Skeletons

Do Not Fear!
For I am not about to reveal any of your guilty secrets.  Not just yet, anyway.  That closet can remain safely locked.
     Which saying obviously leads Your Humble Scribe to wonder and ponder.  If you had a skeleton, one which you had acquired by dubious means, wouldn't it be a good idea to oh, you know, get rid of it?

The evidence

     You could try burning it, I suppose, except that burning bones smell vile* and the neighbours might begin to wonder themselves where, exactly,  your spouse has been all this time?  Or, more practically, break it up into single bones and put one per fortnight into your black bin - or, if you want to be really sneaky, into your nosey neighbour's black bin - and they're visiting their mother, for your information.
     Here an aside.  This is nothing to do with the above which in turn is nothing to do with what's really going on here, except it's my blog.  Expect asides.  Art?

Ray Harryhausen's crowning moment

     The amount of time taken to do the stop-motion on these is staggering, but worth it, because you'll never get CGI to look as real as this.
     Anyway, none of this is really the focus of today's Intro, so allow Art to let a picture tell at least 26 words, if he will.

     This is the 'Skeleton' in question, and only the third one I've tried; I confess I had to amend the first two Across, as I'd obviously got them wrong.  I cheated and looked up 8 Down, because I'd never heard of a "Trundle" as a word meaning "A small wheel or roller".  Really, compiler, this thing is quite difficult enough!

Trundles

     Thank you, Art.  As you can see from the completed crossword, there is an axis of symmetry which will help guide where to put the answers and black squares.  It's actually jolly hard, as they don't bother to give you how many letters a word has; you have to either guess or work out where the relevant black squares go.
     So, I'm not brilliant at it yet, though I'm improving.
     Motley, as a reward for bringing in that mutilated evil clown corpse - so many teeth! - you can have a bag of crystallized ginger.  Don't scoff all at once, mind, because -

Back To The Doctor
No!  I am not ill.  Especially not in the head.  Head is fine, thanks <taps head, flinches at the hollow echo, decides to change subject> I am talking about the BBC's premier dramamentary "Doctor Who" and the Jon Pertwee years, when he was frequently accompanied on set by his young son Sean, because you could get away with that sort of thing in the Seventies: nowadays the Health and Safety people would be fainting in coils if you tried to bring on a youngster who wasn't part of the cast. 
     Young Sean got his hands on all sorts of bits of kit, one much-prized such being a giant maggot from "The Green Death".  It was essentially a giant condom, moulded around - get this - the decayed head of a ferret.  Art?

In those days, it was terrifying.

     Delightful thing to have sitting on top of yer wardrobe.  He also had the statue of Bok, that little demon with glowing eyes, which is so creepy I'm not going to put up a picture, because you wouldn't get any sleep tonight.
     Then there was the Whomobile, a futuristic "car" that was definitely inspired by the gadget-loving Pertwee, and which was surprisingly road-worthy.  Art?

Not that great an image.  Hang on -

Better!

     Pertwee Senior would frequently take Pertwee Junior along for a ride when he went to open a fete or supermarket, only to get stopped by the police nearly every time.  They would come out with some feeble excuse, when all they really wanted was to have a go in it.  Really.  Big kids!  <drifts off into idle fantasy about driving the Whomobile>

     It has somehow shuffled along to 23:30 and, not only have I not taken over the world, I've not watched any Youtube clips tonight, which is shockingly lax and bordering on not doing homework.  We shall thus pause things here until the morrow.

     Excuse me, I've just been to get the motley a carton of plain Greek yoghurt, as it ignored my warning not to neck all that ginger in one go.  You won't do that again, will you, motley - Incandescent Gob Syndrome a stern tutor!
     
  
Please Don't Crash - It's Volcanic Ash!
As mentioned briefly yesteryon, this stuff in outstandingly bad for everything, perhaps aircraft most of all.  Any pilot rash enough to fly his jet into or through a volcanic plume will rapidly regret it.  O yes indeed.
     "For why?" I hear you chorus.  "Tell us, Conrad, for we are eager to know!  And also a bit ghoulish."
     Art!

A jet engine

     The horribly sharp-edged micro-particles of magma will, of course, abrade the moving parts of that above when they get sucked in.  They will also block pitot tubes and ensure instrument readings are all over the shop -

A pitot tube

     - which is bad news again, since windscreens and lights all suffer abrasion damage from the ash, meaning instrument-flying becomes even more important.
     The really nasty bit is that volcanic ash will melt when in the engine's combustion chamber, becoming molten glass, which then cools and solidifies on the engine's turbine blades.  This leads to the engine's stalling and failure, at which point the jet begins to slowly fall out of the sky, and if it wasn't that high to begin with, then the only thing stopping it's fall is the ground.

Ooopsie.

     Hence some inventor has come up with a device that will give up to ten minutes warning of volcanic plumes along a jet's flight path, which he has called - cue chorus of painful groans - Airborne Volcanic Object Infra-red Detector.  I shall let you work it out.
     Iceland!  Home of Siggur Ros, Apparat Organ Quartet and the Eyjafjallajokull volcanic plume!

Thank you, Iceland.  Thank you so much.

Finally -
Oops indeed.  What does the BBC, that font of all that's fit to be writ, have as a sidebar article?
     "What foods should be banned in the office?"

Ah.  Yes.

     Too smelly, apparently.  As is tinned fish.

Gosh, these too?

     Oh dearie me.  These two being a staple part of my lunch at work.  Of course they don't bother me, as I have no sense of smell anyway.  My colleagues aren't too polite to complain, are they?  You know, being British and all?



*  SO I AM TOLD.  THIS IS THEORETICAL ONLY.