VodKAPOW!

There Isn't Really Any KAPOW!
I just couldn't resist it.
     One Youtube channel that Your Humble Scribe has been watching with considerable interest over the past couple of weeks is "Ushanka Show", created and occasionally presented by one Sergei Sputnikoff, which may not be his real name.  It would work as a pseudonym, mind you, as he now lives in South Canada, and "Sputnik" is Russian for "Traveller", which he would have had to be in order to get there from here.

The original traveller

     Sergei maintains a charming Russian accent and, whilst his grasp of English is good, it's not perfect, which I wouldn't want it to be - his struggling to translate idiom is part of the appeal.
     Anyway, Sergei was born in 1971, so he was 20 when the Sinister Empire (okay, okay, The Soviet Union.  There.  Happy now?) collapsed.  This event is now 28 years old, so a whole generation has grown up who never knew Soviet rule or culture or practices; what Sergei attempts to do is develop a picture of what life was like as a Soviet citizen.
     Inevitably, one of his Youtube presentations is about Vodka, which is something people have always associated with Russia, whatever era we are talking about.  Art?

Stolichnaya

     This is one of the three major brands that were available to Soviet citizens, normally coming in a 500ml. bottle, which we here in the Allotment of Eden would call "A pint".  Sergei explains that people would club together in threes to purchase a bottle; this gave the ambient amount of vodka per person.  Two people - they'd make themselves ill.  Four or more - not enough going round to get a buzz from.  Thus you would sometimes find two people accosting perfect strangers with the request "Will you be our third?"
     Here an aside.  In Eric Newby's "The Big Red Train Ride", about his journey on the Trans-Siberian Express, he mentions that bottles of vodka he encountered had horribly flimsy foil caps that couldn't be put back on after they'd been removed.  So - you had to drink the whole bottle straight away.

Both hilarious and educational

     Sergei further explains that you drank vodka with a standard 100 millilitre glass, which we here in the Allotment of Eden* would call "A four ounce glass", that you didn't mix it with anything else, and you certainly didn't waste precious fridge space by putting bottles of vodka in there.  It's vodka - what's it going to do at room temperature?
     There is a lot more to be said about alcohol in Russia Through The Ages, so for the moment I will say - To Be Continued ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBQDqp9RtoY

     That's a link to Ushanka's take on that other drug addiction in the Sinister Empire - smoking!
     Motley!  So glad you could join us - please, take a seat.  I've ordered tea and hot buttered crumpets for you, I hope that's okay?**

Er - No, Art, not like that.

To Create A Crater
Yes, we are back to the 12th Division's historical record, and I will be banging on about the Hohenzollern Redoubt in a minute.  First of all, the text mentions "Smoke Candles" and "Threlfallite Grenades".  A smoke candle would ruin any birthday celebration it was brought to, as it's purpose was to emit large volumes of smoke, the better to obscure the enemy's vision.  As for the Threlfallite grenade, I'd never heard of it before.  It appeared to be a grenade with a filling of white phosphorus and petrol, two things you should never bring together if you wish to live even medium.  Again, used to create a smoke screen.  
     Okay, Art?

     Take note of the puny human included for scale in the lower picture there.  The 12th Division had the misfortune to be allotted to fight in the Hohenzollern Redoubt, one of the nastiest bits of front line on the Western Front, in a front line that didn't lack for nasty bits.  It was the focus for continual mine warfare, where each side sought to tunnel vertically, then horizontally, in order to place tons of explosives under the opposition's front line trenches.  You can see the result above; craters big enough to lay a block of flats inside.  The HR ended up being an overlapping array of mine craters, which would be furiously fought over to either include in a defensive trench system, or to overlook the opposition.  As the 12th's historian writes, two lines in an official dispatch about the fighting at the Redoubt in early 1916 were all that people knew of it.  The division suffered nearly 4,000 casualties in those two lines, however.

