Speaking Of Wolves

NO!  This Is Nothing To Do With Wolverhampton Wanderers
Whom, if you are unaware, are a ballfoot team in the land of Perfidious Albion, and are presumably a bit of a nightmare for ballfoot game announcers in Europe; especially our Teuton chums.
     I am afraid I am referring back to The Mansion's Madame, Edna.  Although massing rather less than 3.3% of the combined body mass of all the other residents, it is Edna's firm conviction that it is she, not us, who rules the roost*.  Art?

Treacherously cute

     For are not all dogs merely variously genetically-massaged wolves?  Edna being a small domesticated version thereof.
     Which brings us - obviously! - to Herr Schickelgruber and the latter years of the Second Unpleasantness, over in East Prussia, near the town of Rastenburg.  For we are now talking about Nazi Megastructures - do keep up! - and that fortified encampment known as the "Wolfsshanze", or, in the Mother of Languages, "Wolf's Lair".  It seems that Herr Schickelgruber liked to think of himself as the pseudonym "Wolf".
     Yeah right.  And Stalin was made out of steel, rather than equal parts paranoia and cruelty?  Tish.  Dictators and their delusions!  Art?

The Wolf's Lair: a map

     This gives you some idea of the extent of this site, which had been deliberately chosen to be well away from any centres of population.  By all accounts it was a horrible place, either freezing in winter or incredibly humid in summer, with a vast population of mosquitoes, and pervaded by an atmosphere of both secrecy and distrust.  It's difficult to find contemporary photographs of the WS, which is odd - one would expect the Nazis to boast to the heavens about what they'd done - constrained, of course, by security.  Art?

An outdoor toilet

     You see, one of the pet foibles of Herr Schickelgruber was the fear of aerial attack on his heavily-camouflaged HQ.  You find this a lot with dictators - desperately keen to have everyone sacrifice themselves in order to protect Our Glorious Leader's skin, whilst OGL is busy cowering in the deepest depths of their reinforced basement.

Outdoor toilet with flushing action

     You can see the depth of said building's roofs, rendered many metres thick in order to resist the impact of (presumably) 2,000 pound bombs falling on them.  I do apologise for mixing Imperial with metric, Your Humble Scribe does attempt to avoid this where possible.  Art?

Reinforced concrete walls 8 metres thick, with puny human for scale
(Note cheeky Polish flag in foreground)

     It cost 36 million Reichsmarks to build the Wolf's Lair, and - you know what?  It was pretty much wasted money.  The Sinisters never knew where it was, or that it existed, so no danger of a bombing raid from them.  The Allies might have known about it, but it sat on the far side of Europe, so far away in fact that it would only have been reachable if the bombers sent were able to land in the Sinister Union to refuel.  In which case Uncle Joe, a.k.a. That Little Sod With The Moustache, would have probably said "O thank you fine Allies for gifting us your very latest Lancasteroverian bombers with all their highly-advanced electronic kit!"     I suppose the finale to the Wolfsschanze was that it got blown up, as much as that was possible, before the advancing Sinisters captured it.

Shower and changing room

     Once more, an example of "Ozymandias Syndrome"**.     Motley, I distinctly told you to ensure that the racing snails were put into a sealed container in the fridge!  Now look - they're even up on the ceiling - The Mansion looks like an out-take from "Delicatessen"!

BeeBooks
No!  Nothing to do with Manchester and bees.  The Beeb, and Books, in a portmanteau form that anyone with a functional IQ of 150 will immediately recognise as being to do with the 100 Greatest All-Time Novels In English In The Last 300 Years That Made A Lot Of Money Or Controversy.  Or both.  Art!

Family & Friendship

A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

Ballet Shoes – Noel Streatfeild

Cloudstreet – Tim Winton

Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith

Middlemarch – George Eliot

Tales of the City – Armistead Maupin

The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë

The Witches – Roald Dahl

     Ah yes.  Conrad has not read any of these.  Does "Wuthering Heights" count as a sprig of the Bronte bush? - of which all I remember is someone gloating about a particularly ferocious hand-held weapon.  I did manage the "100 Dalmatians" novels by Dodie, which were very entertaining, and I've seen the film of "The Witches", and - well, that's about that.  Does reading "The Twits" by Roald Dahl and being aware of his service in the RAF during the Second Unpleasantness count for anything?

Roald

     Probably not.  Would that come under the BeeBook's "Crime And Conflict" heading?  We will probably find out tomorrow.

Finally -
Conrad, as you already know, is worryingly interested in things that go BANG.  He has to be careful that MI5, UNIT and, if he is being especially speculative, Spectrum, do not batter down his front door whilst Grom come in through the air-conditioning vents.

GROM.  Too big to fit through an air-conditioning vent?  Hah!

     Anyway, there we are at the Pub Quiz, and Steve (the quizmaster and lord of all he surveys) asks the question "What costs £50 trillion per gram"
     Obviously - anti-matter!
     Conrad's team are the only ones who get this correct, as most people in the Pleasant do not realise that anti-matter is real, that it has been produced in laboratories around the world since the Fifites, and that the amount we produce doubles year-on-year.

It will take a century or two until we create this much, though.

     And thus we catch the bus.  Tally ho!

*  This is probably mixing metaphors.  I don't care.
**  I feel a bit clever in having invented this concept.  We shall surely come back to it.