Devil Hounds That Are Out Of Bounds

I Am Sticking With Antic Slab

Because I got a tremendous number of hits last post, which might be due to using this very font.  Or it might not.  We shall see.

     Okay, let us kick off with an illustration of the Irish Setter.  Art!

Ein Slubberhund

      Your Humble Scribe is still not a dog person, but there are many out there who suffer from this condition are.  One such being Major Neil Fraser-Tytler, whom is the author of that splendid First Unpleasantness memoir "Field Guns In France" which Conrad is still annotating.  I have reached page 171 out of about 240, so the end is in sight.

      ANYWAY the Major had 'acquired' a pet dog, an Irish setter that had apparently adopted him in April 1917, in which the hapless Hom. Sap. had no say.  The original owner might well have been killed, so NFT felt absolutely no guilt in being dog-adopted.

So sugary I feel a diabetic coma a-coming on

     In May the dog's original owner turned up and convincingly proved their possession of the canine in question; exit the dog from the Major's purview.  It's name, if you can credit this, was 'Mehal Shehal Hash Baz", which is  Biblical and  Hebrew for "Rending and destruction", as this is what happened if the dog was left unattended in a dugout.

     You know the British and their pets, right?  Yeah.  Never come between a Brit and their pet, or they will go through you to get to them.  The Major put it about, discreetly, that there would be A Substantial Reward for anyone whom returned Meh - MSHB to him.  Cue, as he said, all the professional and unprofessional dog-stealers plotting and planning to abduct the hound.  They discovered where it was; leashed in a dug-out not half a mile from their own positions, said intelligence obtained by fake 'working parties of signallers who had gone astray'.  A plan was laid to dig an underground sap into the dug-out, which was only thwarted when the whole battery was moved on.

"Dear sir, I am afraid we cannot budge on only offering your dugout 2 stars.  Sincerely Yours, Michelin"

     That was all about dogs.  Don't get me started on horses.
     Motley!  We're going to play "Starving Rottweiler Versus Bacon-Suited Burglar".  This is the Rottweiler, this is the suit, better get a shift on.

Buying Books

You ought to know that Conrad does this on a regular basis, although he has rather cut down since that visit to Cheadle, when he ended up with a huge bagful of books.  Indeed, some of those very same books are now part of a huge bagful of books waiting until Covid-19 allows me to venture into Royton and render MY BEAUTIFUL BOOKS unto a charity shop.

     Those of you whom assert that Conrad stage-managed Tier 4 to prevent any of MY BEAUTIFUL BOOKS being sold on or dumped are not only libellous but also not long for this dimensional reality*.

     

Heaven

     Since piling back onto The Great War Forum I have posted a few brief notes, including one or two about buying books from abroad, where Voltaire60 weighed in with some notes of note, him (or her) being an ex-bookseller.  They warned that some supposed booksellers on the internet are actually non-stock holding middlemen, who will take your order, then buy up said volume from wherever and multiply the cost by many times, before charging you both arms, both legs and all your internal organs for postage and packing.  Conrad can confirm that he's seen shipping charges from South Canada for a small hardback book at £54, which was a several times the cost of the book itself.

     These people will regret ever having been alive when I take over.

Dance, fox, dance!

     Just because we can, is why, before you ask.

Conrad Considers

I have been rewatching "Battlestar Galactica" in it's remake iteration of late, and wanted to share my thoughts on the matter of Cylon replicants, which is Conrad shorthand for those Cylons that are designed to look human.

     First off, they are designed and intended to be used en masse, across the Twelve Colonies.  We have seen evidence of this in the miniseries that introduced the subsequent series.  Now, while it is true that clothing, makeup and tonsorial treatment (a.k.a. hairdressing) can render these replicants different to the casual eye, there is a limit to how different they can look.

     At least one of these replicants would stand out, don't you think?  

     Then we have the matter of different design numbers.  The more replicants you have, in terms of absolute numbers and design variants, the greater the chance of accidental discovery.  So there is a disconnect between the maximum number of potential saboteurs and a minimum number of covert operatives.

CAUTION! Do not shoot

     You can also discard any of the major characters as being replicant suspects.  If their face is up there on television ten times per day, people are going to notice that Street Sweeper Second Class Mitch Mitcheson looks exactly like Commander Adama, and the "O yeah he's my brother" excuse will only carry for so long.  Given Commander Adama's lunar landscape of a face, it's also vanishingly unlikely that any 'twin brother' would have a face that mirrors it exactly.
     I think we will come back to this, it has legs

 

Meanwhile, Back With The Fleet ...

Mixing two of our staples, "Battlestar Galactica" and Lego modelling, allow me to introduce a 1/2000 scale replica of the Galactica - IN LEGO!  Art?

     This puppy clocks in at 4 feet long, a foot and a half wide, and contains about 29,000 pieces.  Creator doesn't get into how long it took him to plot, plan and build it, but Conrad reckons days.  Days!  Note that there must be a framework under there that the whole exterior sits upon.  As both he and the presenter comment, it has a lot of curves, which are very difficult to manage with Lego and still keep the 'feel' of the thing

Finally -

WASH OUT YOUR FILTHY MINDS!  We are NOT going to be covering 'dangerous curves' in Lego or any other media, thank you very much.  As is repeatedly made clear here, BOOJUM! is SFW.  NO!  NO IT DOES NOT MEAN"SCIENCE FICTION WRITER"!  <sighs heavily and drinks from bucket of gin> "Safe For Work".  Go away now, I've got world domination to plan.

FSW.  Close enough

*  Where do you think Ambrose Bierce and Judge Crater ended up?