TWO MILLION YEARS B.C.!

WASH OUT YOUR FILTHY MINDS!

I know what you colossal perverts are thinking: "O yes, 'One Million Years B.C.' saw Raquel Welch in a fur bikini so this film will have her in half a bikini".

     No.  Go have a cold shower.  However, thank you for mentioning said film, because I can now use it as a click-baity enticement for the blog.  Art!

Not sure they got the skin colour correct on that Brachiosaurus

     Hammer got it deliberately wrong, of course - obviously! - because the dinosaurs were long gone by 1,000,000 BC.  You don't have to take my word for it, there are clever people in lab coats perusing data who have proved this, most recently on or in the colossal island-sized iceberg that is Greenland.  It may not form part of your day-to-day lives, O humble Hom. Sap.'s, but Greenland is a province of Denmark.  The metrics of the two are a little odd; Greenland is 50 times bigger than Denmark yet has one-fifty-ninth of the Danish population.  Art!

     ANYWAY, curious Danish scientists decided that they were going to poke around the Greenland permafrost in search of THINGS MAN WAS NOT MEANT TO KNOW or background profiling DNA, whichever came first.  The idea was that getting a generic profile from the soil would enable an assay of everything that had lived in Greenland's prehistoric past.  Art!

     In real life it's not as simple as "Jurassic Park" would have you believe, not the least because the area samples were taken from was North Greenland, which is an Arctic desert.  There were also concerns about the viability of samples from two million years ago, which proved to be unfounded, the samples worked just fine.

     What did they find?  O I thought you'd never ask!  A landscape that combined both temperate and Arctic lifeforms, in an environment a good 15 C degrees warmer than today.  Art!

     Contrast this with the third picture in today's series of photographs.  Here we have rabbits and mastodons and geese, and lots of the coloured stuff that contemporary Greenland lacks.

     This whole project is fascinating, giving us a window on the past that would otherwise be completely inaccessible, especially since it wasn't known if DNA could survive for this enormous amount of time.

     The other thing, of course - obviously! - is that the barren wastelands of North Greenland are not to be travelled lightly, given their population of polar bears and musk oxen, so, if you're part of a University Of Copenhagen research team, who are you gonna call?

     THE ROYAL DANISH NAVY'S SIRIUS DOG SLED PATROL!!
     Of course.
     Note the hero clad in shorts.  And yes, looking at the rifles these chaps (no women have ever volunteered for this duty) are carrying, they are indeed the M1917 Enfield dating back in design to over a century ago - although the ones in issue are probably a little less aged than that.  Art!

Sirius Slaedepatruljen

Conrad Is Still Vehemently ANGRY!

Even if I've completed another eight Codewords without coming across anything problematic, there's still the ones from before.  I've not forgotten and have made notes.  I have detailed files.  And a long memory.

"LEITMOTIF":  I dunno.  It sounds like one of the actors in a Scandi-drama that the BBC likes to put on in the evening to make people miserable.  Let us consult the Collins Concise.  "An often repeated image or theme in a literary work".  Ah.  You mean along the lines of "Of course - obviously!".  Right.  Gotcha.  Art!

I had to put this up. Obviously.

"MASSIF": NO!  Nothing to do with "Blue Lines".  You're thinking of Massive Attack.  This word?  Who knows.  Let me summon my trusty CC.  "A mass of rock".  O good.  Art!

"QUARTO":  I'd have guessed at an Imperial liquid measure, where the morning after one could boast to one's compatriots 'O yes, I managed five quartos and still managed to gob a kebab with chips, a jar of pickled eggs and a box of Twinkies."

     Hmmmmmm the reality is a lot more boring.  ""A book size resulting from folding a sheet of paper into four leaves or eight pages."  And you can't even eat it.  Bah!

A quart o' beer

Fingers Crossed!

Conrad, as we already know, has absolutely no interest in sport, most especially the ballfoot game.  Yet he is prepared to cross fingers and hope piously that England at least progress to the next 'stage' (stop me if I get too technical) of the Word Cupola, because that prompts my current business managers to let us go home early.  I have no idea if they're playing next week, or when, or against whom, I just like the idea of getting back to The Mansion 30 minutes early.  Art!

It's all happening here, folks

     Note how the sea is next to the sand.  Which leads us seamlessly into ...

"The Sea Of Sand"

An uneasy truce, brokered by Sarah, has emerged between the British and Italian soldiers now hiding from their alien assailants.

‘Grazie,’ he murmured, bracing both elbows on level ground and scanning the now-distant depot.

          Four dark masses, with a background of supply crates and pallets, stood still on the baking gravel.  Further back, beyond them, more black blobs were moving slowly.  This early in the morning heat haze wasn’t a confusing factor for vision.

          ‘They are not moving forwards.  I count four Carro Armato Negre, the black tanks, and more moving in the depot.  Ah.  Ah, yes, now I see.  They were moving the damaged vehicle.’

          Remaining still under the hammer of sunlight for long minutes, long dispirited minutes wondering what his men were suffering, the Tenente realised the alien vehicles were not advancing.  He waved over his driver and stationed him at the wadi edge, with instructions to alert them if the black vehicles began to move again.

          ‘Come on,’ said Sarah, adopting a sure and certain manner that she didn’t really feel.  Leading the way, she introduced the Tenente to her fellow Britons in the Bedford.

          ‘A truce is in place,’ she announced.  ‘We don’t try to get one over on the Italians, and they don’t take us prisoner.’

          ‘Good!’ said Albert, with emphasis.  ‘Since all we have to fight with are fists.’

     That's it, chaps, co-operation.

Not Going To Argue About This One

If your views differ, then THE EXIT DOOR IS THAT WAY!

     Time Magazine, a venerable South Canadian institution, has a record of appointing a 'Person of the Year' towards the end of December, and who do you think they have chosen for 2022?

     That's right, Alan Carr!  Art?

     OF COURSE IT'S NOT THAT WRETCHED BOTTOMHOLE ALAN CARR, DID YOU THINK I WAS SERIOUS?

     <short pause to ameliorate blood pressure>

     Prez Z, as I like to call him (I asked and he said it was fine), has been an inspiration as the Uke's president.  People pointed and laughed saying 'O he was a comedian, look how he's doing now against the 3D-chess master!"

     Well, NO!  He was an actor, yes.  Prez Z has grown into the role of President.  He makes nightly addresses to Ukraine, and, implicitly, the wider world.  He was clean-shaven at the start of Peter The Average's invasion, then let his whiskers sprout, so you can judge timeframes when you see his mug.  Art!

     I think we will come back to this.

     Let it be recorded that Ol' Vlod makes regular trips to the front lines and hospitals, unlike a certain bottomhole who meets up with actors via his three lookalikes.