Conrad Is ANGRY!

Oh So Angry!
"What is the venting old duffer blathering on about now?" I hear you query.  Just wait a minute and I'll find something.
     Ah - I know - that stupid Reader's Digest Giant Compendium of Puzzles and it's stupid photograph-cum-anagram selection, which was compiled by stupid people.  Did I mention how stupid it was?
     And to prove it.  Art?

     
     Picture 1:  what would you think when you see this?  "Scowl?"  "Frown"?  "Grimace"?  "Freckles"?  Apparently what you should have realised is "Fringe".
     Yeah right.  Below it?  Those are Cars, in the Rain, on a Road, and they have their Headlights on.  Which you should immediately recognise are actually Headlamps, because the anagram that goes with that is -

     "Lampshade"  How do you isolate that from everything else in the picture?  Honestly.  O, and those Top Hats?  They are an anagram of Hot Tap - except the photograph they had shows a tap with "C" for "COLD" clearly present.  Art?

     Tap just visible.  O, those beans?  Those Green Beans?  Those are haricot beans, allegedly, although how the holy heck you'd know that is beyond me*.
     Bah!
     Motley, I'm going out to punch the tree and relieve some of my stress.  Be ready with a towel and a bowl of hot water when I come back.

O Wow!
Finally, after all these years - seven in June, I think - I have a follower!  Or should I put "Follower" and capitalise it?  Or lean out of the window and shout this news at passing buses?  Regardless, they still follow me.  I only noticed earlier this afternoon but I don't think I'd have overlooked it, so they must be very recent.  Art?

Proof

     What a dizzy feeling of power that gives one!  You never know, in another seven years I might have as many as TWO Followers.  In which case I will definitely lean out of the window to shout the news, O yes indeedy!

Plane Speaking
NO!  That is not a mis-spelling.  The English language does what I tell it to, and we here at the blog do not make mistakes, despite the eccentricities of the Blogger spell-checker.
     For Lo! we are once again taking a perusal at James Holland's opus "The Battle of Britain", because I invested quite a bit of time in reading it, so you get to experience all the benefits of same.  How lucky you are!
     Here we are looking at aircraft, and specifically numbers of them, because this is how bean-counters work and Your Humble Scribe is nothing if not a pedantic hair-splitting bean-counter.  Except don't mention haricots.  Art?

Spit and Hurri

     It was crucial for the RAF to get as many fighter planes delivered as possible, which didn't happen until that British American Lord Beaverbrook got involved as head of the Ministry of Aircraft Production.  He made things hop!  When he took over in May, only 130 aircraft of all types (fighter, bomber, transport, liaison, seaplane, etcetera) were built per week.  By the time things got really critical in June, almost 300 a week were being built.  For June, the number of fighter aircraft constructed was 440.  These figures made Teuton production numbers look rather sick.

A bandit

      As Jim points out, that's not where the story ends, because aircraft were getting damaged in combat, and there are inevitably lots of accidents when pilots are getting fatigued to the point of exhaustion, and some accidents happen because people are stupid.  
     Thus Beaverbrook assumed control of the Civilian Repair Organisation, and once again he made things happen immediately; this chap would not take anything less than "Yes" as an answer.  The RAF could now count on getting up to 250 repaired aircraft back per week; again, this kind of performance was something the Teutons could only dream about.  All the more so because their aircraft tended to end up at the bottom of the Channel or ploughed up on an English field, rather than being able to be repaired.

An example

The Top 50 Sci-Fi Television Shows
Aaaaand so we come to Number 46: "The 100".  Art?

Yes, I know there are only nine

     Conrad has seen the first season of this and I can tell you that there's a SPOILER coming.



     Still with us?  Okay, "The 100" is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi drama, where a nuclear apocalypse has destroyed most of humanity; a few thousand people survive aboard The Ark, an orbiting habitat that is beginning to suffer from overpopulation after three generations in space.  Since it's now 97 years from World Ground Zero, the rulers aboard The Ark decide to kill two birds with one stone: they will send 100 criminal juveniles down to Earth to determine if it's fit for habitation.  This solves the overpopulation at a stroke.
     However - you were waiting for that, weren't you? - whilst the planet has recovered enough to sustain human life, said human life is extremely hostile and intolerant, and by the end of the first season SPOILER there's not 100 Ark residents down on the planet, there's only 48.
     I may pick up on this from the start as it's long enough ago since I watched it that the details are fuzzy.

The Ark in space**

Finally -
I'm nearly done here, which is good, as I need to get another pot of tea and some food.  As expected, the shelves at the Co-Op had sold out of every staple, so if Conrad wants some wholemeal bread, I think I need to visit first thing in the morning.  There were some pitta breads and a few bagels left on the bread shelves and that was it.  
     Anyway, I need to inform you that I'm on lates next week, that is 10:00 - 18:00.  Still working from home (hooray!) and I also need to make a note to myself to search for works in English on the Ruffian Army from 1914 to 1917.  Yes, there are 7 novels by Solzhenitsyn.  NOVELS.  I want some military history.  And I mean to get it!


     I'm still ANGRY, by the way


*  "Haricot" is an anagram of "Chariot" so there was that clue, I suppose.  But I am still ANGRY!
**  Doctor Who in-joke there