'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!>