Chin Chin

Bear With Me

This one encompasses Chinese, the Coincidence Hydra, comics, Dante and everyone's favourite humourless, ruthless and emotionless lawman - Judge Dredd, you bafunes, not T. J. Hooker <tuts in disgust>.  Art!

Old Stoneyface himself, as rendered by Carlos Ezquerra

     Bear in mind that Dredd had appeared on the scene in 1977, so by 1984 he was very well-known in comic circles.

     We now abruptly change track, looking at "Stig's Inferno", a comic I'd seen adverts for in other comics with a publication date of 1984.  I knew nothing about it, until I Googled about it earlier this week, and Lo! there was a link to all seven copies FOR FREE.  Just don't copy them, requested artist Ty Templeton.  Art!

Stig in the middle

     SPOILERS FOLLOW!

     HONESTLY, THESE WILL SPOIL IT FOR YOU

     I WARNED YOU.

     As you may have gathered from my mention of Dante, Stig is killed by creatures that live in his grand piano by dropping the lid on his head, and he ends up in the Underworld.  Minus his pants.  SFW even so, he wears a long shirt.  He's also unaware that he's dead and thinks Hell is merely a very large and elaborate film set.

     Here an aside.  Hey, I waited for a bit!  Dante's "Inferno" is one part of his "Divine Comedy" which sounds as funny as hepatitis.  In it Dante himself is rescued from being eaten by a leopard, a lion and a wolf by Beatrice, then taken on a journey through the Nine Circles of Hell, which Conrad supposes is cheaper than a cruise around the Med, if a lot less pleasant.  Art!

     Because SI possesses all the logical structure and linearity of a dream, a clutch of police and Stig's date Beatrice also end up at the gates of Hell.  Art!

Beatrice

     

     Hay Pesto!  Ol' Stoneyface himself.  You can tell by the chin.  In one highly amusing JD story an entitled billionaire imitates JD with the help of a prosthetic chin.  Thus we have a partial explanation of today's title.  But that's not the whole story.  "Chin chin" is a British colloquialism usually used as a substitute for 'Goodbye' although Your Humble Scribe doesn't know anyone else who uses it.  Where does it come from?  The Chinese 'Ch'iang Ch'iang', actually, which translates as 'Please Please' and which also inspired The Beatles.  Art!

Prove it didn't

     This is where the Coincidence Hydra comes into play.  Conrad can snap his fingers at this beast thanks to his armour-plated underwear made with Kev

     ANYWAY there I was looking up the definition of "Chin chin" in my Brewer's and my eyes fell upon "Chiron" whom was a noble and learned centaur in Greek mythology, kind of a teaching assistant to the stars (such as Achilles).  Reading on - "In the Inferno Dante gives the name to the keeper of the lake of boiling blood, in the seventh circle of Hell".

     Egad!  Also - Art?

From "2000AD"

     Like I said in the past, everything is connected to everything else.

GREAT SQEAKING VAMPIRE BATS!

We have mentioned earlier in the week that the Braying Jackass had his Mar-A-Lago lair searched by the FBI, executing a federal warrant.  Some of the sheer hilarity of this was caused by the uncertainty over which legal bother this search was occasioned by, because BJ has so many in the pipeline against him.  Art!

     

"I plead the Fifth"*

     Well, it begins to emerge that the documents retrieved were classified as either Top Secret or Top Secret/SCI and were to do with NUCLEAR WEAPONS.

     Egad.  

     Not only that, BJ had refused to hand over any of these documents when it wasn't known what they were or what they contained, until a certain someone on the inside at Mar-A-Lago informed the FBI.  This is possibly indictable under the Espionage Act.

     Blimey.  If this had been written as a script for "The West Wing" people would scoff at it for being so far-fetched.  Bring on the popcorn!

Conrad Is ANGRY!

Gladly so, too, because I was despairing of ever having trouble with a Codeword again, possibly because I'd Remote Nuclear Detonated all the swinish compilers.  Having left them alone for a couple of weeks they seem to have bred back up to a viable population again.  So -

"HAW": What?  Shouldn't that be prefaced by "Lord Haw"?  <consults Collins Concise>.  Ah.  Apparently this is the fruit of the hawthorn.  Did you know hawthorns had fruit?  Me neither.  Art!

Laud haws

"WILCO": WHAT!  Look, the only reason Your Humble Scribe knows this one is because he lards his conversation with RAF slang anyway, pip pip old chap wizard prang and all that.  How on earth you the public would get this one is beyond me.  It's a contraction of a pilot's acknowledgement over the radio "Roger wilco" being a contraction of "Will Comply".  Art!

"JODHPURS": Hmmmmm as beloved by Erich Von Stroheim, bampot Hollywood film director.  Riding breeches, loose at the thigh and tight from knee to ankle, for who knows what reason.  Conrad is not a horseman.  Derived from an Indian city of the same name.  Art!

Erich and his jods

Back To "The Sea Of Sand"

As you should surely recall, The Doctor had been personally targeted by the surviving alien killing machine at the Mersa Mertuba depot, which had prompted his ever-fertile imagination into overdrive.  It's now a race to see who's faster - The Doctor or his malignant pursuer.

Risking a quick glance behind, he saw the black tank only thirty feet behind, the glassy armour scarred and crazed where Captain Dobie’s hand grenades had pummelled it.  Only two of the arms remained intact.

The Doctor put on a sprint and darted around the corner, leaping for the front hull of the abandoned A13 tank, hauling himself onto the turret by the barrel of the gun and dropping inside through the open hatch.  In front of him sat the breech of the two-pounder gun, which he studied for a split second.

Simple technology, no electronics involved, no electricity, only kinetic moving parts – here goes! he thought, mentally crossing fingers. 

The two-pounder shell went in smoothly enough, and the breech closed with only a little grating. 

A sudden darkness blocked sunlight that had been streaming in through the large gap in the turret next to the two-pounder.  The black tank had arrived.

‘Say cheese,’ muttered the Doctor, pulling what he assumed to be the trigger mechanism, closing his eyes and clenching his teeth together tightly.

His guess was correct.  The two-pounder shell was capable of penetrating an inch of armour plate at five hundred yards.  At a range of ten feet, against an artefact composed of silicon dioxide, the effects were literally shattering: the black killer blew apart from the tracks upwards in a million shards, a tinkling explosion that deposited black glass fragments over half an acre.

     I freely confess that I'm guessing about the firing mechanism for the main gun of an A13 - it may have been fired by foot-pedal.  End result still the same!

Finally -

Wow it's hot.  Normally I'd take Edna for a trot whilst the rest of the gang are out shopping, but not today.  She can't take her fur coat off, you see, and Wonder Wifey worries that hot pavements will be bad for her tootsies.  And don't be ridiculous, they don't make shoes for dogs.

     Er -

*  At his deposition he pled the Fifth 440 times.  This from a chap who insisted 'Only the mob takes the Fifth."