A Battlefield -

Just Not How You Imagined It ...
Conrad was watching a short snippet on Youtube where a chap called Corey Mandell was holding forth on his career as a screenwriter, as a result of which he ended up doing scripts simply because of the money involved, and which he also ended up hating.  Hating hating hating!
     This is why he moved into teaching, which he does at UCLA, finding it immensely more rewarding and enjoyable than soullessly churning out tat.  Art?

How to scare cats the Corey Mandell way!

     Corey found himself in a bit of a pickle; none of the scripts he'd worked on had ended up as real live actual films, and he was getting faintly desperate to get something - anything - to fruition.
     So he said "Yes" to "Battlefield Earth".
     I don't know if you've ever seen this farrago; I have, once, and once only, and I would only every do it again for a dare whilst wrapped around a lot of beers.

That's as big as it gets

     Well, Corey explained some of the reasons for it being dire: the original studio involved, Fox 2000, ended up walking away.  None of the other major studios wanted anything to do with it, because Scientology (and it needed a very big budget).  In came Franchise Pictures, independents who specialised in rescuing star's vanity projects, and who took his script and generally mucked around with it, before randomly shuffling the pages, removing every seventh one and excising the letter "E"*.  The film was supposedly budgeted at £45 million, which was kind of on the cheap side for what was supposed to be an effects-heavy epic.

What?  It's a battlefield, with earth

     Of course we now knowthe film was a colossal cinematic colostomy container, widely panned by - everyone, I think - as being so uniquely bad it ought to be sealed in a concrete tomb and despatched to the bottom of the Challenger Deep.
     Then things start to get really interesting ...
     Okay, motley, I challenge you to a contest playing Lawnmower Simulator!

The very real thing

Bitten By The Coincidence Hydra - AGAIN
It had to happen: Your Humble Scribe's behind is too tender and tasty a morsel for the Coincidence Hydra to resist for long.
     Thus is was as I strolled nonchalantly to the Dark Tower this morning, past all the covered concession stands, because you can't leave anything lying around loose in Gomorrah-On-The-Irwell or it will vanish, and what do I see?
     No!  Not a possum pickling plums with picric acid.  Art?

     After me banging on about how 'Gusto' is derived ultimately from the Latin 'Gustatus'.
     What are the chances, eh?

What Have I Stumbled Into?
It appears that the Lego conspiracy stretches further than anyone would have believed, yeah even unto the Antipodes.  Say hello to a little creation worked up by Australian Ryan Mcnaught (also known as "Brickman") in his garage.  Art?

     This beast took him 8 months, £3,500 and 35,000 bricks to complete, not to mention uncountable times spent stepping on bits of Lego and hopping about in pain.  Art!

     Ryan got something more than appreciation from this build; Quantas, the Ocker airline, flew him to South Canada so he could take part in a Lego convention held there annually.  He needed to break the A380 Airbus down into components that would fit into 3 large suitcases, as the assembled build is too fragile to be toted around whole.  And, yes, it would take days to rebuild it.
     Obviously, some people have entirely too much time on their hands** ...
     
"Gurus"
We shall come to where I picked up on this word in a little while, O Yes Indeedy Ally Sheedy.  You have surely heard of it being bandied about in the media, in one of two senses: an acknowledgement of someone's expert status on a particular topic; or a particularly bumptious, self-important oaf***.  Usually mentioned in connection with the ballfoot game.

Definition the second

     Where does it come from?  None other than Sanskrit!  OH HOORAH ANOTHER WORD NOT DERIVED FROM EITHER GREEK OR LATIN!  KALLOO KALLAY! <ahem>  The original word is "Guruh", meaning "weighty" - in the sense of intellectual firepower, not over-eating, though with Conrad you get both at no extra cost - which transposed into the Hindi "Guru".
     And there we have it. 

Not sure about this one, Art ...

     Dog Buns!  Missed that poster with "Russian. Ruthless -" upon it as I was nose-deep in a book when the bus went past it.  Well, I can try tonight, or tomorrow morning unless stricken with a fit of absent-mindedness.

An especially ruthless Ruffian

TIK Versus The Wehraboos

This one might need a bit of explanation, and I've only got three minutes before I commence the nose/grindstone interface.
     Okay, "Wehraboos" are those uncritical, slavering fanboys who insist that the Wehrmacht (and by implication the SS) was the greatest army in the world, evah, with the coolest tanks and guns and shizzle, and it really won the war, except by a cruel trick of fate that probably involves aliens and time travel (and the International Jewish Consipiracy!) it didn't.  Art?

A clinically accurate depiction

     It is no secret that the Wehraboos fly into a frothing rage if you dare to even suggest that the Tiger tank was perhaps not the invulnerable steel juggernaut they worship, and so it was with a book that TIK picked for review.  Art?

Get ready for some fanboy frothing

     This work addresses the patently biased memoirs and 'reports' that came out of captured or collaborating Teuton generals, who had been asked to analyse the Eastern Front post-war for American study.  It's a bit long to go into here, but one of their contentions is that the Wehrmacht fought a war just as dirty and atrocity-filled as the SS, who were for long the lightning-rod for blame.  This isn't really up for debate, unless you have a shrine to the MG42 in your bedroom cupboard.
     Up jump the Wehraboos, all hurling one-star reviews at Smelser and Davies.  TIK bothers to go into a couple of these amazingly biased and tangential "reviews" and pretty much shoots them full of holes, using things like LOGIC and EVIDENCE and FACTS instead of pretty daydreams.
     Bah!

TIK looking less than stern.
(But the steel is there beneath the surface)

*  Perhaps.
**  Said without a hint of irony
***  Which is Conrad?! <hard questions asked courtesy Mister Hand>