Beware, Gentle Reader!
Surely - SURELY! - by now you have realised that Conrad's titles are not to be taken at face value, even if (especially if) they look like a typographical error. Thus we have today's title and the first carping about Codewords SIT BACK DOWN! this is both entertaining and relevant, at least in my mind. And before you ask, the Remote Nuclear Detonator is out of use at present because it's being serviced. Apparently they have a recommended daily vapourisation upper limit of five hundred. Pshaw! Art?
Possibly relevant
The Codeword solution, you see, was "TRUG", which Conrad thought might be a variety of B-movie monster from the Fifties, along the lines of "The Evil Trug From Planet Grug!" or similar. This is why you see the monster from "The Creeping Terror" above, since it was made out of a rug*. Art!
THE TERROR! IT CREEPS!
Sadly none of this proved to be true, which is an example of Conrad's imagination proving a whole lot more colourful than the boring old truth. Art!
The offending article
This, ladies, gentlemen and those unsure, is a 'trug': a type of basket for the gathering of flowers, it says in my Collins Concise. A bit of a come-down, hmmm? O well.
Motley, here's a pair of secateurs, go prune the Howling Blood Orchids, will you? Yes, take the armoured gauntlets.
Bear With Me On This
Conrad was reading a fascinating, and very long, thread on a Youtube Reddit channel, narrated by MostlyGruntled and concerning his best mate David. He was very coy about what David's job actually is, except to say that it's in construction, it replicates 17th century building practices and there are only 8 people in the whole of the UK who are qualified in this field. It takes 9 years to become accredited at the Master level. Someone guessed it was a 'Historical Plasterer', without any subsequent corroboration. Art!
An example of same
David had been working on a restoration project, until he encountered the boss of the firm he had been sub-contracted to. MostlyGruntled used plenty of English vulgarisms in his descriptions and depictions, which seem to have flown entirely under Youtube's radar; however, I cannot replicate his name for the awful boss and will amend it to "Noisy Gobshute". NG liked to throw his weight around on site, bullying and abusing workers, and when David refused to get him a cup of coffee, fired him on the spot. David, canny bloke, recorded this invective-laden dismissal on his phone, then left.
Ooops.
The Site Manager, passing by with that very same coffee, joked about David clocking off early. When told he had been fired, he went white. By the time David got home he'd had 12 calls on his phone. You see, there was nobody else able to do the job; David had notified his peers in the profession and not only were they 1) fully booked up for months, but 2) none of them would work for Noisy Gobshute under any circumstances.
Work left unfinished!
This is only the beginning of the saga. Conrad found it so compelling that he might try to do a little digging and find out some real names and dates.
Bitten By The Coincidence Hydra - AGAIN
<sighs deeply> I had only recently been thinking that this miserable beast had left Your Humble Scribe's buttocks entirely free of toothmarks for a while. It was too good to last. There I was, "Where Eagles Dare" playing in the background - it was the dull set-up scenes establishing shizzle before the shootouts start - and also flipping through "The War Illustrated" when Lo! What happens?
In case your optics aren't up to standard, that's a helicopter landing in the Schloss Adler, whilst below TWI boldly states stuff about South Canadian helicopters, including the little-known (at the time) information that they can take off and land on a very small space. Art!
This is the Vought-Sikorsky V300, which was more an advanced prototype than anything else. It validated the design immediately and led to the first successful mass-produced South Canadian helicopter, the R4. Which was in service in 1944, whereas WED has cheated and used a contemporary Bell Sioux model, because the wartime Teuton efforts were pretty clumsy beasts. Art!
CAUTION! Not suitable for castle courtyards
Here an aside. It's not clear in the film version, but in the novel of WED, by the end Schloss Adler is completely ablaze, which probably means everyone inside was roasted alive, and all those files we see being stored in the film, all the filing cabinets, all that carefully-compiled information - gone. And if any survived, there'd be no way to retrieve it. Nor would the Teutons know if our heroes nicked any information or not. They'd have to consider everything they had at Schloss Adler compromised. Tee hee!
Thank You, Steve
Steve is responsible for long-term memory around here. Every so often he wakes up from his laudanum-induced stupor, twitches violently and - Hay Pesto! - a random word pops up in Conrad's mind. That's my theory, anyway.
This time it was "Engelbelmer". You might well raise your eyebrows. Is it a who or a what or a where?
"Where", it transpires. Engelbelmer is located in France, and seems to have been behind the British lines during the First Unpleasantness, for it does not feature in any hasty Google search about battles or advances. Art!
Midway at port
To get a more detailed and nuanced response means thumbing through the indexes of "Military Operations France And Flanders", all sixteen of them, which would un-necessarily delay my lunch, so - not today.
Finally -
Only a short item here to hit the Compositional Ton. Yet another artist from that list which "Printed In Blood" put up about their "The Thing" event in Portland later this year: Nickolas Gucker. He is better-known as 'Nick The Hat' due to an encounter with an abandoned security guard's hat. His forte is, it seems, art with a decidedly Lovecraftian bent to it. Art!
Intriguing, non? For those of you born after 1991, "CCCP" is the Cyrillic (read: Ruffian) for "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics", which is why I usually abbreviate it to 'Sinisters'.
I think we've short-changed Nick here. We shall probably come back to him. But for now - we are done!
* It's also one of those rare films where the story of it's production is far more interesting than the film itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment