Ooops!

An Admission Of Omission By Accident
Yesterday's blog contained one of my habitual and entirely correct criticisms of a Cryptic Crossword clue, and if I can use Copy and Paste -

 - this is about a Cryptic Crossword answer, how did you guess?  Ah, the throbbing temple veins and froth on my lips, right, right.
     "The ship's account will give you the bird (8)" was the clue, and I had no idea what it could be even though I had three of the letters, until looking up the solution in next day's Metro.
     I'm not going to tell you the answer, either, because I'm feeling extra-specially horrid.

     What I meant to do was torment you until the end of that day's blog, and then put up the answer except I forgot.  So, the answer is:

BOATBILL

     Yes, it baffled me, too.  Art?

The boatbill

     I've heard of the hornbill, and the shoebill, but the boatbill?  Are we crossword solvers now expected to be ornithologists as well as acquainted with obsolete Scottish golfing terms?
     So, if you were both curious and annoyed yesterday, I do apologise.
     That was a short Intro.  Let us now hurry and scurry onwards -

Dare I?
As you should surely know by now, Conrad lacks any kind of inner censor or moderator, the proof of which you can see in his ridiculously protracted assembly of giant jigsaws.  So, I felt a frisson when the following came up on screen -

Perhaps ...

     The thing is, if I were to click on the link, I'd probably sit there until I did solve them, or went insane, whichever arrived quicker.  I recall that book of logic puzzles, where the whole evening would slide by before I remembered to put it down.
     You might not know this, but Edgar Allan Poe was one of the originators of cryptography, thanks to his short story "The Gold Bug", and he got there about a century before Alan Turing.  So there*.

Hapless And Pining
<rubs hands at how clever I am>.  If you read BOOJUM! with any regularity, then you know Conrad has come across the comic creation, by author Joe R. Lansdale, of the Hap Collins and Leonard Pine series of novels.  They can be laugh-out loud funny, so I have to be careful reading them on the bus; they can also include quite horrid violence, since our heroes have a way of finding trouble.  In fact, if trouble was a puddle a yard wide in the middle of the Mojave Desert, Hap would find a way to fall in it and pull Leonard in afterwards.  Art?

The troublesome two

     Okay, with me so far?  I've read the first six novels in the series, then went onto Abebooks last night to pick up the next three.  "Vanilla Ride" and "Devil Red" were fine, second-hand paperbacks, and then came "Hyenas".
     Dog Buns!  £40 for a hardback, and - get this - £48 for post and packaging?  From South Canada?  When the next most expensive edition charges £6 for p & p?  Someone's trying to pull a fast one there.

The swines!

     Not only that, it's only a novella, meaning a pretty short novel.  Double Dog Buns!
     Okay, Conrad, look for the next on the list, "Dead Aim" -
     Dog Buns multiplied by Dog Buns!  Another novella, and £26 the cheapest edition.  Though they're only charging £4 from South Canada to the Pond of Eden.  What about "Briar Patch Boogie"?
                          

     Well there's the thing - can't find it on Abebooks at all, and it only seems to exist as a Kindle edition, so that's that one out the window, too.  And it's described as a "novellette" which means another rather short novel.
     It wasn't a total loss, though, since I have ordered Listy's "Forgotten Tanks and Guns of the 20s, 30s and 40s", and at only £14 with free postage.  And Joe seems to get back into writing Hap and Leonard novels as of 2016, which Conrad approves of**.

You Want Dark Tourism?
I'll give you dark tourism.  Consider the island of Cyprus, a sun-drenched island in the eastern Mediterranean, which had a rather mixed population of Greeks and Turks, until Turkey proper invaded the island in 1973.  This was rather unexpected, as though Greece and Turkey are rather cool towards each other, going to war was a rather nineteenth century kind of thing to do.  Art?

For your erudition

     Nobody is very clued-up about the enormous base areas that Perfidious Albion retains here, which Perfidious Albion is quite happy about.
     Anyway, you can see the Green Line which divides the island, represented on the ground by a UN Buffer Force.  Art?

Thus

     The White Helmets keep the neighbours at arm's length with a no-man's-land they garrison and patrol.  You can wander around on the Greek side fairly freely; trying this on the Turkish side is not advised, as the local secret police don't like it.
     Anyway, getting over the barriers is not advised, either, as packs of feral dogs are known to roam this terrain.  Be a tourist and merely watch.  This advice has been flaunted in the past by Greek poachers who get into the NML to see what they can shoot, and at least one of them has been eaten alive by said packs of wild dogs.

CAUTION! This side is safe.

     So if you do hop the fences, make sure you take along a few pork chops, the better to distract Fido and his slavering chums.

Finally -
The Mordor Tourist Board is now arranging excursions to Mount Doom, and is aiming it's publicity campaign specifically at energy firms.  Art?

CAUTION!  Protective headgear and non-flammable footwear required

     - along with bottled oxygen and bottled water ("There are no concession stands on Mount Doom"  as the guide advises).
     The tagline is all about how MD is " - an un-ending, consistent and reliable source of geothermal energy that can supply a township of up to 750,000 souls people, with an on-site labour force able to work for minimum wage or human flesh, whichever is cheaper."

And with that, we are done!


*  Not sure what point I'm making here, but it's a point and I've made it.
**  He will probably sleep easier knowing this