Corks!

Yes, They Go In Bottles
It's also an appropriate expression for the Twenties, and by that I mean the Nineteen Twenties, not the Two-thousand and Twenties, which will shortly be upon us.  Still no sign of our flying cars, mind you.
     Anyway, I refer to that collection of short stories about Lord Peter Wimsey, the aristocratic amateur detective, which I purchased with a modest squeal of delight a short while ago.  Art?

Memo to Casting: pretty good, especially about that nose

     I do beg your pardon here, as I should have been making notes about what I was reading.  The stories, you see, are getting on for ninety years old at their most hale, and what was commonly understood then has absolutely no meaning now.  This gives me hope: the future may wrinkle it's brow in puzzlement when reading about <shudders> Milie Cyrus or Rustle Brand.
     As an example, Dorothy ("L" as we must distinguish from all the others) Sayers has two motorcycle riders whizzing down the Great North Road on - and I looked this up specially - an "OHV Norton", although the editor has inadvertently put the "OHV" in lower case, which, if Art will stir from his coal-induced stupor -

Exceedingly vroomy

     - which Your Humble Scribe was slightly surprised to see existed as a real artefact.  The other motor-bike was a Scott Flying-Squirrel, which I was convinced Ol' Dot had made up out of whole cloth, but - Art, do the honours, please -

Surprise, it's real

     Indeed it is, or was.  I don't think any motor manufacturers today would dare go for the whimsy <ahem!> of a rugged, manly machine like a motorbike being named after a species of aerial rodent.
     There you go, a fascinating window on the past.  We may come back to this, it's a thick book with a lot of short stories present.
     I say, motley, would you like to ride pillion on a - no?  Not in any way on God's green earth can you be tempted to ride on the back of a motorbike?  Well, okay, but I was going to ride to Nether Champney, where they have the best bitter in the North West ...

"The motley weakened on hearing about the destination ..."

I Can Hardly Wait
As you should know by now, we here at BOOJUM! take a breezily cynical view of pretty much everything under the sun, because we know human nature.  Thus I observe that we are on a countdown to the September 20th "Storm Area 51" event.  I have laid in a stock of popcorn and beer.  Conrad confidently expects the turnout to be in the hundreds at best, out of the two million couch-potato keyboard warriors who expressed an interest - I beg your pardon! - who guaranteed they would be hurling their pasty white bodies at the security fences.

My spidey-sense tells me they're trying to get across some kind of concept about - about - no, it just won't come into focus

     Our very good friend Devin Stone, of Youtube's "Legal Eagle" channel, came back with a real game-changer: one of his legal friends had put in a Freedom Of Information Act request about Area 51 years and years ago.  Possibly as long as 15 years ago?  And he has just been sent an ENORMOUS stash of files and information, which will take months to go through, there's so much of it.
     So, by the time those basement-dwelling hordes* assemble and have to stare down the Camo Guys, an attorney in an office may well have solved the whole thing.

Inevitably, Devin went with the "Lawyers are the real heroes!" theme

You Do Not Sell It Very Well
I refer to a chap I've only recently come across on the BBC's website, one Ramesh Ranganathan, which is a Sri Lankan name in case you didn't know, as they tend to have a lock on very long surnames.  Art?

Romesh: hairy iteration

     I've never heard of him before.  After a bit of Googling around I discovered he has a solid presence as a stand-up comic, who has been around for, oooooh, years and years.  Before that, his prior existence was that of a maths teacher, which is a job only a masochist's masochist would ever undertake.  Anyway, it seems that Romesh has agreed to be a fall guy for a documentary series, where he gets to undertake things that are either humiliating or hazardous, if not both.  In ZImbabwe he got to try out a locally brewed concoction.  Art?

     I laughed like a drain at that**.  It's always hugely amusing to see other people suffering in the cause of your entertainment.  At that point Ramesh may well have been thinking with fondness of form 2C and how to calculate the area under a curve ...

Watch Out, Watch Out, There's A Humphrey About
That will filter out the men from the boys, for it was the slogan for an advertising campaign about, er, about - milk, back in the Seventies.  You never actually saw the Humphreys, only their red and white striped straw which they used to purloin the milk of honest milk-buying, milk-consuming British folk.  Art?

Frank - YOUR MILK!

     Which has very little to do with what ensued Thursday evening at the Pub Quiz, though it does involve drinking of liquids.  This is where matters get technical, so forgive the extraneous detail.  Firstly, you need to know that The Pleasant Inn is a Smith's pub, and that Humphrey Smith, one of the brewery owners, had these past few months sent out an edict that all digital devices capable of communication were to be BANNED from his pubs.  BANNED , I TELL YOU!  I like this chap already.
     Every Thursday Steve the quizmaster would warn folks not to use their mobile phones or talbets (Conrad unsure exactly what these are), as Humphrey might be a-spying through the windows.  No problem for Conrad, he doesn't take his Devil's Digital Device out of the house if it can be avoided.
     However!
              

     Those above are Ol' Hump, and the only two pictures anywhere of him, as he is notoriously reclusive and secretive and as camera-shy as Thomas Pynchon.
     Anyway, in he strode, carrying armfuls of files and printouts, and Hay Pesto, there is a bright young thing busy on his mobile phone right in front of Ol' Hump, who tells Bright Young Thing off, who ignores the telling off, at which point Ol' Humph bars him and his girlfriend -
     Theatre in the raw, folks, theatre in the raw.  Of course Conrad, being a devious and malignant old tumour, wonders if it wasn't a complete set-up from the get go.
     Interesting times!








*  Poetic licence for "A few"
**  British idiom for "I appreciated it's comedic value immensely"