The Red Mist Is Receding ...
Conrad got stuck in traffic this evening after doing the shopping at Iceland; it took 20 minutes to travel a hundred yards, with traffic seemingly backed-up all the way from the M62 for miles into Rochdale. The cashier at Morrisons said there had been 3 accidents on the motorway at rush hour, which had caused the tailbacks, but I cannot find any mention of them on teh Interwebz.
O - hang on! Just found evidence that it actually happened. Art!
A fun way to spend 3 hours
This is the M60 at 15:00, and I got stuck at 18:00, so it was quite the jam. More of a traffic clot than a jam, really. There was a silver lining, however.
ANYWAY I would like to abruptly change track and re-acquaint you with "The Mind Of Wolfie Smith", a comic strip about a teenager gifted with immense powers of ESP, who is also miserably unlucky. His character first appeared in "Tornado" and re-surfaced in "2000AD" when they bought out the former. Art!
In one of his misadventures, Wolfie is blackmailed into working for the grotesquely deformed Harry Kramer, a.k.a. 'The Bogeyman', into breaking into a top secret vault in pursuit of the master computer within. Except -
It's not a master computer. It's a biological warfare agent. I bet you can see where this is going ...
Well, Wolfie is being a little circumloquotious here, as the 'Holy Terrors' were infected by the bacteria, sent raving mad, and killed each other. So they were, momentarily, a gang of crazies.
More contemporaneously, there is also the remake of "The Crazies", which is one of those rarities, a remake that is better than the original. This wasn't hard, the 1973 original had a budget of less than $300,000, and the 2010 iteration weighed in at $20 million, and had Timothy Olyphant to boot. It was a modest success*. Art!
Here you see all the citizens of Ogden Marsh herded into cages, in order to stop them wandering off and spreading the Trixie virus, because SPOILER there is no cure and all these people are either going to die or become homicidally insane. Art!
Some Good Ole Boys then destroy the pen's fencing by ramming it, and yes, they may already have joined the ranks of Crazy, or they may just be ornery South Canadians who distrust the Gubmint on principle. Art!
You want a gang of crazies? That's how you get a gang of crazies.
Thanks to cramming all those people in cheek by jowl, if any single one of them was infected, now they all are. Well done Major Disaster!
ANYWAY of course - obviously! - none of this has to do with the Crazy Gang. You see, whilst I was sitting in the traffic jam, thanking heavens that this is Perfidious Albion, where nobody has a gun, a decades-old memory floated to the top of the septic sewer that is my mind. Sorry if you can't unsee that.
"Nervo and Knox". I think this pairing was the answer to a riddle from an old Eagle annual, because the article declared that they were members of the 'Crazy Gang', as if that was explanation enough. "The Who?" I thought.
A Crazy of One
Well, wouldn't you know, the Crazy Gang were a gang of very successful comedians, three duos who teamed up on stage to outstanding success. You can forgive Conrad for not being aware of them as they began in late 1931 and had ceased performing not long after I was born, as they were all very long in the tooth by then.
For your information, their line-up was: Bud Flanagan; Chesney Allen; Jimmy Nervo; Teddy Knox; Charlie Naughton; Jimmy Gold. Art!
They were so successful on stage during the Thirties that they were signed by Gainsborough studios and made several films, pre- and then into the Second Unpleasantness. Not only that, they had the Royal seal of approval as King George VI was very fond of them. You can also see Flanagan and Allen doing their signature, and most successful, song "Underneath The Arches" in the film "Dunkirk" - the black-and-white version thereof.
Turned out to be quite a productive traffic jam.
Talking Of Crazy -
This one is bizarre and barely credible. Okay, things in Nigeria might not be spiffy, but to do what four Nigerian men did is well beyond the pale. Art!
This is them arriving in Brazil. They had crossed the Atlantic perched on top of the rudder and in the crawl-way space above it. I won't go into what they were reduced to drinking when they ran out of water; they had expected to take a much shorter route to Europe and had only barely enough food and water for that.
The bonkers thing about this is that it's not the first time Nigerians have stowed away on the rudder of a ship - it's happened at least twice already.
"City In The Sky"
Roll up! Roll up! Grandstand seats for the End Of Civilisation As We Know It! A bit tasteless, perhaps, but accurate.
‘That was a live feed from
Feeling sick to her stomach, Ace blundered
out of the claustrophobic room, back into open air.
She liked explosions, yes. The mass slaughter below was a whole level
beyond anything acceptable or understandable.
How could they do it!
Outside, she felt the crushing weight of
the upper hemisphere looming over her, making her tense and fall into a
near-crouch. A consoling hand on her
shoulder made her look up to see Nat, the Warden, looking at her with a mixture
of compassion and worry.
‘I couldn’t stay in there either. It’s too awful,’ said the officer. ‘Come on, show me your strange device and
keep my mind off things.’
The young woman sighed and tried to orient
herself. Up on the ceiling sat a dark
blue speck: the TARDIS. Ten minutes walk
away.
‘There it is. I don’t know how you put up with this – it
feels like the sky’s going to fall on my head.’
To Ace, the awful dizzying panorama merely
scrolled away under her feet, the sense of an imminent collapse never
receding.
‘You get used to it. All of us who came Upstairs had to do two
weeks acclimatisation in
They passed a group of people tilling a
hectare of open ground, planting seedlings from containters. Several looked up and nodded at the pair.
A bucolic contrast, hmmm?
Talking Of Rudders -
You may have heard, if at second- or third-hand, that killer whales, more accurately known as orcas, have been attacking small boats off the coast of Spain, an activity that has been happening since 2020. Marine conservationists who study the orcas, say this behaviour isn't aggressive, compulsive or any other negative, but it in fact a form of play. Art!
Their attacks focus on the rudder of these boats, which they quite often knock apart, because a ten-ton orca overmatches a plastic rudder every time. They will play with the internal plastic packing inside the rudder when it spills out, poking it around the ocean with their noses.
- and now the adults are teaching their delinquent offspring to do the same.
It's not quite challenging Hom. Sap. for dominance of the seas - but it's a worrying start.
Finally -
I bought extra popcorn and crisps, because I intend to spend some time on Youtube watching various news channels about You Know Who getting indicted for the fourth time. Your Humble Scribe won't be toasting this any time soon as I've decided to be sober for August and see what my liver thinks.
* $54 million globally on a $20 million budget
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