A Bit Flip

Good Evening!
Though it is not very good if you are a ballfoot game follower of the Manchester United team.  They have suffered a defeat in something called "Campionship League", which is <takes a wild stab> a league formed in honour of Margery Allingham's aristocratic detective?  Art!

Ever so popular

     Of course Your Humble Scribe does not follow the sporting pages over on the BBC for any interest in a particular discipline: no; he is far more interested in the naked hatred that ballfoot fans of any team display for those fans of that other team.  All that base human emotion plays out very well to a disinterested observer!
     Interestingly enough, this defeat occurred at a place called "Nou Camp", which is a ballfoot stadium within the environs of - Barcelona.  And one of the few places Conrad did not bother to take a photograph of during his visit.  Art?

That is Catalan for "New Camp"

     Well, that's enough of both Current Affairs and Politics, so let us now move on to tackle - PEDIGREE PIG BREEDI - no, hang on, we've gone wrong somewhere -

More About That Robot Bomb Thing
Yesterday's V1.  Which is a whole lot handier than "Vergelstungswaffen Ein", for our Teuton brothers across the Channel have a habit of using looooong names for their sinister secret military projects.  Art?

A V1.  Excuse the swastika.

     These things constituted about a ton of HE, wrapped up in a whole load of metal and gyroscopes and pitot tubes and so on.  They would be launched from Occupied France Or Holland, and then drone their way across the world until their fuel ran out and they came to ground in Perfidious Albion, with a tremendous BANG.
     Or such was the plan.  As with anything concerning Perfidious Albion, you have to consider that this insular island race are probably five steps ahead of you in whatever game you are playing, unless it's chess, in which case they are three moves from checkmate.

Art!  She is not, and never will be, your mate.

     For, to better shoot down V1s, there was the Royal Observer Corps, who would watch out for these buzzing bombs and inform higher command where they were heading.  There were anti-aircraft batteries dedicated to shooting down V1s before they got anywhere near Perfidious Albion, not to mention barrage balloons and back-up batteries of Bofors guns closer to London.  And they were using proximity-fused shells, which are essentially the same as magic.  Oh, and barrage balloons, too.
     Where today's title comes from, however, is those brylcreem boys of the RAF, who intercepted said V1s when given a vector by the ROC.  Initially they tried to shoot 'em down, which was found to be a bad idea: having a ton of explosives go off in the close vicinity of your airborne steed is A Very Bad Idea.
     So!
                         

                                       This probably entitles you to Hazardous Duty Pay
     You simply flew your aircraft alongside the robot bomb, matched speed, then got underneath it, and then rolled your aircraft so your wing went up, and the V1 went down.  Describing this as "a bit dangerous" is really stretching the British gift for understatement to it's elastic limit.




     Okay, motley, you might have thought you were safe, except we super-glued a tinfoil hat to  your head whilst you were asleep, and now we're outdoors in a thunderstorm!

Heh.

I'll See You That Golem 3000 -
Alas, I do not have the required evidentiary photograph, so you will just have to take this on trust.  Do I not have an honest face?*  Agreed, a bit of a mirror-cracker, but candid.
     During Monday's inordinately long bus journey into Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell, Your Humble Scribe looked up from his copy of Dickens, to see another First Bus go by with a malfunctioning digital display.  It was partially looping and thus informed any with eyes to see that it was the number 300000000000 service.

No bus picture, so have some petunias instead

     And that rather dodgy Alfred Bester novel is the only thing that came to mind with "3000" in the title.


Barnstaple
Conrad's knowledge of English geography is a little hazy.  There's Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell, Babylon-lite and Ur-on-Roch, and after that I'm pretty lost.  I always used to believe that Barnstaple was a suburb of London.
     It's not.  It is a town in north Devon, several hundred miles from London.  Fancy that!
     I mention this because, in a moment of idle whimsy,** I wondered why Barnstaple is so called.  Nothing to do with farm storage or mutilating paper sheets, it seems.  Art?

Beautiful Barnstaple burgh

     The original name was "Barnstable", derived from the Anglo-Saxon for an axe ("Bearde") and a meeting place ("Stapol").  It had a long Latin name, Barnastapolitum, which locals contracted to Barum, which is still used for a few local products, which is about all I've got to say about Barnstaple.


"Santa Clarita Diet" And Zombies
I don't think they've actually mentioned The Zed Word yet, though they skirt around it by describing Sheila as "undead".  Since she still possesses rationality and intellect it's not clear if she is a <pauses to consider, shrugs, carries on> classical zombie. 
     Now, this next bit might be a tad SPOILERISH, so you have been warned.  Sheila's husband Joel discovers the existence of a mass outbreak of whatever his wife's got, in a Serbian town pronounced "Pozica".***

The town

     This leads to a long quest to find a cure.  Well, a little of that logic thing would tell you that there has to be a cure, since the entire Balkan peninsula is not, you know, OVER-RUN BY FLESH-EATING ZOMBIES EVEN IF NOT THE CLASSICAL KIND. 
     What is the cure?  Well, why not write to the Serbian consulate and ask them?  That would be too sensible and logical and possibly shorten the series, one supposes, and it only came in at 10 episodes in the first place.

"Act nonchalant!  Act nonchalant!"

     Conrad likes it but remains to be convinced that it has enough staying power to go on for 3 seasons.


Ooops
No wonder I couldn't get a cover picture. 

<sighs>

     Steve - that's my memory - is going to get a very severe talking-to.


Well, we have broken the ton again.  Shall I add in a bit more at lunchtime?  We shall see!





*  Rhetorical question - DO NOT ANSWER!
**  One of several hundred I have per diem.
***  This, somewhat worryingly, is a real place.  Population 333.  Which is half of 666.