I Am Going To Frighten You All

By Quoting Shakespeare

"Where is the real Conrad, the Shakespeare-baiting-hating curmudgeon who bitterly resents all the time lost to 'O' and 'A' Level English Lit because of the Barb Of Avon?"

     Don't worry, I'm still here and still objectionable and STILL HATE MUSICALS just to really seal the deal.  What we need now is a clickbaity picture to draw the punters in.  Art!  No young Angela Lansbury this time, either.

     BECAUSE IT'S BASED ON SHAKESPEARE'S PLAY "THE TEMPEST" you cultureless oiks.  What, you think I'd sully the pages of BOOJUM! with one of his plays?

     ANYWAY we have been going on about "The Brain Of Morbius" recently -

     Here an aside.  Before BOOJUM! erupted onto the world and permanently bent reality, Your Humble Scribe had a side-gig writing Doctor Who fan-fiction.  Serious stuff, none of the more bonkers cross-overs, no dodgy romances between the Doctor and his nubile female companions, and sticking to canon.  The last one I embarked on, years ago, featured the First Doctor and his companions, and if Art will put down his bowl of coal -

A character as crotchety as Conrad

     They bump into a band of 'brigandines', who had been officially-licenced space pirates acting as military auxiliaries during wartime, and who continued being space pirates after wartime.  The brigandine leader takes a verrrry deep interest in the Doctor, because of Morbius' 'Black Crusade'.  This had been the attempt of Morbius, another renegade Time Lord, to seize control of Karn, a planet where an anti-aging drug was produced.  He brought 'The scum of galaxy' along and pretty much destroyed Karn in the process.  What the brigandine leader narrates is that there was a second renegade Time Lord associated with the Black Crusade, whom he suspected of working to his own agenda, and thwarting that of Morbius.

     ANYWAY I may go back and finish it at some point as I put some serious work into those fanfics and they were well-liked.  There was a running joke about Barbara's legs a

     ANYWAY AGAIN there is a line the Doctor pronounces in "Planet Of Evil" - don't whinge about suddenly changing serials - which always resonated with me.  Art!

     There you go, Shakespeare.  Incidentally, that extremely convincing alien 'forest' was actually a corridor within the BBC at Shepherd's Bush, and it took weeks to scrub and scrape all the trimmings off, which did not go down well with the big brass.

     So there you have it, Conrad quoting The Barf Of Avon, who'd have thought it!

"Bill was extremely cross with Conrad"

"The Electric State" By Simon Stalenhag

Those of you with long memories may remember Conrad picking up on illustrations from an online website which were bizarre, fascinating and frightening at the same time.  Their narrative seemed to hint at a semi-successful alien invasion of planet Earth, with their technology in the background, sometimes active, often ruined.  Art!

     The artwork is atmospheric and very detailed, evoking a sense of both dread and wonder.  A Youtube channel explained that it's the road-trip of a young woman and her small yellow robot companion, which kind of ties together the art that the previous website couldn't.

     Conrad is tempted.  Can't deny I am.  I wonder what it's going for on Abebooks?

Appearances.  Deceptive On Occasion

Take, as an example, the picture that Art is going to conjure up for you.  Art!

     Meet the clean-cut, rather mild-looking William Fairbairn.  A retired bank-manager?  Practicing cleric?  Trombone and fiddle player.

     None of the above.  Mr. Fairbairn was a police officer in the crime-ridden city of Shanghai between the First and Second Unpleasantnesses.  He waged a one-man war on the gangs, and he won around 600 fights involving guns, knives and  blunt instruments, leaving him with enough scars to impress Batman.

     When the Second Unpleasantness broke out, he served his country by writing books on all the dirty tricks he'd learned during his time in Shanghai and - he knew a lot.  Art!

     He and a pal of his, one Mr. Sykes, decided that what the British nation really, really needed was a fighting knife.  So they designed the Fairbairn-Sykes Fighting Knife.  This was not a weapon adapted from anything else, it did not double as a tool for cutting bread and shaving with it was not recommended; it was designed to do one thing: make people not-alive.  Art!

     The edges would be sharpened to take a horribly sharp edge - that not-alive thing again - and the whole knife was well-balanced so that it handled well when you not-alived people.  Art!

     One group of enthusiastic hooligans who adopted it quick smart were the Royal Marine Commandos, who were delighted to have a silent weapon that had no moving parts and needed no ammunition, yet which would not-alive the enemy in a few seconds.

   Appearances.  Remember that!

"The Sea Of Sand"

The Doctor and Sarah are both wrestling with the moral consequences of his creating an atom bomb from Spam tins and baling wire, which the other human refugees are completely clueless about.

‘Couldn’t you bluff them?  Say you have a bomb when you haven’t?  or just threaten to use it unless they leave?’

          With a sad shake of the head, the Doctor disagreed.

          ‘You haven’t encountered these creatures face-to-face, Sarah.  Brutal application of force is how their civilisation runs.  Mere threats are not sufficient to cow them.’

          The big question, ultimately, was how to gain access to the various equipments stored at Mersa Martuba.  A raid into the base whilst a diversion was mounted might work – or it might not, since that was how the Doctor had gotten in there the previous night.  Once-bitten, twice shy.

          Torrevechio, on sentry duty, noted an absence that he mentioned to Tam, when the British NCO came to take over.

          ‘Nil Carro Armato Negre.  Black Tank, none,’ he pantomimed.

          Tam, silently cursing the inability of other nationalities to speak English, scanned the depot and began to wonder about what he couldn’t see.

          ‘None of them black buggers, anyroad.  No sign anywheres.’  For at least half an hour he scanned the site, the beaten paths within and the barely-trodden border without.  Unlike previous day’s sentry duty, he didn’t see anything moving at all.

          ‘Nothing moving at all.  I have to tell about this!’

     Opportunity beckons!  I don't think I really explored the consequences of a group of British and Italian soldiers being introduced to fission warheads in early 1941, rather than the whole world discovering about them in August 1945.  

Finally -

Blog traffic is a bit low at present, because I'm working Saturday and Sunday, both last week and this week, which means no ability to create two posts per day over the weekend.  Footasylum don't like employees using their servers to create nonsensical scrivel, it seems, unlike Sainsbo's, who weren't really bothered, as long as it was SFW.  Art!

     As ever, it's the South Canadians who relish BOOJUM! the most, and the grey in Russia is a bit deceptive, as we only have one viewer there.  Most probably a bored FSB officer looking to see what the West thinks of him, and crying at Perun's devastating Youtube OSINT analyses of he and his comrades.  

     And with that we are done!