A Dragon In Her Mouth
You may have been expecting " - The Dragon Tattoo" or " - The Sun In Her Hair" -
Here an aside. Yes, already! Once again, whose blog is it? Thank you. Thank you so much. May I? Thanks again. John Barry, legendary composer of theme tunes, is responsible for the tune behind an advert for Sunsilk Shampoo. Art!
NO! you don't get to see any more of her, you slobbering perverts
Hence TGWTSIHH. I may have bored you before with an anecdote about a documentary on John, where he was sat at a desk with sheets of lined music paper, whizzing through them writing in the musical notation the way you or I would write a letter with a fountain pen. Art!
He wrote this in thirty seconds
(Perhaps)
ANYWAY we are back to our Turkish gypsy folk tale, "The Dead Man's Gratitude" where I have had to fill in a few narrative gaps and make a couple of extrapolations in order for it to make sense.
'We have divided the money; let us also divide your wife.'
The lad said, 'How divide her? If you want her, take her.'
'I won't take her; we'll divide.'
'How divide?' said the lad.
The dead man said, 'I, I will divide.'
The dead man seized her; he bound her knees. 'Do you catch hold of one foot, I'll take the other.'
He raised his sword to strike the girl. In her fright the girl opened her mouth, and cried, and out of her mouth fell a dragon. The dead man said to the lad, 'I am not for a wife, I am not for any money. These dragon's heads are what devoured the men. Take her; the girl shall be yours, the money shall be yours. You did me a kindness; I also have done you one.'
'What kindness did I do you?' asked the lad.
'You took me from the hands of the Jews.'
The dead man departed to his place, and the lad took his wife, went to his father.
Hmmm ah yes the old Chop The Lady In Two So She Can Be Shared routine, it never ends well for the lady, whether it's vertically from head to hindquarters or horizontally at navel-level. I must say, for a corpse Mister Deadite is extremely sprightly, loquacious and comes armed with a sword.
Now we come to that bit about the girl with a dragon in her mouth. Colour Conrad confused, as in the previous extract the girl's triple-headed dragon tongue got hacked off the night before, allowing The Lad to survive uneaten in the bridal bed. Did the dragon-tongue grow back overnight? Or - I dunno, did she have a spare tongue to hand?
Mister Deadite seems to be <thinks> Dracophobic, since the sight of the dragon-tongue - what's that? Yes it is a real word! Art!
<Tazer sounds in background>ART!
Real as anything
Where was I? O yes - the sight of the dragon-tongue puts him off having a wife or money. Hang on - I thought he chopped off the dragon-tongues last night? As for the 'kindness done' - being saved from the hands of the Jews - how come he came back to live when they dug him up? Surely dead is dead! Plus, if "departed to his place" does that mean returning to his grave again? Well even if he gets there, how is he going to get re-interred?
Really, this whole thing raises so many questions.
Of course, I could be overthinking it ...
A Bit Of A Challenge
Conrad has begun to work on a Codeword compendium he bought in December 202, after leaving it for a very long time. They do mix it up every so often, by setting a Codeword with only one letter given. Those are tough. Here's another sinister variant. Art!
Only two letters, which makes it difficult to begin with, and Your Humble Scribe had to work out which squares had to be blacked out - they gave 28 and there are 30 characters total, so 3 of those are black squares. It took ages to work out the first solution, 5 = "E", and it couldn't have been a black square since there were three of them at the cardinal points around a "Y", which itself backed up against a 28 black square.
I did get the thing solved, but it did take recourse to my Longmans Crossword Key for "ANATHEMA" and "AGENDA". Art!
"The Sea Of Sand"
As you should so surely recall, we left young Sarah Jane Smith staring down the barrel of a gun; a rather large gun attached to a tank. Erk!
The gun muzzle, large and
unwavering, pointed directly at her.
Sarah tracked the muzzle backwards, along the barrel, set in a turret,
seeing that it belonged to a tank. A
dusty, rusty, static, un-manned tank.
‘Hello there, Miss!’ said a cheerful Tam, banging about in
the tank’s innards with spanners and a screwdriver.
Recovering from her surprise, Sarah saw that the tank
presented a pretty dismal prospect. The
tracks had gone, and so had what she would learn to call bogey and drive
wheels. A large black hole in the turret
alongside the main gun showed where a machine-gun had once been. Great metal flaps over the engine deck were
permanently propped upwards, and very little of the engine remained when she
peered inside.
Tam reappeared from the depths of the vehicle, clutching a
greasy piece of machinery. He gave her
an irreverent salute and disappeared off to wherever his residence was.
‘ “Deucalion”,’ read Sarah aloud, seeing the tank’s name
painted in faded white lettering on the hull.
Another of the rodent art-forms graced the front mudflaps, and a
red-white-red square faded into near-obscurity was on the hull front.
‘Ah, there you
are,’ said a voice behind her. The
Doctor, returned from his little jaunt out in the desert. ‘Wherever have you been hiding?’
Ah, typical Doctor hypocrisy!
A Spa Gone Too Far
Heh. Yes, another drowned town from that very short list the Beeb put up. Art!
This is the spa town of Villa Epecuen, and that above is a swimming pool that had sunk beneath the waves in 1985, before coming back to view when the water levels dropped in 2009. Art!
Before
I wouldn't make plans about moving back in, the original reason the town became inundated was years of heavier than usual rain, topped off by a storm, which led to a protective sea-wall collapsing. Art!
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| Very much after |
"The War Illustrated"
Let's have more pictographism from the Second Unpleasantness, with the proviso that these pictures are always a couple of weeks out of date, to prevent the Axis from gleaning any information from them. How so, you ask, if this publication circulated within This Sceptred Isle? Teuton staff in the Dublin and Lisbon embassies, that's how. Art!
Here you see a few of the unglamourous aspects of warfare as carried out by the Allies. Industrial capacity producing infantry-landing ships in quantity, thus enabling amphibious invasions. In the upper photo you see the vessels being constructed and the workforce who carried out that construction; in the bottom photo South Canadian troops are re-embarking after an exercise, and you see the craft with landing ramps stowed in the last picture. Make no mistake about it, these types of vessels were critical to the Allies and they never had enough to accommodate all their exotic plans.
Finally -
Spare a thought for my compatriots who have to work this Saturday - actually no don't bother, they can work from home, don't have to answer the phones and can play their music as loudly as they like. Okay, let us swiftly change our position and cast vile aspersions upon them <vile aspersions are cast>. Okay what next? We don't need much to hit the Adjusted Compositional Ton.
Aha! Lithium Wafer Batt - hmmmm perhaps not. O there is that question someone posted on Quora about "Why do the Russians persist in maintaining the Admiral Kuznetsov?"
My answer is simple: prestige. The Bloaty Gas Tout is thus able to beat his chest and shout "Aircraft carrier have we! Rah rah rah!" to which the acid British riposte would be "We have two. And ours work." Art!
The AK in it's natural state: on fire
The AK has only been in action once, off the shores of Syria, where it's aircraft crashed into the Med so frequently that the air wing swallowed their pride and used a Syrian airbase instead. It burns a crude tar-like fuel that emits so much smoke it can be seen over the horizon with the naked eye. It's engines are so unreliable it never goes to sea without an ocean-going tug for when it breaks down. It's been stuck in port for years and is such a disaster that one presumes a posting there is a punishment. I could go on - but the AK cannot. The Russians can't afford to build another one, and the original was built in Ukraine. Irony has teeth, hmmmm? Art!
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| One imagines it's nickname is "Old Smokey" |
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