You Might Well Recall That Song
By The Who, "Armenia City In The Sky", which is pronounced Ar-men-eeyah, not at all the same as that country in the Transcaucasus. Your Humble Scribe nicked most of the title for his own long-form fan-fiction about the Tenth Doctor and Ace, about a space station stuck in orbit, running out of things and wearing out -
ANYWAY - Art?
Well, that has both very little and everything to do with Gomorrah-in-the-Irwell, because I mentioned earlier this week that, looking out of the seventeenth floor windows of The Dark Tower, the grim grey grimy city looked to be sitting on a cloud. Art!Or - perhaps the cloud is sitting on the city?
You know Conrad by now: real life inevitably triggers an association with fiction, and a dim & distant memory came back to me. That obscure Sixties sci-fi series "Starry Treks" (sp?) had an episode featuring not so much a flying city as a hovering one, because flying cities are straight out of James Blish*. Art!
Behold, mere mortals, the cloud-city of Stratos. Which is held aloft by anti-gravity generators or super-magnets or specially-trained wasps. It lives in the skies to keep it metaphorically and literally separate and apart from the gruntish underclass of Troglodytes, who grub about in the dirt mining ores on and beneath the planet's surface. It is, indubitably, a city in the sky.
The thing is, of course - obviously! - Conrad cannot simply leave things there. O no. Over-analysing matters is great fun. So - Stratos is kept aloft by anti-gravity generators (I checked) which must have at least three independent power systems, because it is extremely heavy and if the power goes out it will descend with all the grace of a piano pitched from the top of a skyscraper. Thanks to that sheer mass it doesn't need to take bird-strike into account, and the elite who live there have transporter technology, so they don't need aircraft; another potential aerial hazard averted. Art!
What's wrong with this picture?
No safety nets! Anyone feeling malicious, or who's drunk, or clumsy, or all three, could pitch anything over the balcony. Imagine an empty bottle being chucked over the side ... Not to mention the drunken and clumsy might well pitch themselves over the side by accident. Art!
Ah. Yes. I see. The architects and interior designers didn't want any unsightly features such as O I dunno - proper safety fencing, or stout windows. I mean, with a barrier two and a half feet high, what can possibly go wrong?
I had to ask 
Enjoy your trip!
Plus, what about weather? "O - er - Ardana never has storms or violent winds or hail or lightning - and stop asking questions!" it said in the script. What about plumbing and sewage and waste disposal? "Transporters!" Okay, in a society that consists of the leisured elite, who runs and maintains the anti-gravity generators? because I don't think I'd trust anyone whose sole qualification was an ability with oil paints to run anti-matter power technology. "Go away!" it says in the script at this point.
An rebellious insurrection of - three.
Motley! Here's a golf umbrella you can use as a parachute. Go jump off The Mansion's roof**.
A Factoid For You
On Thursday Your Humble Scribe was bussing it into Gomorrah-in-the-Irwell from Aeldhulme, and decided to keep a five-bar gate count of all the traffic lights we passed, just because. This is not tallying pelican crossings, either. Guess the total! Art?
These ones only let through five cars on green
Thirty seven. If each set only takes thirty seconds to get through then that's nearly twenty minutes time added to your journey. Then factor in that at least one previous service never turned up and Hey Pesto! football match crowds getting on at every stop.
Yes, Edna, you can smell the chicken drumsticks, can't you? But you can't see them. Heh***.
An Interesting Question
Conrad has wasted a spectacular amount of time this afternoon reading Reddit stories on Youtube, the Dog Buns! addictive things. It's hard to stop reading the ones about malicious compliance or revenge, or the 3 hour one about HR firing people - Conrad himself has worked in HR for the past 9 years. Art!
The first person who proudly and loudly declares "Weasels!" will be Remote Nuclear Detonated. Your Humble Scribe was raised by weasels, and rabid ones at that. Art!
Mum on one of her better days
Time To Up The Word Count
Yes! More "Tormentor". Note how I flatter myself by using the Bold Fuschia that is reserved for credible titles here on the blog.
The vice-principal’s office was one of the larger ones
on the ground floor, with a picture window ten feet square and second-best
carpet. Being part-time, Louis shared a
boxy little room with three other part-timers; he rarely got invited to see the
senior staff and felt curious as to why the VP wanted to see him so
urgently. URGENTLY!!! Always a one for lots of exclamation marks,
the VP.
‘Come in,’ called the VP when Louis knocked, and the
door swung open under his knock.
‘Shut the door, Louis, and sit down.’
Louis sat, whilst the vice-principal flipped a set of
stapled sheets back and forth, eventually laying them down and sighing.
‘Louis, what am I going to do with you?’ he asked,
sighing again.
‘Is this a disciplinary?’ asked Louis, instantly suspicious.
Rowell, the vice-principal, looked surprised.
‘It was a rhetorical question, Louis.’
‘Oh. Nobody’s
complained, then?’
Rowell now looked suspicious in turn.
‘No – why, should I be expecting someone to?’
Louis shrugged, not caring one way or the other and
manifesting the attitude in his posture.
‘No, nobody has complained since the last time. I think word has gotten around that you
aren’t a lecturer to mess about with.’
He's certainly not! He really doesn't care what happens to him, which means no sense of self-preservation in job terms. What you might call 'blunt' or even 'brusque'.
Finally -
It's a fair copper, guvnor, I'll come quietly. We are back on the quite horrifying topic of food adulteration in the Victorian era; don't let anyone try to tell you that things were better back then with the 'all natural' foods, because O no they weren't matey.
Take pickles, for example. Conrad loves loves loves his pickled gherkins. Back in the day the picklers used to add copper sulphate to their batches of pickles. Art!
<Slavers quietly>
Why? Because it turned them extra-green. Copper sulphate can cause liver and kidney damage, also affecting blood cells and body tissues, and causing nausea and vomiting. Thank you food regulations!
* He wrote some of the very first ST novels, you know.
** Don't worry, motleys are lightweight, robust and also fairly cheap to replace.
*** If Anna asks, I never said this.
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