Ah, Yes, "Amalgam"
Back in the day this word used to refer to the metallic combination as used by dentists, that being mercury and silver. Conrad is somewhat worried that orthodontic surgery would be carried out by using two heavy metals not known for their benificent action upon human physiology.
Norin Radd being totally bad
Hmmm not sure I'd trust him with a drill and scalpel. Today we use this word more in the sense of "alloy" than anything else.
ANYWAY none of that has to do with our current Intro. Cast your minds back (if you have minds in the first place) to 2013, when BOOJUM! erupted onto the internet, declaring that we would boldly and nobly deal with issues of tanks, atom bombs, zombies and astronomy. I think there were some cuddly critters that we lied about at the time, too except I cannot be bothered to do the digging required to confirm this.
BOOJUM! circa 2013
Let us now explore astronomical object LP 40-365, which Conrad only picked up because "The Daily Beast" broadcast about it in the most tabloid of terms:
You cannot deny that this combines both zombies and astronomy. Whether it is true or not - hmmmmm that remains to be seen.
Being all scientific and shizzle, it would seem that LP (which we will use in the interests of brevity) is the result of two other, considerably more massive, stars colliding. Instead of the anticipated mutual annihilation what we got was a giant fragment of the originals being ejected into space at Silly Speeds. Art!
The launch-pad
LP is unusual because of it's chemical composition. Normal stars are composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, the two lightest elements, but LP has no hydrogen or helium, and instead consists entirely of metallic elements such as iron and nickel. This may well be thanks to it being the child of a supernova. Which has also boosted it's velocity to hitherto-unheard of lengths, at about, oooh, let us say two million miles per hour.
"These are very weird stars" said an astronomer, and - you know what? He's right. Nor is LP the only one of it's kind, since there are another 4 stars of a similar composition that have been detected. The Universe; not only is it stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can possibly imagine. Weird scenes inside the gold mine? Weirder ones outside the galaxy!
Motley, shall we see if you can outpace this stellar remnant by boosting you on a rocket sled? 
Jim! Put some clothes on!
Another Blast From A Very Distant Past
Conrad is reading the biography of Nigel Kneale, which is entitled "Into The Unknown" and jolly interesting it is, too. Kneale, lest you be unaware, spent his formative years on the Isle Of Man, a kind of free-floating polyp in the Irish Sea that has traditionally been ignored by all and sundry, thus allowing it to develop it's very own culture and mythology. Echoes of same are found throughout Kneale's works; the theme of ancient mythology affecting stolid twentieth century folks finds it's apotheosis in "Quatermass And The Pit" which is one of the creepiest sci-fi television programs ever made, despite being over sixty years old. Art!
The text also mentions a couple of Manx mythical monsters, one being the Boggane, which brought up absolutely 0% results from Google, the other being the Phynnodderee, which brought up the above, and you can make all the jokes you like about spirits. That's the trouble, you see: Manx has it's own dialect if not language, so translating causes problems.
Hmmmmmm yes, one doubts that the monsters of antiquity were quite so comely and connubial*.
We shall be coming back to this topic in future OH YES INDEED because Mister Kneale was an influential chap. Not half.
Our Complicated Cousins
Those one across The Pond, you know: South Canadians. As Conrad has pointed out before, we here in Perfidious Albion - and probably our far-flung Dominions too, with the exception of the British Americans - hug the fond illusion that we know their society inside and out because we happen to speak a version of the same mother tongue (except ours is the better). Not so. Not so at all. I have explained this in depth with the Bureau of Reclamations, yet backing up a little in the federal hierarchy brings us to the over-arching federal administration of -
The Department of the Interior. This seems to be a kind of administrative dustbin, where any agency they can't decide about gets lodged. It covers several million square miles of South Canadian federal territory, and includes: the National Parks Service (nothing to do with cars and lots); the Fish and Wildlife Service; the Bureau of Indian Affairs (?); the Bureau of Land Management; the U.S Geological Survey and the Office of Insular Affairs.
The office in question
That, I'm afraid, only scratches the surface. Rest assured, watching "All In The Family" or "Archie Bunker" does not equip you to adequately understand this nation in depth. Tsar Putin is now kicking himself at this point. Sorry, Dimya, watching every episode of "Friends" does not an expert make!
Finally -
If you have a memory beyond that of a goldfish then you recall that Conrad has been whanging on about dirty tricks afoot at the South Canadian World's Fair of 1940, where a time-bomb left in the British Pavilion was discovered and (rather ham-fistedly) dealt with by the local police, leading to the death of two detectives involved. There are rather a lot of loose ends associated with this case, one of which has to be, what was the protocol at the time for dealing with time-bombs? Ignore the fact that there was a finite amount of time elapsed before the infernal device went off, rendering all around it most stonily dead? Not that this eventuality had prevented the Bomb Squad from carrying the bomb past a host of spectators at the event -
"Paging Mister Freud - paging Mister Freud"
* Yes it's a proper word. No, I'm not going to define it for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment