The Wonderfully Woeful World Of Wet

As You Should Surely Know By Now - 
Conrad lives on an island where the surrounding seas make regular visits to the mainland, and on occasion the whole Atlantic comes to say hello.
     Today was not an Atlantic Day, nor yet an Irish Sea day, more like - The Wash, which I think is appropriate.

No tea parties here, thanks very much

     Although Conrad hates both rain and poetry, it is undeniable that a wet cityscape is far more evocative than a dry one, especially when it's dark, because you get an interplay of light on reflective surfaces that is impossible to see in bright or dry weather.  I am minded of that James Dean photograph -

Poetry!  Dean!  Rain!

     Gomorrah-in-the-Irwell (I did mention the rain, didn't I?) cannot compete with NYNY in terms of iconic stature, because - well, I mean, The Smiths posing at Salford Lads Club is pretty okay, but it doesn't have the cachet of the Big Apple.

Perhaps if I make this photo REALLY BIG it will overwhelm James above

     Anyway, as I was walking towards work this morning, pondering on how quickly the seasons turn and that it was now fully dark on this quotidian journey, I stopped and thought - "That's a photo opportunity that Jason would appreciate".  Art?

     I could enlarge, but you'd lose some of the focus.  Gomorrah-in-the-Irwell's city centre at 07:00 this morning, and it is far more pleasant to watch it than walk through it.
     So, there we have today's title.  

Bus-ted
Do you see what - O you do.  As ever, the titanic struggle between Hermes, the god of transport, and First Bus, the dog of transport, and Your Humble Scribe, a cog in that transport, continues apace.
     Today I decided to catch the 184 into Oldham Bus Station from Manchester, because it was right there in front of me, which was perhaps a mistake.  There were endless traffic jams, and then we got to Hollinwood.  Art?

     The previous 184 had broken down, in order to add a frisson of excitement to the passengers, and to exercise them as they dashed from one bus to another.  Mine.  Which was subsequently late into the bus station, although this didn't matter anyway as the 409 I wanted to catch didn't turn up, either.  
     You just wait, First.  When I take over there will be a reckoning.  O yes.
      
A Matter Of Memory
Conrad spent part of Sunday evening baking biscuits, for the urge to do something practical had come upon him - I did a big batch of laundry, too - and Hay Pesto!  We have a load of gluten-free biscuits; biscuits are robust in terms of what flour you use, and don't suffer from using GF flour as some recipes do.  Alright, "cookies" not biscuits, are you happy now? Art?

The items in question

     The thing is, they were a bit soft, even after being baked for longer at a higher Gas Mark than the recipe recommended.  However, the guinea pig (Wonder Wifey) said they were delicious and reminiscent of "Snickerdoodles", a type of soft and chewy South Canadian cookie. 
     After all that, I forgot to take them into work yesteryon, so the gannets in the office will have something sweet today.

What Have I Stumbled Into?
If you remember - and you'd better, by golly yes - Your Humble Scribe happened to come across a new sub-culture that is probably as new to you as it was to me: Lego-building.  None of your ham-fisted junior attempts to recreate the Empire State Building with 7 bricks, these people are experts taking hours to assemble very complex kits.  The Lunar Lander example last week took the builder two and a quarter hours to assemble.

     This thing, though, takes it to another level.  The Sandcrawler from Star Wars, and I got that shot above to show a puny human arm for scale.  The completed monster stands 18" tall, 9" wide and 3 feet long, contains over 12,000 pieces and motors in those tracked sections allow it to move*.

How do you like those apples?

     The kicker is that this monster is not created from a kit - there are Lego Sandcrawler kits out there, which will set you back only a few hundred pounds -

Thus

     - but the monster above was done by freelancers.  You can buy an instruction book for £50 that tells you how to assemble it, and what parts you need, and then you need to set aside a month or two to build it.  Part of the challenge is not only building a structure this large, but making it robust enough to not fall apart when it moves, or even when it's standing still.

First, catch your rabbit ...

     Conrad would be interested to know what the final cost of this beast would be, especially if you factor in the time, at, say £10 per hour.

Salvador Dali, Meet The King's Dragoon Guards
You should all know of Ol' Sal, he of the mighty moustache and peculiar imagination, who's very fond of melting clocks and throwing cats around in spouts of water, which, if that slacker Art will act like his namesake -

Ol' Sal demonstrates his anti-gravity device.
(Or something)

     He is pretty much the first thing that comes to mind when one hears the term "Avant-garde", because he could get away with being a picture-painting bampot artiste of the bizarre and macabre.
     Okay, retain that information.  We now skip from Spain to the equally sunny reaches of the Libyan desert, and the King's Dragoon Guards, chaps who used to swan around on horseback but whom had, by the time of the Second Unpleasantness, graduated to swanning around in armoured cars.  Art?

Thus

    That's a Marmon-Harrington armoured car, made in South Africa, and an ugly vehicle that yet had great heart.  It's in Caunter desert camouflage, with a couple of sand channels hanging off the back to cope with soft sand, and has been up-gunned with a captured Italian Breda cannon, which would give pause to anything not a tank.
     My point - yes there is one, you cheeky pikers! - is that this vehicle performed in the reconnaissance role, going forward to nosey out where the enemy was (or wasn't), reporting back, seeing what matey was up to, swanning round his rear areas if the chance arose.  This is known as being in the "Vanguard".

"I spy with my little eye ..."

     And where do you think the word vanguard, meaning "advance force", comes from?  Why, nowhere but the French phrase "Avante" for "Before" and "Garde" for "Guard".


*  Very slowly.  It is a Sandcrawler after all.