The Old Order Changeth

Or: Boring Work Stuff
Hi!  Your humble scribe here, at a new desk with a different PC, which means taking 20 minutes to log on.  I plan to log in 10 minutes early, too.  This is not a demonstration of how keen I am, merely that if I do that then Conrad can quit work 10 minutes earlier, and get the 17:23 bus home, hooray!
     WAKE UP! I know it's dull stuff; it gives you a soupcon of how my life runs.*
     Plus I've just managed to enhance the brightness of my monitor, which is such an exciting experience I'm not sure I can take any more.  Gasp.

A process only slightly less exciting than this.

     Plus, I baked a cake last night, and forgot to take a picture of it.  Brazil Nut and Banana Loaf, from the Hummingbird Bakery recipe book I got last weekend.  As I have mentioned before, the HB recipes are more fiddly than others, yet they give a very nice end result.  Imagine how it tastes, it'll do your mind good.
     Okay, time to end this Intro, which for once has actually been more of an Intro and less half the whole body of the blog, and see if the motley can outswim this cyborg zombie shark!

I Googled and I found -
(Some people have FAR too much time on their hands)

     Oh.  Apparently there's a submarine volcano in the vicinity that's about to erupt, so - er - we might have shark soup on the menu.**

To Dream The Impossible Dream
That sounds suspiciously like a song from a musical, and if it proves to be so I shall have to fall on my sword.  Meanwhile, I would like

An Ohio 614 4-8-4 steam loco

     Dog Buns!  Stop doing that - you can't just jump into me blog because of your strategic import, you know - go pester a rail enthusiast instead.
     I do apologise, gentle reader.  Where were we?
     Mark Kermode, whom you already know as a big fan of The Comsat Angels, was compiling a vlog list of unfilmable novels.  Wahey, up at number 5 or 7 (I wasn't doing anything as dull as counting) there's "Gravity's Rainbow" by the esteemed  Thomas Pynchon, which Mark slanders as "Often cited as one of the most difficult modern novels to read, and it's suggested you simply skip the first 122 pages," - I don't think so!  Art?

My Edition

    I agree that it would be remarkably difficult to make into a film, given, as people stated to Mark, it's length, the complexity of the many plot strands and the countless characters.  Perhaps a television series?
     You can tell the vlog is a good few years old, as nobody brought up "Against The Day", Ol' Tom's monster opus from <Googles quickly> 2006, which comes in at well over a thousand pages and has about a hundred characters - meaning all the problems of GR in addition to even more of them.
     Still, perhaps one day, in the far future ...

Ol' Tom, when he was younger.

     Hmmm.  Folks across the desk from me have been talking about a scary ex-employee, scary because she talked to herself.  Apparently this sort of thing is frowned upon in sane company, meaning I'm going to have to be careful (and quietly-spoken) here.  I mean, if the only person who knows what you're talking about is yourself, what chance do I have of chatting gaily with my compatriots?***

We're On A Literary Jag Today!
I should point out that we are using "Jag" in the South Canadian slang way, meaning an extended stretch of anything in particular, which you might feel is a tad excessive in the case of a mere two examples, which is why 'Poetic Licence' was invented, which is an overuse of the word "Which".

Hmmmmm.

     I was prompted to post this one after seeing a sidebar on the Beeb's website about their adaptation of a Victor Hugo novel, to wit, "Les Miserables", which proudly boasts that there is no horrid music associated with it.  Good.  I have never seen the wretched musical and never intend to, so there.  That's Conrad for you, STILL HATES ALL MUSICALS!
  I think I've seen part of a film adaptation with Geoffrey Rush, except I fell asleep and had a dream about polishing my brass hand, so -
     My point is, how enticing or appealing is a title that states right there on the cover that it's about the Miserables?  You might also class Charles Dickens' "A Tale Of Two Cities" as being about a whole bunch of murders and misfortunes, but he doesn't rub your face in it from the go.
     Bah!


 *  In a palsied narcoleptic stagger, actually, rather than running.
**  Not motley soup - motleys taste vile.
***  Slim to none!  <the unflattering truth courtesy of Mister Hand>