Aren't I So Trendy?
Your Humble Scribe had heard of this word game previously, and considered that it was probably along the lines of Scrabble or whatever that knock-off version calls itself. Word With Fiends? Whatever. It was perhaps inevitable that a person so keen on words and puns and cryptic crosswords, Codewords and Skeletons would eventually have a crack at it.
Well, Conrad didn't realise that you can use letters more than once. Realising that came as a real lightbulb moment. Art!
After getting over that hurdle (hence today's title) it wasn't too hard, especially since I am one.
Mention of one word game naturally leads to another: Codewords, and the always-pushing-the-boundaries compilers continue to throw in the obscure, the foreign and the obsolete. Why, one from last week had FAJITA, BHAJI and SNOZZCUMBER all in a neat cellular arrangement. Let us commence with foaming at the moth*!
"UMBRAGE": A.k.a. Conrad's default condition. Consider me in a state of umbrage until I tell you I'm not. My Collins Concise defines it as "Displeasure or resentment, offending" and it comes from the Latin <hack spit> "Umbraticus", meaning "To be in the shade". So, Conrad is officially a shady character**. Art!
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| Close enough |
"EXOTISM": This one is so obscure it's not even in my Collins Concise. Your Humble Scribe had to resort to teh Interwebz, which states "Originating in a foreign country" or, alternatively, "Having a strange allure and attraction".
 |
| Marvellous marvellous mangosteens |
"EXHORTER": This is getting more ridiculous than ever. Whoever uses the term "Exhort" nowadays? Yes yes yes, it may have been the go-to word for "Rant at a person to spur them onwards" back in the eighteenth century, not so much in this the twenty-first. Besides which, where would you ever read or speak this word? Most people would mistake it for a typo, thinking is ought to be EXPORTER. Art! I exhort you to come up with an appropriate image.
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| Exhort to export! |
O! That was what it was called, silly me, it must be my cynical and mistrustful self coming through, who would have thought it. Art!
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| NOTHING TO DO WITH SCRABBLE AT ALL EVER |
We shall call a halt to the Codeword analysis there, my blood pressure has spiked thanks to the contents of my veins reaching the temperature of lava.
Peculiarly Apt
As you should surely know by now, our Pictorial Staff here at BOOJUM! consists of Art, whom we pay in coal, anthracite, coke and - for a treat - nuclear fuel rods, all of which he finds delicious. We cherish this bafune, who happens to be a Neanderthal. Yes, really.
So it was with no little interest that we picked up an article at the BBC's news pages about Neanderthals and their heritage. Art!
Art's grandad
The assumption has been that the Neans were wiped out very quickly by Hom. Sap. after the latter arrived in Europe from Africa, because nothing says "intolerance, brutality and sheer wickedness" than Hom. Sap. Except this seems not to have been the case in real life. Hom. Sap. arrived at least 10,000 years earlier than realised, and co-existed with the Neans for millennia. Given that there are traces of Nean DNA in Hom. Sap., some of that 'co-existed' was pretty <ahem> 'intimate' shall we say.
Someone needs a haircut
These finds come from cave excavations in France, which show that the Us Vs. Them school of thought needs to put more nuance into their case, since both groups used the cave at different times over a long period. Sorry, no mass extinctions with oodles of blood.
Meanwhile, Back In The Land Of Fiction
Don't forget, people, none of that frothy nonsense here, O no. Although what follows in "Tormentor" is a little poignant.
A
farewell, it turned out.
Jennifer came out of the kitchen,
looking radiant, lacking the air of maliciousness he’d noticed over the
previous few days.
‘What, no tea?’ joked Louis.
The spirit shook her head, not
speaking. She sat next to Louis and gave
him a hug, making his skin tingle where she touched him.
‘I’m moving on,’ she said. Louis wrinkled his brow.
‘What does that mean?’
‘I’m not bound here any longer,
not now that Eric Miller is dead.’
Blinking owlishly in surprise, he
looked at her, breath catching in his chest.
‘You’re leaving?’
She nodded, her expression a
mixture of sadness and joy.
‘All spirits do, eventually. My time has come.’
Louis stood up and walked over to
the television, looking down at his feet, then turning to the spirit.
‘You were like a second daughter
to me after Natasha died. I’ll miss you
when you leave, but I’ve been given a second chance to say goodbye, and a
chance to come to terms with losing you.’
Jennifer’s spirit started to cry,
tears dripping off her cheeks and vanishing in mid-air.
‘Don’t say nice things,
Luma! It makes it harder to go.’
Wordlessly he held out his arms,
and she came to give him a hug.
‘Goodbye,’ she whispered. He felt the familiar electric chill as she
hugged him tight, then the feeling faded and his arms closed on nothing.
No, we're nowhere near finished, there's another 35 pages to go, since you ask.
What's In A Name?
The shop next to The Pleasant Inn has been a laundromat, a piano shop, a supplier of social carers and now has a new iteration, and this time Conrad has evidence for you. Art!
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| 'Panthera' |
Hmmmmmm. Notice that there's nothing to give away just what 'Panthera' does or supplies. Panthers? Hardly likely, I bet you need a ton of permits and certification to import big cats into Perfidious Albion. Besides which, it would probably call itself "Pantherz". Hmmmm with a touch of Google-fu I notice that there is a charitable organisation called "Panthera" which is dedicated to preserving and maintaining 'all 40 big cat species'. Or - Art!
Take your pick
"Lazerpig"
Conrad is unsure whether or not he's mentioned this Youtube channel before or not. Firstly, STRICTLY NSFW because of the swearing, both on-screen and in the audio. Hilarious, however. Last night Conrad watched his video on the T34 tank, and how it's nowhere near as good as legend and the Sinisters would have you believe. Art!
Ouch
I know, the Sinisters lying, who'd have believed it! Not Dimya. If Tsar Putin watched Lazerpig's video he'd break down in tears before having a hundred people arrested and thrown into a gulag, even if he had to invent the gulag himself from scratch with
ANYWAY the photo above illustrates merely one of LP's criticisms of Sinister tanks; they heat-treated their metals to a ridiculously high Brinnell rating, which did make them extremely hard, yes. It also made them extremely brittle, with the result that in combat they would often shatter apart. A tank with the robustness of an Easter egg is not a good tank. Art!
In this picture the whole front glacis has broken. I shall stop here, I can hear Dimya weeping from where I sit. We may come back to this, it's great to tweak the tails of Krasnaboos***.
Finally -
We've hit the compositional ton, so all that's left to do is post this and hoik off to get lunch. That Beef and Cheese stew is really rather tasty, you know.
* Why not? Moths eat your clothes.
** But we knew that already.
*** The Commie version of Wehraboos.
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