It Comes, Of Course, From The Latin
<hack spit> A compound of "In" and "Vincere" which means "To Conquer", and thus to Late Latin and "Invincibilis".
Because yes, Your Humble Scribe is still valiantly ploughing through the Image series "Invincible" and we are only a third of the way there, on trade paperback Volume 8. I would like to show you a spoofy superhero team that is described as the "Guardians of the Globe". Art?
Not connected to the Justice League at all, hmmmm? From right to left, that's War Woman (Diana clone), Darkwing (Manbat anyone), Martian Man (he's from Mars and he's green), Aquarus (more fish than man), the Red Rush (going for all the primary colours), the Green Glop (unsure of his name, actually, and he's hardly in it) and The Immortal, whom logic would deem to be a knock-off of Superman, except he's not. Perhaps that signal honour is best allocated to Omni-Man, which is a rather rubbish name in my opinion. Art!
I think this is a spoof comic cover <sad face> yet - does it not also reflect that there is a demand for this stuff out there? <hopeful face>
The Motley's not back from hospital yet. Juggling accident*.
Novi Pazar: Europe's Mangosteen Shame
Well, Conrad has to confess that he's lying about the above. For one thing, mangosteens only grow in Asia, and have no shameful component to them. I wanted to create a brief, nonsensical heading because - Art? Earn your plateful of coal!
What? Whom? Is there an apostrophe missing there? Shouldn't "pole" be capitalized? Can you eat Bottas with a fork or toast it under a grill? Ah - I just noticed the "Formula 1". So it's about soaps. All is well, then. Yes, there is a picture of someone wearing a helmet; he might just be taking extreme Covid precautions.
This Sounds Rude -
Though it most certainly is not, or it wouldn't pass the censors here at BOOJUM! I refer to the word "Quincunx", which is easier to display than describe. Art!
A dot at each corner and one in the middle, is the rather underwhelming definition. Your Humble Scribe knows that James Blish wrote a novel with this word in the title, probably for a bet. Art!
You can imagine how it went: there's Ol' Jim and his mates down the pub (or the South Canadian equivalent), getting tanked up, and they're all trying to impress each other with strange words they know, and one of them bets Jim he can't write a title with 'Quincunx' in, so he does.
Anyway, that's peripheral to what I really wanted to discuss, which was that terminally dull book "Transportation On The Western Front", where the text on Page 436** mentions the French town of "Quinconce". This seems rather too much as if the Coincidence Hydra were fastening it's fangs in my nethers. Art!
And a touch of Google-fu does indeed reveal that "Quinconce" is indeed the French for "Quincunx", now a part of Bordeaux and home to one of the largest squares in Europe, which is probably where the name originates. There you go, another fascinating factoid courtesy of the blog and now we all know more than we did five minutes ago.
Mine Is Bigger Than Yours
NO! Wash out your dirty minds, you guttersnipes. Conrad has to correct a recent post about the Arecibo Radio Telescope, which he incorrectly stated was the biggest radio telescope out there. This was proven false in January of this year, when the Populous Dictatorship's F.A.S.T. went live, finally, having been tested for the previous 3 years. Art!
It is 500 yards across, being bigger than Arecibo when it was still around, though Arecibo could do some cool radar stuff that FAST can't, and it can't track Near Earth Objects, so nah.
One doubts whether the true cost of it will ever be revealed. I would guess at as much as £83.17. And how long will it last? If any of it falls down, or over, i the next few years there will be some architects and builders mysteriously vanishing at the same time as human organs come onto the market***.
It was TNT! I remember now, because we had to fill a crater in.
That Beer Advent Calendar
Conrad, perhaps ill-advisedly, informed his work colleagues that he had a Beer Advent Calendar and had been slowly tackling the contents thereof. It was on Teams, so the admission is going to be there for a good while <patiently resigned face>. So let's have a gander at the Fifth and Sixth of December, shall we?
"Double Punk" is a larger version of First December's IPA, for your information. I've not tackled the "New England IPA" yet, that may come about on Wednesday night since I'm off on Thursday. I will, of course, let you know.
Finally -
Your Humble Scribe is still annotating "Field Guns In France" by Colonel Fraser-Tytler, and it was illuminating to read how he spent a typical day from 21:00 one evening to 19:30 the next. He had gone to bed at 21:30 and was woken at 22:00 by Group ringing up with an 'urgent' enquiry - how many men could he send to the baths at Susanne the next day? Five, he replied, and went back to bed, only to be roused out again at 22:15 by another call from Group, and again at 22:45, and again at 00:00.
And with that, Vulnavia, we are done done done!
* It was either TNT or meat cleavers, I forget which.
** See what I put up with on your behalf?
*** Don't snigger. This is now "World War Z" the novel begins.
No comments:
Post a Comment