Rat Shot Roberts

Just Thought I'd Condense A Couple Of South Canadian-isms
Here I am, 258 years old 58 years old* and never having heard the term "Rat shot" before, until it turns up twice this afternoon and evening.  If you are reading this in South Canada and are thinking "Who is this rube?", or again are perusing on the enormous open plains of Ruffia and thinking "Yab vi mat!", then I had better explain.

Ruffian wheat field

Ukranian flag

     Oh - er - bad Art!  Naughty Art!  Bringing political satire into the blog and like shizzle - er - O look a flying saucer -
     Actually farmers would be familiar with rat shot, as would other people who deal with vermin, such as newspaper editors exterminators and hitchhikers.  The term refers to a small arms round that is hollow and loaded with very light shot, which thus has a very short effective range.  This is fine for dealing with snakes or rats up close and personal, but you can't snipe Batavian infantry moving out of cover at a quarter of a mile away**.

Yes, I know what it looks like

     The same 'rat shot' term has turned up in Jim Crumley's "The Last Good Kiss" and Joe R Lansdale's "Mucho Mojo", so you can clearly see I had no choice but to chase the definition.  'Mucho Mojo' being, on occasion, laugh out loud funny, which will make tomorrow's reading it on the bus interesting.

As deadly as rat shot, if a little slower

     Also, do you know where those roses Oh-so-fittingly sitting  in that vase upon your hailway table hail from?  Well, DO YOU?  Read Mister Lehane for the awful truth.

Then Again -
I did mention Fireball Roberts yesterday, him being the bulldog from "The Last Good Kiss", and then I went and did a bit of Google-fu on teh interwebz, which revealed that there really was a Fireball Roberts, which is either extremely bad taste in post-mortem nicknames or prescience of the highest order.  Art?

Okay, prescient

     He was a South Canadian stock car racer, up there in the pantheon of Top 50 NASCAR drivers despite coming to an untimely end.  His car crashed as he sought to avoid other crashed cars, he suffered extensive serious burns and died in hospital a couple of weeks later, which circumstances contrived to impel South Canadian car-racing authorities to introduce fire-retardant clothing and fuel-tank safety measures.

Thus

     By Coincidence Amazing, what else did I discover but that John Hiatt, respected South Canadian indie balladeer, has done a song title "Fireball Roberts".  You could have an entire blog entry on Ol' John, as he's been around that long, except not today, I've a plan and an agenda and time's a wasting.

     Hmmm.  I'm writing this at work, and that means I can't load up photographs from my phone, which means "Estate Agent's For Sale" and "Wartime Pamphlet" will have to wait until I get home.

"The Boys"
Conrad is slightly boggled that this television series 1) Ever got made and 2) That it was ever shown, since the comics it is based on are very very Mature Readers Only, given the levels of sex, violence and superhero satire involved.  I think Marvel and DC will be more "unpleasantly surprised in a bad way" than boggled.  Art?

The Boys

     Yes yes yes, I know one of them's a girl, and there's Fireball Roberts again - you see how a theme runs through everything? - and sadly Wee Hughie has been transformed into a South Canadian played by some anonymous dork, instead of SIMON PEGG AS CLEARLY DRAWN IN THE COMICS.  Yes yes yes, I know he turns up as Hughie's dad, which is not good enough.  Art?

PROOF!  Proof, I tell you! <fades off into frothing gibberish>

     I am only 22 minutes into the first episode, so you are going to hear more about this as Conrad Sits In Judgement.  O Yes Indeed.  Hopefully Billy Butcher is still British and not from New Zealand or Norstrilia.
     Oh, and apparently that anonymous dork is Jack Quaid, son of Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan so not that anonymous after all ...

By The Way
Of late, I have been playing "The Invitation" and "A Strange Encounter" by those lovable Cornish scamps Thirteen Senses, TI being their debut and ASE the subsequent follow-up.  Or so I thought.  Now, Your Humble Scribe may not know anything about cricket or what's happening on "Love Island" but I do know my music, and I observed that ASE had moved on, markedly, from TI.  Art?

Sorry, no bulldogs

     There is a reason for this.  TI came out in 2004, and ASE was their fourth studio album, released in 2014.  This explains the difference, and also points up the sheer laziness of modern musicians who take years and years to release a new album.  It's already been five years since ASE, so what's the delay?

Come ON, guys, this is five years old.  Enough resting on laurels.

     And, whilst we're on about failing to produce a new masterwork, where's the next opus from Thomas Pynchon, eh?  Come on, Tom, you're already pretty ancient and we need at least another work before you amble off this mortal coil.

It's the Enquirer, so take with a massive column of sodium chloride

     Where were we?  Oh yes -

Rechlin
Another of those words that pop up into the brain when I wake up.  I had the faint notion that there was something Teutonic about it, and I was right.  According to Wiki, it is a small town in North East Germany, close to the Baltic, and if Art can put down his plate of coal -

Thus

     There you are.  Now, here is where the possible link comes in.  It was the go-to place for the Luftwaffe when it was testing or developing new aircraft, kind of like Area 51 With A Swastika, during the Nazi years.  I'm sure that I've read about it somewhere, probably in connection with Me 163 pilots getting dissolved in crashes.***
And with that- we are done!



* AND NOT AN ALIEN CYBORG SPY AT ALL
**  Batavia was totally a thing, Google it and see.
***  A very real hazard of flying this aircraft.