It's A Diminutive Of "Peter"
Just so we're clear. Annnnnnnnnd once again we venture into the realms of fantasy and another extract from "The Red King And The Witch", where the youngest princeling of said king has gone off on an eight-year hunt for a wife. So he claims. Personally one feels he was off sowing fields full of wild oats.
Anyone with a verrrrry long memory might confuse another Peterkin from our folk-tale protagonist. Art!
This, apparently, is also 'Peterkin' and you'd need to be at least 84 to recall him because this cartoon came out in 1939. I use the male pronoun because the creature is topless and you couldn't get away with that nowadays and certainly not in 1939.
Here an aside. Yes, already! Your Humble Scribe was pondering how to work "Stranger Things" in here somehow because 1) we have no shame and 2) people seem to like it. There's been some retconning in the most recent season about how and when a connection to the Upside Down was created; in Season One it appears to come about when El's unbridled terror at meeting The Monster causes havoc in the real world. Art!
The Demogorgon
Yeah, I bet it has one heck of a dentist's bill, possibly slightly offset by not having to see an optician ever*.
ANYWAY Your Humble Scribe was wondering why Flapface is entirely unaffected by bullets, yet SPOILERS
NO KIDDING, REALLY SPOILERY STUFF AHEAD
I WARNED YOU!
Hopper is able to first chop one of it's arms off, and then it's head, using a weapon that must have a history of at least 10,000 years. Art!
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| Rendered 'armless |
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| Rendered dead (less head) |
Yet he emptied a Kalasnhikov at it to no effect. How come? Clearly the kinetic energy of a bullet far exceeds that of a sword, even if swung by the no-longer-fat-Rambo himself. What does a sword have that a bullet doesn't? Hmmmm a cutting edge, suspects Conrad. Recall, if you will, that small Demogorgon strapped to an operating table with it's innards exposed - clearly the Sinister sadists used scalpels to perform their surgery. Bullets tend to have an ogive shape to them, rather than a point, and definitely lack a cutting edge. Art!
Positively flat-faced, some of them.
Back to our regular broadcast:
And the queen of the birds asked him, 'Whither away, Peterkin?'
'Thither, where there is neither death nor old age, to marry me.'
The queen said to him, 'Here is neither death nor old age.'
Then Peterkin said to her, 'How comes it that here is neither death nor old age?'
Then she said to him, 'When I whittle away the wood of
all this forest, then death will come and take me and old age.'
Then Peterkin said, One day and one morning death will come and old age, and take me.'
And he departed further, and journeyed on eight years and arrived at a palace of copper.
This, frankly, raises more questions than answers. How did Queenie get to have this arrangement with old age and death? Is it down in black and white on a notarised contract signed by the parties involved? Then look at the terms involved. Queenie has to whittle away the entire forest and only then will she die? No problem, says Conrad. Whittle away one whittling per year, that should see you last several hundred millenia. Or is there a quota she has to fill? Again, is this in the contract? Because, if you whittle below a certain rate, those trees are going to have grown sufficiently to negate completely the amount removed by whittling, not to mention the growth of new saplings. You see? Not quite as simple as it seems at first glance, is it?
Of course, I could be overthinking this ...
A palace of coppers. Close enough.
Lord Huron Lording It
Conrad was listening to them yesteryon and, knowing nothing about them, did a little Google-fu. They seem to be absolutely beloved of television and film soundtrack creators. Take a look at this -
The band's track "Fool for Love" is used in the end credits of the episode "Wedding Day" of HBO's Girls and "Bonnie" of Lovesick, and was also featured in the Season 7 episode "Hyperion Heights" of Once Upon a Time.[32]
The songs "She Lit a Fire", "Ends of the Earth", "Brother", "The Ghost on the Shore", and the previously-unreleased track "The Birds are Singing at Night" are all used in the film A Walk in the Woods.[33]
Their song "The Yawning Grave" appears in the 11th episode of the seventh season of The CW's The Vampire Diaries.
The song "Lonesome Dreams" is used in the 7th episode of the first season of HBO's Togetherness.[34]
The song "When the Night is Over" appears in the 15th episode of the third season of Chicago Med and “TCM Remembers 2018”.
The song "Love Like Ghosts" appears in the 9th episode of the ninth season of Shameless.
The song "Time to Run" appears in the 12th episode of the ninth season of Grey's Anatomy. A version of the song recorded in Simlish appears on the soundtrack for The Sims 3: Seasons.
"Moonbeam" and "Ancient Names Pt. 1" are used in the 15th episode of the second season of The Good Doctor.
The Song "Meet Me In The Woods" of Album Strange Trails is briefly used in Season 3 Episode 1 of Titans.
The song “I Lied” is played during the Netflix show You during episode 3 of season 3.
And that's only part of their oeuvre. They must earn a fortune in royalties! Art?
Wow we're racking up the word count today! Next -
"The Sea Of Sand"
As you recall, The Doctor had - er - 'borrowed' a truck from the British garrison at Mersa Martuba, and was en route to the archaeological dig at Makkan Al-Jinni.
After at least nine miles, the truck began to
encounter drifts of soft sand, makiing progress at a slightly reduced
rate. This would be the beginning of the
Saharan sand sea, realised the Doctor. Easy
to bog the vehicle down in conditions like that, and extricating it would be a
long and difficult job for one man.
Deciding that caution surmounted speed, he brought
the truck to a stop and climbed down, catching sight of a small dark shape in
the heat haze to the south-east. The
shape resolved into a crescent of a dozen pitched tents, which rippled in the
heat as he approached.
‘Hello! Hello
there!’ he called, without provoking a response. Tent flaps moved listlessly, whirls and
eddies of dust moved between the fabrics, but nobody replied.
‘The cupboard was bare,’ muttered the Doctor to
himself. He stood in front of the tents,
noticing signs of recent activity; footprints in the sand, bread and a tube of
liquid cheese lying on a table, boxes of photographic plates.
At the dig? wondered the Time Lord. He could see the well-worn track over the
dunes and followed it.
His first impression on seeing the excavated site of Makan Al-Jinni was one of alien-ness. From his vantage point on the rim of the great sand bowl the complex sat in, he could see right to the other side, an uninterrupted vista of black, satiny, massive structures.
How Angry Is Conrad? VERY ANGRY!
It doesn't come naturally, I have to work at it. Getting into a state of Frothing Nitric Ire on a daily basis is an effort, you know. However, Conrad can count on the Codeword Compilers to provoke him, the dirty curs.
"ACME": As defined in my Collins Concise, "the culminating point, as of achievement or excellence". From the Greek <hack spit> 'Akme'. This word probably went out of use in Victorian times. Art!
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| Admit it, this is what you thought |
"PARADIGM": Do you understand how difficult it is to parse a word that ends in "GM"? NOT EASY AT ALL! And how often do you use this work in written or spoken form? The only people who would are scientists, because it's defined as "A general conception of the nature of scientific endeavour, within which a given enquiry is made".
What? "A pattern or model". Ah. Clearer. Art?
Finally -
Who is Liz Phair? A track of hers has come up on the i-pod and I don't recognise the name at all. From "Now Hear This!" whatever that is. A quick Google is required here to sate my curiousity. Hmmmm a South Canadian indie artist whom the critics seem to like. No idea what the album is. Possibly a sampler.
* Do you se - O you do.
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