Competition!

Perhaps Not Where You'd Expect It

As you should surely know by now, Conrad likes to mess about with words and language, and chuckles with smug self-importance whenever he manages a pun.  Which is frequently.  This leads to a certain jealous contemplation when others try their hand at wordplay -

     Oh, and by the way, I am once again FURIOUSLY ANGRY! at a Crossword this time.  I've yet to manage the Codeword, so there might be even more rage in the near future.

A clue

     We shall come back to this later, do not doubt it.  Now, back to the punnery, and to get the relevant context we shall travel 48 million miles to Jezero Crater on Mars.  For Lo! we are back to Perseverance the rover.  Art!

    If you are wondering what exactly "MMRTG" is then my guess would be "Mars Mission" - which is the guess part and the "RTG" is "Radioactive Thermal Generator", which uses the heat emitted by radioactive decay as a power source.  Then we come to the bit where NASA was clearly reaching.  "Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment" acronymed as "MOXIE" instead of "MOXISRUE" because a pen-pushing geek is trying to go one better than I.  

Moxey.  Close enough.

     Then there's the rock-probe, which would be a pretty great description as it stands, but O no! NASA have to be clever.  "Planetary Instrument for X-Ray Lithography" hence "PIXL".  I see you omitted the "F", hmmm?  And why the curiously vague "Planetary" instead of "Mars"? ah, yes, because "MIXL" doesn't sound as good.  Everyone knows what a 'pixel' is, whilst the mysterious and unsettling 'mixel' could be anything. 

A mixel.  Perhaps.

     Then we have "SHERLOC" and keep your eyes off Lucy Liu, I saw her first they don't bother to break the acronym down.  So I shall: "Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence of Organics and Chemicals", so by my books that ought to read "SHEWRALOOAC", which sounds like a battle cry as howled by Pictish warriors whilst attacking Roman invaders.  Definitely not like the world's first consulting detective.

     Motley!  Come help and lend your skills with this Pictorially Instructive Guidance Schema Heuristically Engineered for Didactism*.

Nasser.  See?  I can do it, too.

Let Me Run This By You

"One century of Bridge (9)".  This is the crossword 'clue' that they inflicted on me yesteryon, and which I am justifiably incensed by.  No! Not as in sweet-smelling sticks you burn to cover up the smell of illegal - no, as in enraged.

     I'm not going to give you the solution, either, so sit and simmer upon it**.

Gallipoli: Phase One

Your Humble Scribe has just finished Volume One of the Official History of the campaign in the Dardanelles during the First Unpleasantness, which is a tale of squandered opportunities, defeat snatched from the gullet of victory, and of goalposts ever being moved further apart.  Let's have a map.  Art!

     One thing the whole operation exemplifies is that South Canadian-ism "Mission Creep", or, as I said above, moving the goalposts.  Originally the idea had been to use warships alone to breach the Dardanelles; then it became a joint army-navy mission involving two divisions, then they added another French division, and now the 52nd Division is en route from Perfidious Albion.  

     That this is the first modern amphibious operation with an opposed landing isn't really mentioned in the plenary chapter in the OH, perhaps because it was taken as read.  Conrad has already noted that the amount of training involved was minimal; getting into and out of boats.  No simulated landing under fire, against wired defences, and an entrenched enemy, for one thing.  Thus the impeccable timetables broke down immediately the Turks opened fire.

V Beach.  No photographs, for obvious reasons

     There were a few other things to take away from the first four weeks of the campaign, such as the extremely heavy Turkish casualties.  They learned the hard way that an advance in daylight over open ground meant the Royal Navy potting them like partridges, and never tried this again after early May.  For all the advantages of defence at this time, they were still sorely tried.

     Cheery stuff indeed!  Let us move onto lighter and more frothy matters -

Darwin Award Winners In Films

I should point out I'm working from a list of horror films, and as author James Blish pointed out, these films would last only ten minutes if the cast weren't all abject idiots, since they seem to have an average IQ of 80 at best***.  This includes university students.  Art!

"The calls are coming from inside the house!"

     This is Jess.  Jess lives in a sorority house with other witless students, who are being murdered one by one.  The film is "Black Christmas" and here the police are even more stupid than the students, and would be outsmarted by the Keystone Cops.  The Keystone Cops on a bad day when they're all hung over and suffering from flu and dysentery.  Anyway, when everyone else has been murdered, Jess gets a call from the police, saying that the taunting obscene phone calls are coming from inside the house and to GET OUT.  

     What does she do?  Ignores this sound advice and instead goes, unarmed, to nosy about upstairs, loudly calling (and thus warning) the lurking killer.  She may be dead at the end.

"O noes!  We've run out of toilet paper!"

Finally -

O go on then, because I'm merciful.  The Crossword answer was "SINGLETON" so you can see where the get "One century" from.  Your Humble Scribe had to look the word up in his Collins Concise (best leaving prezzy ever, thank you Ashton Social Services) only to find out that it is a term as used in the card game "Bridge" rather than anything to do with civil engineering: "An original holding of one card only in a suit."

                                               WHAT!

     Now they expect me to know jargon associated with a card game I've never seen, let alone played?  Bah! 

A PROPER BRIDGE

*  A.k.a. "BOOJUM!"

**  Yes I am a swine

***  That last bit was me, not James.