Don't Worry, This Is Not A Threat
And it will become clearer later in this afternoon's ranting and tanting. First, I need to go back upstairs because I need to get some stills for exposition, as we are going to be delving into matte film work in colour sci-fi films of the Fifties and Sixties again. Having done that, they're not so very high-quality - there's a fat biffer's reflection in a lot. I shall have to see how we make out.
Okay, first of all I spent an hour and a pot of tea having a quick flick through one of the tomes I bought yesterday, "The American Heritage New History Of The Civil War". Art!
You can tell that the South Canadians are Johnny-come-lately's on the international stage, since their Civil Unpleasantness was mid-nineteenth century, whereas we in Perfidious Albion had the common sense to get ours over and done with in the seventeenth century.
The work is long and detailed, with plenty of photographs, since photography had begun to be used widescale at pretty much the same time the Civil Unpleasantness broke out. There are maps of the major battlefields, and plenty of sketches, too, quite a few of which have a very contemporary feel to them. Art!
The top sketch is a caricature of Abe Lincoln, sneaking through town as there had been a rumoured plot to ambush him, and really, you wouldn't know it hadn't been printed yesterday in "Time" or the "Sacramento Bee". It also serves to point out that South Canadians can be absolutely excoriating to and about their politicians, and that's not a recent development. It is, however, tilting towards Politics, so that ends that*. Picture the second looks to be done in the style of Edward Ardizzone**, except about eighty years earlier. The third could be from a contemporary comic, and the last, explicitly dated "Decatur July 22nd 1864" could be from the First Unpleasantness, given the troop density.
We shall probably come back to this work, as there's a lot to it and Conrad will take some time to get to it, sitting as it does at the foot of the Book Mountain.
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| Captain Bierce in his Civil Unpleasantness uniform |
Motley! Time for a few overs of Cactus Cricket!
"The War Illustrated"
This, you ought to remember, is that faded and foxed work I got yesteryon, which, if Art can put down his plate of coal -
There we are. It's title is "The War Illustrated" and at first Your Humble Scribe thought it was a variation on the First Unpleasantness, which confused me as I already have all six of those volumes and they are a lot smaller.
But no! it is actually a piecework published during the Second Unpleasantness by Amalgamated Press, this volume containing about twenty individual magazines bound together. As an example - Art!
In case your optics are poor, that date is "January 22 1943", so by that time the war was definitely turning in the Allies favour, with the Battle of El Alamein a recent victory, whilst the Sinisters slowly squeezed the Teuton garrison at Stalingrad to a powder. What will be interesting is seeing events that we now know the background to in detail, not to mention also having information from the other side of the hill. I may share some of this with you in the future as I peruse it, depending on how much your brain glazes over.
Conrad Is STILL Angry!
O yes indeed. The Manchester Evening News continues to employ hair-splitting pedants to compile their Codewords, filling them with solutions that are wilfully obscure, require ridiculously detailed scientific knowledge, or are foreign, and one day they'll manage to combine all three <long pause to allow blood pressure to fall>. Continue.
"CHIPOLATA": For those of you unfamiliar with British cuisine, this is a small sausage, mid-way between a standard-sized sausage and a cocktail sausage. The name is from the French by way of Italian, derived from "Cipolla", the Italian for "Onion". WHY COULDN'T THEY JUST HAVE "SAUSAGE"? WHY! WHY?
With fork for scale
"FAZE": Described as "Informal" for "To disconcert or disturb someone". It also sound FAR TOO SOUTH CANADIAN for Your Humble Scribe, so, in a fir of dudgeon, I shall NOT put up an illustrative picture.
"KILLDEER": YOU WHAT? <takes deep breath to get rid of the red mist> I had to go over all the letters in this solution to check I'd got it right, and I had. Hence today's title for BOOJUM! So, what on Earth is a 'Killdeer'? Art?
One of these
My Collins Concise defines it as:"A large brown and white North American plover, with two black breast bands." WHAT ARE WE SOUTH CANADIAN ORNITHLOGY EXPERTS NOW?
Conrad is beginning to get suspicious about just whom is compiling these Codewords. Are they being bought in from across the Atlantic? because that would explain a lot. My Remote Nuclear Detonator stands ready.
"This Island Earth"
- no, only kidding, I think we've analysed this film as much as mortal man or alien can. Although - why didn't Exeter and Brak just steal refined uranium or even uranium ore from wherever on Earth? That would have been a lot easier than their fantastically convoluted methodology.
Though it would have been ore-ful***
Finally -
Hmmm we have enough wordage here and are sufficiently close to the Compositional Ton that we don't need the frankly hokey pictures I took of "Forbidden Planet". I may try to re-take them later tonight when it's dark and reflections won't show up so badly.
ANYWAY I wanted to mention a minor martial matter from the podcast "We Have Ways", where Al and Jim had as a guest the Teuton museum curator Jens Wernher, who knows his stuff about the war on the Eastern Front, and other stuff too. For instance, you may be familiar with the Teuton SS, who jackbooted about in sinister black uniforms. Art!
In reality they bitterly resented this colour and wanted to wear the same field-grey that conventional Wehrmacht troops wore, because 'Feld-Grau' had a lot more social cachet attached to it, going all the way back to the First Unpleasantness. Imagine that, weepy snowflake SS troops, O dear how sad never mind.
Right, that'll do, time for lunch and a bit of prep for next week's Bigos, whoopee. I shall try very hard not to slice the ends of any fingers off.
* Except for our usual exhortation (not a word you expected to see today) about voting for President Bierce!
** An interesting chap in his own right, whom we may come back to.
*** Sorry.
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