It's Roger Delgado - With An Avocado!

For No Other Reason Than That They Rhyme

Which is reason enough here in the bowels of The Mansion, because once again whose blog is it?  Exactly.  Splendid.  Can we proceed, now?  How magnanimous of you!*  Art!

His most famous role

     Interesting chap, Roger.  Despite his somewhat exotic looks - an inheritance from his Belgian and Spanish parents - he was as British as a badger in a bowler hat bicycling whilst eating a bacon butty on brown bread**.  His real name is rather a mouthful: Roger Caesar Marius Bernard De Delgado Torres Castillo Roberto, so it's no -

      What's that?  O go on you pedantic hair-splitter*** -  

     Satisfied now?  Are we allowed to proceed?  So grateful!* 

     ANYWAY back to Rog.  He served in the armed forces of Perfidious Albion during the Second Unpleasantness, in Signals, and in fact rose to the rank of Major, so he had a certain degree of nous about him.  One is not totally certain yet if one could retain a rank of Major or above once hostilities had ceased.  I may get back to you on that. Or not.

     We're not done with Ol' Rog, not by a long shot.  

     Motley, you do realise that if he'd been in the Royal Engineers, he'd have been a Major miner?  Now take this shovel and dig!

CONRAD IS ANGRY!  O SO ANGRY!  FURIOUSLY ANGRY!

Just so you know.  First of all, when did "Yum yum" become eliminated by the hideous South Canadianism "Nom nom"?  Honestly, you graciously allow these people their independence and they reply by trying to pervert your language.  Okay, now onto the meat of the matter - CODEWORDS!

"DYBBUK": You what?  The only reason Conrad knew that this word exists is because he's widely-read and also extremely clever.  I think we've also covered it in BOOJUM! before, so YOU should also be familiar with it, and there will be severe reprisals if you so much as express the slightest incomprehension.  Art!

     This particular beastie is, in Jewish mythology, the clingy spirit of a dead person which tries to attach itself to a live body, for nefarious purposes.  It is dispelled(*) by either exorcism or attaining it's infernal ends.  So now we all know. Or have had our memories refreshed.

"LARYNX": Aha, I completed this one, which does not surprise me.  No false modesty here.  You should know what it means by now, and also be wary of a six-letter word with only one vowel, especially one with two of the alphabet's least-used letters.  Conrad 1 Codeword 0 BUT I AM STILL, OF COURSE, ENORMOUSLY ANGRY.

Larry Nicks.  Close enough.

"HAKA": Another GRRRRR BAH! moment.  No, this is not a mis-spelling of HACKER, you bafoons.  It is the traditional war-dance of the Maori, the one that involves rolling of eyes and sticking out of tongues, which might sound a little effete until you see the All Blacks rugby team doing it, which is enough to make strong men turn to drink.  Of course - obviously! - I knew it, once again no false modesty here.  I'm only thinking of all the benighted South Canadians who won't have the faintest idea and to whom the rest of this paragraph will resemble a foreign language.  Art!

Mock them, I dare you

"NABOB": Were Conrad into cheap puns, then - O I am into cheap puns.  Okay, in that case this is not a Geordie replying to Robert in the negative.  It is instead a provincial governor under the Mughal empire, and I apologise in that I've had to resort to Google for a definition - typing this at work and thus no Collins Concise.  Accept my humble grovelling.  Anyway, I did recognise it because it's the sort of word that crops up in Dickens and I read plenty of his work.  Just feel pity for the poor benighted South Canadians who only read "The Daily Beast" and who haven't the faintest idea what kind of exotic animal a 'Geordie' is.  Art!

Don't ask me, I have no idea.

     Just a heads-up for you, gentle reader.  I never got around to doing the weekly shop last night as I got in late THANK YOU FIRST BUS, and in fact am now typing up Friday's blog on Thursday evening, having done a fair bit whilst ensconced in the Dark Tower.

More Musical Critique

Ah, the torture never stops, does it, Bri?  We continue with our remorselessly logical deconstruction of "King's Lead Hat" for no other reason than we can, and also Eno's pretty old and frail and can't hit back.  Let the roasting continue!

I count my fingers (digit counter) as night falls

Colour Conrad Confusd.  Diurnal or nocturnal or even crepuscular, there is no way that ambient light influences how many digits one has.  

Photoshopped.  I hope.

And draw bananas on the bathroom walls

Vandalism!  Bri, I never thought I'd see the day when you stooped so low - and - hang, on, are those bananas?  Because they look pretty pha

The killer cycles (humdrum) the killer hertz

You forgot to mention Killer Watts, although I'm not sure if the album had come out by this time or not.  

1980.  So Bri influenced heavy metal.  Who knew!

The passage of my life is measured out in shirts

Interesting!  Conrad usually measures the passing of life in terms of years and months, not items of haberdashery

     Shall we call a halt there?  I think we shall, Bri's eyes are running like taps.  O pull yourself together man!  You're worse than Simon and Garfunkel, and they were Dog Buns drama queens.

Finally -

One small pleasure that redeems a lot of displeasure at the office is the splendid view one obtains o'er the whole of Greater Manchester, from the hills above Rochdale to the control tower of Manchester Airport many miles to the south.  In fact the view is so expansive you can see whole weather patterns arriving and departing, and this afternoon was a splendid example of just that, with giant purple storm clouds rolling in from different directions, clear skies appearing at random, impenetrable hazes where water hung heavy in the air, the odd burst of sunlight, all against the inevitable backdrop of a positive forest of jib cranes.  One feels these structures must be one of Gomorrah-in-the-Irwell's staple crops.  Art!

*  This, lest you be unaware, is irony.  

**  In Bristol.

***  Two of humanity's best ever personal qualities