The Towering Infernal

Conrad Narrowed His Eyes, Threateningly

You should know very well by now that Conrad makes the English language jump, dance, cavort and generally behave how he wishes it to, so if I put up a title, then there are NO spelling errors.  My Remote Nuclear Detonator is itching for a new target, so ...

     NO! I do not refer to that classic disaster thriller "The Towering Inferno" which I have never seen to completion <hangs head a little>.  Art!

Both towering and an inferno.  Does what it says on the tin.

     I may see it it's available on Youtube because if

     ANYWAY I am referring once more to my 3D jigsaw construction puzzle of - the Empire State Building.  Recall, if you will, that it has 975 pieces.  Let us have some pictures doing the talking.  Art!

     That's how much I've completed so far, all of 40 pieces.  Note the handy helpful guide that lacks any of the pictorial detail for the pieces, and the box illustrations aren't that helpful either.  Art!

Mister Smug looking pleased with himself after some other poor sap assembled it.

 
     They proudly assert that this is the front and this is the back, so you don't get to see the sides at ground level, nor a top-down view of the horizontal parts.  Perhaps there was a helpful schematic that the original owner lost?  And whilst I am sorting through the pieces for the ground floor section, there are these many pieces to sort through.  Art!

     Your Humble Scribe thinks this one may take a long time to complete.  O well nothing worthwhile ever came easy, and there are only 935 pieces to dig through.  Hence today's title.

     And wouldn't you know it, TTI is not available for free on Youtube.

     Motley!  Get the Lego and I'll get some petrol and we'll have our very own Tower-o-Fire.

Conrad Plays Detective

Not so much 'Whodunnit' as 'Where and when it was done'.  I had been reading about that revered actor and raconteur Sir David Niven - Art!

   I think it was in a list of people born on St David's Day, and they mentioned that his father, a Major in the Berkshire Yeomanry, had been killed at Gallipoli in August 1915.

     Oho.  You know Conrad.  He could not let this opportunity to do a bit of fact-checking pass by.  First of all, was there such a regiment?

There certainly was, you can see them against the Brigade they were in, as "2/1/Berks Yeo".  Since Conrad only finished reading the Official History of the Gallipoli campaign, the relevant volume was still on my shelves.  Thus a recourse to the Order Of Battle at the end and - Art!

     So it was the First Battalion who served at Gallipoli.  Note that, although they and all their fellow battalions were cavalry, they all served as dismounted infantry, because there was simply no way for horse cavalry to serve on the peninsula.

     The Berkshires were part of a costly and unsuccessful battle that took place on 21/08/1915, where they were involved in an attempt to seize Scimitar Hill from the Turks.  It was a horribly mis-managed affair, and this is when Lieutenant William Niven would have been killed; though seen as a badly-planned and staff-deficient defeat on the British & Commonwealth side, the German accounts mention 'ferocious hand-to-hand fighting' and it seemed a lot more in the balance to them.  Art!

     37 is pretty old for a Lieutenant; there's got to be a story about that in the records.  For another day, perhaps.  And remember, young David was only 5 when this happened.

     

The Stork Of The Town

Or

Coming To Grief

You'll see.

For Lo! we have another Honourable Mention from the Darwin Awards, this time a tale from the land of the Teutons, wherein there is a zoo known as the Greifswald Zoo.  Art!

     One of their star performers is a stork called 'Luise' whom is reliably cheeky and greedy, and will steal visitor's sausages if same are not carefully guarded.  This fame may have a bearing on what happened late one night in July, when a thief broke into the park, got into the stork enclosure and attempted to make off with Luise.

     

     Luise objected to this laying-on of hands, and protested loudly in bird.  Her fellow storks, listening intently, then proceeded to mob and attack the thief with such force that he fell over, breaking an arm and leg.  The zoo, feeling both maliciously amused and magnanimous, decided not to press charges; Luise's feelings on the subject are unknown.

     And there you have the source of two terrible title puns.

Only Here For The Beer (Can)

It's pretty much a given that Your Humble Scribe is the only person who will scan the beers, wines and spirits aisles of a supermarket to see which one he can use to generate blog content.  Hence the following - Art!

     Why they called it "Clairvoyance" I don't know, because that's the French for "Clear-seeing" and it was as cloudy as a wet summer's day in Manchester.  Striking illustration on the can, mind.  O - the beer?  Rather a grapefruity taste to it, like one of Brewdog's variants.

"Redemption Ark" By Alastair Reynolds

Conrad rather suspected by the time we were at Page 400 (out of 640) that there was no way to wrap this story up conclusively, and that the star-smashing space opera stuff was going to require a sequel, which it appears is entirely true.  There is another novel in this series called "Absolution Gap" which completes the trilogy.  Well, Conrad still isn't sure that he's read the first in this series ("Revelation Space") so a short excursion to Abebooks may be called for.  Art!

A big spaceship*.

Finally -

I have been watching more episodes of "Dad's Army" from that charity-shop DVD purchase, and idly noted that these episodes are 50 years old, supposedly set in a period 80 years ago, and wondered if audiences today could make heads or tails of them?  You'd have to make sense of the Home Guard and This Sceptred Isle in the summer of 1940 onwards, and what an ARP warden was, also what blackout was and - 

     Well, it makes me laugh.  Which is what's important**.

Our stalwart defenders

*  Over two miles long, FYI

**  Keep your apprentice World Dictator sweet.