I Was Diverted

You Know Your Humble Scribe By Now

Conrad's mind is a thing of wonder, no less to himself than to any of you out there reading with amusement, yet never wanting to meet the author face-to-face.  Fair enough, it's not a very nice face, definitely not one made for smiling -

     ANYWAY I have been pondering, in the background whilst multi-tasking elsewhere, about that science fiction author whose short story incorporated the word 'Veeblefetzer'.  The term itself has a long story behind it; go look at backdated BOOJUM!s if you really must know.  Art!

A Veeblefetzer in the flesh.  So to speak.

     All I could remember was that his first name was 'Robert', and NO it wasn't Robert Heinlein, nor yet Robert Silverberg.  So eventually I weakened and brought up an immensely long list of science-fiction authors, then searched for ones with the name 'Robert' present and BINGO BY JINGO!

     Robert Sheckley is the man.  His work was more along the lines of humourous satire rather than cold hard nuclear-fusion and laser death-rays.  He was a prolific chap, writing lots of short stories and plenty of novels.  Conrad recalls reading "The 7th Victim" even now, which was filmed as "The 10th Victim"; wherein a reality television show allows a hunted protagonist to be chased on live television, with hunters attempting to kill him.  Art!

NO I WILL NOT ENLARGE!  PERVERTS.

     Conrad still recalls when the protagonist in the story is trapped and about to be killed, when - Deus Ex Machina! - he is saved by a couple of viewers who had hired 1) an explosives expert to blow in the wall of his windowless bolt-hole and 2) someone to throw smoke grenades into the bolt-hole in order to confuse the assailant.  Of course, as they have expended money, they get a name-check on national television.  This is, as you may be aware, reality television 40 years ahead of it's time.  It does not bode well, frankly.  Art!

This may give you bad dreams.

     Ol' Bob shuffled off this mortal coil quite sixteen years ago, so he may only  have had an inkling of what he'd predicted.  Not so much with "Freejack", which was a rather ham-fisted adaptation of his novel "Immortality Inc." about a chap perpetually doomed (in this life and the hereafter) to be the admin middle-guy go to for liaison in a yacht-building business.

     Conrad feels he'd probably appreciate Ol' Bob a lot more today than he did as a callow teenager, because he has developed a horrible sense of humour in between.

Ol' Bob

     Motley, I challenge you to a game of draughts.  Yes yes yes, you can have whatever colour you like.  Beware the randomly booby-trapped squares, as TNT can make your eyes water.  And your fingers disintegrate*.

A Kind Of Diversion

If you are any kind of regular then you will remember that Conrad yesteryon laid out the first segment of a very long Reddit post on Youtube, concerning historically-qualified construction workers.  The restoration work in question was being undertaken by contract with Historic England, who oversee, audit and assay anything to do with listed buildings and sites.

     Here an aside.  Historic England DO NOT MUCK ABOUT.  If you cross them, in terms of shoddy contractual work, or trespass or <shudder> destruction of listed sites, then you can say Hello! to enormous fines.  Art!

Before

     This shows Withybrook's deserted medieval village, which was a protected site and should have been walked upon with the softest of kid-soled shoes, if at all.  The Mac family <bites tongue to avoid cheap punnery> decided that, since it was on their land, they could do whatever they jolly well wanted with it.  Art!

After

     The construction/vandalism took place over 3 years, by which point Historic England had the three Macs (Daddy Mac, Mummy Mac and Baby Mac) up in court, and they probably didn't like what the verdict was:  £160,000 in fines.

After from above

     That's not all.  If the fines were not paid by a specified date (September last year), all three Macs <again bites tongue> would be spending over a year in prison.  Your Humble Scribe spent a while on Google with this article and there are no stories after the trial date, so we presume the defendants paid up promptly to avoid clink.  They may yet get sued to restore the site to it's original state, which will cost in the £100,000s to begin with.

     Historic England - HARDCORE England!

Another Short Aside

Yesteryon Your Humble Scribe was yarking on about "Where Eagles Dare"and for the first time ever bothered to look at the "Extras" feature, which was quite informative.  One of the British second-unit crew mentioned that they would need to use "between 10,000 and 20,000 rounds of blank ammunition" in the Schloss Adler engagements, and another 10,000 in all the other engagements.  Since all the Teuton troops we meet are armed with the Mp40 sub-machine gun (horribly inaccurate) that has a 30 round magazine, we are talking 1,000 magazines in total.  Yet we only ever see Clint changing magazines once or twice.  Remarkable!

"Do ya feel pucky, lunk?"

Absence Of News Is Not News Of Absence

Except maybe it is.  Conrad remembers from last year that Judge Dredd was going to get an outing in Mega-City One in a television series this year.  Well here we are, five months and counting into 2021, and not only no JD television series, but no word on anything being on the horizon, be it ever so distant.  I am beginning to suspect that this was never proper news in the first place, since "Batwoman" has threatened us with a third season, when it's audience by then will be into negative numbers.

"Negative audience figures are illegal.  Studio - you're under arrest, creep!"

Finally -

Whilst we are on a science-fiction jag for the moment, why don't we look at master of the genre Roger Zelazny?  Rog was unusual in that he had a literary background, rather than being a technical whiz at whatever complicated MacGuffin manoeuvring other authors specialised in.  E.E.'Doc' Smith, for example, was an expert in doughnuts.  Roger tended to write in a style that evoked myths and legends, so "Damnation Alley" is very much in the style of the medieval quest.  Did he ever read 2000AD's "The Cursed Earth", where a serum has to be transported overland from the East Coast to the West?

Possibly not

     We may come back to this, it has legs.  Meanwhile - cheerio!

*  South Canadians know this game (INCORRECTLY)  as 'checkers'