Gold Finger

Gold Hand, Gold Arm, Gold Head - In Fact Gold Everything

No!  We are not on about the Legend of King Midas, principally because his leg ends were perfectly normal and made out of flesh and blood (and bone), and Conrad is enough of an anorak (a noble and much under-rated garment) to ponder about some details the legend doesn't go into.  

This will make sense in a bit.  Hopefully.

     WASH OUT YOUR DIRTY MINDS!  for we are not going anywhere near the bathroom (O and hairs, too).  No, what I wondered was about inhalation and expiration.  Old King Midas had to breathe, didn't he?  So did he exhale a cloud of gold dust when he breathed out?  The air he inhaled certainly can't have been converted to gold in his lungs or he'd have suffocated within minutes (doe toe-nails count separately or not?), and what about sweat?  Did it coalesce into gold on his skin or did it have to physically fall off before becoming gold?  What about shedding tears?

     Why didn't he try wearing gloves?  Yes, they would have turned to gold too, yet then he wouldn't be touching anything else, so his daughter would have been fine, and the food, too.

     You can tell from the above that Conrad is a hair-splitter of the very pedantic variety, which may be news to you.  Or not if you've been reading BOOJUM! for any length of time (cartilage, too, or would that only be in the kneecaps?).  And of course I always spend a lot of time prevaricating about what this isn't about.

     So!  I was actually on about the Axons, in that reference about gold, from the Beeb's premier dramamentary series "Doctor Who".  Art?

See?  Even Goldy locks.

     Of course - obviously! - despite their <ahem> attractive appearance, the Axons were utter villains, planning to drain all the energy from planet Earth (bad news for stockholders in United Utilities).  They turned out to be hideous tentacled monsters that were all subdivisions of their spaceship, Axos - Art?

As disgustrous as it looks

     The Third Doctor tellingly described Axis itself as a "cosmic bacterium" and trapped it in a time loop, hurray! leaving Earth free*.  There used to be a proverb, "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts", which you might adapt here to "Beware of Axons bearing Axonite".

     What's that?  You thought this was going to be a tribute to the James Bond film of the same title?  A tribute to Sean Connery?  And cause for us to mention production designer Ken Adams, who flew Tornado ground-attack aircraft in the Second Unpleasantness?  Hmmmmmm, interesting idea.  No.

     Motley, you can be Odd Job and I'll be 007; you can have your razor-rimmed bowler and I'll have a Walther PPK, and this pile of fireworks we're both chained to can stand in for the nuke.  Go!

<tuts> Drunk on the job again, 007?

"France: The Dark Years 1940 - 1944" By Julian Jackson

Conrad has really revved it up with this work, getting to page 230 this evening.  The timeline has moved into 1943 and even the most die-hard neo-Nazi right wing extremists in French politics can see that the writing is on the wall.

     Just to clarify a few hundred pages of learned text, let Conrad explain that France secured an Armistice in June of 1940, NOT a peace treaty.  There wouldn't be a peace treaty until the war ended, which seemed a foregone conclusion in the summer of 1940.

     However ...

These chaps begged to differ

     The war didn't finish in 1940.  Quelle surpris!  Then, in June 1941, the Teutons launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Sinister Union.  This meant French Communists immediately became enemies of the Teutons, leading to murders and sabotage, to which the Teutons responded with mass executions of hostages.  This did not sit well with the French.  Then in December 1941 South Canada joined the war, as part of the Allies, making any likely end to the war vanish into the future.  When they, as part of the Allied Operation Torch, invaded French North Africa in November 1942, the Teutons promptly occupied the whole of France.  At this point selling collaboration with the Teutons was, to put it mildly, a bit of an ask.

     There is more - O boy is there a lot more! - and I'm not even half-way through the book.  What is fascinating is all the dirty infighting and manoeuvring amongst French politicians, desperate to acquire power, or hang on to it, or exclude other people from it, in what I would call "Operatic Government".
     We'll come back to this, though not in detail, I'm not quite that cruel.


A New Teapot In The Mansion

Don't snigger at the back!  Given the amount of tea Your Humble Scribe drinks in lockdown thanks to working from home, anything to do with tea is big news in The Mansion.  Why, I even made up a jar of Spiced Tea.  Darjeeling base, allspice, mixed spice, ground cloves, cinnamon - not bad for a first attempt.  Anyway - Art!

Behold Bodum

     It's tricky to pour from this without dribbling - the teapot not Conrad** - and there must be a knack to it, which will take a bit of practice to acquire.  Why Bodum did away with the long spout on their pots is a mystery, because they had a wonderful pouring action <reminiscences about pouring tea> and that, children, is irrefutable proof that Conrad is now bordering on old-age.

Stop press!  I am now up to page 50 of "Bleak House" which makes it 1/19 of the overall total.  Only another 900 pages to go <flexes fingers forcefully>.

 
Mentioning The Wyvern -

Not in this post, in yesteryon's - do keep up!  There was a plane known as the Westland Wyvern, which was around in the Fifites in Perfidious Albion's Fleet Air Arm, or planes which flew off aircraft carriers, mostly.  Art?

     I say "mostly" because their engines sometimes failed under the impetus of the steam catapult that launched them off the flight deck, in which case they plummeted into the ocean.  In the photo above you can see a helicopter stooging around, just in case. One pilot managed a record-breaking stunt he would probably have wished never happened.  His Wyvern went into the Mediterranean after the engine died during launch.  He survived this.  Then the aircraft carrier rode over the Wyvern and cut it in two.  He also survived this.  He activated his plane's ejection seat mechanism whilst underwater - and survived that, too.  Records do not reveal how many rabbit's feet he was carrying.

Fingers crossed!

Finally -

Time has run out for us again.  Your Humble Scribe is on early shifts next week so cannot work too late or he turns into a Butternut Squash.  Remember, pilgrims, keep watching the pies!

*  For the moment. I have plans.

**  Old but not senile yet.