Ha! Do You See Wh - O You Do
You ought to know Conrad by now, never one to avoid wringing or squeezing the very last drop of creative content from anything. This is because <long boring self-pitying screed redacted by Mister Hand and you're welcome!> Mabel Attwell.
What we need now is a clickbaity picture that will entice the unwary, and Conrad has just the thing. Art!
Courtesy of Frank Kelly Freas. Please note that this painting's bottom edge abruptly ends before it might venture into territory that the censor would object to, though some strategically-placed bubbles would -
ANYWAY where were we? O yes - atomic bombs. Conrad found it very interesting that artillery officer Jack Swaab - he of "Field Of Fire" memoir authorship - found time to comment in his diary about the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was incredible news, as it meant neither he nor his fellow gunners would need to be sent out to the Far East, where an invasion of Japan loomed. Art!
"The Competitive-Handshaking Champion works his magic."
It must have been big news, it seems to rank higher than the 4th Test at Lords, which is crickety stuff to all those unfamiliar with the terms. Jackie Boy is pretty prescient in his predictions of chaos and strife attendant upon a world where the Bomb From Atom is a fixture: "It could be a great power for peace held by the right people but if it gets about the place I can see the world blowing itself to pieces in another 25 or 50 years." Well, we're still here 75 years later, so we've either been doing some things right or not sufficient bad things wrongly.
Kim Jong Un 
Fat Man
In another expression of wartime rancour, one of Jack's gunnery crews states the howlingly un-Politically Correct decision that, if there were a button that when pressed would totally destroy Germany, he would happily press it. Fortunately it has not come to this*.
Wow, how dark and sinister we have been! Motley, throw away the sackcloth and ashes and put on a happy smile!
Quite possibly the Motley smiling.
Excuse me, the Dehumidifier's just been bleeping it's song of <thinks> swillingness, so I need to go empty it. The Sekrit Layr sounds uncanny and odd without it's ever-present hum.
More Revisiting The Past
We travelled back in time to the mid-Seventies yesteryon, with Your Humble Scribe finally discovering the author of a novel he read about 45 years ago. Today we go still further back, to 1970, and a pair of novellas that go under the rather awkward title of "The 13 Clocks And The Wonderful O", by James Thurber. Art!
With illustrations by Ronald Searle. Conrad remembered very little about the first tale, which features an evil aristocrat who duly gets his cum-uppance at the end. He is pursued, and tackled, as Your Humble Scribe remembers it, by an hideous monstrosity known as "The Threlp", which finishes him off by gleeping. "The Threlp gleeped" is apparently as dreadful an ending as coming across a Boojum all unawares. Not mentioned in the Wiki article, however, so - could it have been a dream all along, and I'll wake up and be nine years old again**? Then again, all I am sure about is the gleeping, and only 50/50 on that.
We shall come back to this, because Conrad and the first line of today's blog.
The family photograph album: Conrad at 9
A Bit Of Gender-Swapping
Firstly, WASH OUT YOUR FILTHY SEWER-LIKE MINDS! WITH CHLORINE TRIFLOURIDE YET! <pauses until the red mist recedes>. What Conrad means is the traditional Ruffian concept of "The Motherland" or "Za Rodina", also encapsulated as "Holy Mother Russia", which can be pictured thus - Art!
There's no denying the Motherliness of that icon. Whole regiments of Ruffians would plunge into battle in the Second Unpleasantness roaring "URRAH! POBYEDA! ZA RODINA!***" although they might have omitted that "H" in URRAH as there is no letter "H" in Ruffian. The Sinisters very wisely allowed (if they had a choice) this shockingly non-Sinister expression of intent, because it was very hard to make people care about the Sinister ethos enough to die for it; whereas your average Ivan, stoked up on vodka and machorka, was quite willing to storm Berlin on behalf of Za Rodina. Art!
Translation: "There are one million gallons of vodka being stored in Berlin."
So that makes the following picture rather an oddity. Art!
"Defender of the Fatherland Day". Hey what say what? Where did that come from? Is Tsar Putin trying to cover all bases by claiming all the parental authority there is? Also, note the iconography at work here; these characters are all pre-gunpowder era and, surprisingly, make no mention of the Great Patriotic War (better known as "The Second Unpleasantness"), which would have been punishable by dismemberment during the Sinister era. Then again, note that this display is in Vladivostok ("Prince of the East"), which is about as far as you can get from Moscow and still be within the boundaries of Ruffia. Art!
Finally -
As you should surely know by now, Conrad likes to know about the derivation of words, because he is a curious character - yes yes yes ambiguous I know - with an inquisitive nature and a prehensile nose. Thus we come across the South Canadian term "pratfall", which means to fall down directly onto one's buttocks. Cue queries from the gallery about where the word "prat" comes from. Do you know, the jury is still out on this one. There is an entry in my Collins Concise that states 'prat' was known in the sixteenth century as slang for 'buttocks', but it cannot provide a source or a root word. Nothing in my Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable <sad face> and - yes yes yes I could always resort to the internet <sighs and lowering himself so>
Hmmmm, according to them, it comes from the Germanic "Prattuz" meaning 'Deceitful language' - which just about defines BOOJUM!
Go on! You were expecting that actor, weren't you?
And with that we are done!
* Our grandchildren may see this differently ...#
** One emphatically hopes NOT.
*** "Hooray! Victory! For the Motherland!"
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