To Create, I Adumbrate

No!  You Dirty-Minded Rascals
<mutters darkly> There is nothing seedy or sordid about "Adumbrate" I'll have you know.  If you will allow me to read from my Collins Concise - 
  "To create an outline or faintly cast a shadow", which is derived from - inevitably! - Latin, and "Adumbrare", meaning "To cast a shadow", which equally inevitably is derived from the Latin for "Shadow", that being "Umbra".

The Shadow knows.  I'm not sure what he knows, but it doesn't sound like fluffy bunnies and roses.

     Okay, I wanted to post a picture of what Your Humble Scribe gets up to in order to generate a story or item, and here we have it - Art?

Raw scrivel

     This is unprocessed piffle, before it gets turned into waffle.  I haven't gone over it with a blue pen yet, so the items "Film Poster", "Epistle" and "23rd Division" are still present when in fact they ought to be scored out.  I know you'll forgive me, I have an honest face.*  So, this is the outline that gets prepared as thoughts are generated by my imagination, or just turn up in my head unannounced.

Like this.

     Enough admin wibble!  Let us proceed with the meat of the matter, as I also wonder about composing a bit of doggerel about a Rottweiler.
     Hey, motley, we've done some popcorn and chucked sugar on it, want some?

Too Much In The Skies**
For Lo! we are back on the subject of futurologist Gerry Anderson's "U.F.O." which I have already uneasily dismissed as not at all possible, or even probable, unless it happens, which I don't want it to.
     Anyway, I wanted to try and track down how far into the future this series is actually set, rather than the bland and patently inaccurate opening titles would have you believe.  1980?  I rather think not!  Art?

Moonbase

     Here you have a large, multi-person installation on the Moon, with a shuttle launch pad and shuttle to boot.  Here we are in 2019 and we've got nothing like this at all.  AT ALL!
     Then you have the Interceptors, which are one-man combat spacecraft capable of limited-duration high-velocity pursuit, making Apollo 11 look like a dustbin lorry.  Nor is that all.  They fire a missile of large yet indeterminate yield - Art?

Ugly but effective

     I cannot decide if they are a low-yield fusion weapon, with the Interceptors being built out of railway girders and neutronium in order to avoid any kind of radioactive or EMP damage, or just an explosive slurry mixture loaded with exotic shrapnel.
     Whichever it is, this is very certainly not the technology of 1980, when a Sony Walkman was the height of technological sophistication.  Art?

Art of the state way back in '88

     Let us not forget SID, the "Space Intruder Detector", whose interior was literally a million miles from the clunky tape reels of laggardly terrestrial computers.

SID under repair

SID's interior.  Once again - 1980?

     This is practically 2019 technology, a gap of at least 40 years between the kit you see in SHADO's supposedly hi-tec headquarters beneath the Harlington-Straker film studios, which is rather more like the clunky electro-mechanical hardware of the Seventies and Eighties.
     Aha.  Realisation dawns!  Ol' Gez suspects that there are alien spies or suborned humans lurking in the background, and this "1980" nonsense is there to throw them off the scent.  Keep them off-balance, don't you know.      I'm enjoying this particular topic, I think we'll keep going with it!***
"The Goalkeeper's Revenge" By Bill Naughton
For some unfathomable reason this collection of short stories from waaaaay back in my youth has popped up in my brain, again.  Why?  Why not! - any quips about sense and nonsense will be both ignored and flamed.
     I was quite stunned that I'd got the title right, since we are talking about a gap of 35 years plus.  Proof that I'm not entirely senile yet.  Art!

Aptly dog-eared

     The stories are set in Lancashire between the wars, when times were hard - well, harder than normal in Lancashire, because it's rough up North at the best of times what with our weather - and feature a lot of wiley protagonists. 
     That one about the goalie - I remember this one.  It's about the goalkeeper on a school football (what the South Canadians call "Soccer") team, whose position is mocked and who is then dismissed by the machinations of the star striker, the dirty cur!      Our hero (the goalie, do keep up!) then goes on to a successful career as an entrepreneur, and he ends up buying/running a football team.  Guess who said team's star striker is?  O yus, that very same one from the school team.  You can guess the rest ...

Attacked by ferocious spheroidal alien?

     There are other stories that I recall, which I may bore you with.  Or not, as the word count goes.  I do remember liking these stories a whole lot more than the dull and boring "The Family From One End Street" which had a similar mileu.  They were probably Southerners.

The delights of rural Lancashire in it's heyday

I Get The Horn
WASH OUT YOUR DIRTY MINDS! <mutters even more darkly, if that's possible, and if it's not then I shall make it so O yes indeed>
     - sorry, where were we?
     Oh yes.  Back to the "History of the 23rd Division in the Great War 1914 - 1918".  At one point in the text Mr. Sandilands (the author - do keep up!) refers to gas warfare in France and Flanders, where he hilariously refers to members of the Royal Engineers "Special Brigade" as "gas mongers", a term I've not heard before.

A mass of mongers.

     Lest you be unaware, the RE's Special Brigade dealt with all forms of gas warfare in the armies of Perfidious Albion - but that's another story.
     Anyway, Mr. Sandilands also mentions a "Strombus Horn", an engine of war I hadn't heard of before, and which was problematic of explanation.  A bit of digging revealed that -
                                 
     It was a gas-warning horn powered by a cylinder of - O hilarious irony - gas, though an inert one.  You can see one at left of centre in the photograph above of Ocker troops at rest.  When a sentry or anyone especially alert detected gas, Hay Pesto! they sounded the Strombo and everyone donned their Respirator, Gas, Large.
     The name "Strombus" itself comes from the Strombus conch, which is a great big shell hailing from the Pacific.  Art?

The honking conch

*  A bare-faced lie! <said Mister Hand>
**  Annette Peacock reference for you there
***  No, I don't care what you think.