Be Careful
Be very careful, lest you invoke my ire and end up as a cloud of radioactive vapour, for the Remote Nuclear Detonator has not been used today. Yet.
Because NO, that title is not a reference to the epic television series "Band Of Brothers", which Your Humble Scribe has on DVD and still re-watches occasionally, but only occasionally as it's plenty long. Art!
"These tourists are kinda hostile, y'know?"
Of course - obviously! - the wehraboos hate hate hate it, because the Teutons get roundly beaten, which, amazingly enough, is what happened in real life.
ANYWAY that's not what we're talking about in this Intro. Leaping onto a completely different narrative track, you may remember Conrad mentioning his Fitbit at times. This was a digital device which tracked how many steps you'd done per day, plus other guff about relaxing or exercise, or - most important of all - a stopwatch function. Art!
This is what mine looked like, as it refused to charge and eventually died the death of defunct digital devices, meaning it got chucked in the bin. No sentimentality, that's me. Having gotten used to the device, I ordered a new model, 'Band 4', which is where we get today's title from, as it will unfailingly pester you about exercise and your blood oxygen levels and whether you put clean underwear on that morning. Art!
 |
| Bandbox? |
This one has a snazzy colour display and updates your step count in real time, and has so far been consistent in coming alive when Conrad moves his wrist, whereas the old Fitbit was very temperamental about displaying. It not only has a Stopwatch function, the stopwatch counts tenths of seconds. Art!
 |
| Gosh, what hairy hands Conrad has! |
Obviously not the Stopwatch function, and a little fuzzy thanks to how awkward it is to take a photograph of your starboard wrist with your port hand. The strap has lots of holes in, unlike the old model, so I may be able to avoid getting a sweat rash again.
Eagle-eyed viewers that you are, the name "Huawei" will have immediately jumped out at you from the box packaging, so yes, this device is a product of The Populous Dictatorship. Doubtless full of sinister monitoring chips that will report back on what Your Humble Scribe is up to, or what he's typing.
A real band box
Motley! Dig out a record for me. "Music From Big Pink", I feel like wallowing in a bit of Sixties retrospective.
This One Rambles A Tad
So what's new? Remember that Cryptic solution I brought up about "ASPHALT"? There was more to that crossword than bitumen and minerals, as evinced by the picture below. Art!
The clue went along the lines of "Source of liquorice (3,5)" and the solution was a kind of inspired guess, as I'd no clue what "OLD SARUM" meant, whether it was a township, an edible dish of stewed turnip and mangel-wurzel or an ancient author similar to the Venerable Bede.
That first guess is the closest, and if Art will put down his coke sandwich -
This is what's left of Old Sarum, it being a defended locality from the Iron Age onwards. You can see the outer ditch, which had a curtain wall around it when OS was a going concern, as well as the motte that Normans constructed. There was a castle atop the mound, and you can also see where the cathedral once stood. If we can dig up a picture of it during it's heyday - Art!
From the beginning of the thirteenth century it was supplanted by New Sarum, further out on the plain, which became better known as Salisbury. When I say 'supplanted' I mean 'dismantled to build New Sarum'.
Ah, you want to know about the liquorice, don't you? Bassett's Liquorice Allsorts hail from Sheffield, and the only online trace to OS I could find was as below. Art!
Conrad thinks this is wilfully obscure if the Cryptic compilers expect people to solve the clue on the strength of this. I had no trouble, because I'm a Cryptic expert, I'm just thinking of
Beautiful Beautiful Schadenfreude
You remember schadenfreude, don't you? One of the rare occasions when the Teuton language is compact and concise: 'malicious enjoyment of other people's misery' and in Conrad's world that usually means the ballfoot game, so let Art illuminate us. Art?
 |
| 2559 Comments |
Conrad has perused a sample of these Comments, and most of them seem to be gloating that Manuted were beaten by Migglesbouroug, with invective being ladled over the Manuted in creative fashion, as the BBC will remove comments with obvious swearing present. O - Comments now up to 3,595.
That, lest you be unaware, is irony laid on with a JCB ("Backhoe" for our South Canadian friends).
Let's Have More "Torment"
Whilst we're on that particular theme. If you recall, Eric Miller was being tormented (that title reference again!) by the spirit of the girl he'd murdered, and it's not looking good for him. Don't forget, this stuff is pretty dark, and it's going to get darker still.
The
thing made a slobbering rasp. Any person
speaking like that could only have a major speech impairment or a seriously
damaged jaw –
- then the covers were slowly
dragged off him, despite his desperate clinging to them. When his face was free of the covers the
sitting-thing leaned forward, to judge by the change in weight he felt.
Eric kept his eyes shut.
‘Boo!’ said a cheery teenaged
voice.
Eric opened his eyes. A vivacious teenaged girl looked down at him,
grinning the grin of a cat with a mouse.
In less than a second her face contorted into a wrecked, rotting,
collapsed parody of a person, eyes fallen in, wildly flapping tongue
threatening to hit him in the face.
For the second time Eric screamed
so loudly his throat hurt.
‘Are you decent?’ asked Jen from
outside Louis’s bedroom door.
‘Would it stop you if I wasn’t?’
he countered.
‘Eww! That’s gross!’ she replied. ‘Yes it would. I don’t fancy you.’
Louis dived into bed, making the
bedsprings creak in protest.
‘Okay, you can come in.’
Her ability to walk through solid
objects never ceased to be a source of wonderment to Louis. Now she sat on the end of the bed, checking
his reading material.
‘Ghormenghast? For amusement? Louis, that’s sick!’
They bantered a little about
literature, then Louis went for the meat of the matter.
‘How is our least favourite human
being?’
‘Frightened. I scared him by pulling the sheets off his
bed.’
Louis recalled how terrified he’d
been when she pulled the same trick on him.
Involuntary gooseflesh came up on his arms.
Brrrr!
Finally -
Conrad's practically non-existent sense of smell is picking up scents from the kitchen, meaning they're cooking up tea, and incidentally making me hungry. Or nudging my greed, one of the two. I did finish off the sandwich from last night while composing the Intro so I can manage for a little longer. Aren't there Onion Ring crisps lying around the Sekrit Layr?
No comments:
Post a Comment