Although Conrad does have a sneaking fond regard for their early Seventies stuff - you know, "Band on the Run" or "Venus and Mars" (which has a track about superheroes biffing the spit out of each other).
No, I refer, of course - obviously! - to yesterday's Cryptic Crossword, which had the most fiendish clue I have seen for many a year.
"Mother! (13)"
I filled in most of the word, getting every second letter, and realised that, what the heck, the answer was "LEPIDOPTERIST"
"Lepidopterist - what has that to do with Mother?" I mused. Aloud, since there were not many people in the office as yet.
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| You! You there, with the baby - what does it mean? |
Moths.
Making yer average lepidopterist a moth-er, if you like. Your Humble Scribe growled in grudging admiration when he finally got it. Technically they were cheating by omitting a hyphen, but it was such a horribly clever clue then can keep it.
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| Eye eye eye eye |
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| This counts, right? |
All that now remains is to completely wrap the motley in chains and see what happens when it gets swept up by a combine harvester.*
Ooops. Sorry, formatting problems there - the old "Pick up a format with the cursor and wildly amend everything in a manner that makes it impossible to recover it", before Your Humble Scribe realises and closes Blogger down.
"Red Thunder"
More concerning Shello and her - No! Sorry! "Shelli" - been thrown off by that damn cello again. Shelli. She had been, I alleged, guzzling can after can of Red Bull in order to stay awake and alert.
"Not so!" quoth she. "I have quaffed but a single tin, which is purveyed under the nomenclature "Red Thunder" (though she probably spoke a little less preciously).** Art?
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| CAUTION! Liable to lead to lawsuits |
Wandering to work, this came back to me, and Your Humble Scribe squinted and thought hard.
"Red Thunder!" (and here we nod an acknowledgement to the Strugatsky Brothers) "Socialist superhero of the Soviet Union!"
Well, yes, except I'm a little behind the curve here. Art?
| Meet - RED SON! |
In this particular tranche, the writers imagine that Kal-El's rocketship landed in the Soviet Union rather than South Canada. Oo-er, missus!
I haven't read any of these stories, so I can't say that my "Red Thunder" is at all plagiaristic, which leads me to wonder exactly how the Red Son/Red Thunder would help to ensure the Sinisters not only survive, but thrive.
We will have to come back to this: it needs a fair bit of thought to create and all I've done so far is come up with four words - "Red Thunder Socialist Superhero".
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| Red Square |
The Fools! The Meddling Fools!
Don't they realise there are Some Secrets Man Was Not Meant To Know! <imagine lightning and thunder in the background, visible through the barred windows of the mad scientist's castle hideaway>
Actually the reality is considerably more mundane. Conrad was idly staring out of the bus window yesterday, cogitating on that Dog Buns! "Mother! (13)" clue, when he witnessed a peculiar grass-cutting machine working solo, without a control lead or a driver or, indeed, any human contact at all. We whizzed past far too quickly for Conrad to get a photo.
However -
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| Similar to this |
It was operating on a slanted embankment, where it would have been dodgy in terms of health and safety for a human operator to sit upon a mowing machine. Just the environment you'd like to put a radio-controlled mower than you can guide whilst sitting on the seat at a nearby bus-stop, sipping your mocha latte and nibbling on your quinoa energy bar.
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| Or ... |
"4 Years On The Western Front" By Aubrey Smith
Yes, we are back to the little-known subject of transport at battalion level in the armies of Perfidious Albion during the First Unpleasantness. I would like to put forth what us poseurs call the "Table of Organisation", namely all the stuff that Ol' Aubs worked with. To wit:
11 x limbers, each with a driver and 2 horses; 2 tool limbers, 4 machine gun limbers, 5 ammunition limbers
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| Limbers, lumbering |
2 x water carts, each with a driver and 2 horses
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| Cart, Water, One of |
4 x Field Kitchens, each with a driver and 2 horses
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| Cookers, cooking |
1 x mess cart, with one driver and 1 horse
1 x medical cart, with one driver and 1 horse
11 grooms with one officer's horse each
10 x pack-ponies, each with a driver
1 x Transport Officer's batman (No! Not the friend of Superman! Stop thinking that way!)
2 x cooks
2 x wheelers
2 x shoeing smith
3 x forage men
4 x NCO's
Thus 19 various wagons, 57 horses and ponies, 29 drivers, and 25 other men. And this is for a single battalion, at a time when each division had 12 battalions, and there were 63 divisions in France and Flanders - the numbers mount up.
For your information, a "batman" was a kind of servant assigned to more senior officers, who would carry out all sort of menial but necessary tasks, ensuring their officer got to do the important stuff, like completing G1094 forms.
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| "Dear citizen, we are taking your horses. Ta very much, the King." |
One reason Ol' Aubs was around after the First Unpleasantness was because, after surviving Second Ypres, he was in the transport section. One poignant passage has him visiting "D" Company, his old comrades from 1915, where barely any of his original compatriots survived.
Anyway, I could fill the rest of today's blog with minutiae like this, but in the interests of mercy I shall defer this delightfully dolorous data-dump.
Finally -
As you should surely know by now, Your Humble Scribe's mind makes wild leaps from one subject to another, and today's non sequiteur comes from the 4-letter proof code for my First Bus e-pass: "GNAT"
Ladies, gentlemen and those unsure, let me introduce you to the -
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| Folland Gnat |
Designed as a cheap, light trainer and fighter, it had a long and illustrious career with the Red Arrows aerial acrobatics team. Lots got exported, and indeed the Indian Air Force thought so highly of this little dart's performance in combat that they built hundreds under licence.
What you might call <ahem> gnat bad.
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* Conrad will make a wild guess and say nothing pleasant? Don't worry, the harvester is insured.
** Poetic licence.
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