiz past me in the fog, were I not sticking my large, noticeable and comprehensively extended arm into the middle of the road.

Fog!  The enemy of bus timetables.  Or something.

Finally -
No blog post would really be complete without your humble scribe complaining bitterly about something especially marginal and unlikely.
     Hence "OOZIEST".  This was the answer in a Codeword I did yesterday, and frankly I don't think they're playing fair.  Is it even a proper word?
     <stops typing before the red mist descends>

Quite oozy - but is it the ooziest?

     Oh, except that's not quite the end.  When work finished in an hour or so I then have the toxic trauma of travel by First Bus, if they can manage to sort out a bus that doesn't break down, blow up or get transmutated into the fourth dimension.





* Conrad:  not even a nice human.
**  Blackmail!