Doubtless You'd Roll Your Eye
(Since you only have the one and because it rhymes better than "Eyes".
Yes, we have a theme for the Intro. I can also work in a picture from "Lord Of The Rings" as click-bait, because we have no scruples when it comes to enticing in victims. Or viewers, if you prefer. Art!
Okay, we have a list and a deadline, so let's get cracking.
FLY: As my Collins Concise has it, "Any dipterous insect, especially the housefly, characterised by active flight." Derived from the Old English "Fleoge". They are Dog Buns! disgusting little swine that Conrad cordially detests and the good thing about it being October with the onset of autumn imminent is that the cold sees off the flies. On the other hand they do provide a spectator sport to those passing The Mansion as they witness a large, elderly man jumping about the kitchen wielding a flyswatter. Art!
Know thy enemy
This, of course, is the image that will have immediately popped into your head. That's not all there is to "Fly". Art!
This, ladies and gentleman and those unsure, is a "Jack Scott" FLY, used by fishermen to lure salmon by choice and other fish by chance. I came across mention of it in Josephine Tey's "The Singing Sands" as the central character, Inspector Grant, is on a fly-fishing holiday in the Highlands. These types of lures are designed to mimic the appearance of various flies and nymphs, thus tempting the fish to bite, whereupon they move from about to have dinner to becoming it.
There is a whole sub-culture associated with fly-fishing, which Conrad finds so tedious that he's going to ignore it.
Then of course there is the verb itself, as in "To FLY", which millions of people do on a daily basis. Art!
Not Aeroflot
No, indeed. There is a cruel yet accurate joke going the rounds about the Ruffian aviation industry: What did Russia have before the horse and cart? Boeing and Airbus.
ANYWAY There was also an eighteenth century horse-drawn transport for soldiers called a 'FLY' which I remember seeing illustrated in a book. Can I find a picture of one anywhere? No I can not! It was essentially back-to-back benches two high, on a wheeled chassis that was hauled by a pair of horses. The idea was being able to move relatively large numbers of men quickly. Conrad unsure how effective it was if there's no internet presence anywhere. Art!
Use your imagination
Then there is the adjective FLY, British slang for a person who is all too knowing for their own good, craft, cunning and even sly. Art!
Fly personified
That's quite enough of that. Time to fly!
Speaking Of Fly ...
Conrad wanted to revisit a character from "The Perils Of Penelope Pitstop", which was a kind of spin-off from "The Wacky Races". I say 'kind of' to qualify because TWR was firmly set in the contemporary Sixties, TPOPP was set at least fifty years earlier. Prequel? Time travel? Drunk scriptwriters? Take your pick.
ANYWAY the premise of the series was that wealthy heiress Penelope Pitstop in under the guardianship of her uncle, Sylvester Sneakly. Art!
No good can come from a man with a surname like that. This is proven since SS is always trying to kill Penelope in order to inherit her fortune. He does this by putting on a hat and cloak and assuming the identity of 'The Hooded Claw', whom, it ought to be pointed out, has neither a hood nor claws. Perhaps all the other villain's names were taken? Art!
THC's schemes to kill Penelope were always convoluted, elaborate and pointless. I know it's not in keeping with a Universal rating, but why didn't he just use a gun and shoot her? Art!
"When the rays of the sun, focussed by this magnifying glass, burn through the rope, the anvil will fall through the trapdoor and plunge you into the basement which is flooded and full of starving rabid rats, shortly before the walls give way and release you into the bowels of the volcano -"
You know, the kind of "Mousetrap" mind-set. If he put the time and effort into his stocks portfolio as he did in setting dud traps, he'd be a millionaire by now.
"The Sea Of Sand"
The Doctor and Albert are both hiding beneath a collapsed tent, whispering about how they deal with the bio-vore invaders.
The sound of sand being trodden not far away led to their tense, sudden silence. With a regular pattern the footsteps moved away into the night.
Albert released his breath, feeling a cold sweat all over him. That question about the trans-mat wouldn't go away, like toothache. If they had to deal with just over fifty aliens at this precise moment, how many countless thousands might come flooding through the working trans-mat? From what he understood - which seemed to be far less than this Doctor, who really was most mysterious himself - from what he understood, a trans-mat acted like a doorway. A doorway here on Earth, with another door nineteen light-years away, and a person could walk through the two with no lapse of time.
Why, there might be millions of these bio-vores waiting to flood into this world! And these were creatures who had wilfully destroyed their own world, and all life on it, even down to the vegetation. What unbridled mayhem might they not wreak on Earth?
"Sorry to keep going on about it, Doctor, but can you send a trans-mat along by trans-mat?"
The Time Lord laughed quietly. The boy was obviously struck by matter-transmission technology!
Well so would you be if the technology of the far future landed at your feet.
"The Singing Sands" By Josephine Tey
As warned, Conrad has been keeping notes of unfamiliar words or phrases in the text. We've already had the 'Jack Scott' fishing lure. Art!
First off, "Zoffany". Say what? From the context it seems to be a referral to art, which is where Google comes in. There was a very influential Teuton painter named Johan Zoffany, who rose to prominence in the later eighteenth century, and who enjoyed both royal patronage and commercial success in Britain, so let's prod Art into semi-sentience and get a picture.
Neoclassical shizzle, hmmm?
That seems to make sense, it was describing a family in their living room.
A few of the geographical locations are suspect, too. There is no River Turlie, and the town of Clune only exists as a derelict estate in Glasgow, nowhere near the West Highland setting of the novel.
O Joy Unabated!
When Conrad walked into Lesser Sodom on Sunday, he passed a house flying a Manchester In The City ballfoot flag, which seemed a little odd. It's a free country, you can FLY all the ballfoot club flags you want. Yesteryon Your Humble Scribe discovered that there had been a 'Darby' match between MITC and The Manchester Unite, where MITC won 6:3.
This, inevitably, led to the BBC opening a Have Your Say about the game, which is always hilarious to read when you've no involvement with either team. There are over 2,500 Comments so I don't have time to read them all or night would have fallen. A delicious simmer in a stew of finest Schadenfreude!
I shall post a couple of the funnier ones.
This is a persistent jibe, that a lot of The Manchester United fans are from far away towns and cities and only support them because they used to be successful. Personally, if I'd paid for a return ticket to Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell I'd see the game to the bitter end, those tickets aren't cheap. "the Etihad" is the ballfoot stadium the game was played in - stop me if I get too technical.
And with that we are done!
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