The Redoubt from the air.
(Like the surface of the Moon, with trenches)

     Wow.  Grim stuff, eh?  Let us move on to sunnier subjects -

Cake!
I haven't baked for a good few weeks now, because Your Humble Scribe is an idle rascal at times, especially when his time is eaten up by doing a jigsaw puzzle.  What can I say?  My Inner Compulsive gets the better of me and I spend 3 hours shuffling little bits of coloured cardboard around.
     Anyway, I deliberately made a vow in front of Wonder Wifey yesterday, that I would bake a cake, because that way I have to stick to it - or else there would be endless "Is it done yet?  Is it done yet?  Is it done yet?  Is it done yet?  Is it done yet?" until one of us cracked and the Secure Psychiatric Facility had to find bed space -
     Ooops.  "Sunnier" is obviously a bit of a stretch for Conrad.  Quick, Art, change the subject!

Gluten-free Soured Cream and Blueberry Loaf

     I would post a caution that this is straight out of the oven, when retained heat and expansion of steam keeps it bouyed and risen.  The question is, how risen will it remain when thoroughly cooled?

Well.  There you go.  I've just seen a bus go by with a poster for "Spiderman: Far From Home" on the side, which is an Automatic Spoiler for "Avengers: Eternity War".
     THANK YOU SO MUCH, BUS COMPANY!
     Ah - I might have guessed.  First Bus.  I shall go away and ponder upon a terrible revenge, something along the lines of Snapping My Fingers And Transforming All First Buses Into Horses-and-carts.




*  It's been dry lately.
**  Mindgames.  Let the motley fret about what horrible surprise is about to be sprung!

Getting Jig-y With It

NO!  That Is Not A Typo
Which, in case you were wondering, and even if you weren't, is the commonly accepted abbreviation for "Typographical Error" -
     DOG BUNS!  BITTEN BY THE COINCIDENCE HYDRA AGAIN!
     

See?

    As I was about to start banging on about jigsaws - and you can see where today's title comes from, can't you? - what happens on "Doom Patrol" but junior Jane STARTS DOING A JIGSAW PUZZLE!  
     What is it about my tender behind that makes it so irresistible?  Taste?  Texture?  Tattoos?  Type of blood?
     Dog Buns!  I keep losing the font - it keeps dropping into Verdana, instead of the old default Times, and Verdana is close enough to Trebuchet that it takes a minute to notice.  What is going on with the world?
     Anyway - there you  go, back to Verdana again - Anyway IF I CAN CONTINUE?  I have completed my 1,000 piece jigsaw, which actually turned out to be a 999 piece jigsaw.  Art?

     Can you spot it?
     The thing is, Your Humble Scribe is so careless and clumsy that it's quite possible I dropped it on the floor of the Sekrit Layr, where it has been covered by a comic book, empty envelope, dead newspaper and a bottle-top.  It'll turn up the next time I hoover, in two or three months weeks.
     There you go, my current jigsaw completed.  It takes a peculiar mindset to find enjoyment in these puzzles, doesn't it?  And you're looking at it.
     Right, motley, time to play Shark-Pong in your swimsuit made of bacon!

Festival Time
The BBC's News website is really pushing Glastonbury, which it states sports 100 stages that will permit 3,000 acts to play.  That's a lot of performers, eh?
     Let us return to the forestalled Powder Ridge Rock Festival, the music festival that never was, since the locals got it cancelled before it began.  Which didn't stop 30,000 people from turning up in the hope that something would happen.
     Well, with no music, no food, no plumbing, no entertainment but lots and lots of drugs, as I posed the question, what could possibly go wrong?

A question I had to ask

     Enter "Electric Water".  These were vats of water that non-festival festival goers were encouraged to drop their unwanted drugs into, and then to drink from the resulting chemical cocktail.  Unsurprisingly, a lot of people underwent quite horrible experiences and needed medical help, which is what you tend to suffer when drinking entirely unknown cordials of sinister pharmaceuticals.  The volunteer doctor on site said it was quite the worst case of hallucinogenic abuse he'd ever seen.

