Thanks, Brain

I Have Remarked Before -
I know my brain works, because here I am typing this, and it works well enough that I can manage complicated, bitty, constantly-changing input onto our staff database in the office, and interpret what confused people who think maximizing and minimizing a window is a complicated technical operation are trying to explain.
     That said, exactly how it works is another question.
     Case in point: Alcibiades.  Art?

Al with mum and dad
(Perhaps)

     That's the only picture I could find without naked people, thus it may be a little ambiguous, yet still SFW.
     His name popped into my septic stew (or strew) of a mind as I came back from a trip to the bathroom in the small hours.
     "Alcibiades; great, thanks very much brain.  Really.  No, I'm not going to go look him up at 04:10."
     At first I thought he might be something associated with medicine, like Asclepius.  In fact I checked that I hadn't already posted anything about him already in BOOJUM! as I know you wouldn't like repetition.

Asclepius, Greek god of medicine

     I hadn't.  So, my Collins Concise reports that he was an Athenian statesman and soldier, around between 450 B.C. and 404 B.C. during the Peloponnesian War.  He defected to Sparta, yet came back to Athens and helped them win two major battles against the Spartans.
     Thucydides "History of the Peloponnesian War" is a work I dust off and read every few years, so I will have read about Ol' Al there.  The question is, why did his name come up on a cold dark morning in September?
     I say, motley, let's go play lawn darts!  And no, you won't be the target, promise.

Per Ardua Ad Astra
"Through hardship to the stars" if your Latin isn't up to it, and the motto of the Brylcreem Boys a.k.a. the R.A.F.
     Of which only the last two words are relevant at all, I just thought I'd throw it in there and try to seem impressive.
     One of the things that we like to ponder here on the blog is astronomy, for who cannot fail to be interested in strange stars and distant planets?  Or distant stars and strange planets, if you want to ring the changes on that.  Every so often research throws up a result that causes astronomers to shake their heads and rethink theories from the bottom up, and - Art?

Gas giant plus parent star

     Clever astronomers have found a gas giant, GJ3512b, about half the mass of Jupiter, orbiting a very small, dim star - an M-type red dwarf, when current theories say the gas giant ought not to exist at all.  It's disproportionately huge compared to the parent star, at least several dozens of times larger than current astronomical models predict.  Not only that, it whizzes around said star closer then Mercury is to our Sun.
     This means even cleverer astronomers are going to have to come up with another theory of how planets come to be.  Science: self-correcting shizzle!
     Phil Plait would be proud of me.

Phil, astronomer
(Also not-so-closeted sci-fi nerd)

"Devil Red" By Joe R. Lansdale
Got to put the "R" in there or Ol' Joey might get annoyed.  Just finished this, and the most hilarious bit is a running gag about Leonard choosing to wear a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat, to the amazement, derision and outright disgust of his best friend Hap (and most everybody else).  Leonard, you see, being a cultured chap, is a big fan of Sherlock Holmes.  Hap, on the other hand, is big on Westerns.  They do not see eye to eye about that hat.  Not at all.

My edition

     Don't get upset if I spoil things for you by saying there are no water towers featured in the novel.  Not a one.
     Anyway, I notice that the index of Hap and Leonard novels on the inner page goes straight to "Honky Tonk Samurai" after "Devil Red", so I may move right on to order that and omit the horribly expensive trio of novellas I've mentioned before, in the hope that nothing important happens in them*.

     Excuse me, I've got to go turn the oven on.  I have a remaindered pie to heat up and eat up.  Back shortly!

Finally -
Not sure what kind of schedule the blog will be maintaining tomorrow, as all occupants of The Mansion are heading south to meet up with Darling Daughter and Tom The Cleanly-Shaven (to ensure a better gas-mask fit), and are hieing hence to the very excellent Mi & Pho restaurant, there to dine on Vietnamese cooking.  Not only is their stuff excellent, they serve boatloads of it and DD has had to ask for a doggie bag in the past.  Art?

They do gluten-free, too

     We came to know about this place as Tom visited quite frequently with his work chums.  The reason we go tomorrow is in celebration of Degsy's birthday, and he's been warned not to pay for anything.
     So, there may only be one post tomorrow, or if your Humble Scribe isn't sleeping off an enormous meal, perhaps the usual two.  We shall see!  Whatever occurs, it will have all the usual quality, which is a wildly ambiguous statement and entirely par for the course.

I'm going to call a halt here as I need to go put that pie in the oven and prep some potatoes, but we're only about 30 words off the Compositional Ton, so you've got nothing to complain about.


* "Nothing important that is mentioned in the subsequent novels" is what I meant.  Of course I expect lots of important things to happen.