Fiat Lux

 I Know, I Know, Stooping To The Use Of Latin

So sue me.  Conrad cannot easily juxtapose (a swine of a word when used in a Codeword) Trinity House and Alex and his droogs from "A Clockwork Orange".  Art?

This, you should be familiar with

     Incidentally, it was never banned; Ol' Stan just ensured it was never shown in This Sceptred Isle after some nasty publicity.

     Trinity House you are probably a lot less familiar with.  Art?

     And I bet you've never heard of the "Commissioners of Irish Lights", have you?  They have a very modern, jazzed-up building as compared to the frankly fuddy-duddy British one.  Art?

     You're going to ask where all this is leading, aren't you?  Okay, let us jump tracks and whiz back in time to 1971, when ACO came out, and there was a song on the soundtrack one of my friends at school loved to bits.  Ahem -

I want to marry a lighthouse keeper
And keep him company.
I want to marry a lighthouse keeper
And live by the side of the sea.
I'll polish his lamp by the light of day,
So ships at night can find their way.
I want to marry a lighthouse keeper,
Won't that be okay?

     Well, dear, I'm afraid it won't.  All lighthouses around the UK have been automated for these past 22 years.  Sorry about that.

     My Intro today concerns a lighthouse on the coast of County Down, in Northern Island, which has long been automated.  Conrad's normally flinty heart was somewhat saddened when they finally automated all lighthouses, as there was a kind of romance associated with their crews, especially the ones stuck in a lighthouse that balanced on a rock in the sea, miles from land.  Art?

     This waspish structure is the Saint John's Point lighthouse, and the time has come to change it's light-generating source, from the old incandescent lamps to a brand new industrial-sized LED.  This is the way of the future, since an LED light can run on solar power or batteries if need be, instead of a big polluting diesel generator.  Not only that, they last between 50 to 100 times longer, which they need to do as each one comes in at about £18,000.  Art?

Yes, it does have a touch of death-ray about it

     The locals are unhappy about the march of progress and are bitterly determined to retain incandescent lighting, which they feel has a better quality to it.  Keep an eye out, this one will run.

     Motley!  Break out a copy of "The Horror Of Fang Rock" for I feel the call of lighthouse-based drama!


Today Is Officially "Battle Of Britain Day"

It seems to have been reasonably low-key, thanks to that wretched Covid-19, the ultimate pooper of parties.  There was an acrobatic flight aloft, creating smoke signs in the skies over RAF Duxford, which is where they have the enormous RAF collection and which is expensive and awkward to get to by public transport.

     Anyway, there's an entry on the RAF Duxford page titled "What the Luftwaffe thought about Duxford".  Art?

     "An unpleasant place with a lot of flying teeth," one presumes.  "Also, it is a long way to fly to and expensive, too."
     Hmmmm, how remarkably prescient.

     We may come back to this, it has legs.  Oh, and I see that "We Have Ways" is going about the B.o.B. today, too.  James will have plenty to say on the matter, he's written a book about it.

The Lost Language Of Latterly

Today Conrad hauled out that box of P.G. Wodehouse paperbacks he bought several years ago and determined that he was going to read the 6 'Jeeves' novels and then cart the whole lot down to the charity shop.  I selected "Jeeves In The Offing" and am now half-way through.  Art?

Bertie reads the banns about his forthcoming marriage.
Of which he was entirely unaware.

     The thing is, Plum wrote this SIXTY years ago, and though 1960 is bordering on modern times, and he even mentions invading monsters in science-fiction films, his vocab. can be a tad hard to fathom.  I shall explicate one example, whilst continuing to make notes and will present my findings to the court in due course <clears throat, chokes>.

     "Beasel": with a gasp! of horror I could not find this word in my Collins Concise, so had to resort to teh interwebz, which were pretty Dog Buns ambiguous.  It is either a shaven-headed demon -

     - or it refers to a young lady, possibly of sexual precociousness.  Yes, well, neither of these applies to the written works of Plum.  I think we shall have to put it down as a kind-of compliment to a young woman.

Bobbie "Beasel" Wickham     

     I say, Mister Producer?  In the novel there is much mention of her flaming red hair.  Did she have a hair-dye accident?

Egad!  Also Sacre Bleu!

Through a long Tweet that I only connected with at the very end, Your Humble Scribe has now found a link to a 1809 page digitised record of the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second Unpleasantness.  This is going to take a while to assess, but I feel like the cat that got both the cream and the canary, and the canary's mate, too.

     French and English title because it was digitised in 1977 when they used both languages officially as a matter of course.

Getting Funky With Punky

What's in a word?  I've asked this before and no, the answer is not "four letters".  I happened to look up "Atompunk" in order to find some relevant images, and subsequently discovered that the sci-fi term "Cyberpunk" has generated a whole lot of "-punk" subgenres.  If your only exposure to sci-fi has been "Starry Trek" or that other one <thinks> "War In The Stars"? then you may not be au fait with cyberpunk.  It came out of the Eighties and someone else has defined it better than I, so I'll just nick their words:

 "Classic cyberpunk characters were marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge of society in generally dystopic futures where daily life was impacted by rapid technological change, an ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information, and invasive modification of the human body."

     Said by Lawrence Person, so there he can't sue me.  The classic example is William Gibson's "Neuromancer" which I bought and re-read recently.  Art?

     Your Humble Scribe is amazed and astounded that this hasn't been made into a film yet.  Some of it was co-opted by "Johnny Mnemonic" but we won't talk about that.  Is there a film in the offing?  Trouble is, by the time it arrives, all the preceding decades of films drawing inspiration from cyberpunk will consequently make it look pretty jaded.

Art!  I said NO mentioning this one!

     And with that I think we are done <checks> yup done.  Bye bye!