At least it wasn't raining

    
     Watching "Doom Patrol" again and yes, it is still living up - or down - to the Strangeness Quotient.  We've just spent an episode inside Jane's brain, which is every bit as dangerous and dark as you'd expect of someone with 64 distinct personalities.
Food Safety - A Challenge Not A Warning!
Last week in work saw a couple of general changes across the floor.  We changed desks, which I mentioned before - "We Fear Change" being the general theme - well, it was true for me, if not for everybody else.  Pedestals were also switched around, which meant that several long-abandoned ones were emptied of their contents, including this - Art?

     For those without sufficiently keen eyesight, that Best Before date is "Jan 2019", meaning it was practically in date, as what's five months between us?  Plus, it was sealed in a wrapper and had been kept in a pedestal at room temperature, meaning it was bound to be fine.
     So I ate it.  And I'm still here.  Thus my logic is correct.  

A Blast From The Past
Literally!  For Lo!  we are now talking about the "History of the 12th (Eastern) Division", which has sufficient detail to be interesting, including stuff I'd not heard of before.  For one, it mentioned the attempts of both sides to tap each other's phone communications, by running lines across No Man's Land and putting "Earth pins" into each other's parapets, which is activity novel to me.  I suspect this means being able to pick up insufficiently shielded telephone wires.

State of the art in 1915

     I do know that the Teutons were able to pick up such later in the war, and that the British were insufficiently cautious about using codes or ciphers when chatting via telephone, which led to giving important secrets away.  Ooops!
     Then there is one episode where an infantry battalion was detailed off for a special duty, which amounted to a "spy raid" on the town of Bethune.  This town was behind the front lines, though distant enough to still have a substantial civilian French population, and the 12th Division soldiers were positioned at each of the four corners that separated a street from the others.  On a given signal they all promptly positioned themselves across the street, bayonets a-fixed, and let nobody in or out, whilst search parties went through the whole street, house by house.  This apparently did catch some spies; though given the fervour with which both British and French pursued same, whether extant or not, there is some doubt as to just how spy-y these spies were.

Like it says on the tin - Bethune

      Damn it, still losing the font!  Okay, since I need to have some lunch before heading into Royton on my constitutional, and getting some bread and potatoes, and some gin (because that bucket takes a bit of filling, don't you know), I shall call a halt here, somewhat under the Compositional Ton.  Only around a hundred sixty words short, so you can't complain too much.  I mean, it's not as if you have to pay to read this scrivel, is it?

Though, if the urge takes you ...

'Tis The Season Of Mud And Flood!

Ergo, Time To Put On A Festival
Conrad, let it be said, is a creature who likes his comforts.  A comfy leather-backed chair, a pot of freshly-brewed Darjeeling (loose-leaf, of course), a comic book and a pint of gin - little things.  Sorry - beer!  A pint of beer, not gin.  Gin only fit for effete cocktail sippers.
     Thus he has never been tempted to ever venture to a music festival, which seems an appropriate subject to broach as Glastonbury is now in full swing, and work colleague Shelli is off to perform at another festival; we'll get to that in due course.  Art?

Glasto 2015

     Darling Daughter had long reserved a passion about going to a music festival, so many years ago (2011?) I taxiied her to Reading's Rock Festival, and the year after, and that was sufficient to put her off for good.  Rain, mud, idiots, more mud, drunken idiots, dreadful toilets, even further mud, no showers, yes still the mud, grossly-overpriced horrid food, drugged idiots, queues, showers of frogs, plagues of locusts and no, the mud hasn't gone away.

The aftermath (during a dry season)

     By now you should remember the debacle that was the Fyre Festival, and Conrad's description of the Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival, truly an epic of disastrous proportions, neither of which contended with inclement weather.  If you add in storms and - as it says in the title, floods, which are wont to turn up in summer unannounced and unwanted - then you get an extra-special level of awfullness.  Looking at a South Canadian list of "10 Worst Festivals" they cheekly describe TomorrowWorld in 2015 as " - no worse than a rainy, mud-laden British festival -" Excuse me!

Hmmm.  They have a point ...

