Berry My Knee -

 - With The Rest Of Me
Ha!  Gotcha.  You were expecting some excruciating variation on "Bury My Knee At Wounded Heart" or similar, weren't you?
      Alas, no.  We here at BOOJUM! like to keep you guessing.  At times we keep ourselves guessing, too - the game of "What on earth did I mean last night by creating that title?" of a morning is such a fulfilling one.
     We'll come back to that horrid punning title shortly.  In the meantime I am hammering this out prefatory to whizzing off to Pub Quizzing, as I need to make the most of it.  Rosie and Phil, my PQ partners, are selling their house shortly and moving to London to be closer to their kids and grand-kids.  Not sure what I shall do then.  Pine and decline?
     Enough of morbid!  Art, entertain and divert people.

     This is the badly-bashed bus I told you of yesterday.  It's not a great shot but hey I didn't want to look like a disaster tourist, though you can see everything below the windscreen has been smashed either flat or absent.  This spot is just about the worst spot to pick for a collision.  Dunno if I can get up a map to illustrate -


     Church Street is the "A6" in fetching taupe.  
     So, at peak time, in the rush hour, two of the city's busiest roads were blocked off, thanks to some idiot trying to beat a red light.
      

      That red object is a massive metal ramp that was being sent under the bus in order to lift it up, so that something wheely could be placed beneath it, and the wreck towed away.  Impressive if time-consuming, so Conrad ambled and shambled his way off to Stevenson Square (visible on the map above) to get home a lot later than liked.
     Enough of misery and misfortune!  

The Haul
Er, yes, funny you should mention misery and misfortune, because here we have the two latest Hap and Leonard novels in Joe R. Lansdale's series about Our Hapless Heroes, which are made up of equal parts misery and misfortune, with a dash of malice thrown in for seasoning, and the occasional mayhem arriving for free.  Art?

CAUTION!  Do not mis-interpret as "Vanilla Devil" or "Ride Red"

     It was a bit tricky deciding which to read first, until I checked the publication dates and worked out VR is the first.  Interestingly enough there is no mention in the index of the three novellas that were published after these two, which intrigues me a tad.  Are these volumes too recently printed to have "Hyenas" present?  Or were they published by a different imprint?  Or is someone trying to squeeze the market so they can either sell off their old copies for princely returns?
     It'll be interesting to see how this one plays out, as we've already had one particularly extreme gun battle on the streets of La Borde and I can't see Ol' Joe repeating himself.  But, count on Hap and Leonard to find the biggest, baddest pile of trouble there is and fall gracelessly into it.
     >>>  Short update - we're 140 pages in and no gun battles so far.

"The Disaster Twins" as the police know them

About That Horrid Punning Title -
This goes back to that BBC article on British towns with names that are difficult for outsiders to pronounce, which can be a worry for said outsiders if the locals look inbred and truculent less than welcoming.
     Anyway, we have a local town that is a touchstone for this: Bury.  Art?

Wild times in Bury

     I have visited in the past, because it's where the Lancashire Fusiliers Regimental Museum is located, and that would have been a lot better to put up as an illustration, Art.  Sometimes, you know, I wonder why we employ him*.

The hilariously re-purposed Land Rover at said museum

     The acid test is how you pronounce it.  As an outsider <hack! spit!> you would of course pronounce it as "Buree" which is WRONG!  And by now you're already inside the wicker man with the scent smoke in your nostrils.  It is pronounced "BEREE".
     So now you know, and knowledge is power.  If only we could use it to fuel the national grid, as it would be so much cleaner than nuclear power (though Art would have to go without his snacking on nuclear fuel rods).
     Where were we?  O yes.  Try this from yesterday:

Ballachulish, Highland, Scotland

     Which is pronounced "Ball-a-hooish".  I think (since I copied this from the BBC) that by "Highland" they mean "The Highlands".

Further Down The Rabbit Hole
If you recall, Conrad was banging on about a novel called "The Cauldron", by one 'Zeno' and yes that's a pseudonym, as the real Zeno coughed it many millennia ago.  I was yarking about it because Al Murray of the "We Have Ways Of Making You Talk" podcast recommended it, and I recalled some of it, too, which, given that it's over 30 years since I last perused it, implies either a good novel or a retentive memory**.

One edition

     The novel was very well-regarded, and the man who wrote it was a highly-experienced paratrooper who had served with distinction in North Africa, Sicily and Holland.  He wrote it whilst serving a prison sentence for murder, which is only the beginning of a long and convoluted story that beggars belief.
     More at the weekend!
     "From Alamein To Zem Zem" is another work that the WHWOMYT recommended, and yet another that I have in my collection, and have read, too.  Art?

No, I don't know what it is, either

     It's a fascinating read, not least because Douglas was killed a couple of days into the Normandy invasion in 1944, having gone through some of the worst that North Africa had to offer.  Although Your Humble Scribe loathes poetry with a passion, one line of the author's has rather stuck with me.

"How can I live amongst this gentle, obsolescent breed of heroes, and not weep?"

Finally -
Another wretched Windows Forcible Update this morning, THAT I DID NOT WANT OR NEED! AND WHICH HAS - excuse me, I'll stop shouting now - and which put me at risk of missing the bus.  Windows and First Bus - a truly frightening combination!

"Of course, hideous is in the eye of the beholder," said the First Bus spokesdemon.

*  Because he works for nothing, except delicious plates of coal <the evil truth courtesy Mister Hand!>
**  Or both.  Just to cover all eventualities.