For Lo! We Are Back On The Subject Of Sharks
Yes, you might say it's time to get Boyled, as we return to a theme that Conrad has been bravely promoting all these years (at least two, after rebuilding the weasel's reputation): Sharks Are Our Friends!
Or, if you feel that's going a little too far, Sharks Are Not The Enemy! Let us introduce one of the films that Apryl cast an analytical eye over. Art!
Smiley!*
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| "The Meg" And don't worry, she's safe behind glass |
Apryl is not impressed with "The Meg", not one bit. Or bite. The shark would have avoided the underwater lab, not gone barrelling into it, thanks to the spatial awareness that it's lateral stripes give it, and it certainly wouldn't have tried to eat a small human being as that's definitely not it's normal food type. Repeat after me SHARKS ARE PICKY EATERS.
What Apryl didn't do was mention that "The Meg" stars "The Stath", whom you might know better as Jason Statham, and The Stath has a certain reputation for appearing in films like <thinks> "Crank", "The Expendables" and "
Shall we tackle another one? O go on then. Next came "The Shallows" and whilst Conrad has seen "The Meg" this is one he hasn't seen and - do you know what? - I don't intend to. Art!
Apryl, predictably, scoffed at this behaviour. You can see her concise rejection of why on earth a shark would go deliberately go after a puny human being: shark's diet consists primarily of 'calorie-dense' finny foodstuffs, and a stripling Hom. Sap. simply isn't worth the energy of pursuing, especially not if said Hom. Sap. is sat on a rock. I think we've covered this scenario before; with a sea full of food swimming about waiting to be eaten, a shark has no reason to try and wait for a human to get off the rocks, given that the puny, defenceless biped** might well be there for hours.
One can only hope that she never gets to see any of the "Sharknado" films or there will be blood on the carpet in several low-budget film studios.
Apryl is angry!
Whilst the motley and I are watching "Jaws" - the motley's never seen it - I've got a balloon and a pin, and at that bit where they're inspecting the bottom of a boat with a hole in it ...
Real? Fake? Only time will tell!
Conrad Is Cross!
Crosser, that is, than my usual state of seething, simmering, sulphurous ire. For why? The Codeword, of course! It is a widely-acknowledged fact that 87% of all the world's major problems have a Codeword as the cause***. Let me explicate.
"APOGEE": Thank you for using an astronomical term that isn't in daily use, you pill. It means the highest point in the orbit of a moon or satellite around the parent body, and comes from the Greek "Apogaios", meaning "To move away from the Earth". Come on, how many of you would have got that?
"OAT": When was the last time you heard a person say, "I'm going to have porridge oat for breakfast" or "I'm on a diet - one oat per day" or "They are going to sow their wild oat"?
There is worse to come
"INFO": Conrad considers this to be slang. SLANG! NOT THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH AS SHE IS SPOKE! This is the slippery slide to letting vulgarisms and swears into Codewords, a sure and certain sign of the decline of British civilisation and the bar<Mister Hand intervenes to redact another 7 pages of frothing lexicographical hatred>.
There are NO pictures of a single oat
You're info it
"UVEAS": Your Humble (Yet Rancourous) Scribe had to check he'd gotten this one correct, as it was a word he'd not encountered before. Was it an obscure South American tribe who dwelt in the rainforest? A synthetic dye invented by Teuton chemists in 1881? The name given to a crater on the Moon?
None of the above. My Collins Concise confirmed I'd solved it correctly. It is the plural of "Uvea", that "part of the eye consisting of the iris, ciliary body and choroid." Of course it is. WHAT? WHAT! ARE YOU DOG BUNS JOKING!!
Get your uvea out of here!
There will now be a short pause to allow the red mist to recede.
Art Attack
No, not our resident Neanderthal poster of pictures, who, even as I type, is busy tucking into a refreshing bowl of nutty slack - watch out for slugs and beetles, Art, they kind of blend into the background.
No, I refer, of course - obviously! - to the news via the BBC website that some original Herge artwork has sold for about £3,000,000. Art, can you - o ta.
You may not touch the artwork. This is from prospective art for the cover of "The Blue Lotus", which the publisher cheapened out on, and no, the book's not about botany or flower-arranging, it's about our intrepid reporter in China during the Japanese invasion of 1931. Art? Terribly sorry to interrupt -
£3 million is a lot of loot. Conrad bets they lock the thing up in a vault and only take it out to peer at the picture under strict environmental conditions once a decade.
Finally -
We only need a short article to polish off the blog and exceed the Compositional Ton, so what can that be? Ah! I know -
This is only a placeholder, just until Your Humble Artisan goes a-looking on teh interwebz and finds more sculptures and details about them. Given that the series has been out for a couple of years now, there's bound to be some mental sets built by bespoke constructors. We shall see!
Chin chin!
* Okay, and a bit sinister, too.
** "Doctor Who" reference for you there.
*** This might be exaggerated by a decimal point or four
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