     This list of Bottom 10 festivals includes one I'd never heard of before, mostly because it never took place.  You see, after the success of Woodstock in 1969, a whole lot of shady promoters with sketchy ethics thought they could make a ton of money, and some of those characters intended to put on a festival at Powder Ridge.
     They had reckoned without the inhabitants of Powder Ridge, Connecticut, who did not relish the thought of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of hippies turning up in their quiet, rural backwater.

Powder Ridge

     So, they got an injunction and banned the festival before it even began.  This was after 30,000 tickets had been sold at $20 each; the promoters couldn't be contacted to be informed the concert was off, and they were never heard of again.  This makes Cynical Old Conrad wonder if that injunction wasn't their plan all along; take all the money, then not have to do any planning or organising or preparation because No Festival!  Nor did they refund a red cent of their ill-gotten gains.
     However -

Surprise!  Here we are!

     An estimated 30,000 people did turn up for the non-event - perhaps as many as 50,000 in fact, as certified audience-attendance assayers and notarisers were pretty thin on the ground.  They found no bands, no water, no food, no shelter, no entertainment - but lots and lots of drugs!
     What could possibly go wrong!  Things couldn't get any worse, could they?
     Funny you should ask ...*
     
The Reason This Blog Is A Little Late -
You recall I was ranting and tanting about Codewords earlier today?  Having done two of them with an inexcusable mixture of obscure or foreign, or obscure and foreign, words, I had to complete the third, just in case.  No, I simply didn't have any choice in the matter; I had to check for the Word Absurd.
     Well, it was disappointingly easy, to be honest.  "HYMN" was about the only tricky word.
     However!  There are still some words I wish to complain about -
     "CASSIS":  This, gentle reader, is a blackcurrant cordial - I know because I am vaguely familiar with it and have just looked it up in my Collins Concise.  However, imagine the trouble everybody else would have with it?  This is simply UNFAIR!

Hero?  More like zero!

     "AKIMBO": I wouldn't say that this is the improper use of a foreign word - though the Old English it derives from, "In Kenebowe" which means "In an acute curve", is pretty alien to the modern eye and ear - so much as it's an obsolete one.  How often do you hear this word in conversation?  I only remember hearing it once, in "The League of Gentlemen", about a satirical nude dance troupe who called themselves ' Legs Akimbo'.  Which is an image you're not going to easily unsee.**

Not someone I would mock for the akimbo stance.

"THORAX": No!  No relation to the Hyrax, in case you were wondering.
     Dog Buns!  Now I have to make a diversion to explain the Hyrax, don't I?

The Hyrax.  Cute little chap, ain't he?
(Right up until he EATS YOUR FACE OFF!)***

     This feller is a small mammal that dwells in rocky African terrain, where it lives on grasses and similar, so there's no danger of it biting your foot or face off.  It's mentioned in the Bible, as being non-kosher, though I think you'd have your work cut out to actually capture one, and even so there doesn't look to be much meat on it.  Got any good soup recipes?  there you are.
     Anyway, back to the thorax.  This is either Greek or Latin, and refers to the chest.  That bit between neck and stomach, which we can only illustrate with that of a man -

Those expecting a lady's chest are pervy bafoons.

     There you go, I feel so much better for having vented!  What's that?  You feel the crushing ennui of life bearing down upon you like an icebreaker after reading the above?  Who cares!

Finally -
I only need a short article here.  How about - rain at Glastonbury?  I remember when The Who were playing there back in <thinks> 2015?  The Beeb had a live feed from the Pyramid stage, actually on stage with the band, looking out over the audience.  I cannot find a picture of same, so you'll just had to add night and rain to this shot. Art?

Just add imagination

     You could see the rain coming down in the stage lighting, and to use a colloquial Britishism, it was "coming down in stair rods".  How grateful I was to be sitting comfortably at home in a chair, with a roof over my head and a bucket of gin to hand!


     No - hang on, don't Publish that, I meant a bu


*  To be continued.
**  Sorry!
*** Scaremongering for comic effect: Conrad - officially has no shame <Malicious edit courtesy Mister Hand!>