The Way To Dusty Breath

I Keep Milking That Line, Don't I?
And <cackles hideously and with gleeful exuberance> I shall continue to do so whilst my fertile and malicious imagination comes up with variations on it, so there.  I don't know how many words rhyme with "Death", but we'll find out, won't we?
     Okay, let us have a picture of the Spitfire.  Art?

ART!

      I beg your pardon - I should have added "Supermarine" to that description.  You know, the incomparable fighter aircraft of the Second Unpleasantness, which looks fast simply standing on the tarmac - Art?

The beautiful, curvy, elegant -
<pauses to wipe sweaty palms>

     Now, look at the nose of this beast.  Take a closer look, because there is a Vokes filter mounted underneath it.  This was a modification added to all the Desert Air Force fighter aircraft, because of the horribly sandy and gritty nature of the terrain there.  So, it allowed the engine to "breathe" properly in the dusty atmosphere of Egypt and Libya.
     And there we have our title for today!*
     Okay, motley, that macaroon was - poisoned!  And the only antidote is water.  A gallon of water, drunk within ten minutes.  Have at this handy water-butt.

"One, Two, Buckle My Shoe"
SPOILERS!

SERIOUSLY, SPOILERS!

I WARNED YOU!

I have worked out the solution before Poirot has done so.  The real target was Amberiotis, so the killers got the dentist's secretary out of the way, in order to have a fake dentist present to operate on Amberiotis.  Mr. A being a new patient, he couldn't have known what the original dentist, Morley, looked like.  The fatal injection of poison was thus administered, and Mr. A. subsequently expired.  In the meantime old Morley was disposed of in a manner to suggest suicide: shot in the head.
     However!

Laser-eyed!

     It's about another 20 minutes until the dapper detective reveals all.
     My suspicions were roused by the placement of the bullet casing next to Morley's body - it simply wouldn't have fallen next to the body, but rather would have been ejected across the room.
      - and the traditional everyone all-together-scene is proving me correct in every detail.

     <there will now be a short pause as I go check on the potatoes>

"Assistive Bathing"
Ah, you can tell what demographic ITV 3 are aiming for when showing "Poirot".  The middle-aged.  No adverts with attractive young things (though lots for toilet paper), and the commercial break is bookended by the sponsors - "Assistive Bathing".  Which seems to consist of a vertical bath that has a door in it.

A water-butt in the bathroom would do as well, surely?

     Yep, "Poirot" is concluding just as I predicted.  Clever old me.

"The Doomed City" - By The Strugatsky's
The brothers mention things in passing that might be familiar to an audience in Ruffia, even in Sinister-era Ruffia, but which are somewhat obscure to a Western audience.  Take, as an example, the "Tambov partisan army".  Conrad had actually read about this a loooong time ago; it was classed as one of the "Green Rebellions" against the Bolshevics, and was an enormous peasant uprising that got suppressed with an ocean of bloodshed by said Bolshies - nobody could be allowed to challenge their dictatorship of the proletariat, even if they had to exterminate the proletariat to do so!

Tambov now

     And they did so.  Using hostage-taking, concentration camps, poison gas, heavy artillery and armoured trains, the Tambov rebellion was crushed.
     After the fact, of course, the Sinisters decided that perhaps posterity might not look on massacring unarmed civilians by the hundred thousand with any great favour, so they tried to destroy any paperwork involved -

"The Doomed City" 1914 - an influence on the Brothers

     So, even mentioning this event in passing would have immediately prevented the publication of TDC in the Sinister era, and if it had been submitted both brothers would have lost their jobs at the least, and possibly gone to prison, too.

<there will now be another pause as I scoff my lunch and have Edna look at me with mournful, mock-starving eyes>

"The Universe Is Stranger Than We Can Imagine"
I forget who said that <quick Google reveals it was Heisenberg> but a post by Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer over on Syfy confirms this at the astronomical level.  One can only ponder what we'd see if Hom. Sap. were ever able to spy on planets that bear life.

Hmmm, perhaps, perhaps.

     What Phil describes is an astronomical phenomenon occurring 8,000 light years away in the V404 Cygni system, which is a binary system consisting of a star gradually turning into a red giant, and a black hole.
     This pair of stars are very, very close together in astronomical terms, having an orbit that lasts only 6 1/2 days, which is bad news for the sub-red giant, because it is being slowly disintegrated (or "eaten" if you want to be dramatic) by the black hole.  The stellar material from the star forms a huge disk around the black hole, which blasts out radiation.  This is an "accretion disk".  Art, can we have a picture?

Thus

     Once this galactic gubbins falls into the black hole, it blasts back out again as jets travelling at close to the speed of light.  In this particular exotic case, however, rather than being stable and perpendicular to the black hole's axis, these jets swing about all over the cosmos, because the black hole itself is tilted relative to the accretion disk, for reasons nobody can adequately explain yet.  You can get a similar effect if you turn on your garden hose, firmly grasp the nozzle and rotate it at an angle in a circle.
     If you take it all together, this is rather mind-bending stuff.  I shall give you a while to make sense of it.

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/astronomers-watch-an-active-black-hole-dragging-spacetime-around-it

     That's the link to Phil's very entertaining blog over on SyFy.

Lots and lots of galaxies

*  Your awed admiration at my cleverness is taken as given.