OSTRO-BOTHNIA!

It Has To Be All Upper-Case

For dramatic effect.  Any Swedes or Finns here present can sit this one out.

     Okay, it perhaps sounds rather like the magic phrase which young Johnny Katzenellenbogen, who found the magic sword, has to shout aloud in order to transform into Kaptain Karnage, meaning he's in trouble if he ever gets laryngitis, isn't he?  Art!

     Here an aside.  Yes, the above is He-Man, getting his lightning-bolt fix once he intones "By the power of Grayskull!", hopefully he is keeping a safe distance from any electrical equipment, because the insurance company will be skeptical, to say the least, about a claim where the cause is "Celestial energy bolts".  Conrad, being the pedantic hair-splitter that he is (and I know you love me for it), wonders if it makes any difference how "Grayskull" is spelled, for the one above seems to differ from canon.  Art?

     Also, does it have to be said in English?  Would it work if chanted in, say Serbo-Croat?  Or Sinhalese?  Or <shudders> Latin?  What if you ran all the words together because things were desperate and split-seconds mattered, thus "BythepowerofGreyskull"?  Does it have to be bellowed or can you whisper?  Of course, I may be overthinking this ...

     ANYWAY back to Ostro-Bothnia.  This is a term Your Humble Scribe has not heard before; it came up on a comment about a drunken Finn cycling and weaving all over the road as a pair of rather laid-back Finnish police ("Poliisi") drove alongside him, then diverted him onto a cycle-track.  Art!

Note the lack of chrome and <ahem> fins

     He refused to stop for them, shouting "Can't!" when they ordered him to.  In certain other countries this would mean spike strips, guns and emergency surgery.  These poliisi let him go.  Conrad did wonder why their uniforms had both "Poliisi" and "Polis" on them, because the latter is Swedish for "Police".  Art!

Still no Finns

     Okay, from what I've dug up this makes perfect sense.  "Ostro-Bothnia" is a western province of Finland, where Swedish is spoken by a majority of the population (over 51%) so it makes sense to have dual-language signage on your police officers.  Art!

Ostro-Bothnia in green

     One of the commenters was definitely Finnish, as they nailed the officer's accent as Ostro-Bothnian.  So now we all know more than we did five minutes ago.
     Motley, shall we play Blindfold Motorbike Chicken? - after a half-pint snifter of gin each, of course.

Be Aware Of Vapourware

We mentioned VW yesteryon, so if you're unfamiliar with this term THEN YOU ARE IN BIG TROUBLE FOR NOT READING YESTERDAY'S BLOG.  The uranium mines beckon.

     One vapourware product they mentioned over on Wiki was a computer game, "Duke Nukem Forever" which was due for release in 1997.  Except the game company responsible for it kept pushing the release date back and back and back.  Art!

Pushed back - forever

     This is because the computers it was going to be played on were advancing by leaps and bounds, so the game itself had to be continually re-jigged and adapted, but by the time it was due for release the computers had improved again, so it had to be <imagine infinite recursive loop here>.  The games company went bankrupt in 2007, with DNF still unreleased.  Having bought up these company assets, another game company released it in 2011, to absolutely no success.  Wowsers.  Who would have thought it!

     Conrad is pretty certain he played this game at work back in the early Nineties, on a computer at work, sneakily in the back office where nobody could see him.  DNF is available on Steam if you feel like knocking yourself out and having a go.

     

"We Have Ways"

Or, "How to make an hour pass in mere minutes for a military history nerd", when your guest is Professor John Buckley, the author of "Monty's Men", which I am re-reading AND I CHECKED THE FOOTNOTES AND WROTE DOWN ANOTHER SIX BOOKS I MUST HAVE er - yes, re-reading. I refer, of course, to the podcast "We Have Ways Of Making You Talk" as created and delivered by comedian James Holland and military historian Al Murray.  They have a Patreon page where you can join for £5 per month, which gets you the chance to log on and hear live broadcasts every Thursday; their last one was with Professor Peter Caddick-Adams, which makes me a little jealous.  Art!

Peter getting ready for Ascot.  Or perhaps Epsom*.

     The success of this podcast can perhaps be gauged by the statistics for PC-A's guest performance, where 2,000 members joined in.  As Al put it, their nickname of "The Independent Company" would now have to become "The Independent Battalion", there's so many of them.  And £10,000 income per month is nothing to sneeze at!
     I was going to bang on about Professor Buckley's input, except it mirrors a lot of what he wrote in "Monty's Men" and you'll be getting feedback on that - O boy will you! - so perhaps not right now.

"Gudgeon"

You know Conrad cannot resist silly word games, puns and being far too clever with language, so after having "Dudgeon" as an etymological (not a word you ever expected to see today, nicht wahr?) entry, it was inevitable that this word would crop up.  Art!

Puny Gudgeon with mighty human hand for scale

     Pretty obviously, it's a fish.  "A small slender European freshwater fish with a barbel at either side of it's mouth".  The name?  Hmmm well, apparently from Old French "Gougon", which in turn is thought to come from the Latin "Gobius", that in turn derives from the Greek "Kobius".  Which is also where the name "Goby" comes from, and if Art can put down the coal -

Gobys go by

Finally -

We don't need much here to hit the Compositional Ton, which is a good thing, as Your Humble Scribe needs to go and make some tea**; there's altogether too much loose cheese loitering in the fridge, so if I don't use it up, it may get <shudders> THROWN OUT! which offends both my sense of greed and thrift.  I mean, if the cheese has mould on it, just trim off the surface and carry on.  Simples!

     And with that, Vulnavia, we are most surely done!

*  Obscure military history in-joke that none of you will get.  Why do I bother.

**  In the sense of the late afternoon/early evening meal, not the drink.  Just so we're clear.