We Have Not Been Excessively Troubled -
- by the big green beastie, not since our purchase of armoured underpants. Still, being defied and defeated seems to have made it more determined to chew into Conrad's tender and succulent (I imagine) buttocks.
First of all, let us change tack entirely and bring in our first visual pun. Art!
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| Man. Tea. Python. |
I don't have anything else to add that is specific to "Monty Python's Flying Circus" - or do I? Because I'll bet you military history ingoramuses are unaware where the "Flying Circus" bit comes from. We obviously can't leave it there, can we?
Okay, cast your mind back to the First Unpleasantness, where aerial combat took place on a large scale for the first time ever. Perfidious Albion created the Royal Air Force out of the Royal Naval Air Service and Royal Flying Corps, for example, on April 1st 1918, a date the other services have never let them forget. On the Teuton side of the lines you had Jagdgeschwader 1, under the command of Manfred Von Richthofen. Art!
As you can see, their planes were painted every hue of the rainbow, with an exuberance that the more stolid commanders of the RAF wouldn't have tolerated. Hence it's being somewhat sardonically dubbed a "Flying Circus" and in the Biggles short-story
ANYWAY back to the fascinating anecdote. I couldn't take a picture because the coincidence was upon my phone itself, being the four-letter word that is generated as proof of a valid e-ticket on First Bus' application: SKEW.
And what came up as a Cryptic Crossword solution? I've thrown the paper away and can only remember that the clue involved 'no hair' and the solution was SKEWBALD which I'd never heard of before, even if I'd actually seen it. Art!
There you have a skewbald horse. "A horse spotted with white and any colour apart from black" says my Collins Concise.
Okay okay okay this Intro might be reaching but now you know a bit more about both horses and the First Unpleasantness, and a small win is still a win.
Motley, I noticed that the vivarium door was ajar earlier. Keep a weather eye open.
A Theme Just Not How You Were Expecting It
For no particular reason Your Humble Scribe had the theme music to "633 Squadron" ringing around his head on Friday morning. Perhaps because I'd been looking at my playlist on Spotify and there's a bunch of film themes there. I wonder if - hang on - Yes! found it and am playing it in the background RIGHT NOW. Art!
Give up, Teutons, the Mozzies are here!
The film was a colossal success, despite it's rather downbeat ending, and having an epic theme tune can't have hurt one bit.
Hmmmm another mention for the RAF.
A Buccaneer Just Not How You Were Expecting It
Yes, "it" not him, because Lo! we are talking about the Blackburn Buccaneer, and I've had this one written down in my notebook for several days, so that's proof I never set out to create today's blog with a theme present. Art!
A buccaneer being very near
No, it's not taking off or landing, otherwise the landing gear would be visible. This is how high it would operate in the North Sea, coming in under the radar net of Sinister warships and hitting them with nuclear missiles, which is logical enough as that's how it was designed. Conrad recalls a journalist on exercise with a Buccaneer squadron, hearing one of the RAF artificers describing loading nuclear bombs as being 'buckets of instant sunshine". Quite. Said artificer was very blase about his aircraft, which must have been over 20 years old by that time: " - they built 'em out of box girders and railway sleepers back then". Robust, you see. Art!
Interestingly enough, they were used on a couple of occasions to screech over the rooftops at Mach 1 in order to enthuse the locals and cause the opposition to need a change of underwear; once when Belize, just prior to independence, was being threatened by a Guatemalan invasion (which never happened) and again in Lebanon during peace-keeping duties.
We may come back to the Buccaneer. I bet you can hardly wait!
Finally Nothing To Do With Aircraft
Although I bet the real thing has warning lights situated high on the structure to prevent any low-flying aircraft from discovering where they are, suddenly. Art!
Progress so far in the construction of the 3D Empire State Building Puzzle. I've cut the box top away from the bottom so I have a picture to work from, if needed, whilst all the remaining bits are in the bottom box. What I'm doing is referring to the schematic outlay and indicating which bits I've gotten and completed, rather than trust to box art that omits the sides and top-down views*. Art!
As you can imagine this is very fiddly and time-consuming, just the kind of task Conrad is good at yet which other people would consider cruel and unusual punishment. All I can say is that this is what would have made me an excellent codebreaker at Bletchley Park. It has, incidentally, meant that my planned wargame to get re-acquainted with the "Blitzkrieg Commander" ruleset has been postponed. O well into each life a little rain must fall**.
Finally Finally -
Hmmmmm in light of that last crack I think the rainclouds might be moving away - hang on a minute - I think the rainclouds might be moving away mustn't scare them into returning must we. This might mean Edna gets a constitutional trot and I can go boldly striding forth in my Crocs, rather than having to contort my fat feet into shoes only just barely big enough for them. When it's raining my socks tend to get wet in Crocs because they have plenty of holes in them. By design, I hasten to add, not through excess wear and tear.
See?
You might (if you were reaching desperately for a pun) call them RAFs - "Royton Airy Footwear", which is where we came in.
* This makes me VERY VERY ANGRY. Just thought you'd like to know.
** Unless you live within the bounds of This Sceptred Isle, in which case it's a lot of rain.
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