A Lack Of Muse

No!  Not The Band

I have several of their albums already, so there's no shortage of alt rock tracks for me to listen to, ta very much.  Art!

How can you not love a band with a track name like "Supermassive Black Hole"

     No, I mean The Muse, as in inspiration for the blog, which I normally think deeply about whilst walking Edna, except I was busy going over That Thing In Ukraine to the extent that I hadn't come up with anything creative by the time we got back to The Mansion.  I was so distracted I got snagged in the barbed wire and o

     ANYWAY I did have another random entry that I'd picked out of my "Brewer's" yesterday, which would have made for a very short Intro, so instead we are going to put up photographs from "The War Illustrated".  In case you have been living under a rock all this time, TWI was a fortnightly magazine that was published during the Second Unpleasantness, with the articles and photos always a couple of weeks out of date, so that nothing useful got back to the Axis.  The current edition these pictures come from is Number 163, published as of 17th September 1943.  Art!

     At top to port you have the rather ironic sight of "DUCE", the abbreviated adulation for Mussolini, in the port city of Messina, the last bit of Sicily to be either conquered or liberated, depending on your point of view.  To judge by the rapturous greeting of the Sicilian at bottom port, more a liberation than a conquest.  At top to starboard you can see General Patton arriving in Messina as of August 17th - remember what I said about being out-of-date.  There was a bit of a competition between Generals Patton and Montgomery about capturing Messina.  At bottom starboard relieved Sicilians leave a tunnel shelter, doubtless glad that people have stopped chucking around things that go BANG.  Art!

     This is a shot of Centuripe, a Sicilian town that the British occupied on August 5th, and here you see a couple of the ubiquitous Bren Carriers hauling supplies.  Yes, you see them a lot because the Brits and Canadians made tens of thousands of them.  You can tell the fighting is over and done with because the lead vehicle has a road wheel right where the Bren gun should be, and it would be foolish in the extreme to put a jerrycan of fuel out in the open on the front.  Note also the other clutter and sandbags loaded onto the front hull, the better to protect from enemy fire.

     What TWI doesn't say, perhaps because they didn't know at the time, was that the Axis ran a successful evacuation from Sicily across the Straits of Messina, covered by hundreds of anti-aircraft guns that prevented any Allied aerial interdiction.  

     

Sicily and environs

     Motley!  Bring me a gelato!

"Briaraeus"

This is the random entry I found in "Brewer's", and he happens to be a character from Greek mythology, whose name is a compound of Greek words meaning "Strong" and "Goat", so perhaps he had horns and bleated?  Art!

     If the image looks rather odd, that's because he had 50 heads and 100 hands, which must have made personal hygiene a time-consuming chore.  He participated in the war between the Titans and the Olympians, though history is undecided as to which side he fought on.

     Which also caused Conrad to recall a sci-fi novel that he's never read, one "The Twilight Of Briareus" by Richard Cowper.  This deals with the aftermath of a supernova, the star Briareus Delta (which doesn't exist), which goes pop only 130 light years from Earth.  Art!

Disturbing cover art by who knows

Conrad:  His Nitric Ire Is Still Frothing

O my goodness yes it is!  It seems that for every witless Codeword compiler I vapourise, two more take their place.  Just you lot wait until I take over, then you'll be sorry*.

"SNAZZIER":  YOU WHAT!  Dog Buns compilers, can't even be satisfied with SNAZZY, O no, you have to push it further.  It means to be even flashier, trashier and more attractive than another object or person.  Art!

     I leave it to you to judge which of these two, Granny and Mara, is snazzier.

     Thank you, Art.

"GUSTATION": As used by strangers in the backwoods of Southern South Canada of the locals when their car is low on petrol "Canyewtellmewhurthegustationis?"

     Ha!  No, my Collins Concise defines it as "The act of tasting or the faculty of taste" and you would only ever hear it used by doctors, and possibly some pseudy poets.  As if you'd describe tasting as 'gustation' in a normal conversation.  Art!

How's your gustation, sir?

"YURT": DOG BUNS WHAT WHAT WHAT!  I kid you not, Conrad vapourised ten Codeword compilers when he'd solved this one.  "A circular tent consisting of a framework of poles covered with felt or skin".  And the word is of Turkic origin.  O WE'RE SUDDENLY EXPERTS ON MONGOLIAN AND TURKIC CULTURE ARE WE.

     Bah!

A yurt in the dirt

Or It Might Have Been Sand

Which is our cue to bring in another instalment of "The Sea Of Sand" where The Doctor is speculating on what kind of aliens have turned up in the middle of the Libyan sand sea.

"Their physiology denotes an amphibian evolution, Albert.  I would guess that their body-shape descends from a form designed to move easily in water.  Two eyes, positioned close together on the front of the body indicates a predatory history.  No large talons or visible fangs, however.  And they got here via the trans-mat."

     The assembled creatures carried out their gymnastic exercise for nearly an hour, before stopping in ones and twos.  A section of the dome wall sank away into the interior and a long, inclined walkway emerged, forming an angled ramp that the creatures walked down.  One party split off and headed for the shattered dome, checking over the sand and rubble-strewn interior.  Finding nothing worth rescuing or reviving, they then made their way to the first dome, which began to grate and squeal as it, too, began to open up.

     The second part of aliens made their way to a cuboidal structure north of The Dais.  One whole wall concertinaed inwards, allowing the  creatures to enter.  They spent a long time inside, only emerging into daylight when they had acquired their equivalent of combined clothing and body armour.   Most of them now wore great padded jackets, replete with rings, pockets, belts, straps and clips, from which dangled unguessable alien technology.

     Hmmm definitely getting ready for action.

"Jalousies"

Yet another mysterious word as encountered in the works of Dorothy L. Sayers, which Conrad is unfamiliar with.  It has the ring of being Scottish slang, but I will away to my CC and see if it's listed there.  One moment - 

     "A window blind or shutter constructed from angled slats of wood" and it comes from Old English, not Scottish - "Gelosie" meaning 'Latticework screen".  

     Aha.  It all becomes clearer now.  Art!

     Also a variety of pie, it seems.  Let's try again - 

     There we go, all done.

Finally -

I didn't get my usual afternoon stroll into Royton yesterday, so I intend to manage that in a short while.  However, I need a scrape and a scrub first, for I am a bristly, greasy gremlin of a Conrad.  Chin Chin!

*  And vapourised, too.