Suicidal Squad

Take Careful Note Of That Title

And how it narrowly avoids being the same as a certain blockbuster film, which we will be arriving at in just a moment, for the title refers to an entirely different and far more horrifying proposition.  Art!

     This is the cover that you mere hoi polloi are going to be buying and looking at, whereas premier important subscribers like Conrad have been given a full-colour insert of the cover, which I shall now taunt you with.  Art!

The Suicide Squad

     Yes, O Confused Consumer, there was a rather forgettable film made five years ago, which Your Humble Scribe cannot be bothered to check on.  Is this a completely new reboot of the concept?  Or a sequel?  No idea.  You can go Google yourselves if you have the time to spare, I don't.  Blog to create.  Books to read.  Films to watch.  World to take over.

     The concept behind the Suicide Squad - I've seen an animated version which is where I acquired my knowledge - is that the worst of Gotham's super-villains are kept alive in prison, not out of some misplaced snivelling notion about the intrinsic value of human life*, but so they can be sent into the most perilous and dangerous of situations.  Most of them are expected to die in the process, but - hey! they saved Old Sparky some wear and tear and Gotham's citizens got useful work out of them.  Art!

One of them never even made it out of the room.

     There's a similar doomsday team constituted for extreme emergencies in Mega-City One, with the proviso that they're all volunteer Judges - and of course I cannot find an appropriate picture -

     Except now I have!  Sorry for the tangent, I never intended to venture off in this direction, although since we're here we shall keep on going.  Art!

Artwork courtesy the outstanding Ron Smith

     Let Conrad explicate a little further.  The Doomsday Dogs, a band of violent criminal mutants, have bombed Mega-City One's principal source of energy, Power Tower, turning a controlled volcano into an extremely uncontrolled one.  The Holocaust squad are parafoiled in to physically close down the Tower's valving equipment, which lies at the bottom of a lake of lava.  They succeed - just.  And they all die.  Bit of a bummer, what?

     ANYWAY none of this has to do with today's title, because today we take a look at driving in Russia, where (allegedly) all one needs to do to obtain a driving licence is bribe the officials who issue them.  This means that the roads in Russia as traversed by Ruffians are so dangerous you take your life in your hands when driving.  It also means that Ruffians put dashcams in their vehicles before they put petrol in, to provide evidence that It Was Their Fault Officer.  Art!

     This bus is turning across the road, without indicating I may add, and there was another car alongside and slightly behind the dashcam vehicle here.  The bus had been parked along the side of the road before slowly moving into traffic, possibly to merge into the other lane.  It was not to be.  Art!

     Fortunately there don't appear to be any passengers on the bus.  Wonder what the driver's excuse will be?  "Sorry yer Honner I hadn't sobered up."

     This isn't even scratching the surface the surface of Ruffian's rampaging on roads.  You can bet we return to this, O yes Elliot Ness!

     And now - tea beckons.  Excuse for a while.

     We seem to be back to double-spaced paragraphs again, without any human intervention amending them from single-spaced.

Conrad Is ANGRY!

That is to say, angrier than his default Mildly Enraged.  For Lo! we are back to vilifying Codeword compilers, whom will become an endangered species once I take over.  Let the ranting begin!

"SILEX": Hmmmm okay I give up.  A sinister supervillain whose ability is being able to <thinks> eat Ghost Chilli Peppers without consequence?  Perhaps not.  O trusty Collins Concise - "A type of heat-resistant glass made from fused quartz" O WE'RE EXPERT MINERALOGISTS NOW ARE WE? Art.

Nope.

     Teh Interwebz have it as a type of flint.  Conrad too annoyed to challenge or concede.  Go on, how many of you knew what it was?  Hmmmm?

"PHLEGM":  Quite apart from being the epitomy of disgusting, how on EARTH is one supposed to work this one out?  And no, you're not getting a picture.

"JOULES":  As Conrad recollects, a term used in defining and quantifying energy and work.  WHAT, ARE WE ALL HIGH-ENERGY PHYSICISTS NOW? Get out of here with your expenditure of one newton over a distance of one metre**!

Close enough

Conrad Begs Your Pardon

When I posted a link to the blog on Facebook earlier this morning, inasmuch as you could tell it was morning, I used an abbreviation "U.G.L." and didn't explain what it meant.  Naturally, you knowing Conrad as well as you do, and his positively schoolboy fascination with guns and bombs and things that go BANG, you'd be well within your rights to anticipate that it meant "Underbarrel Grenade Launcher" .  Art!

The ugly fugly UGL

     Except no.  Not today.  No, this is an abbreviation created by Your Humble Wordsmith to describe a day when it looks as it will rain always and forever.  It's a phrase usable when you look up to the skies and see - endless grey.  An unbroken inverted sea of mid-monochrome malfeasance.  Art!

   

     Hence Uniform Grey Layer.

Finally - 

As you should surely know by now, Conrad is a big fan of "Forbidden Planet" and ponders on it at random, as happened last night.  There is a bit of a plot hole, you see, and if you don't want any SPOILERS then you may want to dodge the next few sentences.

     Mind you, it is over sixty years old now, so you really have no excuse for not having seen it by yet.

     ANYWAY, my point is that when the Id Monster makes it's first appearance at the United Planets Cruiser C-57D, and also at the domicile of Morbius, it manifests waaaaaay off in the distance.  Art!

Tired, footsore and grumpy: wouldn't you attack?

     There may be a reason why it has to trot for about a mile to reach the humans at their spaceship, but since Morbius is the one creating it, why didn't it suddenly appear (yes yes yes I know it's invisible, I'm speaking metaphorically) in his back yard?  Instead it plods methodically through the thickets, having to force all the flora aside, taking simply ages.

     Of course, I may be overthinking this ...

*  Okay, okay, I nicked this from James Blish.

**  Apologies for stooping so low as to use <hack spit> metric measurements.  But we have our revenge - by using a small "m"!