The Thing Is -

Bitten By The Coincidence Hydra AGAIN -
But first, I would like to return to that prolific purveyor of purulent pulp, Mister Guy N. Smith, who hasn't had the grace to kick the bucket and make the world of books a better place for it.  He's still at it, and he's eighty years old.
     Anyway, if you recall, his oeuvre is utter schlock delivered with regularity, being mostly horror.  He is rather - er - utilitarian in his use of titles, but this list will give you an idea of his back-catalogue:  Werewolf By Moonlight; Doomflight; Abomination; The Festering; Badger Island; Maneater; Nightspawn - you get the idea.

The spawn - of NIGHT!!

     However, our awesome author has a rather broader hobby base than you might imagine, and he had a regular career writing for shooting magazines, as well as publishing some non-fiction books that have nothing to do with depraved slug-zombie cannibal priests, such as the below: 

The very same chap

     He is also a big fan of smoking, especially pipe smoking, and is indeed keen on tobacco in any form.  Art?

Guy pondering dark thoughts.

     Wiki even states that he was he was British Pipe Smoking Champion in 2003, an award that Your Humble Scribe is rather uncertain about, since it implies you smoke yourself into a nicotine coma against other people who only black out temporarily.  Or something.  Tobacco a closed book to Conrad.  Art?

I bet the ceiling is yellow!

     Whilst still on the theme of Horror, I came across another illustration on the Abebooks "Retro Monsters" feature that brought back memories, I can tell you.  Art?

In real life, you could see the fingerprints

     I dunno.  The sculptor spent as long as three or four minutes making that farrago, and as I said, you could see their fingerprints in the clay.  Not only that, the Thing had red eyes <heavy sigh>.  Okay, the novella is actually called "Who Goes There?"
     Then, what do I find at random whilst looking for - well, someThing, but an article on John Campbell's original draft for WGT.  Art?

Hay Pesto!

     It seems that JWC wrote a much longer story than WGT, about 140 pages long, which was simply unacceptable in length for the sci-fi magazines of the time.  He set to and trimmed the story down into the change-of-underwear story we have today, whilst leaving an MSS of the original, which lay undiscovered in Harvard Library for decades.  Only within the last year did an archivist, pursuing some hints in JWC's letters, ferret out "Frozen Hell" and you can now buy the story which the author would have liked to have been the one published.
     Of course, this find has given some impetus to those who are considering whether the world needs an adaptation of the original manuscript ...

"Mac sought to destroy the recently-discovered manuscript -"

     Well, yeah, I'd get RJ's opinion first, he can be a bit hot-tempered*.
     Wowsers, that was a long Intro.  Motley, shall we put on a deerstalker, fire up the Meerschaum and go bag a brace or two of pheasants**?

Working From Home
My still coyly-anonymous yet enormous employer has sent all of us office minions off to work from home, tra-la.  So last night's walk home from the Dark Tower through the Arndale was the last trip for a while.  It was practically empty compared to the usual footfall on a weekday at 17:10, rather eerie in fact, with several shops closed thanks to corporate decisions.

The beating heart of a great metropo - O.

     This is great for Your Humble Scribe, as I don't have to now spend 3 hours travelling by bus into Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell, with all the attendant risks of hacking passengers and squealing little reptiles whose parents cannot control them.

How to make First bus run efficiently!

     Of course some things are constant: the First 409 out of Oldham Bus Station was late. Really, these people would be late for Armaggedon.

Aunty Beeb Jibes At Scribes
There was a very amusing short article on the BBC's website about generic book cover designs, which actually rang very true.  They posited that, for certain literary genres, there are stereotypical designs that are intended to appeal to the relevant demographic or gender.  Art?

As they say, typical airport potboiler that's three inches thick

     We've all seen ones like this, haven't we?  I remember one of Tom Clancy's as being the worst of this variety - don't worry, I only paid 50p for it at Manchester Dog's Home - because it was, again, three inches thick and could easily have been edited down to two inches if the editor had not been terrified of cropping Tom's purple prose.  Aunty Beeb also showed the examples of life imitating Art?

Man With Back To Audience Walking Moodily Away In Silhouette

     There are other examples, which I think we'll come back to at a later date, because I like to have something in the imagination coffers***.

Finally -
There are those out there who have underestimated the sheer utter deviousness of Perfidious Albion in times of conflict, where, underneath the veneer of Observing The Rules Of Warfare As If It Were A Game Of Cricket, this Sceptred Isle plays with understated treachery, cunning and ruthlessness.
     I refer to a couple of literary works I'm reading at present.  One is "The Battle of Britain" by one James Holland, and the other is "The London Cage" by Helen Fry.

The French get a shoeing

     Ol' Jim recounts the Royal Navy's attack on French warships that had taken refuge at the North African port of Mers El Kebir; the French admiral refused to sail to neutral ports in the West Indies, to surrender his battleships or to join the Royal Navy.  Which then sank them.  This was a kind of ruthless two-fingered salute to both the puppet Vichy regime and Herr Schickelgruber, and is an example of just what Perfidious Albion is capable of when pushed to it.
     The "London Cage" was the nickname for an interrogation centre based in London, where Teuton prisoners were relentlessly squeezed for information, using a whole slew of unethical and extremely sneaky methods.

Behind this bland facade ...

     One method was to subject a couple of Teuton PoWs to a deliberately inept interrogation, after which they would be bunged up in chokey together.  They would inevitably either boast or discuss about what the hapless Britishers had missed - which was all diligently recorded and analysed, as the prison cells were all bugged.
     We will probably come back to this ...

*  Do you see what - O you do.
**  At the supermarket, not going out into the countryside to shoot them, O no!
***  An admission of sheer creative idleness!  <the hideous truth courtesy of Mister Hand>