I Lied

Don't Look So Surprised

You ought to know by now that BOOJUM! oscillates wildly between a touchstone for the truth and the unscrupulous deceit committed when we think it'll bring in more traffic.  The very definition of venal, that us NO THAT IS NOT RUDE GO LOOK IT UP!  

     ANYWAY, you ought to recall (if you know what's good for you*) that yesteryon we had up a pulp magazine cover as the usual click-bait Intro picture, although rather worryingly Conrad's face came up when I re-posted this morning.  Conrad is no oil painting and his fizzog is liable to send small children away crying.  Art!

As is this, frankly

     I thought I'd just throw that one in there to mix it up a little, and hopefully keep my own face out of the picture.  One has to wonder that this ghastly apparition has no face left, yet it has hale and hearty fingers, fully flexible and articulated.  Nor does it have eyes.  In fact, how can it even hunt people down, considering a lack of eyes, nose and (presumably) ears?  This is wh

     ANYWAY before we get too far off track, let us return to yesteryon's picture.  Art!

     I over-analysed this image as only Conrad can, so I shan't say any more about it, except that I did subsequently Google for it, just to see if the title brought up any interesting or salacious facts.  The former I would share, the latter I would not.  The "I lied" bit of today's title is due to me not being remotely honest about doing this whilst I was composing that day's blog, because once again venal.  To wit:

“The Last Two Alive!” by sci-fi maestro Alfred Coppel. Could he stop total galactic carnage? Aram Jerrold had been betrayed by the woman he loved. Convicted of treason, he was now faced with a death sentence of the worst kind—death by slow disintegration on a prison planet light years away. Yet by a strange twist of fate, Jerrold found himself in the middle of a strange conspiracy—a conspiracy led by a small group of rebels with a desperate plan to save the galaxy from total destruction

     Take this with a large dose of sodium chloride.  I've never heard of Alfred Coppel, which is probably a pseudonym anyway, and this blurb comes from a reprint 7 years old.  Do you see re-issues of his works anywhere?  NO!

     At least we know that TLTA does, indeed, refer to that cover illustration.  Thank heavens we got that straightened out.

CAUTION!  Endangered species

     Motley, fetch me some milk!

Conrad - Still Seething At Codewords

For a different reason this time.  Don't worry, we'll get back to the traditional Frothing Nitric Ire at ridiculously obscure words that went out of use shortly after the Barf Of Avon kicked the bucket. That, or scien

     ANYWAY Your Humble Scribe has solved hundreds, if not thousands, of Codewords.  Imagine that I've done one per day for the last five years, which will average out the Sunday ones where I tackle three at a time** and the hollow emptiness of a day without any.  That comes in at 1,825 Codewords.  Art!

     That second Codeword took ages longer to solve than it ought to, because I sat there thinking "No, they can't possibly have the same letter/number combination twice in a row."

     Except it appears that YES THEY CAN.  Do you know what the odds of this happening by chance are?  Of course you don't.  Let me explicate and elucidate.

61,561,196,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1.  

     Clearly, the universe is trying to tell me something.  I wonder what?

Another Photo Competition!

I do appreciate the BBC's commitment to providing free blog content.  This time it's on the theme of "Winter" and the photographs have been taken by members of a curious BBC-affiliated band called "Weather Watchers".  Art!

Courtesy of Soggy Bottom.  I'm not making this up.

     This spectacular and eerie image is of the Firth and Queensferry bridges during a foggy spell.  Just imagine all those wretchedly gloomy drivers and pedestrians (and train passengers) hunching their shoulders under a sombre pall of wet, whilst the crew and passengers of airliners smugly smile and don sunglasses.  Conrad is unsure exactly what makes this picture different from Summer - perhaps the sun is lower in the sky?

Bring The Torment

O very well, if you insist.  I cut the extract short and missed a natural stopping point yesteryon, as otherwise there'd have been altogether too much of a good thing.  TORMENTOR of course, Dog Buns your eyes for querying!

After a snack he set to on his painting task, getting the job done without messing the lounge carpet up, and remembering that he really did need a new coffee table.  The spirits who preferred writing messages to appearing in the – flesh? – had left sympathetic comments on his horrid experience of the previous night, scribbled on the sheets of printer paper.  A few gloated over “Pistolero” getting a large lump of silver right in his ethereal guts; the consensus seemed to be that it wouldn’t be enough to destroy the spirit, but it would definitely injure him, probably irreperably, certainly painfully.

               Tonight Louis was extra-specially careful not to remove the crucifix, not even when he took a shower.  The realisation that he’d been very lucky yesterday still hadn’t quite sunk in, although some students and staff at college noticed a distracted air to him.

 

               ‘I don’t know about it.  He makes me feel – uneasy,’ Paula informed her colleague.  ‘And we can only do tests in our spare time, and if we get permission to use the lab.’

               She sipped her tea in the science staff’s corner of the staffroom, looking with a touch of wonder at Nige.  Previously he’d only tolerated her interest in parapsychology, and that just barely.  Now he wanted to try Subject M again.

               ‘Don’t whisper, everyone will think we’re plotting.’  Indeed several of the other science staff were nosily paying attention.

               ‘We are.’

               ‘Yes but I don’t want to get unwelcome attention.  If the college admin find out what we’re doing it could mean a disciplinary.’

               Paula stirred her tea and dipped a biscuit.

               ‘Why the sudden conversion to an interest in parascience?’

     O sorry, I mentioned 'painting' in yesterday's post and had already excised it as being the part adding too much length.  Now you know.

Thank You Steve And Oscar

Yes, thank you SO MUCH!  Last night Your Humble Scribe had a vivid and horrid dream about sinisterly proliferating nanotechnology that would have made a good episode of "The Outer Limits".  If you're not well-behaved you may well get a description.  Art!

Close enough

     No more nanotech for Conrad.

     Wellllll not for a while, anyway.  It may take as many as three or four snifters of gin to get settled tonight.
     

Finally -

O woe shall be us.  My colleagues and I have been allocated to answering calls on the pay query line tomorrow, as our store brethren get vision of their payslips tomorrow.  So too Friday, when pay actually hits their bank accounts.  Why the woe?  Because this payslip has all the year-end details, making it more complex than usual.  Not only that, it's for the period after the Kronos recovery, making it more complex still.  Those Dog Buns Nork hackers and their meddling with things man was not meant to know!  

     When I take over we shall plant anti-matter bombs along the entire periphery of this miserable nation and detonate them, flinging it into orbit, so that people can point and laugh.  Yes, the UN will use space shuttles to rescue the population, but their doorways will be only two feet wide.

Only one person will worry

     And with that, Vulnavia, having offended everybody everywhere, our job is done.

*  It's not just me who threatens viewers to make them return, is it?

**  You may gasp politely here