T'aglets

Conrad Stood, Arms Akimbo -
NO!  Today's title is not a mis-spelling of "Tablets" nor yet the name of some kibbutz in Gallilee, and that "Arms Akimbo" stance is supposed to be threatening, warning you that the first comment about needing to consult my Collins is going to be met with near-lethal force.

Angry and akimbo

         I'm not entirely sure why people adopt this pose when they want to get across a bit of non-verbal bluster or bullying.  Perhaps because it helps to maximise their outline? in the same way that cats fluff up their fur to look bigger and scarier.*  It might, of course - excuse me, what's that sniggering at the back?  I haven't got to the funny bit yet, so I don't see - oh wait a minute, is Mister Hand bloviating again?  CUT IT OUT, HAND!
     As I was saying, this pose might be another Hollywood motif that has become a cliche, from all those films back in the Thirties where the gruff (yet secretly sentimental) newpaper editor gives either a cub reporter or his ace journo "twenty four hours to crack this case", which we all know is code for "forty-eight hours if you take the ditzy Women's Page correspondent with you," -

Hoorah!  A picture of exactly what I was looking for!

      - and a screwball comedy with Cary Grant and Paulette Goddard ensues.
     Where were we?
     O yes.  Aglets.  The aglets, or, in Northern patois, t'aglets.  Art?

T'aglets

     These are small constricted tubes of metal or plastic that go on the end of shoelaces to stop them unravelling and make threading them easier.  There you go, one more thing that you know today which you didn't yesterday.
     SIT BACK DOWN!  For we are nowhere near finished.  O no.  Art?

The sadly-missed quite definitely alive Mystery Jets

     You see, the first track on their CD "Curve of the Earth" is called "Telomere", and Conrad didn't have the remotest idea what a Telomere was; do you wear it?  Eat it?  Measure the radial velocity of strange particles in a vacuum with it?  The lyrics are so obtuse that they don't help at all.  Thanks, chaps.
     Hence a recourse to - 

     I say!  No wonder I never got any search results when looking up "Telepherage"!  Well I'll be - sorry about this, I was looking up "Telomere" in my Collins and - a story for another day -

     - teh interwebz, which reveal that a "Telomere" is nothing to do with distant lakes,** but rather is a bit of genetically inert material that makes up the end of a chromosome.  I don't know if we can dig up a useful picture or not; let's cattle-prod Art and see if he can convulse something appropriate from the files -

Telomeres

     The telomeres protect chromosome ends from decay, erosion or splitting, and also from inadvertently joining other chromosomes, so you can see that the analogy they share with aglets is not too strained.
     Okay, time to see what happens when the motley, wearing scuba gear, goes into an industrial washing machine on a ninety-minute cycle!


Merely Being DANGEROUS At The Festival
Yesterday we covered all the HIGHLY DANGEROUS things that may occur at the Glastonbury Festival, which they have to not only plan for, but demonstrate to the local council and the police and probably the fire brigade, too, showing that their plans are sound.  Let us move onto Part Two -
"HIGH RISK"
'Vehicle Safety' - Yes, indeed, for we are talking not about a tarmac'ed environment with lane markings, traffic lights, roundabouts, yellow lines and kerbs, but a giant muddy field.  Were the fancy to take some idiot, they could drive wherever they wanted.  Not only that, in the wetter festivals you might return to your chariot to find that the weight of 2 1/2 tons of beer and cider than you put in the boot has now sunk it up to the axles into clingy, sticky, oozing mud.

CAUTION!  Drinking all the beer may bring further problems.

'Poor Weather Impact (winds and rain)' - Okay, so all involved are aware that the Great British Summer weather may only be disgusting, instead of harmful to the nth degree.  Under these circumstances you may only contract a sickness of the soul, rather than being swallowed up in mud, only for your mummified corpse to be dug up by alien archaeologists in 100,000 years time.  The Cure would be your soundtrack for this weather, as they are grey and miserable themselves.

CAUTION!  Worse than the disease.

'Infectious Diseases Related To Personal Hygiene' - Ah yes, we return to that theme of human effluent swilling around the neighbourhood, when it rains, or legions of flies, when it's sunny.  So you are doubly damned.  If you look at photographs of the site after the punters have variously staggered, lurched and tottered away, you get an idea of the sheer amount of rubbish generated over the few days of this event.  A fly's delight!

Close enough.

'Safety of Structures' - or, "Your Tent Is Afloat", if you are lucky and waterproofed, or "Hello You're Drowning' if not.  Or - do they mean the stages et al?  It's a little-known fact that the Pyramid Stage is built on a dozen 15,000 ton concrete pilings, in order to make sure it doesn't sink.  I think the other stages are merely built atop the sunken remains of the previous year's stages -

CAUTION!  Sinking at a rate of 1 1/2 inches per year

     - don't mock, Schliemann discovered the very same thing when he was excavating at Troy.
'Drug And Alcohol Impacts' - I shall refrain from comment here, as this, as a subject, is such low-hanging fruit that it's simply unfair to chaff it.

     I think that's enough of Living A Moderately Dangerous Lifestyle As It Applies To Festivals for one day, which means that, once again, we have to defer any description of the Not A Cult Festival.  Don't worry, just like your prince, it will one day come!

Finally -
Trust the Ruffians to come up with a solution for a problem that nobody else saw.
     Imagine you are a Sinister cosmonaut, fretting, as you descend from orbit, that nobody ever got Elton John to create a song for you -
     Plop.  You come down to Earth (literally; as if Pravda is going to commission decadent capitalist Westerners to write songs about you!) in the middle of the taiga in midsummer.  A million square miles of mud, streams, swamps and baba yagas, with no roads, although they do have one trillion mosquitoes per cubic decimetre.
     How then to retrieve these gallant heroes of the Sinister Union?  Aha!
           

     A Zil 2906 Screw-Propelled Cosmonaut Recovery Vehicle.
     No doubt years of development and billions of roubles went into developing this peculiar machine, in the interests of proving the superiority of Sinister technology, all undercut by the single word "Helicopter" (or "Gelicopter" as there is no "H" in Ruffian)


     And there, gentle reader, we shall leave it for today.



*  If Hefty Harry the Humble Scribe was any bigger, he'd implode under his own gigantic mass <the cruel truth courtesy Mister Hand!>
**  Combined dead language pun - Latin and Greek!***
***  Greek's not dead, fatty - Mister Hand strikes again!