This Wil Slay You

Hopefully Not By Boring You To Death

I have to strike whilst the iron is hot, you see, since I am now giving my copy of "Le Mort D'Arthur" to Shelli, as her surname happens to chime with one of the characters and no, it's not 'Saunce Pite".  Thus I only have half a page of scribbled lines and my own memory to fall back upon.

Okay, okay, you got me, I nicked it.  There.  Happy now?

     So, firstly I'd like to once again take umbrage at that title, because at the end Sir Tom (the author, do keep up!) makes certain to throw doubt on whether Ol' Kingy is dead or not -

     Here an aside.  I see where "Batwoman" was coming from in the first episode of the new second series, by having the Batsuit fall out of the heavens, without Kate Kane (the previous Batwoman, do keep up!) being inside of it*.  That way they can keep the mystery of "Is she?  Isn't she?" going, when in reality the actress (Ruby Rose - honest, I'm not making this up) quit before the end of the first series and is never, ever coming back.

Someone is unimpressed

    Long before that, however, we come to another battle between the forces of Sir Mordred and Kingy's army, where Sir Mo has once again acquired an hundred thousand men, and once again he gets the collective tar beaten out of him.  Third time's a charm! except not in a good way, for at the last encounter between these two huge armies, everyone except Sir Mo, Kingy, and three of Kingy's knights are slain and STOP RIGHT THERE!  From tens of thousands down to five?  With nobody noticing?  Pshaw!  Nonsense.  Art!

     Typically in medieval battles, the side that broke and ran suffered grievous casualties, and no army would stand and suffer to be slaughtered en masse, especially since a lot of them would be rank and file with no great attachment to Sir Mo.  So I'm not having it.  All the more so because he'd done his recruiting by claiming that Kingy was the party of war.   

     Jumping back to the beginning and the end, we are told that Kingy gets a terminal hack to the head from Sir Mo; yet he carries on, if a bit feebly, for ages afterwards.  Thus having us wonder just how severely injured he really is, and whether he's not putting it on a bit to get sympathy going to die after all, or perhaps he is?  Sir Mo?  Ah, yes, he gets run through with a spear and ended up inspiring the sausage-on-a-cocktail-stick**.  As well as being extremely dead, and a byword for shockingly bad misbehaviour.

Kingy and Shelli's namesake

     Motley!  Fancy a trip to Avalon?  There's only one catch, you need to be mortally wounded, so stand still while I get the fire axe ...

"How To Cook That"

Yes, we are back to Professor Ann Reardon on her culinary crusade , confronting cads and curmudgeons, making Youtube a safer place for you the public, and being entertaining about it, to boot. Half-way through her latest debunking was a piece about making ice in a microwave.  Art!

" - because they don't work."

     Here the buffoon who posted the video claims to be "reversing the polarity of the power supply", which, as anyone who knows Conrad, instantly brought back memories of Jon Pertwee solemnly intoning " - reverse the polarity of the neutron flow -" in "Doctor Who", because it's a classic line that Jon liked so much he insisted it be written in as often as possible.  Art?

     It's a neat trick because neutrons, by their very nature, do not have any polarity, which me

     ANYWAY back to HTCT, and the 'ice maker'.
     In goes the water -

     - and then the video jumps ahead by nine seconds, with the timer going from 09 seconds to "End".  O my, could they possibly have fiddled with continuity in order to carry out a bit of skullduggery?

     There's the supposed end result, a beaker of ice.  STOP RIGHT THERE! A microwave works by agitating the water molecules in whatever gets put inside it, so if you put a beaker of water inside, IT'S GOING TO HEAT UP.  Never mind the polarity of the neutro - the power supply, that water is going to get hot.  You might fool people who regard microwaves with dark suspicion as being satanic devices, yes; not Conrad.

"Phenol Pthalein"

Conrad was reminded of this chemical when Listy, over on his blog, was complaining about the compounds used to add extra ginger to explosives, such as a 'phthalate'.  It is used as an indicator in testing for acids or bases, since it becomes colourless in acids but pink in basic solutions.  Art!

     We were cautioned in chemistry that it's also an extremely powerful laxative, which nobody was daft enough to put to the test.

     Of course you are wondering where the names come from, aren't you?  That's what I like about Hom. Sap., an incorrigible curiosity.  Okay then.  "Phenol" is a derivative from "Phene", which was an early French name for benzene.  The chemical, not continental petrol.  Art!

     "Phthalein" comes from "Napthalene", where my Collins Concise kind of runs out of steam, saying that "Phthal" is from the Greek, which in turn derives from the Persian, without going any further <sad face>.

And they were all obtained from petroleum distillation

Finally -

Conrad is unsure exactly how he came across the subject of the "Barisal Guns", for his journeys across teh interwebz lead to many strange and uncouth places, where they drive on the left-hand side of the road and pass the port to the right.

     They are described in my "Brewers" as being a series of loud reports or bangs, off the coast of Barisal (modern-day Bangladesh) in the nineteenth century, for which no cause was ever definitively found.  They are not limited to this location, having also been heard off the coast of the Netherlands, where they are dubbed 'mistpoeffers', and in the Finger Lakes of South Canada, where nobody would think loud bangs remarkable, since there are five guns per person in that nation**.

     Whatever their cause, they seem to be generated at sea yet relatively close to a coastline, although this may also be due to the presence of an audience.  They are almost certainly nothing to do with the sinister interplanetary submarine invaders of John Wyndham's "The Kraken Wakes", yet it wouldn't do any harm to make sure you have a dinghy to hand and a bricked up cellar full of non-perishable foodstuffs.

Almost quite probably certain to possibly never happen

     And with that we are done!

*  Although some fans would have paid good money to see that happen.

**   Poetic licence.