Dear All, Having An Offal Time Of It

Ha!  Do You See - O You Do

 Bear with me on this, it'll take quite a bit of background and a couple of photos, a bucket of quick-setting glue, sand and bit of Sprong that I took yesteryon.  I've no idea why I took the first one, it's passing rare for me to take pictures of a Codeword even when complete.  Perhaps I needed to feel a sense of validation?  Enough waffle, let Art work his magix*.

     "HAVOC" seemed to be the only possible solution for the upper port word.  However, doing that meant that the next but one down was "O_ _ A _" and I couldn't work out a solution that worked for this.

     Doubt crept in.  Could HAVOC be wrong?  If I transposed the "A" into an "E" then a viable solution could be either OFFER or OTTER which made sense, except in that case HAVOC was definitely wrong.  Art!

     Here an aside.  Those chaps you see above are the stunt team HAVOC, who performed the larger-scale stunts in the BBC's premier dramamentary "Doctor Who".  Whenever you see Sarn't Major Benton anxiously reporting to Captain Yates "It's no good sir, we just can't hold them", the valiant UNIT troopers dying in the background were all portrayed by HAVOC.

      Where were we?  O yes -

    Your Humble Scribe had recourse to his Longmans Crossword Key, looking for 5-letter words that ended in "-OC" and Hey Pesto! I found one - "MEDOC".  Never heard of it?  A region of France, that produces a wine of the same name.  AHA!  That would validate OTTER and OFFER.  Art!

     So off I went across the Codeword, amending with a big black Sharpie, until twenty minutes later a lightning bolt of revelation hit me.  You may have seen the results on Facebook last night.

     OFFAL!  So - HAVOC was correct  Kreplach!  Dog Buns!  Great Squeaking Bats! <note how we remain SFW here>.  Back I go with the big black Sharpie again, correcting the corrections.  Grrrrr.  Going back to 'Doctor Who', that Dog Buns Longman's Crossword Key threw me astray almost as much as did Wexler's discovery of the double nexus Zygma particle.  Yes, it was that bad.  Art!

     It took ages to complete that Codeword BUT I PREVAILED.  Art!

     Of course - obviously! - I do Codewords for the sheer enjoyment of it.

The Hedgehog From Hades YES AGAIN

Conrad sat down this morning and mentally kicked himself for neglecting to bring into the "Wouldn't It Be Cool" blog another type of Hedgehog, and in fact one that he'd read about in "Why The Allies Won" even the day before.  Art!

Hoggy, with puny humans for scale

     This was a species of spigot mortar, where the bomb has a hollow tail, which sits on a pole - the spigot - that you can see above as these infernal engines were being loaded.  They were an anti-submarine weapon, firing in salvoes of twenty-four at a time, and were propelled forwards from the vessel firing them, landing in a big spread on the ocean surface.  A single one would turn a U-boat inside out like a tin of dog food.  Two would turn it into iron filings.

     How effective were they?  Jolly deadly!  They weren't brought into service until 1943 and they sank 47 u-boats.  Art!

This, gentle reader, explains the 'Hedgehog' name

Following On From That -

We can only commence with "On The Water", that themed photographic exhibition that the BBC so generously provided me with.  Although they never re-instated all those links to photography pages that mysteriously vanished months ago.  Art!

First person to say 'Smoke' will be Remote Nuclear Detonated.

     Courtesy Gary Framingham.  This was taken early in the morning on the River Chet in Norfolk, which explains the mist.  A touch eerie in the absence of other Hom. Sap.

Aaaand From Water To "The Sea Of Sand"

As you should surely recall, we left The Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith in a TARDIS that seemed to be operating with more than it's usual capriciousness.  This turns out to have a very good reason.  Read on to find out.

Thinking hard, the Doctor chewed on a jelly-baby.  Without looking he knew it was a green one – chemical addictive T53 for the colouring.  His taste buds interpreted the various flavourings, the gelatine, the dusting of icing sugar, the resistant exterior and pliant interior.  Very conducive to forensic thought, chewing a jelly-baby, he had long maintained.

‘Is the TARDIS malfunctioning?’ asked Sarah, her voice coming from a long way off, or so it seemed to the meditating Doctor.

‘Hmm?’ he replied.  ‘Oh.  Jelly-baby?’ he said, offering the bag.  Seeing Sarah’s look of concern he abruptly returned to the here-and-now.  ‘Malfunctioning?  No, certainly not.  At the moment it is operating under the control of an external influence.’  His expression remained annoyed, instead of shading into worried.

‘The Time Lords?’ guessed Sarah.  She’d seen this once before, when they had been involuntarily diverted to Skaro by the Time Lords.

‘Very perspicacious.  Yes, the Time Lords – those interfering Gallifreyan nincompoops!’ replied the Doctor, his voice increasing in volume as he spoke.  ‘Nincompoops!’ he repeated, looking around the TARDIS in a full circle as if for an audience.

‘I heard you the first time,’ complained Sarah.

‘Ah, but you don’t know what “nincompoop” means in Old High Gallifreyan!” replied the Doctor, a look of supreme mischief on his face.

Sarah bit the inside of her lip.  No, she didn’t know, and she didn’t want to know.  What she did want to know was – where were they going?

‘If the Time Lords are steering us, where are we going?’

Her companion gave a shrug.

And thereby hangs a tale, and hopefully your attention, too.

Once again, nobody has said they dislike TSOS**, so - long will it continue!

A Bit Of A Plot Hole

Conrad, as you may be aware, has been binge-watching "Titans" of late.  It struck me last night that, whilst they frequently confront villains, minions and thugs who are armed to the teeth, none of the Titans carries a firearm.

     Seriously?  Conrad has a considerably harder attitude to the VMTs encountered and would not hesitate to give them a controlled burst of gunfire.  All future potential problems with them solved, ensuring that they don't sit in prison for a few years and then either escape, get broken out or serve their pathetically short sentence.  "For nuking the centre of Gotham and killing fifteen thousand people, plus causing twenty billion in property damage, I sentence you to fifty hours of community service" kind of thing.  Art!

Case in point

Finally -

I'm having trouble thinking up another insulting nickname for Putin On The Fritz, but don't worry, something appropriately vile yet Safe For Work will eventually percolate up from the depths.  De Profundis, you might say.  The Inbred Square?  Peter The Grate?  Ivan The Edible?  The Man Of Steel?  Art?

Portrait of git with 'tash.

     That takes a bit of explanation.  Josef Dzugiashvili thought his Georgian surname would be a bit of a mouthful for non-Georgian speakers, so he assumed the pseudonym 'Stalin', which means 'Steel', or, in idiom, 'Man Of Steel'.

Uh-oh.  Someone doesn't like that.

     And with that, we are done.  Very well done.

*  Another word I've just invented.  Like it or not, it's staying.

**  You can dislike it if you wish in the Comments, without fear of atomic disintegration***.

***  Or can you?