HACK

Without Slash

NO!  I don't mean the guitar player, although that does give me an excuse to have his hideous grinning maw at this point in the Intro.  Art!

     Nor do I refer to the far more obscure Nash The Slash, who was an Eighties-era performer permanently swathed in bandages.  Art!

     He's an interesting character we may come back to, because - once again! - this is nothing to do with what I intend to write about.  

     Okay, here's a joke from a South Canadian children's book of jokes that utterly baffled an immensely younger Conrad.

     Q:  Who took the very first taxi ride?

     A:  George Washington.  He took a hack at the cherry tree.

     Cue puzzled looks from all non-South Canadians.  Of course - obviously! - I shall have to explain.  Art!

He's not the President, he's a very naughty boy!

     The myth goes that Young George got a hatchet as a birthday present when he was six STOP RIGHT THERE!  A hatchet?  In the hands of a small boy?  This is asking for trouble.  YG then went out and attacked one of his father's cherry trees, because when you have a hatchet, everything looks like lumber.  His irate father challenged YG, who boldly admitted his guilt, at which his father embraced him and declared such honesty was worth a thousand cherry trees.

     "Yes but 'taxi'?" I hear you quibble.  Art!

     

     This noble contraption is a "Hackney Carriage", a species of horse-drawn cab for hire, the kind where Sherlock Holmes would offer a golden guinea if they got to Moriarty's hiding place in under five minutes, that sort of thing.  The South Canadians, given as they are to mucking about with the King's English, abbreviated this phrase to 'hack'.

     Then we have the use of 'Hack' as an insulting reference to one who churns out undifferentiated guff, whether it be written or filmed.  Art!

     Matey here is one Joel Schumacher, which surname is Teuton for "cobbler" and he certainly churned out a right load of cobblers*.  That's "Batman And Robin" in the background, which he never stopped apologising for.  No, actually he stopped apologising a couple of years ago, when he trudged off this mortal coil.

     I just found a poem in my "Brewer's" by Oliver Goldsmith about a hack writer called Edward Purdon.

Here lies poor Ned Purdon, from misery freed,

Who long was a bookseller's hack:

He led such a damnable life in this world,

I don't think he'll wish to come back.

     And then there is the term 'hack' as it refers to computers, which I have recently read of upon the BBC's News webpage.  One Joe Sullivan has just been found guilty in South Canada of covering up a hack against his employer, Uber, when he was the Chief Security Officer.  Ooops.  He paid the hackers £89,000 to delete their scraped data files and not mention it to anyone, which is par for the course for big companies nowadays.  Art!

     However, naughty Joe didn't inform the Federal Trade Commission about the hack, nor any of the affected Uber customers.  This came to light when Uber did their own investigating of the hack a year later and Surprise! suddenly Joe found himself unemployed.  This is a howling irony because before he worked for Uber, he had a paying gig as an attorney working for San Francisco in prosecuting cyber-criminals and hackers.

     He's probably feeling a little hacked-off right now.

And sore

Pro-Revenge Part Two

As you should surely recall, we left off yesteryon with OP getting shrieked at by his boss, a garage owner, because he couldn't fart dollars.  OP had been in the process of rebuilding a Porsche engine for an incredibly rich Italian Celebrity, which Bottomhole Owner considered to be cheating and stealing from him.  After saying that he quit, OP loaded the engine and parts into the back of his truck, took his tools and left.  Art!

A car of some description

     He drove to the home address of IC, explained that he'd quit the garage, but would still re-build the engine.  IC, being both wise and rich, not only agreed to this but asked if OP would like to work on his collection of luxury cars?  OP, being a mech-head, heartily agreed.

     The scene was spoiled only by the arrival of BO, practically frothing at the mouth, accusing OP of theft, sodomy and passing the port to the left.  IC's private security escorted him off the premises and delivered him to the police, who were on the scene instanter as you might expect.  Art!

Another car with low mileage and hideously expensive insurance

     IC then hit BO with a lawsuit that included slander, trespass and wage theft (reflecting OP's finances at the garage).  He explained to OP that his intent was not to put BO in jail, but to instead teach him the value of a dollar.  Which he certainly did thanks to legal fees.  Bottomhole Owner lost his boat, his Corvette and eventually his garage and was reduced to a job he deserved, as a used-car salesman.

"The Sea Of Sand"

We left the Doctor about to scale The Temple, for an indeterminate reason neither he nor the author have explained.

To climb the column, he used a technique he'd seen in the South Seas, where locals climbed the branchless trunks of coconut palms.  The rope went around the full circumference of the pillar, he grasped an end in each hand and then pulled it taut, then moved each foot vertically against the column and braced himself.  Quickly relaxing the rope and throwing it upwards, he gained six inches and just as quickly moved his feet upwards.  Moving six inches at a time, he slowly climbed vertically.

     It was far harder than he'd anticipated.  Coconut palms, after all, were much thinner than massive basalt columns.  Sweat beaded on his forehead, his arms began to ache and his palms were badly chafed.  After ten feet, when he began to wonder if this idea would work before he became exhausted, progress became slightly easier - eventually his bounds upwards became eight inches, then twelve.  

     Ah! he realised, gratefully.  The column was starting to taper.  His strength was still flagging when he made the roof and then he had no choice but to use the sonic screwdriver, clutching the rope single-handedly, to make a handhold in the black stone, then another.  That was even harder, dangling from a single cavity fifty feet above the ground.

     Okay, he's practically at the top of The Temple.  To what end?  

Happy Seventieth Birthday To Peter The Average!

I admit that I stole that line from a poster on a Youtube channel I subscribe to.

     Yes, it is Dimya's 70th birthday today.  No doubt he anticipated being crowned Emperor Of Russia And Ukraine on this day, except things haven't gone at all as planned.  Art!

     You no doubt recall that staged 'spontaneous' event in Red Square where he jabbered on about four regions being "Eternally Russian".  The Ukrainians are now inside Luhansk, one of the oblasts he claimed.  They are also kicking Ruffian bottom in the Kherson oblast he claimed.  They already control about 40% of the Donetsk oblast he claimed.

     If Peter The Average says the sun will rise tomorrow, lay in a stock of matches, candles and wind-up torches.

Finally -

I blithely posted on Facebook about taking Edna for a walk before it rained, which was prudent of me, since I had to drive Wonder Wifey over to Shivs, and O My did it rain!  It would have been better to have taken a submarine.  One problem The Mansion has with rain this heavy is that it tends to short the electric barbed wire.  Art!

From our kitchen window

*  British slang.  It is not a compliment.