A Train Of Thought

This Will Take Time To Develop
<code for "This Is Extra-Specially Obscure"> 
     Okay, as you may already remember, Your Humble Scribe is a wargamer.  Quite possibly the most idle, feckless and dilettante wargamer in the history of the hobby, but that's my claim.  As a wargamer, I am of course a distant cousin of the Model Railway enthusiast, those peculiar people/oddities/pillars of the community (delete where applicable) who send small replica mobile vehicles around a track, endlessly.
     At this point we have recourse to the BBC, that font of all that's fit to be writ, and one of their stories about vandals wrecking a model railway exhibition.  Art?

The repellent spectacle

     The odious little twods responsible were apprehended and shall surely face justice - though this will surely be less than the sentence Franz Kafka dreamed of - in due course.
     In a peculiar way, this has done the Market Deeping railway modellers club (the people who suffered vandalism) a good turn.  A charity page was created to raise funds for them, anticipated as raising Oooh! as much as £500, to replace all the destroyed stuff, except Sir Rod Stewart, celebrity model railway fan, appears on the scene.  He gives them a whacking big donation of £10,000 and thereby starts the ball rolling.
     I warn you not to be snarky or disrespectful of Sir Rod, since he was a good mate of Sir John Peel, and being hit by a lightning-bolt can offend.

Rod and John on Top Of The Pops

     Anyway, the total raised for the railway modellers now amounts to - Tah-Dah! - £70,000, which is proud proof of the British way of life and Yah Boo Sucks to the little Schickelgrubers who did the smashing to begin with. 
     Here an aside.  Remember when the Manchester Dog's Home was burnt down by a couple of evil little scrotes with matches?  People risked their lives to rescue those dogs, and a gigantic campaign afterwards resulted in millions of £££ donated to the charity.  Scrotes do not always prosper.*

Rescuers (inc. top left) at work

Where were we?  O yes.  Well, the thing is, Your Humble Scribe noticed that the Beeb     made mention that Sir Rod had a hit in the Eighties with - "Downtown Train" and that        triggered a memory of Tom Waits and the original "DT" which - obviously! - I had to go     across to Youtube and investigate.              

     Wow!                                                                                                                        

    What a great track!  With excellent guitar work, too.  And a video with Tom's - er -       shall we say "idiosyncratic rhythmic movement"? because I don't think you can call it  dancing, exactly.                                                                                                     

           So, there you go, a chain of association brought about by a bunch of idiots with low impulse control and access to delicate things.  Proof that BOOJUM! can work with anything.**                                                                                            

You can tell this is being done at work with pictures already loaded the night before, can't you?                                                                                                                                 

You May Commence The Panicking Now                                                                          

As you should surely know by now, one of Conrad's favouritest novels is "The Kraken          Wakes" by John Wyndham, which deals with an unusual species of alien invasion.  For one thing, the aliens land only at sea, and in very deep bodies of water, which means that      most of their aquatic descents are unseen by human eye.  They carry out a not too            successful campaign against the land-dwelling humans, before resorting to the relatively simple (relatively) plan of melting the polar ice-caps.

Your back lawn circa 2100

This results in catastrophic flooding across the globe, killing off about 4/5 of humanity,    before you we retaliate and - but that would be telling.                                                  

                  Anyway, Conrad worries that the invasion may have already taken place and    that the evil shapeless jelly blobs are sitting at the bottom of the oceans, squatting and plotting, and - the waters are rising, aren't they?  Perhaps global warming isn't to blame for that, not entirely, and perhaps also these aliens didn't waste time trying to attack the land, and just went for the destructive option immediately.

     Of course, I may be overthinking this ...                                                                      

Hay Pesto!                                                                                                                    

Behold the banana bread!

        It was "suggested" that Your Humble Scribe utilise the rather spotty bananas that were languishing in the banana bag (yes, this is a thing), getting ready to go mushy.  So that above is the whole thing, of which half will be sliced off and taken into the office, where the ganterpies will fall upon it, slavering.***
     This is the first cake I've baked for an age, since doing so risks the wrath of the 17th Floor Tuck Shop ladies, who are not a pair you ever want to get on the wrong side of.


Gallium Arsenide!
Despite how it sounds, this is not a vulgar exclamation (but it sounds enough like one that I may use it as a SFW swear).  It is in fact a compound of gallium and arsenic, which can be put together in such a fashion that they can be electrically stimulated to generate a laser beam.
     Before your gaze drifts into the middle distance amidst thoughts of blasting missiles out of the air -

BLAMBLAMBLAM

      - I should point out that yer average GA laser is actually very small.  If you want to know how small, pop the DVD player out on your laptop, and examine it, because that's about the size of it.  Art?

Sadly relevant

     This topic is, as mentioned above, sadly relevant, since my elderly laptop is no longer able to read a DVD; what you might call senility, and not premature, either.  It was on the cards, as it's so old.  The last time this happened I was able to steal a few months more by cleaning the laser, a resolution that's not worked today <makes sad face>.


Finally -
Talking of senility, Your Humble Scribe was feeling every one of his 157 years this morning, because could I complete The Metro's Cryptic Crossword?  No I could not!  I had to leave it whilst travelling in on the bus and finish it in the office - in between taking phone calls because Conrad is no skiver - which I did manage.  Eventually.
     I realise this sounds like another of those "Someone Dropped A One-Pound Weight In Chile And It Was Close To A Seismometer" issues, at least to you.  Conrad's stated reasons for doing Cryptic Crosswords is because it keeps his wits sharp, so for said wits to appear a dull as a spoon - well, it's worrying.

Conrad.  Probably plotting something horrid.

*  They were identified on Twitter and were advised to go far away.
**  Formatting problems plague us at work today
***  Or drooling, if you prefer.