But Why Did His Head Explode?

I Shan't Name Names

Because that would spoil it for you, if you ever decide to buy "The Bunker".  Yes, Volume 4 did arrive today, which is well before the August 15th date Abebooks had posted.  It came from South Canada, which explains why it was later than the other two volumes.

     Conrad is a bit on the fence about how it ends.  Given that it involves time-travel and the plotlines move back and forth in time, it was never going to be an easy read, but it kind of peters out rather than achieving anything definitive.  And there's no explanation for why one character's head blows apart like a dropped melon.  World's worst headache?  Art!

     Other reviewers have whined and moaned about the artwork but Your Humble Scribe likes it.

     ANYWAY none of that is what the rest of the Intro is about, because I have a rare example of a Reddit Revenge story on Youtube that's from This Sceptred Isle.  Original Poster had been nagged by his mum into getting the first job available, which involved door-to-door selling.  This is not a job of choice for anyone, but it was a job, the commission was supposedly fantastic and His Mum Nagged.  Art!

     First red flag; their contract was over 50 pages long.  For a door-to-door sales job?  OP tried to at least skim-read it but was hurried along by the other eager chumps.

     The manager's girlfriend was the assistant manager, and both would drive the D2D salespeople to a particular location to drop them off and pick them up.

     Red flag number two; the GF was a raging alcoholic who would go through four bottles of wine per day, which made her already awful driving even worse.  She disguised her swilling the vino by pouring into water bottles so it looked like a fruit juice drink. If she got too blitzed to drive, her boyfriend would do the duty, and he was a worse driver than she was, even when sober.

     Red flag number three: the manager would swoop in to close OP's sales, blithely lying that he'd pass the commission on to him.  This cost OP £3,000 in sales, which to my mind seems rather high for a humble D2D job.  Art!

Come on.  You knew this was coming.

     Red flag number four; the manager never answered his phone, didn't reply to texts and frequently failed to attend the office.  

     OP then handed in his badge at the showrooms in a shopping centre, made a claim for Jobseekers Allowance, and then paid a visit to the nearest police station.  Where he dropped GF and BF right in it, explaining about the drink driving and explaining in detail where they'd be operating from in the following fortnight, together with a map and times.  Art!

     When OP next passed the showroom again, there was a big sign in the window advertising a manager vacancy.  The sign stayed up for a year before the showroom closed down.  GF went to prison; British courts and judges take a very dim view of people getting sloshed and driving.  Last OP heard, BF had lost his house and was back living with his mum, because it turns out the 'contract' was completely void and illegal and he'd needed to sell his house to pay the fines.  I hope that £3 grand was worth it, matey.

     And with that, I think we can agree that justice was served.

Speaking Of Which ...

"The Daily Beast" has been speculating, with a touch of malicious glee, about Citizen Trump's upcoming indictment, arrest, and subsequent trial, in Washington D.C.  The jurors who sat on the trials of the January 6th rioters have been unanimously harsh in handing out convictions.  One of their lawyers opined that "If I was Donald J. Trump, the last place on earth I'd want to be tried ... is Washington D.C."  Art!

      Another lawyer for January insurrectionists explained that the process of jury selection had been horrible, because so many residents of DC felt that they had been personally insulted by the riot.  "It took us 12 days to pick a jury and we didn't like what we had."

     Trump is probably dimly aware of how disliked he is in the South Canadian capital and will doubtless throw a temper-tantrum on Twooth Social, ranting about fairness, impartiality and how he wants a different venue.  As legal counsel have already explained, that's not going to happen, regardless how many toys he throws out of the pram.

     Tee hee!

So That's Where It Went

Conrad used to knock around a college in central Manchester back in the day, which was not far from Granada Studios Tour.  This was where various television shows were shot, and Conrad, in the guise of being a male helper on a primary school outing, did the site tour.  Art!

     It closed down decades ago.  Now, an arts venue has been erected on the old GST site.  Art!

     With puny human for scale.  The place cost a whopping £215 million, half of which was provided by The Government, the rest from Manchester.  The first exhibition is by a Japanese artist, Yayoi  Kusama, who has provided gigantic inflatable - sculptures?  Art!

     Also with puny humans for scale.  Conrad is not entirely convinced; it looks like someone was under the influence of something illegal whilst reading H. P. Lovecraft.  Having a quick look at ticket prices, they seem to be a bit coy about the full-price ones but loudly promote the 'Affordable' ones at £10 a throw, so I imagine £20.

You may hear more about this.

"City In The Sky"

Ace and the Doctor have taken refuge in Arcology One, so the Doctor can crack a few heads together - metaphorically - and pound sense into at least a few Hom. Sap., since the ones 'Downstairs' are currently involved in global thermo-nuclear war.

     ‘Taiwan has joined in, and a submarine in the Pacific has hit Indonesia.  It’s spreading.’  She looked coolly at both travellers.  ‘Who are these two and how did they get in?’

      Virginia felt as if the pace of events was speeding up and accelerating beyond her ability to keep track of it.  She looked at the central screens, the ones that displayed launch warnings, missile tracks, projected impact points, and sighed.  They’d over-hauled and updated their detection software since the Iran-Israel affair, and for the moment they’d disabled “Nuclear Detonation Detected” or that would be all the screens showed.

     The madness had begun unexpectedly, with a missile launch from Pakistan, when everyone had seen China and Taiwan coming to blows first.  The Arcologies were the intended target; there was no deviation in the missile’s flight, no post-boost course correction, only a straight track from Kahuta to near Earth orbit.  That had been scary, knowing that a nuclear-armed missile was heading straight for you, and your utterly defenceless, fragile bubble in space.

     Within seconds of the launch track, their permanently-present American watchdog had powered up it’s on-board laser system, bounced a 0.001% strength pulse off the rising missile to accurately determine it’s position in space and then fried the weapon with a gigajoule of coherent gamma rays.  What a shame their American shepherd wasn’t simply an old-fashioned missile-firing platform!  That would have returned the missile to earth in a million pieces

     Dear me, some people really have a grudge against the arcologies, don't they?  Why, it's almost as if they had a hidden agenda.

Finally -

Today the weather has been mocking me.  MOCKING ME!  Sunshine and blue skies all day long whilst I am chained to my laptop and monitor, whereas it rained non-stop all weekend and I got damp on my constitutional to and from Lesser Sodom.

     Bah!