Brian Of Venus!

 Yes Yes Yes Yesterday It Was 'Brain Of Venus'

You remember, the cover illustration from Thrilling Rocket-Jockey Wonder Tales or whatever the magazine was.  Hmmmmm you know, that sounds like a good name for an album, one with a retro cover.  Not sure which band I'll assign to thi

     ANYWAY yes, the story was set on Venus, and - who's this?  Art!

Brian of Venus!

     The story hails from 1937, when the common assumption was that Venus would be verdant and wet, thanks to the total cloud coverage.  By divers means we need not go into, the brain of the Chinese criminal Lu Sang is removed from his body - still alive, because the science of nineteen ninety-nine is awesomely advanced! - and ends up on Venus when the spaceship it was being escorted by crashes there.

     In reality, said brain would have been crushed into a protein puree instantly it met the atmosphere of Venus, as well as being rendered into a slimy remnant by the incredibly acidic airs.  John Russell Fearn - the author, do keep up! - has it that the vibrant and fecund nature of Venus allows the brain of Lu Sang - whom I have decided to call Brian for no other reason than that I can - to expand to enormous dimensions.  Art!

     Of course - obviously! - the Brain Of Brian turns out to be eeeeevil beyond belief, and is intent on destroying the Universe, because heck even a disembodied brain needs a hobby.  Pluto and Mars are destroyed and Earth is inundated by an invasion of protoplasm, until our plucky heroes blow up Venus and get rid of Lu Sang.  Conrad thinks this is going a bit far; a remotely-directed missile would have done the job just as definitely, and with Mars and Pluto already gone, bankable real estate in the Solar System must be at a premium.  Art!

Ooopsie.

     Unusually for a bit of space opera like this, the heroic protagonist gets killed at the end I DON'T CARE ABOUT SPOILERS IT'S EIGHTY-FIVE YEARS OLD, which might be down to the author being British, because our authors like to bring readers down to earth with a bump.  Had he been South Canadian I bet there'd be angelic choirs and a memorial parade, a bank note with his face on and a public park named after him.

     Motley, I feel an urge to hear Wings back when they were good.  Put "Venus And Mars' on the turning-table!

Let's Wheel On "The War Illustrated"

And not dilly-dally about it, because it'll soon be time to wheel on photos from the next edition, and we can't have an item-jam, can we?  Art!

     For your information, the Mareth Line was a series of fortifications running from the Mediterranean inland along the border between the French colony of Tunisia and the Italian colony of Libya.  The French, not especially trusting nor fond of the Italians, built it just in case Mussolini got the expansionist itch again.

     At top you see a lot of RAF ground crew prepping a stretch of desert to be an airfield, which amounts to picking up rocks and chucking them into potholes.  No need for grading or levelling plant, the whole place is flat as Brian's Brain on Venus.  Next you see evidence that winter storms in the desert could deposit an awful lot of water in a very short timespan, and these trucks have most unwisely chosen a low-lying area to park.  Well, now they are submarines, and the crew are sailors.

     Next up are Ford CMP trucks a-bursting with troops from the 51st Highland Division, all of whom carried a piece of chalk.  This meant that, when they came across kit captured by another party, they could scribble their initials upon it and claim the honour.  Yes, this is very naughty, and yes, they did it in the First World 'Special' Military Operation, too.

     Lastly you have Monty, minus headgear, and General Leclerc, who was a fighting general to stand alongside the fightingest of fighting generals, and who had the good sense to not get killed in action (ring a bell at all?).  Art!

     I think we'll call a halt to TWI there as the photographs that follow need copious amounts of explanation and verbiage, and we're well ahead on the word count.

More Of Those Sony Photographs

Sorry if we seem to whizzing through these at pace, it's just I want to get them out of the way so we can go back to more BBC Themed photographs, as yes they have put up another category.  Enough of that, let's get onto this.  Art!

     The blurb holds that this village in Kurdistan looks beautiful at dusk.  NOT IF YOU'RE THE TURKISH GOVERNMENT! as the very mention of 'Kurd' sends them into a frothing frenzy.  I believe the nursery rhyme 'Little Miss Tuffet' is banned there, as it mentions curds.  The Turkish Embassy in London gets very nervous when the council there goes on about road improvements, because it's easy to mis-hear 'Kerb' when you're paranoid.

      ANYWAY yeah, nice photo.

Bring On The Torment

Yes another extract from "Tormentor".  If you recall, Luma had been joined by the spirit of a dead actress, who was trying to earn brownie points with Heaven by helping out mortal souls.

Looking alternately left and right, they made it to his house without any sinister attack, the Dark Ones doubtless still having dinner.

               ‘I intend to have my tea.  You can stay and watch a mortal batchelor cook odd things.’

               The spirit snorted.

               ‘You’re back home and safe, which is what I had to watch for.  Still, I feel uneasy.  Watch yourself.’

               Then she vanished.  Louis considered the past half hour and began to wonder if perhaps he hadn’t really gone completely round the twist. 

               Damn!  I should have got her surname!  That would let me look her up on the internet. 

               For tea he put together an omelette, managing to overcook the bottom and leave the top underdone.

               ‘Still it keeps body and soul together.  Talking to yourself again, Louis?  Why yes.  At least I make sense to me.  For the present.’

               In what had started as a small check on the pseudo-spiritual material on television, he spent an hour in mocking the fake psychics and spiritualists on various channels.  Hilarious if not very productive – the Prof would doubtless disapprove.  One day perhaps his path and one of the fakers would cross; which would be amusing for one party and unpleasant for the other.

               The Professor arrived from the shadows, gliding in from the back room silently.

               ‘Sober tonight,’ began Louis.

               ‘So I see.  May I begin?’

               Louis made an expansive gesture of permission, feeling generous.

               ‘Thank you.  I need to know what methods of defence you have taken against the Dark Ones.’

               This unusually direct approach by the Professor made Louis instantly suspicious.  Perhaps he might not have been so apprehensive had Yvonne not warned him already, not to mention the lack of long words with a Latin root in the question.

     Ooo-er Matron!  What's going on?  Sorry, I've got no idea, it's ages since I last read this guff so Conrad is as in the dark as you are.  I suppose we'll find out tomorrow.

Finally -

And here we are with Conrad's considered opinion on what's going down in Ukraine, not the least of which is Ruffian morale.  Consider this, as Your Humble Scribe has calculated, the Ruffians appear to be suffering 1,000 casualties PER DAY on average.  This is possibly on the low side, as better-informed NATO sources reckon on closer to 1,400 per day, which is simply staggering.  Art!

The Stan of Afghan

     Consider, if you will, the Ruffian <ahem> 'Sinister' presence in Afghanistan, where they spent ten years not being able to defeat an insurgency.  Total casualties we shall round up slightly to 70,000 across ten years.  Which is TWENTY PER DAY, four of those being fatalities.

     It's actually a lot worse for the Ruffians in Ukraine today than those figures suggest, because the vast proportion of casualties are amongst what we call the 'teeth arms', the grunts at the front line who do the fighting and dying.  Remember that gloomy Ruffian general who predicted a Ruffian military occupation of Ukraine for forty years?  Even if the casualty totals are no worse than in Afghanistan, they would still total over a quarter of a million.

     So - let us praise the advisers whom Jonesy consulted before planning his invasion - Art!

Order of Stalin for all of you!