As that well-respected musician Sir Paul McCartney sang.
And yes, this is the man we were spitefully criticising yesterday, because we here at BOOJUM! are hideously mercurial and can change opinions before reaching the end of a sentence. Take our attitude towards that dismal deluded drug-dazzled duffer Paul McCartney, for instance.
Anyway, I was pondering on a bottle of beer I bought last night - how very unusual! - which, for some bizarre reason, had been christened "Venus And Mars". Art?
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| The evidence |
For some reason their blurb on the back had Mars down as the "God of Agriculture".
Er - chaps? There's a reason the word "Martial" exists. Mars - God of Making People Stop Breathing By Poking Them With Sharp Things. Since the invention of gunpowder, you might add Frequently At High Speed.
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| Congrats, Art: you got a picture correct |
Anyway, less of Mars, as it was Venus I wanted to talk about. In science fiction circles, Venus was always but always depicted as being incredibly wet, courtesy of the total cloud cover in it's atmosphere, which means us Brits would have felt right at home. Venus = Planet-Wide Swamp is the name of the trope, I think. If you want examples, lest you think my writing is the product of a fevered hallucinating mind,* I suggest you check out Ray Bradbury's "The Illustrated Man" or John Wyndham's "The Outward Urge".
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| Typical summer's day, Venus. (Or the U.K.) |
The difference is, Venus is a lot closer to the traditional image of Hell than it is to soggy foggy boggy Britain. For one thing, the temperature is hot enough to melt tin, cadmium and lead. The rain, when it falls, is acid, either hydrochloric or sulphuric. The pressure, were you to experience it unshielded, would crush you as if you were a cockroach beneath a jackboot. The Sinisters sent many probes to Venus, none of which functioned for long until they either melted, dissolved or collapsed.
So - why name a beer after a planet that must be the lowest rent in the Solar System?
Yes, I know it was a hit single for Bananarama, but that was 30 years ago, I thought it was rubbish and never liked them anyway.
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| A panorama of banana |
Now, can we make the motley go down the slide faster if we cover it in goose grease?
I Say, Small Domesticated Wolf!
As you should surely know by now, your humble scribe is not a dog person, despite at this very moment being in charge of Edna whilst everyone else swans off to do their shopping.
Now let me change track entirely and mention Eels' frontman and driving force, Mark Oliver Everett, he of the beard like a doormat. Art?
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| Mark, about to murder a doughnut |
Mark is known for producing music of an utterly curmudgeonly nature, which is part of why Conrad likes Eels. They are not a band to listen to if you want your soul lifting.
And yet! It transpires that Mr. E loves him some doggy companionship, having had Bobby Junior for 10 years - Art?
When Ol' Bob passed away, Mr. E, being about as tough as marshmallow, promptly got another two dogs.
It's more than a little scary to think that "Beautiful Freak" came out 25 years ago.**
Remember When -
You were young, you shone like the sun - No! Sorry, that's Pink Floyd and "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", isn't it?
Actually the next post is going to be outstandingly difficult for anyone to remember, seeing as it took place 114 years ago. Remember when Perfidious Albion and the Ruffians nearly went to war?
For yes, we are talking about the Dogger Bank Incident. No, we are not going to be discussing anything to do with Novichok today. The Dogger Bank, 1904, okay?
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| The Ruffian cruiser "Bogatyr" |
Picture the scene. The Ruffian's Baltic Fleet is en route to Port Arthur in their Far East possessions, where they expect to encounter the Japanese high seas fleet and battle it out. The Ruffian naval crews are not up to scratch, frankly - the Tsar might like his battleships but Ruffians are not a naval nation.
The Ruffian fleet then encounters a fleet of trawlers out of Kingston-upon-Hull at the Dogger Bank, identifies them as Japanese torpedo-boats and opens fire on them. For twenty minutes. I should point out that torpedo-boats have a range of a few hundred miles and the Baltic Fleet is over 10,000 miles from Japanese home waters.
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| An "Ooops" moment if ever there was one |
Fortunately only three fishermen are killed, which is one more than Ruffians killed, as the Baltic Fleet also opens fire on itself - more "Japanese" ships being identified. Damage is slight as Ruffian gunnery is execrable; one ship fired 500 shells without hitting anything.
The British are understandably apoplectic with rage about the incident and shadow the Baltic Fleet, getting their own back by supplying the Japanese with all the intelligence information they can acquire. Tracking it's progress would have been relatively easy, anyway, since all one would need to do is listen to the telegraph communications from civilian merchant shipping identified as "Japanese" and fired upon.
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| "Japonskogo Linkor!!STRELYAT!!"*** |
It is nice to record that the Ruffians coughed up £66,000 in compensation, which was a whacking big amount in 1905; so well done Tsar Nicholas. One wonders what Tsar Putin's response would be today ...
There you go, you can consider that post to be on the theme of "Mars". So we've covered both Venus and Mars, which is where we came in -
* That would, frankly, be an improvement.
** Top record, not a duff track on it.
*** Russian for "I do not have my contact lenses in."
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