The Crystal Place

As You Should Surely Know By Now

Conrad knows little about the ballfoot game, and can barely tell one end of a football from the other, which doesn't stop him from enjoying the delicious schadenfreude of 'Have Your Say' on the BBC's sports webpages.  O my! the invective and venom that spills over is awesome to behold and extremely funny, if you don't have a dog in the fight.  Art!

Vostok Adin

     Continuing an aside with spherical objects, that's Vostok One with Yuri Gagarin aboard, because the ballfoot game is boring.

     ANYWAY there was a match between The Crystal Place, which sounds more like a jewellery shop than a ballfoot team, and Loverpool, who sound too risque and overly friendly to Your Humble Scribe.  One team won, can't remember who - hang on, hang on, can't let BOOJUM!'s legendary truthfulness and accuracy* get besmirched - ah it was Laverpool.  Got that?  The Comments were, to a large extent, concerned with the referee.  Art!

More Vostok

     Because referees are just as boring as ballfoot.  The referee, in case you were unaware, is a match official whose responsibility it is to be equally reviled by both teams and their supporters.  He runs up and down the pitch because a moving target is harder to hit, and he interferes in the game to keep passions roused (I think).  Typically there are any number of conspiracy theories about referees and their bias, which we won't go into here**.  One of the commenters came up with an hilarious jibe.  Art - no Vostok this time, please.

     
     What Conrad is waiting for is a match where The Manchester United are on one side, and lose, because then there are THOUSANDS of Comments, mostly fans of other teams gloating madly.  Yes, this makes me a terrible person and no, I don't care.

     O as another aside, I think I'll ban ballfoot completely when I take over.  Or have the result decided by tossing a coin.  And - let's see - the players will have to pay to be in a team.  And <thinks hard> all the players and managers and staff from teams that get relegated will go to the uranium mines.  Oooh, got another - a red card means an immediate trip to be divvied up into the organ banks.  And and and - cor blimey I can't ban it, can I, this is all far too entertaining! - the referee will be armed, probably with Colin Furze's Thermite Cannon, and any foul will be rewarded with instant immolation -

There's a pair for the morgue right away

     I wonder how Colin's doing?

     Hmmm.  I don't know why this chap is still alive.

Montana Tonka Moniker

I put that in because you shouldn't imagine this is a typo about Tonga -

     Here an aside.  They have cleared the airport runway of ash and planes are now arriving with aid, and the Ockers and Polite Australians have been air-dropping supplies, too.  Things are still bad but getting better.

     ANYWAY Conrad was idly musing "Whatever happened to Tonka Toys?" because I do a lot of musing.  Your Humble Scribe is unsure if you're familiar with the brand, so I shall explicate.  They were known for making metal toys, usually heavy industrial plant, that were extremely robust because they used steel, not tin.  Art!

No plastic shizzle here!

     Where does their odd name come from?  Partly from Sioux - 'Tanka' in Sioux means 'big', and these were not diecast toys you could comfortably fit in a pocket.  Art!

With puny human for scale

     Their original logo also featured waves, because what geographical feature was nearby?  Why none other than Lake Winnetonka.  Art!

Lake

Logo

     Of course - obviously! - you want to know where Montana comes in, if the company was based in Minnesota?  Because there's a museum in the Montana town of Winifred, logically known as the Winifred Museum, that houses a collection of Tonka Toys.  Three thousand of 'em.  They were gifted to the museum from a collector who had acquired five thousand of them, at which point one presumes the wife said 'It's them or me.'  Art!

     Now we are all better-educated than we were five minutes ago.

From Tonka To Torment

Yup another instalment of "Tormentor"

Having missed the verdict, Louis rapidly booted up his computer and checked the local BBC news.

               “Violent Sex Offender Sentenced to Life” read the headlines.  “Eric Miller, a.k.a. Eric Murdoch, a.k.a. Elvis Miller, had a history of violent sexual offences against women, dating back to his first offence at the age of fifteen.  Miller, aged 25, stood impassively in the dock as he was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for the brutal murder of schoolgirl Jennifer Hargreaves, aged 15.”

               A photograph of Miller had been added to the page, revealing a cocky, arrogant face topped with blond spiked hair that had gone out of style in the previous decade.

               ‘*******,’ muttered Louis.  ‘You’ll get it in the neck, matey, I promise.’

 

               The remedial English class now numbered ten.  Another departee was in hospital, having been “jumped” by a rival gang and given an involuntary approximate appendectomy.

               Louis gave the class copies of the local newspaper to read, asking them to go over different pages and report back to him about what they saw.  The idea was to acquaint them with conversational English in written form.  Louis’s opinion of the local journalists amounted to “able to write for the lowest common denominator”, which ought to be pushing the envelope for his beloved troglodytes.

               ‘That fu – er, that perv who killed that schoolie’s in here,’ announced one student, that midget in the hoodie who left the classroom with a profound comment at each lesson.

               Louis’s head came up like a shot, and he pointed to the student.

     This may still end well for the troglodytes, IF they can keep their mouths shut, because Luma is not a man to mix it with.

Another Dangerous Lighthouse!

I like this subject, as you can tell.  Today we look at the unpronouncable Waugoshance lighthouse on Lake Michigan, which was built in 1850.  Art!

     It's looking a little the worse for wear, admittedly.  It went out of service in 1912, when two other lighthouses of better quality construction and utility made it obsolete.  During the Second Unpleasantness it was used for bombing practice, as a result of which everything wooden was consumed by flames.  The waves in this part of Lake Michigan are especially severe, as are the frequent storms, and the 'crib' the lighthouse sits upon has been extensively eroded.  People who tried to save and renovate it gave up, as the costs would have been north of £200,000 just to stabilise the crib.  So at some point soon the whole thing will collapse.  Wicked!

In better days

Finally -

"GARLIC BINBAGS" it says on the Shopping Notice slate near the back door.  Conrad, of course, couldn't help but wonder if there's a market for scented bin bags, and if ever Asda or Tesco start selling them, I want royalties.

     Well, there we have it, hit the Compositional Ton, and I need a shave, so that's it for today to date.  Pip pip!

*  This is a lie! <the hideous truth courtesy Mister Hand>

**  Not today.