What A Woefully Wet Weekend

This Sceptred Isle - 
 - has, in the past in terms of martial capability, been described as an "unsinkable aircraft carrier".  Well, one feels that description might have been a bit hasty given today's weather.  It has been raining heavily and continuously for the past nine hours, with no sign of stopping any time soon. My ears were treated to the swish of tyres on wet tarmac first thing, and here I sit typing, that sound still susurrating across the road.

Davey Jones ahoy.*

     This is one of those times when Your Humble Scribe changes his usual hilarious nickname for this island nation to "The Pond of Eden".  If you are unfortunate enough not to live here then you cannot truly understand my fellow citizen's obsessive interest in the weather.  It is, as Tacitus shrewdly observed, never that extreme.  Instead it can possess a grim, grey,mordant and wearing quality that never once approaches excitement.  We don't have hurricanes, but we do have rain.  We don't have tornadoes, but we do have flooding of low-lying land.  We don't have blizzards, but we do have sleet.  We don't have droughts, but we do have a couple of weeks of nice weather spread over six months.

"Today's summer temperatures may reach as high as 10 or even 12 Degrees Centigrade."

      For those amongst you with a knowledge of genre films, there is one that strikes quite the soggy chord, if Art will lift his Neanderthal snout out of his coal dish -

Just very, very slowly, if this date is correct.

     Okay, let's put goggles on the otherwise-naked motley, give it a machete and put it in the ring with half-a-dozen Spitting Cobras!

Today's Horrifying Fact: the Spitting Cobra is real.
(And there are 18 species of them)

Ripped From Today's Headlines
Perhaps "Surgically removed" is a less upsetting description.  Anyway, a peculiar picture over on the font of all that's fit to be writ (the BBC for those not paying attention) caught my eye earlier today, and if Art will stop sucking that nuclear fuel-rod like a marrow bone and do some work -

You have to admit, you're curious, right?

     You may not quite understand what you're looking at here, as the dimensions are way, way off.  Okay, this is not a long, narrow stretch of tarmac path; it is, however, a very wide and short stretch of motorway, the sort of structure you are used to looking at more in this sense.  Art?

Imagine a one-yard slice crossways

     The whole thing was a political pressure stunt, mounted by a Romanian businessman in protest at how little motorway infrastructure that country possesses.  The hearse, ambulance and crashed cars are there to make a point about how dangerous Romania's current road system is.
     One suspects that in Romania, one of Europe's less affluent countries, there has been a lack of infrastructure investment which will take decades to correct, except that's boring so - Art?

The A57(M)

     - behold the A57(M), the Pond of Eden's shortest motorway at 585 yards, so <sobs quietly> we have lost that title to these Romanian upstarts.
Minking
Don't worry, this isn't rude and will all make sense over on Facebook.  Okay, you may or may not know about the release into This Sceptred Isle's environs of the American Mink, from way back in the Sixties onwards.  These, as the name implies, are not native to the UK, and probably protested at being brought up in such a soggy environment as ( Cont. Page 96) nevertheless flourished.  Art?


     Conrad has a couple of musings here.  These beasties have been breeding in the wild since the mid-Fifties and are now established across the Pond.  So - are they still a non-native species after over 60 years of living here?  I bet all those mink great-great-great grandchildren wouldn't have the slightest idea what their old fogey ancestors meant by "Oooh, oooh, the Big Sky Country!  The Big Easy!  The Big Apple!" and so forth.**

Big Sky, Montana
(They have mountains.  Who knew!)

      My next observation is of those shrieking tabloid headlines along the lines of "KILLER MINK ARMED WITH ATOM BOMBBS SLAUGHTER OUR WILDLIFE!" and yes, they were so determined to be scary that their spell-check was ignored.
     Didn't Malthus deal with this a couple of centuries ago?  If the Evil Killer Mink Massacre-ers gorge themselves silly on the Pond's wildlife, then there suddenly won't be enough of said wildlife to sustain their ferocious depredations.  Mink numbers abruptly drop as they all starve to death.  Native Pond wildlife recovers.  Evil Minkers are trapped by HM Government before their numbers bump up again.

This explains it all.

     I do beg your pardon - I only intended to put in a few lines about mink here as a bit of a pun, and instead I've shaken the foundations of the UK's wildlife preservation and reform programs.
     Ooops!***

Finally -
I need only a small article here to hit - and here an aside.  Apparently the new daily total of wordcount required on BOOJUM! has now stretched to 1,000, up from 750 as of a few months ago.  Compare that to the 200 - 300 way back in 2014.
     Where were we?  Having trouble focussing here - I think the drugs are wearing off.^

WASH YOUR DIRTY MINDS OUT!

     Little did you know that there is a terminology to Tiddlywinks.  I bet there's a whole subculture associated with this lot and their Pot, which will have to wait until tomorrow, as I need both food and beer, and none are available up here (in my Sekrit Layr).



*  Lest you think this is some tasteless exploitation of marine disaster, this is an AC being deliberately sunk to make a coral reef.  BOOJUM! - ever thoughtful.
** A rolling of the eyes and "Grandad's been on the fermented herring again", I suspect.
***  What can I say?  My brain at work.
^  Or have not yet taken affect.