Magical Mystery Bore

Ha!  Do You See What I Did There  -
 - O you do.  
     "Thaumaturgy"
     O Productive Brain.  Yes, another of those words that pop up in my brain from time to time, this one as I was on my way back to my desk in the office.  
     Here an aside.  Our management like to stir the soup every few months and move people around, which I'm sure is straight out of some South Canadian management strategy handbook.  It's a pain, because you have to wait a good fifteen minutes for your new PC to boot up properly, and then you have to reset all the applications from scratch.  Anyway, lucky Conrad was one of only two people out of 40 who didn't have to move from my position in the corner.

Conrad looking suitably happy
(No it's not the office; that might give away Whom I work for)

     So, what on earth is it?  A French soup recipe?  Wiltshire dialect for an idiot?  A process of stellar evolution out in the Horsehead Nebula?
     None of the above.  Although that astronomical stuff ...
     It means "Being able to work miracles" and - perhaps inevitably - comes from the Greek "Thauma" meaning "Miracle" and not just some occasional magical event but miracles all the time, miracles until they come out of ones ears, until you get fed up of them.

Like this chappy

     There you go, and now we all know more than we did five minutes ago, and you're welcome*.
     Okay, motley, time to break out the riot guns and rubber bullets and practice repelling boarders!

Yippee Skippy!
I'm not going to tell you how <criminal!  criminal! - the awful truth courtesy Mister Hand> but Your Humble Scribe is busy watching Season Four of "The Expanse" and is even now up to Episode Three.
     It's great, and thank you Mister Bezos for rescuing it - they've just started filming Season Five so no worries about cancellations just yet, and see what you could have had, Sci-Fi?

Creepy and enigmatic alien structures?  Check

     I don't think it's a spoiler to reveal that our heroes from the Rocinante come across the above, mostly intact, and date them to be one and a half billion years old.  Quite the antiques; and besides that - still functional.
     Then there's the lightning that runs in straight lines ...
     One reassuring thing, a touchstone in these trying times, is that the chief bad guy, a really slimey sleazebag, is played by a British actor.  Some things never change!

Burn showing his sunnier side

     He does tend to get cast as the villain, but apparently in real life is a real sweetie.  Oh, and for the record, he is indeed British**.  

Just An Aside
As I have mentioned a few times, once you hit middle-age, your genes take over and you become passionately interested in Murder Mysteries.  This is why I have the collected works of Dorothy Sayers, and have watched several series of Lord Peter Wimsey (with the perfectly-cast Ian Carmichael).  And <hangs head in shame> this is why I am typing this whilst watching "Murder She Wrote".  This one is about an alleged murder and business swindle ten years previously (sorry, I missed the title) and O my!  Every veteran South Canadian television actor is there present.  Art?

Lloyd Bochner

     He always plays the slightly-oily types, businessmen with a guilty conscience, fatally flawed senior officers,  etcetera.  

Pat Hingle

     You probably remember him from "Batman".
     Plus Erin Moran and that weasely little chap who was a senior officer in "McCloud" and the great William Windom.  Art?

WW

     Of course he stands out as the doomed Commodore Decker in that obscure Sixties sci-fi show "Starry Trex" and one of my favourite episodes "The Doomsday Machine", which, if Art will put down his plate of coal -

A man who has gone through the wringer

     Sorry we got off the topic a little but what the heck - it's not as if you're paying for this, is it?
     Aha - so, Jessica has just worked out that Roberts was killed on purpose - dammit, I'm going to have to watch this episode to it's end, Edna's walk will just have to wait.

Clarification Station
Yes, Conrad continues with making notes about "The Stand" and defining exactly what is what, for the further edification of himself and yourselves - how selfless I am!  
     "Cowbird eggs" get mentioned, which Conrad at first thought was a regional South Canadian phrase for a mythical bird, a la the phoenix.  Art?

A phoenix

     But no!  The cowbird is a very real bird, which has the habits of the cuckoo, since it lays it's eggs in the nests of other birds, often nastily getting rid of the native eggs in the process.  Art?

The rather wicked cowbird

     This unpleasant and unappealing behaviour means that Ol' Cowy doesn't have to do the hard work of bringing up baby chicks, the malevolent pikers.

     Ah, thank goodness!  MSW has just wrapped up and the villain revealed, confessing all and thus putting their head in the noose, so I can take a comfort break and go to the bathroom.  All that tea from breakfast, don't you know.

Finally -
Conrad would like to share an image with you that he'd not seen before.  It's from a series of images that the BBC put up about striking astronomical images of 2019, and somehow I've managed to miss all of them.  Art?

"The Snowman", "Ultima Thule" or "Arrokoth"

     This bizarre-looking item is actually two Kuiper Belt Objects that impacted with enough speed to become locked together, and not quite enough to shatter apart.  You can instantly see why astronomers with a sense of humour dubbed it "The Snowman".  Though you most definitely need a bigger back garden to put this one up.

     And with that, we are done!

*  Mostly.
**  British British British.  BRITISH!