BOOJUM!: Dead In The Head

No! To All The Naval Or Marines Persons Out There
For in Royal Naval or Royal Marine parlance (we shall ignore those parvenus from South Canada the USN and the USMC*) "head" is what the rest of us call "the toilet", and we will stop right there as BOOJUM! intends to retain it's SFW mantle.

NO, ART NO! "SFW" means 'Safe For Work' NOT 'Special Forces Warfare'

If we can continue, o'er that sizzling sound which is Art skittering around at the end of a 750 tera-joule cattle prod, by "Dead In The Head" I refer to those saddoes who retire from work on week 34 of the tax year, and whose lifeless corpse is discovered by the milkman at the start of week 43**. Nothing else to complete their empty hollow lives, one presumes.
Does, or will, Conrad suffer from this weakness? That is, will he ever be 'Dead in the Head'?

A head that is, undeniably, dead

Not a bit of it! Your Modest Artisan would have trouble fitting a week's worth of planned activity into a real day. Am I not typing out this blog even as we read? Yes I am, it was a rhetorical question. There is the Mountain Of Books, and the wargaming, and crosswords and codewords, not to mention a dozen different television programmes or films, and the baking - Conrad would have trouble even if we went to the metric twenty-five hour day.
I guess you will have to reconcile yourselves to both BOOJUM! and Conrad being around for a while longer.
I say, motley, would you like a nice relaxing massage with scented oils, followed by a plate of zakuski and a jug of chilled vodka?

ZAKUSKI!

Here An Aside -
If you were not already aware, 'zakuski' are Russian hors d'oevres, which, as you can see from the picture above, they do not do by halves. In fact, from a Western European perspective, they seem intent on killing you with food. Conrad recalls an hilarious moment from one of the "Hornblower" novels where our hero informs his Russian hosts that he has "dined sufficiently", where in reality he has only been stuffing himself with the appetizers. He goes on to have a complete gustatory coma and metabolic collapse when the Actual Real Meal begins.

"Hornblower was peculiarly possessive about his telescope"

Damn it, none of this is what we're supposed to be blathering on about. Retirement and appetizers, it does not make for an awesome interwebz experience. Let me just kick the Reboot Button -

In The City Of Grinding Blights -
Also known as "Manchester", or "Gomorrah-in-the-Irwell", so heavy has the rainfall of recent been. I took the following picture after Shelli - whom we shall dub "Mischievous Cello-dier" had stopped throwing up her arms and interrupting on a visual level -

What you're looking at here is a picture of Unparalleled Greyness, as those rectangles of solid grey ought to be vignettes of Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell. This is what happens when the rain-clouds roll in; hope, beauty and A Better Tomorrow all roll out.
That blob of hirsute in the foreground is Shelli. I shan't mention her again for a while, as Anna will probably get 1) Curious and perhaps (fingers crossed!) 2) Jealous.

Also, we had a fire-drill today. The assembled hordes of the Dark Tower assembled under the walkway, abuzz with conversation, and very luckily in the dry part of the day when the sun was shining.

The Love Of Language
Very definitely not the same as the language of love. The BBC's website had a verrrry interesting article about Viking words that had worked their way into English.

I am afraid that - you know what I'm like - I had to rather jib at the list of words that the Vikings introduced into the Pond of Eden, because although the BBC's website linguists legitimately included words such as "knife" and "club", they also included "gun".
     Sorry but NO!
     Given that they are talking about the Ninth Century, and we do not see gunpowder-fired bombards until the Thirteenth, this is an anachronism, all the more so since hand-held gunpowder weapons that accord to the general principle of "gun" take another century to arrive.
     Apologies for being a grammar and concept Nazi, it's just how my mind works.

Avoiding The Inevitable Pun
If you have a memory more persistent over time than a goldfish, then you know there were serious issues over in South Canada because of a dam and un-seasonal flooding. Of course, this kind of exciting and dangerous thing would never be allowed to happen in the sleepy and well-mannered small towns of Derbyshire, would it? Yes, well -
Sorry but NO! Art?

Hay Pesto. Conrad had seen some photographs of the dam's slipway collapsing, which gave no sense of scale. With this picture, you get the sense of scale alright, and then some. Engineers are already lowering the water level in the reservoir, as well as crossing their fingers that the CEASELESS EVER-POUNDING RAIN holds off for a day or two, because if water tops the dam again, it will continue to scour away the slipway's underburden. Given the level of water in the dam, the retaining wall holding it back might give way under all that water pressure, in which case a mighty torrent would erupt and head downstream.

Oops.

Right in the sights of the flood is the town of Whaley Bridge, which would indeed be suitable for whales, i.e. whale-y***, as it would end up underwater. The river, after all, used to run in that direction before it was dammed to create the reservoir.
What fun water is!

Back To Bedlam
Yes, that pamphlet again!

Notice no title. I think the idea was to show the variety of terrain present in the North African War. Yes, we get it.

Another oops

     Sorry for the angle here, and I don't have the ability to rotate this file as I'm working from an office PC, so cannot jigger about with the original.
     Anyway, this is supposedly a picture of 8th Army tank crews -
     Sorry but NO! - I do seem to be saying that a lot today, don't I?
     That protective head-gear is South Canadian, so I presume these crews are members of a Honey squadron, as that was the South Canadian tank of issue at the time.
     HOWEVER! British tank crews NEVER wore protective head-gear, as it was considered sissylike and pansyish or something. Their headgear was a black beret, and that's it. It engendered a sense of esprit de corps, even at the cost of significantly higher levels of head injury than the tank crews of other, more sensible nations. Art?
                       Image result for 8th army tank crew