A Nonsense Of Numbers

If This Were A Crossword -

Then you'd be pondering whether this was about ordinal or cardinal figures, and not getting anywhere, until you realise that it refers to anaesthetics.  Well, here at BOOJUM! we're going to double-bluff you and really talk about figures, not ether.  Or whatever they use to stun people into being able to have a tooth extracted or a limb removed without screaming themselves to death.  Art!

Nothing to do with numbers, I just felt like it

     Actually there were a lot of pulp titles that came up when I Googled "Sinister Pulp cover" except most of them seemed to belong to the magazine 'Sinister', which featured young ladies not wearing a lot in peril, saucy bordering on NSFW, so I shall only replicate a small cover.  Art!

As big as it gets, you slobbering perverts

     As for that original cover, it looks like Ron Turner artwork, underlined by the fact that the price is in pre-decimal British LSD NO SNIGGERING AT THE BACK THERE! coinage system.  Note that the space-ship is a-bristle with guns and has claws for an undercarriage system, and that the astronauts all tote weapons.  Probably South Canadian.

    ANYWAY back to numbers.  You should be aware that the blog recently passed it's ninth birthday, which is entirely your fault because you're still reading it, and in some numbers.  Art!

     Imagine that, 4001 posts and not an ounce of sense in any of them.  The South Canadians cannot get enough of BOOJUM! because we only mildly roast them; quite why the Ruffians love a blog that openly mocks Tsar Poutine is another matter.  Unless it's all those recently-unemployed FSB officers looking for validation?  Art!

The world according to BOOJUM!

     FYI the South Canadians muster 123 viewers and the Ruffians 99.  I chose to go with a Snip and a description instead of a photograph full of synchrony lines.
     Don't fall over yourselves adding a congratulatory Comment or two*.

How Is This Man Still Alive?

I refer, of course - obviously! - to Colin Furze, the archetypal English eccentric inventor, whose inventions frequently involve explosions and very sharp objects moving at speed.  He has finally arrived, because now he's so famous/infamous/deranged that the BBC has written an article about him.  Art!

     You may already know that Ol' Col has constructed an underground bunker come Man-Cave under his back garden, to a very high standard.  The local council became aware of this and politely enquired if Col had applied for planning permission for his tunnel?

     Er no, came the embarrassed response.  So Col applied for retrospective permission, and got it.  So by the time he's done there will be a secret tunnel running from the back of his kitchen cupboard down into the bunker.  Yes yes yes, the neighbours might scoff now, but who's going to be queuing up at Col's door if Bloaty Gas Tout goes stark raving bonkers and gives The Order?

Carefully planned

     You never know, the parish council might cash in on Ol' Col's mighty civil engineering project and put up tourist signs.

Conrad: Still Pretty Seethy

What's new?  Your Humble Scribe had to put up with a late bus this morning, then the 83 never turned up, and the 84 goes out on an immense loop of 129 parsecs that takes in Hollinwood, and there were scads of people waiting at every stop, a sure indicator that at least one bus hadn't turned up.  By the time I got into the office I was a simmering pudding of evil intent.

     Then I had to solve the Codeword.

     "EXPUNGING": YOU WHAT!  A word that went out of use after the First Unpleasantness, I bet.  Hang on - Art!

     See?  I wasn't far wrong.  Yeah, I bet it's the kind of word that Charles Dickens liked, the fearful piker.  It means "To delete or erase, to blot out, to obliterate" and whilst you might think Conrad's vapourising of vile Codeword compilers is the very definition, I have a better image.  Art?

Expunging Saruman from Theoden

     I am still Bah!

"ZYGOTIC":  You see?  You see what I have to put up with? <gnashing of teeth, rending of garments>.  Collins Concise!  "Of a cell resulting from the union of an ovum and spermatozoan".  From Greek, pretty obviously, the dirty curs.  Art?

All you're getting

"GAMETE":  WHAT ARE WE SUDDENLY ALL REPRODUCTIVE BIOLOGISTS NOW?  Conrad pretty sure this is reproductive biology at play.  Allow the CC to elucidate.  "A haploid germ cell that fuses with another during fertilisation.

     No clearer at this end.  In fact it raises more questions, because what the Kreplach! is a "Haploid Germ Cell"?  Sounds like an invading alien from Thirties pulp fiction <see Intro>.  It sounds sleazy, seedy and is almost certainly NSFW, so that's as far as we go.  Art!

     Georgei Gamov.  That's as close as your getting, matey.

Meanwhile, Back In North Africa -

I know you're on tenterhooks about whether this will be more of "The War Illustrated" or "The Sea Of Sand".  Tenterhooks, positively tenterhooks!

     It's TSOS.  Chin up, chaps, I've got enough material here to keep going for months.  Years, even.

The mechanical dog merely sat on the floor, inert.

‘He’s not been active for several minutes,’ explained the Doctor.  ‘I rather suspect the Time Lords have deliberately rendered him inoperable.’

Doffing his hat, the Doctor activated the TARDIS doors and stepped outside, gesturing for Sarah to join him.

‘Hot,’ she said, noticing the baking heat instantly.  Her linen dungarees might be a bit warm for this weather.  Luckily her tee-shirt was cool enough.  The Doctor remained in his coat, hat and scarf, seemingly unaware of the roasting heat.

‘Single yellow dwarf,’ he said, pointing to the sun.  He unrolled a yo-yo and managed a few desultory casts.  ‘One gee.’

‘Earth?’ guessed Sarah.  The Doctor shrugged his shoulders.

‘We don’t know that there aren’t three suns just below the horizon.’

‘ “And all around the lone and level sands stretched bare –“,’ recited Sarah, casting an appreciative eye over the landscape.  The terrain consisted of pea gravel and sand, on an underlying rock substrate.  No features could be discerned in the hostile vista, which shimmered and danced with heat, casting back the rays of the sun like a crude stone mirror.

‘Ozymandias.  Shelley.  The Lake District.  A greater contrast couldn’t exist, could it?’ asked the Doctor, looking in all directions at the featureless grey-brown nothing that confronted the two travellers.  They took a direction at random and began walking, keeping close together for company.  Sarah later felt sure that at least an hour had passed, even if her watch insisted that they only left the TARDIS environs five minutes before.

Ah yes.  To paraphrase a popular recounting of the desert war: "You get into your slit trench in the middle of a sandstorm at ten in the morning.  You spend the next four hours sitting there.  When you check your watch again it's a quarter past ten."

Finally -

We're bumping up against the Adjusted Compositional Ton, so not a lot needed to make the 1,200 word mark.  O I did spend a good 5 minutes hacking a chunk of frozen Burgoo off an enormous frozen lump of it, in order to take the fraction in for lunch tomorrow.  I had, you see, been unwise enough to freeze the entire tub all in one big plastic container, when it would have been much simpler in the long run if I'd done four individual frozen portions.  Instead it was hack, saw, rotate through 180º and repeat.  Art!

Conrad versus the Burgoo

*  This, lest ye be unaware, is irony.  Cast irony.