Why I Am A Horrible Person

In A Word, "Schadenfreude"
A compact yet telling Teutonic word which means "malicious enjoyment of other people's misfortune", and that's me, and then some.
     You may be asking yourself quite what I mean by this, so I shall explicate.  There is this game called ballfoot, which Conrad has absolutely no interest in, meaning I don't support any teams.  However, the passions of true ballfoot fans when their teams win or lose - or draw, that's the other option - is hilarious to behold, most especially in the Comments section of the BBC's webpages.  Art?

That one about Everton and Liverpool

     Let me highlight that number: 1218 comments.  I didn't sit down and read them all, as it would have taken all night, and I have a jigsaw to complete and comics to read.  The majority of comments were mockeries directed at Liverpool, whom are called by the disrespectful nickname (or SOBRIQUET if you're an M.E.N. Codeword compiler) "Loserpool" or "Liverfool".  The former because they haven't won any trophies in a very long time, and the latter just to be insulting.  Art?

The Liver building, pronounced "Lie-ver" not as in the internal organ.

     From these comments I learned that Liverpool did have a substantial points lead at the start of the year, but are now a point behind Manchester City - which was a cause for considerable merriment amongst those who are not Liverpool fans, or in other words nearly all the commenters.
     Speaking of Manchester City - Art?

Manchester city centre.  My workplace, the Dark Tower, at centre left.

     - you can play a kind of Insult Bingo in any thread about them.  The terms "oil rigs", "Emptihad", "FFP" and "Abu Dhabi" are guaranteed to crop up sooner rather than later.  However, because you might not be able to sustain the raw adrenaline rush of reading nasty things about ballfoot clubs, I shall save the explanations for later.
     Now that we've donned our hazmat suits, let's chase the bikini-clad motley with bunches of Dendrocnide Moroides leaves!

Blimey Heck!!
I apologise for the almost Continental level of hysteria implied by TWO exclamation marks, but this is serious stuff.  I refer, of course, to "The Umbrella Academy", and the ending of Episode 8 -

SPOILER ALERT!SPOILER ALERT!SPOILER ALERT!SPOILER ALERT!SPOILER ALERT!SPOILER ALERT!SPOILER ALERT!

     - you can't say you weren't warned.  So, Vanya turns out to be an hysterical, easily-annoyed and potentially violent possessor of immense power.  Which she uses to slash Allison's throat open.  The gal's not dead yet, we saw her eyes twitching, though it looks to be a matter of time, and not much of that either.  Egad!

The six still-living Umbrellas

     I may have to wait until tomorrow to find out what happens next.  Gadzooks!

Can You Cook A Chicken By Slapping It?
This is one of the more out-there questions posed to Kyle Hill, the presenter of "Because Science" over on Youtube.  Kyle went into a lot of detailed maths about the physics of transferring energy to the chicken, ending up with the answer that you could indeed cook the chicken by slapping it at about, oooh, 1,000 miles per hour.

The kind of chicken we're talking about here

     I'm sure you see the problem here.  Well, two problems.  Firstly, Hom. Sap. cannot slap anything at that speed, nor anywhere near it.  Secondly, if you construct some infernal engine that can slap that hard, you will disintegrate the chicken carcass.
     However!  Commenters over on Youtube suggested repeated slaps at a reduced velocity, say merely 100 m.p.h. instead, done ten times.  Again, the problem is that you will once more have chicken confetti all over your workshop.  Plus, I bet some gets into a hidden nook that you don't notice until it starts to rot and stink the place out.  Also, ants.

Explode your chickens outdoors, dynamiters.

     Conrad's postulate is that we find out what the shear limit is for a chicken carcass, then we tune our infernal slapping engine to work at say 10% below that, so you can repeatedly slap that chicken until it cooks.
     If only Mythbusters were still running ...

Oh, I see someone already invented just such an infernal engine

Ooops
Sorry, just been over on the "Space Opera" site on Facebook, where I just had to stick my oar in about futurologist Gerry Anderson's "UFO" series.  There are several lines of defence against intruding UFOs, you see, which I just had to detail.  First line are the Interceptors launched from Moonbase, each mounting a multi-megaton nuclear missile.  Art?

<insert insanely catchy theme tune here>

      Actually I'm guessing at the warhead yield and type.  It might simply be a very large conventional payload.
     Moonbase itself has some tracked missile-launchers for close-in defence.  Art?

Eat missile, you dirty curs!

     The second line of defence was the Sky1 jet, the aerial component of Skydiver.  This would engage any UFO that got into Earth's atmosphere.  Art!

Small, but bristling with ordnance

     Because the aliens had a tendency to seek cover underwater, there was the Diver part of Skydiver.  Art?

Dubious engineering, but undeniably cool

     And if those dirty curs actually landed their UFO, why then, the Mobiles would tackle 'em.

Airlifted to location

     These things, again, bristled with weapons and were not at all shy about using them.  As mentioned above, they would be airlifted to the nearest airport to a landed UFO and would then hunt it down, a chore made more difficult due to the alien's fondness for hiding underwater - this prevented atmospheric corrosion of their vessel's hull, which would degrade to the point of complete destruction in only a few days.

     Wow, I never intended to type one word about "UFO", and here I am going on at length about it!  As you may have guessed, I rather liked it, despite (or possibly because!) my parent's sniffy dismissal of it.

     And with that, we are done.  Toodle Pip!