A Touch Of Technical Troubles

AGAIN!
Your Humble Scribe is once again devoid of any photographs taken with his mobile phone.  Once again, my laptop refuses to cooperate and read anything from it.  "This folder is empty" it continues to lie.
     I KNOW THERE ARE PHOTOS HIDING IN THERE!
     For one, I can see them if I select "Gallery" on the phone display. The trouble is, I cannot remember how I got the files to read last time.  Conrad had rashly assumed that correcting the fault meant it would stay corrected.  Not so.  The phone is sitting there, being gleefully obstructive, and unknowingly getting that much closer to being put in a sack and smashed with a hammer -

Yeah!

        Thus I cannot put up the photograph of the Skeleton I took, which would have saved me a whole lot of typing.  Art?

No!  Bafoon -

     Perhaps I wasn't quite explicit enough.  A "Skeleton" is a variety of Crossword, where only a few of the black squares and numbers have been added in.  Try again, Art -

Better

     You the solver have then to work out the clues (which don't tell you how many letters they have) position them and work out where the black squares go.  The first one I did last week went horribly wrong when I put "BLEEP" instead of "BEEP", which threw out everything afterwards, and also I put "DEVOLVE" instead of "REGRESS" - same meaning, same number of letters, but entirely WRONG.  This week I worked out that the black squares have an axis of symmetry, meaning you can duplicate the squares already given, IF you know where the axis of symmetry lies.
     Quite a challenge.  I enjoyed it.  You know me, mucking about with words is an occupation I was genetically spliced in a lab for.

    Clouds, silver linings, etcetera.  If I'd been able to post the photo, I don't suppose I'd have accumulated quite so many words towards that total of a ton.

We're on our way!

       Okay, motley, go stand in the rain.  For six hours.




Speaking Of Which -

UTTOXETER!  Another of those words that just bob up on the surface of my thoughts, akin to mental jetsam, for no known reason.  Perhaps because I had been thinking of "Uxbridge" and wondering how many other English towns there are that begin with the letter "U".

     Anyway, Uttoxeter.  Art?

The centre

     Surprise surprise, that name has been the source of some confusion over time.  There have been 80 different spelling since the Domesday Book first took note of it way back when.*  Initially it was down as "Wotocheshede", having originally been "Wuttuc's homestead on the heath", more compactly put in Anglo-Saxon as "Wuttuceshaede".

     Uttoxeter typifies "Sleepy English market town", since the most memorable event to ever happen there was when Doctor Johnson (the mighty and noble creator of the Dictionary), as a young man, stood outside in the rain.  This was penance for not helping his dad run a bookstall.

     Uttoxeter:  nothing happens there, and it happens very slowly.

The mad whirl of urban life in Uttoxeter

Did You Know?

Speaking of standing in the rain - the first person to mention dancing in it will be hideously tormented before being shot and then tormented again - it was officially the First Day Of Summer on Friday 21st June.

     To which the natural, acerbic, response is "How can you tell? as this rain today is the same as the rain yesterday, and will probably be mimicked by the rain due tomorrow."

     Staring out of the windows at the top of the Dark Tower, one can see the clammy clouds obscuring the Pennines and - well, pretty much everything, to be honest.  If only my phone could download pictures to my laptop, then you'd see.

The City of Gray on a hot summer's day

     You'd not see a lot; which would be the point.

The Road Works

In the sense that it is a stretch of landscape designed to enable the rapid movement of vehicular travel, that is.  Until spoiled by roadworks, which ironically-named activities ensure that the roads don't work. 

     As last week, when someone - United Utilities?  Manchester City Council?  The FSB's Industrial Sabotage Directorate? - decided to replace all the drains along miles of the A627, one of the main routes into Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell.  This added about thirty minutes to my journey, which is the most important one there is.

The Manchester car in it's natural habitat

     Not so today!  The traffic cones and barriers and dug-up drains at the Dean Lane Junction were all gone.  Gone gone gone!  Thus my journey to work was all the swifter and sweeter.  Mind you, I did have less time to do my Codeword and read "Lord of Light".

     Sadly there was no point in taking a photograph of the non-roadworks, as <long boring and bitter rant about disobedient sentient modern technology that ought to be substituted by tin cans on a string redacted by Mister Hand>

You What?

A compatriot on Facebook posted up a clip of some Japanese anime series called "G Force", which was hilariously badly scripted by the South Canadian doing the voice-over.

The future will still have skirts.  I am reassured.

     This is the best Earth has got?  And they're all it's got?  Five of them?  Whatever happened to conscription?

     Anyway, that's not what I wanted to prate about.  No.  Another colleague put up a clip to an even older cartoon series from long, long ago.  Art?

Yes, really.

     This had Robin Hood hiding out in the asteroid belt, riding around on a rocket-pack and doing things.  Probably highly illegal things that we the youthful audience were supposed to be all for, as it was in defiance of - er - stuff.  Bad people.  Yeah.  Also, since I cannot find the relevant part of the title sequence - probably because they knew why I was looking - you will have to make do with this -

Actually that worked better than I feared it would

     You can see them all rocketing off with their rocket packs, wondrously managing not to roast their buttocks off, and all gloriously free of helmets.  Thus they would asphyxiate within mere seconds and die horribly as their blood boiled in their veins - the vacuum of space, don't you know.  I don't know what rationale they have for using bows and arrows when they clearly have ray guns.  A desire to cultivate upper-body strength?

     And with that, gentle reader, we are done.

*  The Eleventh Century sometime.  Google it if you must.