I Am, As Usual, EXCEEDINGLY Cross

Really, Keep Out Of Strangling Distance

Just in case.  It's not merely the apoplexy-inducing Codeword solutions, it's also the fact that I failed to get two of "The Metro"'s Cryptic Crossword questions earlier this morning, a fact that will colour at least the rest of my day and probably tomorrow as well*.  Plus, since I am writing this at work in The Dark Tower, I can't load any photographs from my phone<sad face>.  On the plus side, I have found another film I can substitute for Manchester - Art!

     Wow, that looks exciting, certainly a lot more than our grimy Northern metropolis.  Explosions!  Diving suits!  An underwater city!  We do have a sufficiency of half-naked nutjobs wielding tyre-irons, however.

     What's that other film, set in the nineteenth century, where Vincent Price shrivels up like a worm in the sun at the conclusion?

     Aha!  You ought to know Conrad by now, he can't leave that sort of thing a-hanging in the wind.  Incidentally, did you know that Ol' Vinnie had a degree in Art History?  I did know he was a collector, and now we both know more than we did five minutes ago.  Art**!

     Conrad didn't realise it was made by the late great Jaques Tourneur (he of "Night Of The Demon" fame.  It was released under a different title in South Canada, "War Gods Of The Deep" because there is no warfare, there are no celestial beings and the whole thing is set in the shallows.  It also features an unusual phenomenon, a submarine volcano off the coast of - Cornwall, actually.  Conrad is unsure yet fairly certain that Edgar Allen Poe never gratuitously inserted a volcano into his poem.  Where are the ceaseless towering clouds of steam that would result from an underwater volcano? hmmmm.

     Well there we go.  A new nickname for the city of Manch.

     Motley, we need to show people the reality of living in this city.  Run a bath and lie in it, that'll teach 'em.

My Best Friend Mister Collins Concise

Conrad, as we all know, is a pedantic hair-splitter of the very finest variety, and could not simply abandon RAPTORIAL once it had provoked him to a frothing rage.  So I went and looked it up, and what do you know there was RAPSCALLION at the top of the page, an epithet that we throw around here on the blog with relish.  Look, here's proof-positive that it is, and that I am the kind of anorak who deliberately scrolls through the definitions in a dictionary.  It's the sort of thing you'd expect of a man who reads (and notes down) chemical constituents on the back of shampoo bottles.  Art!

Nope.  This way you have to read my definitions

    
     " A disreputable person," defines the CC.  Derived from "Rascallion" which is in turn derived from the Old French "Rascaille" meaning "Rabble".  At least it's not Latin <hack spit>.

     Then there's "RAPT", meaning "To be spellbound, enthralled or totally engrossed" which comes from - O wouldn't you know it - the Latin "Rapere" which means "To seize".

And also "Wrapped" in the lands of Ocker and the Polite Australians.

     
     I think that's enough wordplay for one day.  Let us move swiftly on.  No dawdling at the back there!

I Say, I Say, Look At This Display!

As you ought to know by now, Conrad works in The Dark Tower, and in order to get there has to pass by a certain number of shops.  Most of them are clothing shops CONRAD SPECTACULARY UNINTERESTED with a few interesting exceptions.  The Lego shop, for one.  Art?

I'll give you three guesses ...

     We have featured window exhibits from here over the years - how much profit do they make that they can afford the no-doubt extremely steep rental and overheads? and do that many people buy those huge expensive kits? - and here's another one.  Art!

Clever, nicht wahr?

     Conrad dare not put a foot across this threshold, lest he acquire another expensive hobby that takes up too much room, alongside the jigsaws and wargames.  Besides which, stepping on a Lego brick in your stocking feet is an acutely unpleasant experience that I am not keen to replicate.

Frank's Tanks Glance

It kind of rhymes if you say it quickly.  ANYWAY we are off again with madcap - some would say rapscallion - artist Frank Tinsley, arch-illustrator of "Mechanix Illustrated" and another hare-brained - apologies to hares worldwide - suggestion that never came to fruition.  Art!

Why don't we?  Because it's a silly idea

     Bear in mind that this is from the Fifties, when all you had was grainy black and white sets and no ability to record what you were seeing.  If you attempt to cover a large area with your Tankamera*** you won't get any detail, and if you zoom in to get more detail, you lose the big picture.  Even today, when we do have the technology, battlefield imagery is recorded for playback, not beamed live to HQ.  We do have drones on the modern battlefield, which are a whole lot cheaper, smaller, harder to hit and easier to replace than an armoured fighting vehicle and crew.  One notes that the originator of this article was a member of the Signal Corps; he should probably have stuck to fixing radios.

     That's why.

Finally -

What can we tie up with?  Well, Shiz, one of my old compatriots from ages ago, Messaged me on Facebook and asked for a photo of the offices.  Not quite sure why, there's no entrapment or blackmail potential present.  Take a look yourself.  Art!

And this is one of our busier, better-attended days

     Atypically the sun was shining, which does give you a wonderful panorama from the hills above Roch-on-the-Ur to Manchester Airport's control tower and even the radio-telescope out at Jodrell Bank.

     I need to wrap this up quickly, there's another cake to bake and my lunch to make.  Are we at Compositional Ton yet?

     We are now!

*  I can bear a grudge for centuries if need be.

**  The irony does not escape me.

***  If this ever becomes a thing I want royalties.