Bent Blades

I Shan't Explain That Straight Away

Because then you have to read on to discover exactly what I'm talking about, at which point you'll have gone too far to stop and will have to continue until the last full-stop in 'Finally -', ho ho my cunning plan.

     This tale begins with yet another Youtube Reddit thread, which asked a rather indelicate question along the lines of "What is the biggest <excrement>show you've ever witnessed?"

     Cue one reply from a sailor in the South Canadian Navy, who didn't identify the ship he served upon - First Challenge - merely that it was a Dock Landing Ship.  Art!

LSD 38 'Pensacola'

     As you can see, this thing is no slender lightweight and is over 210 yards long.  OP said he was in his berth when the ship, taking part in an assault exercise, gave a violent shudder and came to a complete halt.

     They had run aground, on a sandbank off North Carolina.  OP stated that the Captain was on the bridge, drunk, and was almost solely responsible for this mishap/disaster/accident <delete where applicable>.  They needed tugs to get them off the sandbank, and the Captain decided not to report in about it.

     Bad move.

     Conrad did a little Google-fu and discovered the name of the ship and a report in a naval publication, where divers were tasked with discovering why the Pensacola ran so slowly and with considerable vibration.  They found extensive  damage to the propeller-shafts and the propeller screw-blades themselves, which were extensively bent, causing the speed and vibration problems.  Art!

The shuddering, juddering Pensacola's ruddering

     This was evidence that chimed with running aground, at which the truth gradually came out.  The Captain was forced to retire, and several other officers were disciplined.  OP stated that the ship had to spend a year in dry dock undergoing repairs, and that naval publication asserted that said repairs cost at least £110,000, which is a big chunk of change if you consider it wouldn't have been needed had Captain Birdseye not been plonkoed on duty.  He ought to have stuck to - waitforitwaitforit - Pensa-Cola.

     I'll get me coat.

Conrad Seethes Once Again!

Because, after all, where would the blog be without a little Frothing Nitric Ire?  Also, you gentle readers out there probably enjoy seeing an old man foaming at the mouth with rage and oral hygiene issues. Let us whittle down the list of Do\g Buns! Codeword envelope-pushing solutions. 

"SULPHIDE": WHAT ARE WE ALL CHEMISTS NOW!  Do you know how difficult it is to parse a solution where the combination "PH" occurs?  Conrad is only grateful that this combination wasn't at the beginning of this word.  Art!

I cannot abide - SULPHIDE!

 
     Smacks of the Devil to me.

"LEXEME": No!  Nothing to do with Lex Luthor memes - although that's probably a thing, given that Conrad hasn't bothered to research it, and the f

     ANYWAY this is a grammatical term I've never heard of before, and the definition in my Collins Concise didn't clear it up at all.  "A minimal meaningful unit that cannot be understood from the meanings of it's component morphemes."  Art!

     Is that clear?  Good, because now you can explain it to me in the Comments.

"EGGNOG": O my - a word with three "G"s in it?  I was going to expostulate about the hyphen, except I just checked the CC and yes, this spelling is entirely legit.  It's a drink made from eggs, milk, sugar, spice and rum.  Do you know, we have those ingredients to hand.  I wonder - ought I to try making it? because I well remember the gustatory disaster that was my Mojito.

Nog of egg

"It's History"

Yes, a single from The Comsat Angels, which I had as a piece of vinyl about 47 years ago, and which, like all their stuff, had a dark lyric to it whilst being extremely catchy musically.  Art!

     Which has nothing to do with the BBC's Historic Photograph series of pictures, up on their website.  We are now onto the runners-up, which are pretty remarkable in themselves.  Art!

Courtesy Scott Antcliffe

     This is Bamburgh Castle, and once again we aren't given any more information than that, so allow Your Humble Scribe to go doing a bit of digging -

     Here an aside.  This picture, which is incredibly evocative in terms of atmosphere, reminded me of a Bruce Pennington picture I had on my bedroom wall back in 1977 - 

Ol' Brucie - master of the evocative

     Bamburgh Castle appears to have been built at a strategic location, since there have been fortifications there since Anglo-Saxon times, and the name 'Bamburgh' derives from the appellation 'Bebbanburh', because one of the resident monarchs made it over to his wife, Bebba.  It was last actively involved in matters martial way back in 1095, so you might way it's been sitting on it's laurels for the past 926 years.

ART!

Shall We Salt The Mix With Supernatural Tricks?

Why yes we shall - it was a rhetorical question and whether you reply or not has no weight at all.

Off the neighbour went, glad that the nutter in number 73 hadn’t gone mad the way he’d heard of the previous night, attacking a gang with rocks and bare fists.

               Louis walked down to the front of the street where his garden ended and looked back at the house-front.

               Pristine.  No thrown white paint, no sprayed-on name.

               ‘This is seriously weird,’ he muttered.  Back inside, he was tempted to pour out a bottle of cheap whisky and stun himself into a state of couldn’t-care-less.  Perhaps the gaggle of hostile teenagers came back in the night and cleaned up the mess they’d made in the first place, shamed into it, or egged on by critical parents.

               About as likely as the glass-sweeping burglars.

               With a flush of gooseflesh, Louis realised that if he was carrying out actions he had no conscious knowledge of, then the police were quite right to treat him as a suspect.  Amnesia.  What a convenient excuse for not knowing what you might have done.

               Christ, he couldn’t have attacked Jen himself, could he?  The very idea brought him out in a icy sweat.  Surely not.  Yet, if he could amble around getting rid of tablets or cleaning up paint –

     O ho ho, the heart is not only a lonely hunter, so is the brain.  We shall see what comes of Luma's determinations about his mental state, because he cannot possibly guess what the correct resolution is.

Turning Tricks With 'Armpit Slicks'

I do apologise that, once again I've dove into a rabbit hole and emerged into the sunlight in Bulgaria.  Or it might be Macedonia. Where w

     ANYWAY I can inform you, gentle reader, that I have recently come across a genre of pulp magazines under the umbrella title 'Men's Adventures', which I had a bare acknowledgement of.  This was a pulp class that appealed to men, red-blooded carnivorous massively-muscled meaty MEN.  Their nicknames in the industry were 'the sweats', 'men's sweat magazines' and 'armpit slicks' which is where this item's title comes from.  Art!

Note that title: "Weasels ripped my flesh"

     That bye-line seemed familiar.  "Weasels ripped my flesh?"  Well, quite apart from it being incorrect WEASELS ARE OUR FRIENDS it did trigger a recollection - Art!

     Hmmmm.  <squints disapprovingly at Frank Zappa>

Finally -

We are well over the Compositional Ton and I'm only putting this here as I mentioned about viewers having to read up until this point.