With A Little Nostalgic Dreaming
First of all, thanks to the Youtube Reddit channel that asked "What was the biggest corporate Darwin Award?". FYI, the Darwin Awards are those given to members of Hom. Sap. who remove themselves from the gene pool; the corporate equivalent would be along the lines of Schlitz beer. Art!
You couldn't claim this nowadays
We've covered this subject in depth previously, and here's the link:
BOOJUM!: Up Schlitz Creek (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)
Briefly put, Schlitz cut so many corners that it eventually cut it's own throat. Then we have Breyer's Ice Cream. This was famously simple, natural ice cream that resembled home-made in every way and was beloved of South Canadian households across the nation. Art!
With hilarious irony, one of their adverts from the last century had little Johnny unable to read the list of chemically-laden contents on the back of a cheap, generic ice cream. When it came to Breyers he managed no trouble, "Milk, sugar, cream, strawberries".
Enter the sinister multi-national conglomerate Skynet Unilever, whom acquired Breyers in 2005. Art!
Because it is run by cyborgs with no taste buds/idiots/suits only concerned with a profit <delete where applicable> they immediately mucked about with the ice cream recipe, including so many additives that it cannot be called 'ice cream' any longer, and instead masquerades under the Trojan horse "Frozen Dairy Dessert'. To be ice cream it has to have a minimum of 10% dairy product. Art!
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| No sugar! Lots of hideous additives, however! |
Milk, Sugar, Corn Syrup, Butter Pecans (Pecans, Butter, Cottonseed Oil, Butter (Cream, Salt), Salt], Cream, Whey, Mono and Diglycerides, Salt, Carob Bean Gum, Guar Gum, Natural Flavors, Carrageenan, Lactase Enzyme, Annatto (For Color), Vitamin A Palmitate, Tara Gum
They had bought the Trojan Horse version without realising and first noticed the differences in that it barely felt like ice cream and more like Marshmallow Fluff. Nobody could finish their bowl, and - MOST TELLINGLY OF ALL! - their cat refused to lick the bowls clean.
"I know what you don't"
Motley! We've had a marked lack of screaming, so we're going to put you blindfolded and hands-tied down the log flume. Yes yes yes you fusspot, you can have a crash-helmet.
Plenty Of Screaming Here
Your Humble Scribe is, slowly, working his way through that recently-purchased work "The Guards Armoured Division" which was but a fraction of the list price for those keeping count of the beans. Art!
The narrative has reached the beginning of Operation Market Garden, and corresponds (roughly) with the opening scenes of the British armour advancing in "A Bridge Too Far", except there were no budget or equipment restrictions in 1944. Art!
Tanks, ambushed.
Here come the Brylcreem Boys, and note that tank burning at lower starboard - it's a South Canadian M24 Chaffee which didn't go into service until 1945 -
ANYWAY for the real thing - actually they might have been pretending that the M24 was actually a British Cromwell - allow Art to update us -
Monochrome but AUTHENTIC
What happened in real life was that a significant Teuton force allowed the artillery barrage to move on after lying in their trenches, and a group of Guards tanks and mechanised infantry were cut off when the lurkers popped up and began banging away.
Cue the arrival of seven squadrons of Typhoon fighter-bombers, at least seventy aircraft armed with bombs, rockets and 20 m.m. <hack spit> cannons. They pounded the living daylights out of the hapless Teutons; a rocket-armed Tiffy could unload 480 pounds of high explosive; if only half of them were so equipped then that's at least seven tons of HE delivered in 30 minutes. Art!
Down below, someone is having the bad-hair day to end all bad-hair days
As the Guards history recounted, any surviving Teutons went loping gratefully into captivity like Olympic sprinters.
More! More! You All Scream For "Tormentor"
Or, at least, nobody's pleaded with me to stop posting it, which is exactly the same as screaming for it in Conrad's mind*.
The usual CAUTION! applies, as this is not typical BOOJUM! fluff - er - if you can count an unhealthy fascination with thermonuclear weapons as 'fluff'**.
Bewildered,
Louis tested the back door: locked. So
was the front door. None of the
television or computer equipment in the lounge or the back room had been
touched. Burglars didn’t break into
houses to clean up smashed glass coffee tables, did they?
Sleepwalking was the only
suggestion he could come up with. Either
the drink and sleeping tablets and grief and stress or a combination of all of
them, must have caused him to sleepwalk.
‘Shame I couldn’t manage all the
housework like that,’ he muttered. Given
the circumstances, it lacked any humour.
There were no messages on the
answerphone. No mail yet, either. The local television news, however, had a
roving reporter on Baytree Avenue, the main road that his own ran onto. The reporter stood outside the dark blue
portakabin that constituted the police Incident Unit.
“Police have not released any
details so far, but describe this as a particularly brutal and violent killing
of a defenceless young woman - ’
‘Can you make me feel any worse!’
shouted Louis at the reporter, who ignored the outburst and continued.
‘ – appealing for any witnesses to
come forward. The victim’s name is not
being released until the next of kin have been informed. Local residents are absolutely stunned that
such a crime should happen here, in a quiet suburban street -’
Louis switched channels hurriedly,
before he overdosed on a broadcast of solid cliché.
I've stopped there before the police arrive, and I didn't have to censor out any swear words.
Roel's Goals
Are almost completed. We are looking at the last of his prescient and humourous anlayses of warfare as waged in the ancient world, and for this one we (I flatter myself by inclusion alongside a Professor but he'll never know) look at "Hercules".
Hmmmmm this gets both Yes and No. The 'Hollow Square' was a formation often used, as it provided protection when on the move if in dubious territory; and if you're waging war against sinister opponents, then it goes without saying that the territory is dubious.
Chariots, however? Definite NO. As Roel points out - Conrad entirely unaware - chariots were a Bronze age innovation that became obsolete the instant cavalry came in - and there are cavalry in that scene. Cavalry were faster, more agile and cheaper than a great trundling shopping trolley.
4/10. Must Do Better.
More Picturesque Arabesque
Ha! I lied. Actually more like Gothic, either medieval or Victorian, for Lo! we are back on the subject of historically-relevant photographs, this time on the runner-up list from the BBC's website article as regards the same. Art!
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| Courtesy Jo Borzsony |
Hmmmmm the irony here is that "Borzsony" is Hungarian, you know, the capital of which is the twin-citied Buda-Pest, also known as "The City Of Cathedrals". Well our humble Anglo-Saxon architecture must have a bit of magic about it - probably associated with that photo from earlier in the week of the Shambles in York, which definitely looked like a Harry Potter set.
And with that desperate reaching, Vulnavia, we are so very very done!
* It's my mind and blog and I'll interpret however I feel like. So there.
** Also tanks. And zombies.
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