You Can Tell When Autumn Has Arrived -

In The Allotment Of Eden
Because Conrad starts to make hearty soups, none of that horrid thin stuff that looks like dishwater-only-slightly-strained, O no.  No, these soups will help to propel you into the day ahead as if you were juiced on the Rocinante's flight deck doing a 7G burn -
      Excuse me.  I may have been getting a little too much into "The Expanse".  Quick, change the subject - Art!

Sherba

     This is a recipe from the excellent Covent Garden Soup Company recipe book: Sherba, a Moroccan-style lamb dish with spices and chick peas, which is especially good for cold autumnal evenings like today.
     No, the motley can't have any! everyone knows motleys are allergic to a combination of lamb and chick peas*.
     Well, that was a short Intro.

Go On, Owen
This might sound a tad forced, after hearing of guns named the 'Sten' and the 'Bren', but hear me out about the Owen Sub-Machine Carbine.  This was a simple yet extremely effective SMG of the Second Unpleasantness, dreamed up by young Evelyn Owen, and which was - and this is so unusual it needs to be emphasised! - adopted with great relish by the Australian government, whilst the Australian army dragged it's heels and had to be prodded into acceptance of.  Art?

Ian of Forgotten Weapons having a blast.  In the literal sense.

     The reason I raise this weapon as a matter of interest is because Ian McCollom of Forgotten Weapons got his hot sweaty hands on one that's due to be auctioned, and proceeded to have a whale of a time shooting off several magazines.  I think we need a proper illustration.  Art?

Sic

     As Ian admits, it looks odd.  However, it worked, and worked extremely well.  You could drop it in a mud wallow and it would still work.  The double hand-grips meant it was easy to aim and control.  That magazine on top? assisted by gravity, helped to avoid feed issues with bullets.  The ejection port on the bottom?  That meant any crud that got into the gun also fell out again.  It was what soldiers like - reliable.  In fact the South Canadians were so impressed with it that they wanted to buy tens of thousands, which their government managed to prevent.  Politicians, hmm?
     The Ockers liked it so much they used it up until their involvement in Vietnam, a lifespan of over 20 years for something dreamed up in a garage.

"Ho ho ho!" laughed the enemy.  "What do you call that?" and then they were dead.

     Hmmm.  Soup and guns.  You can't say we're not eclectic here.

Cheated And Defeated
You know Conrad - or at least you ought to know Conrad IF YOU HAVE BEEN READING REGULARLY - and how he might not be able to work out anything arithmetical unless he uses fingers and toes, but when it comes to words and messing about with them, he's your man.  Art?

     This item has umpteen sections and I am currently on the "Word Power" one, where they had various anagrams to work out under the title "World Leaders".  Okay, "Mary Robinson" and "Yasser Arafat" were easy enough, but "Joseph Stalin"? not "Iosef Stalin"?
     Then they had "Franklin D. Roosevelt", as if the middle initial was used all the time, and "President Boris Yeltsin"?  None of the other answers bother with anyone's official title, so why this one?  Hmmmm?  As the title says, Defeated because they CHEATED!

The perils of being a dictator: sore ribs

     Of course, this might admittedly just be sour grapes because I didn't solve them all yet I think I have a point, and because it's my blog that's what matters.  So there.

"Gusto"
This is not me trying to be wilfully eclectic, it was one of the answers in that crossword I did earlier today, "Enthusiasm" the clue, and - of course! - Your Humble Scribe immediately began to wonder where the word came from.  "Probably Latin," I scowled to myself.  "If not Greek."  At least Greek is still a live language - oh, and another crossword clue was "Eighth letter of the Greek alphabet" - "THETA" of course.  If you didn't know that then consider yourself educated with another new factoid.
     Anyway, "Gusto".  It comes from the Spanish for "Taste", which is "Gusto".  How this came to mean going great guns at something is beyond me, so we shall just take it as read.  Gusto itself derives from the Latin (Boo!  Hiss!  Zombie languages go home!) "Gustus", meaning "A tasting".

Sic

     Such would be wasted on Conrad; his palate is so utterly dead he can barely tell the difference betwixt lava and hot chilli sauce, though having to use a lump hammer and cold steel chisel to clean the cutlery would probably provide a helpful hint or two.

Well Did You Know ...
As you ought to already know, we here at BOOJUM! are big fans of futurologist Gerry Anderson, who inspired several generations of physicists, aeronautical engineers and military designers.  One of his halfway-correct guesses about what the future would bring was "Zero X", a gigantic interplanetary spacecraft that utilised remote-control lifting bodies to help it out of Earth's gravity well.  Art?

The beast in question

     This thing manages to reach Mars as humanity's first explorers of that world, and it does so twice - once in "Thunderbirds" and again in "Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons".
     So.  "Thunderbirds" therefore takes place in the same universe as does "Captain Scarlet".  Obviously the two series were created as separate, stand-alone enterprises, but there is scope here for a legitimate cross-over; or, if one happens to be writing a fan-fiction knock-off of either series, to have some sly little background references incorporated.

Captain Black.  A.k.a. Conrad**.

     You know, it's a long time since I wrote any fan-fiction, and that was all "Doctor Who" or "UNIT" stuff, but - I'm going to go away and ponder on this.

Finally -
We only need a short item here to hit the Compositional Ton, and this is it.



*  And we don't want to split it 4 ways, either.

**  Conrad Turner.  But, still ...