Neck Your Crane

NO!  I Do Not Mean "Crane Your Neck"

Because that would be 1) sensible and 2) not remotely amusing, and you ought to know Conrad by now: erratic, capricious and desperate to dig out puns in every possible circumstance.

     Okay, let us now abruptly jump tracks and focus on ALIEN INVASION!  INVASION!  BY ALIENS!  You know, War of the Worlds stuff, because that's been bred into human DNA since H. G. Wells first published his analogy of British imperialism in Tasmania*.  Art!

     This is the kind of trope you'd expect an alien invasion to manifest, isn't it?  Lots of heavy metal, spaceships, robots, killer cyborg weaselnanas.

     Here an aside.  "Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers" rather broke the mould as it involved creepy pod people in a soft assault, instead of a massed attack by killer cyborg weaselnanas.  The threat of assimilation from within, as it were, rather than outright war, and all the medical analogies with Communism - but that's enough cod-psychoanalysis for an Intro.  Art!

Pod people, before "Thunderbirds" made pods cool

     "Okay, who's been at the cooking sherry alread?" I hear you query, quibblishly.  Pausing only to remark that sherry is The Devil's Sinovial Drainings and I'd rather go thirsty than consume it, I shall explicate.  Art!

DO YOU SEE?  DO YOU?

     Look at all those cranes.  They never stop.  Day in, day out, week after week after week.  Even during the worst days of the recession you couldn't spit from the Dark Tower and not hit a jib crane, if that's the kind of disgusting metric and behaviour you're into.  The explanation, which I trot out every couple of years, is that they are, in reality, SINISTER ALIEN SPIES.

     It's the only explanation.  Have you ever  seen one of these cranes get erected? STOP SNIGGERING AT THE BACK!  Or taken down?  No, and you won't, because they teleport in from their stealth-enabled mothership in orbit, only to teleport back out when their eeeeeevil overwatch is complete.  They even come equipped with humanoid slaves to further foster the illusion.

     So, expect to wake up one day in the near future and SURPRISE! there's a sixty foot metal monster sitting in your garden, dictating what you do.

     What's that, Phil?  If you were still alive you'd back me up?  Ta very much!

The Big Man approves of Conrad!

I'm A Bit Lost

For the unthinkable has happened, I've left my Notebook at home.  After I'd carefully sat down and listed what I was going to write about, too.  Of course Conrad, the infinitely inventive, can make shizzle up without working up a sweat, but I can't remember the Codewords I was going to froth about - hang on, let me give Steve and Oscar an elbow-jog -

"ETYMOLOGY":  WHAT'S THIS?  Well it's not a dagger that I see before me.  How incredibly ironic that a blog which regularly practices etymology should see it as a Codeword solution, doncha think?  "The study of words, their origins and useage across time" for your information.  Art!

Etymologist hard at work

"POTASH": No!  Nothing to do with porridge, nor potage either.  You wouldn't enjoy eating a bowl of potash, unless you were a plant.  Apparently it refers to minerals high in water-soluble potassium salts, which can be used as fertiliser.  Art!

Yum, said the triffid

     
     The name - being an etymologist again - comes from a pot filled with ashes and water, which is how they made potassium salts back in Ye Olden Days.

"VIALS": This sounds so seventeenth century.  You can imagine King Charles, before he got the chop, sounding off about witches and their vials of 'Sinisterre liquids' (he wasn't too hot at spelling).  I mean, who talks about 'vials' nowadays?  Possibly only scientists in a lab, except they do most of their work on computers.  Art!

"The Satan Bug"

     I bet there's some vials in the groovy lab where they brew up bacterial cocktails that can end all life on Earth**.

"The Sea Of Sand"

ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?  ARE YOU?  YOU GOT YOUR ALIENS!  <ahem>

Ahead of him earlier arrivals were also making their slow and weary way over the dead ground to the hutments.  This time an unpleasant surprise awaited him and other arriving Farmers – a Warrior stood inside the granite structure, behind the door and facing inwards, looking at the room, the tables and the shortly-to-be-dining Farmers.

Under this hostile gaze, the nervous and hungry Farmers absorbed their energy quotient with haste.  The Overseers remained at their own table, conversing quietly, until one nodded at the Warrior. 

A late arrival came into the hutment, a Farmer the Overseer must have seen hurrying to get what remained of the food and water.

‘Violator!’ snapped the head Overseer.  Taking his cue, the Warrior strode forward and extended his proboscis forward, the hundreds of tiny probes in the end connecting with the Farmer’s back.  The hapless victim instantly became rigid, unable to even scream, as his life energy was drained out of him.  In the space of twenty seconds the bulk of the Farmer shrivelled and collapsed inwards, until all that remained was a dry, lifeless husk on the floor.

‘Violator punishment, serfs,’ said the Warrior loudly, bristling with energy, as well he might be.  ‘Lateness is inefficient.  Be warned in future!’

Farmer Selig pushed aside the bowl of dried algae revenants, ducked his upper torso and left the hutment quickly, not daring to look up at the Warrior.  He only straighened up outside, scared and humiliated.

Another Farmer dead, of a supposed “Violation”.  A Violation that hadn’t existed until now, he told himself bitterly.  A Violation invented so the Warrior could indulge himself in life energy.

Farmer Selig set himself away from the desert and towards the sea.

     A bit longer than usual, but it does finish the chapter, and the next one introduces The Doctor (Fourth iteration of) and Sarah Jane Smith.

And In Sharp Contrast

Back we go to the BBC's 'On The Water', and since I'm typing it at work I can actually look at an image.  Art!

Courtesy Nigel Caulkett

     Well, if you can have a skareboarding duck, you can have a surfboarding dog.  The life-jacket is fully functional, because Winnie here loves being on the water but is no swimmer.  I wonder, do they make life-jackets for dogs or was this a bespoke item?  Art?

I had to ask

     I wonder - are those chickens still on the loose?

Back To 1943

And we once again hit the pages of "The War Illustrated", this time a montage of artwork rather than photographs.  Art!

     Your Humble Scribe is intimately familiar with the picture at upper port, since it's a monochrome reproduction of the painting that graces my copy of "The Sands Of Valour", easily the best novel of the Second Unpleasantness in North Africa.  It's a novel with a lot of autobiography to it.  Art!

In glorious colour

     The chaps depicted as shirtless are that way because humping artillery shells around is hot sweaty work and this is the North African desert war.

     I'm not familiar with any of these artists, and cannot fold the book any flatter, so the unfortunate chaps whose face has vanished into the crease will just have to suffer manfully.

Finally -

We've nearly hit the Adjusted Compositional Ton - actually strike that we've hit it already so - 

*  Deadly honest.

**  Don't judge, a man's gotta have a hobby