A Screed - About Weed
Indeed. Shall I proceed? Okay, as you ought to know by know, Conrad has all the mental application and resolution of an amphetamined flea on an acre-wide griddle at Gas Mark 6.75. In a hurricane. That is to say, his mind bounces around a bit. One day it's methods of deep-sea exploration, the next it's how to construct a lithium wafer battery, and we end up on that existential horror blog The Floppy Bunnies Have Exciting Adventures. So! What happened when - yes yes yes, we'll get to the "Weed" bit in a second or so - when I Googled "Science Fiction Cover Art"? Art*?
Of course I had to leave any investigation of these covers until after I'd completed yesteryon's blog, and what did I find a little further down from the above? Art?
With a title like that, I had to go looking for more information. As you might guess, this was a little fraught and you'd be surprised at how many references to illegal drugs come up when a search term in Google has "Weed" in it. Thus it was I did an image search, and found the following. Art!
To my startlement, this website provided a link to a digitally uploaded copy of the original pulp publication with details of the print date and the cover artist (which attribution is a lot less common than you might think). Art!
When ballroom dancing was a required social skill, apparently. Just to make sure, I went to the end, 68 pages in. Your Humble Scribe may or may not read the thing; as a product of the pulp magazines of the Fifties, it's not going to be deathless prose with big concepts and nuanced characters, though perhaps enjoyable enough if read unsober.
Motley! Here's a trowel, get busy!
Conrad is ANGRY!
I know I know, I'm always angry. Angrier than usual, shall we say.
"What can have propelled the fearsome old duffer into wakeful wrath from his Darjeeling-induced coma?" I hear you wonder, and, pausing only to point out that it's a "Stupor" not a "Coma" - as if! - I shall explicate. Art!
I am now half-way through this tome, and STILL NO MURDER! If you are unaware of whom the victim is, and want to remain ignorant, then beware for there are SPOILERS ahead.
Right. You have had 170 years to prepare for this, so it's not like you were unwarned.
The sly and sinister Tulkinghorn, that's the victim, as described on the cover of my paperback edition. Well so far he's still swilling down his port and scoffing his viands and helping Inspector Bucket with his charades, hence very much alive. You're on borrowed time, Tulky, borrowed time.
Another thing that cropped up in the text was the mention of a "ticket porter", who carries a sealed letter from Esther to Mr. Jarndyce. Conrad, like the cat, had to know more. Ticket porters, it seems, were chaps who carried anything from a written note to a couple of hundred pounds of potatoes from Point A to Point B. Art!
Them rammers is hammers
Scottish Sanctuary Stone
Conrad has never noticed the inset stone on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, though next time he's in that city he'll keep an eye open for it. Art?
This comes of reading about Thomas De Quincey. The "S" above marks the boundary of what was a sanctuary for debtors, who could not be touched by their creditors if within the bounds of Holyrood Park. This was an area of about 5 square miles**, where people could gambol (rather than gamble) freely and cock a snook at creditors and their agents, and to which Mr. De Quincey had frequent recourse, as he was utterly incapable of managing his finances. In fact he got into debt with people within the sanctuary, which they must have felt ever so slightly peeved at.
Am I Still Angry? Hmmmm - Yes!
Once again a crossword solution is responsible. "MOIETY" as the answer, to "Small portion or share (6)". Have you ever heard this word before? Of course you haven't, because Conrad hasn't! Really, producing obscure Victorian words long out of use as if they were contemporaneous, I could spit.
Mind you, I did also come across the word "Ransack" as an answer -
THERE! THERE! WHAT DO I KEEP TELLING YOU! TWO EAST-BOUND 409'S WITHIN SECONDS OF EACH OTHER!
<pauses for pulse to slow down and the red mist to clear a little>
Ah. Yes, "Ransack" which has it's origins in Old Norse <hooray!> rather than the Zombie Language Latin, for once. "Rann" in ON means "House" and "Saka" means "to search". Which is a polite way of saying ROBLOOTPLUNDER. Perhaps they ought to have added "Sverd" to it and made it more applicable.
Old Norse tourists putting them to the sverd***
Finally -
Conrad, curious as the cat, always likes to know more. Unlike the cat, he does not sneak outside at the earliest possible opportunity and then hide under the bushes for hours until the back door is opened again.
So, I was watching the climactic battle at the end of the miniseries "Battlestar Galactica" and wondered a couple of wonders about some of the military kit we see. I even took a couple of slightly blurry photographs, which - Art? less anthracite more picture!
Unlike the dorsal gun batteries, these things have a relatively low rate of fire, one round per second at an approximation. The triple-armed section physically recoils on firing. Are they some variety of rail-gun? or the equivalent on a space vessel. This is not stretching technology too far as the South Canadian navy has created and tested such systems already. Art?
And don't forget in space there's no annoying atmosphere to muck up trajectories or ballistics with wind direction or air resistance. Yes, Vulnavia, I'm pretty sure there's a website out there that describes all the Battlestar's ordnance in detail, which is nowhere near as much fun as speculating about it.
And with that, we are O so definitely done!
* Do you see wh - O you do.
** No metric equivalent provided, ever
***They are better-behaved nowadays
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