Let Me Tell You A Storey ...

And If You Accuse Me Of A Spelling Mistake -
I WILL LEAP OUT OF THIS MONITOR AND CHOKE YOU!
     <ahem>
     Seriously, when do I ever mis-spell anything?  You ought to know better*.
     Anyway, I should begin at the start.  Here in the Dark Tower the reception area is undergoing a major refit, so a temporary reception has been established on the mezzanine floor (or storey) above.  Art?

The old iteration

     The three of us going down in a lift on Wednesday made mention of the mezzanine, and - obviously! - Your Humble Scribe immediately began to wonder 1) exactly what a "Mezzanine" is and 2) where the word comes from.
     Let us tackle the word first.  No, that's not doing it backwards, it's just being differently mentalled.  Apparently it's root lies in Latin <hack spit> and the word "Medianus" for "Middle", which segued gently into the Italian "Mezzano", again meaning "Middle".  From there twas but a hop, skip and bumble to the later Italian "Mezzanino" and then the French "Mezzanine".  Art?

An example

     There you go.  A mezzanine is an intermediate floor (or storey) between the ground and first floor (or storey), which does not extend over the whole floor (or storey) area.  Very popular with modern architects and their pursuit of large, airy, open spaces.
     There you go, now you know more than you did five minutes ago.
     I say, motley, shall we go riding the largest water slide in Europe, except backwards and blindfold!


Not With A Bang But A Whimper
Jason, jollification personified this morning, was reading from a news website about the coronavirus proliferating around the world.  Conrad, being even jollier, then reminisced about that BBC series from the Seventies, "Survivors".  It begins in Asia, with a masked scientist knocking over a glass flask, which shatters and releases the liquid within.  We then get a montage of (unknowingly) infected people travelling the world by airliner and passing the disease right on.

There he is, the swine who finishes off Hom. Sap.  Clumsy idiot.

     Of course it can't possibly happen like that in real life: in "Survivors" the survival rate was only a fraction of a per cent, whereas the coronavirus survival rate is a lot higher.
     Which brings me to what I really intended to talk about: "World War Z" by Max Brooks.  I have just finished my umpteenth re-reading of it.  In this work Max credits the Patient Zero of the zombie apocalypse as being Chinese, though we never discover exactly how the disease originates.  It is globally spread in the first wave by organ exports from the Populous Dictatorship, before anyone knew to test for the disease, so it is present all over the world from the get-go.  There is no cure or vaccine for it, although one bumbletuck makes billions from putting out a supposed preventative medicine that doesn't work.  And cultures collapse by the dozen as they fail to cope with the walking dead.
     Now, that's a frightening disease out of China.  Sadly no sequel to the film - £££ don't you know.

Brad will save us!
(Hopefully.  He is getting on a bit)

    
Conrad - Still ANGRY!
I resorted to buying a copy of the Manchester Evening News yesteryon, and you'd better believe I checked the inside to ensure there was a crossword present.  There was, which was good news for the editorial staff, I can tell you.  Really, this isn't on.  I don't buy this rag for it's news content - which seems to consist entirely of alarmist shrieking - but the puzzle pages.
     Okay, that's Casus Belli Number One, as there was plenty going on yesterday and today to rattle my cage.

Shouldn't there be a space between "9" and "M", hmmmmm?
(Now I'm even ANGRIER!)

     Casus Belli - Latin for a provocation that leads to Global Thermonuclear War Conrad getting annoyed, just so we're clear - Number Two was a bus poster that Conrad eyed with some incredulity. 
     " 'Back To The Future'?" I mused internally, as I was outside and people tend to look askance at large scowly men muttering to themselves.  "That was decades ago.  Surely this cannot be a bus poster from that date.  It looks too new."
     Then I looked closer, and what do you know, the poster was promoting some ghastly musical version of BTTF. Cue stare of undying hatred from Your Humble Scribe.

All the pens, all the time

     You know I loathe and detest all musicals**, and here some pillock is pilfering an established film of considerable success and prostituting it to make money from the feeble of taste yet expansive of wallet.  This does seem to be a trend, doesn't it?  There was an advert for "The Lion King" in The Metro this week, and Conrad was fulminating and generally airing his Frothing Nitric Ire yesteryon about a musical of "Pretty Woman".
     Bah!  and Bah! again.
     Casus Belli the third came about this morning.  Conrad, as you may remember, has to work every third Saturday, which fires up his Frothing Nitric Ire and then some.  So I was standing at the bus stop in the pre-dawn dark (thankfully it was dry), moping mournfully.
     Then what do I hear?  The dawn chorus.  A vast panoply of songbirds all chirp chirp chirping away in the most positive manner, all over the landscape, the dastards.
     "What have they to be so cheerful about?" I grumbled to myself, aloud, as I was all alone in the night.

Like Babylon 5

     When I take over the world the dawn chorus will be banned, count on it.  And the M.E.N. editorial staff had better look out, too.

Finally -
I have been very remiss in keeping my list of military history books up to date and made a start on this chore last night.  The problem is all the books scattered in miscellaneous piles across my Mancave's floor, without any kind of logical arrangement, together with ones I've already read and have brought out of storage for Reasons.
     I did notice that, in "18 Platoon", Sydney Jary makes a couple of mentions of our old friends, the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, so when I annotate this, I'll need to cross reference with the other SRY memoirs I've annotated.  How delightful!

One of the SRY's Recce Troop Honey tanks, the CO gassing with a couple of South Canadians

*  Obviously you don't or you wouldn't be here! <the unpleasant truth courtesy Mister Hand>

**  "The Blues Brothers" and "The Return of Captain Invincible" don't count.