That Is, I've Not Outsmarted Myself -
Nor is there such a term as 'insmarted', so Conrad is going for the middle ground and using 'about'. You see, last night I was obviously hit by artistic inspiration, probably when looking at a page of Youtube channels, and wrote a bit of script down, although maybe it was also triggered by writing a bit more of "The Annals Of Urquelomplangia". I'm pretty certain it didn't come from the end of Episode 10 of "For All Mankind" as they have 0% involvement in ghosts, spirits and the supernatural. Art!
If I can elucidate a tad, what I wrote was "Rent-A-Ghost (Inc.)", the 'Inc' implying that I'd gotten an idea about RAG and another television or film on a similar theme, because I wouldn't bother about a single TV series.
Or would I? I may have had an idea about what that other item was, but Conrad is not sure, the old grey cells having encountered probably far too much gin in their time. Art!
This is "Hire-A-Horror" as seen in the pages of "Cor!". The idea was quite simple; each week someone would call HAH in order to contract their assorted monsters, ghouls, vampires, zombies and other supernatural creatures, and both high jinks and hilarity would ensue. Of course - obviously! - it was played for laughs as this was a children's comic, not "Eerie" or any of that ilk. The strip ran for years, so it must have been liked by a few people out there. Art!
Actually they were a limited company
Rather than have an array of different monsters, RAGL specialised in the niche market for ghosts, though Conrad wonders how a collection of ethereal spirits managed to handle a telephone and why they needed a desk. This strip was in "Buster" and you may notice that the artist in both strips is the same (Reg Parlett). Nobody seems to know which influenced which, just that RAGL had a long life, ten years until the comic itself folded in the late Seventies. Art!
Then there's this, "Rentaghost", which doesn't seem to have registered with Somerset House and which, once again, featured ghosts that could be hired to do various mundane or ultramundane things. The initial set-up was that a ghost, who was a miserably unsuccessful man in life, seeks to provide fellow spooks who were similarly hopeless alive with a chance at success, post mortal-coil.
It was very successful for a children's television program, running for nine seasons, despite having to cope with the death of one of the actors - yes, for real, dead as a doornail - and another deciding not to return for the second series. Art!
And death shall have no dominion. Or something pseudy like that.
Then we have Tim Burton's look at the theme of haunting houses, "Beetlejuice", surely the least appropriate source for a children's cartoon ever. In case you missed it, the film features a 'Bio-exorcist' who goes by the handle Beetlejuice, which is what he mangles 'Betelgeuse' into. Art!
Michael Keaton's finest moment
The plot is that a recently-deceased couple, finding that an obnoxious and unwanted live family have moved into their house, hire Beetlejuice to haunt them the heck out of there. The cure proves to be worse than the disease. Conrad also loved loved loved the Sandworms, which I will glorify here. Art!
CAUTION! Not suitable as domestic pets
And I think that's enough of RAG for one Intro. I shall, doubtless, realise what I meant last night only after posting this blog. Such is life, and also the midden that Conrad calls a mind.
"The War Illustrated"
We are into April with this edition, and indeed near the end of this volume. The other nine are still wrapped in plastic and waiting to be unleashed. Conrad is curious what the editions from this time 84 years ago up until the end of 1942 had to say, because it was pretty much all bad news for the Allies. Art!
At least they admit it was brutal fighting, which by this time had been going on for three months, and still had another month to go. Fighting there was so fierce that one Teuton soldier, who had been transferred there from the Eastern Front, said that he'd gladly crawl back to Russia if it meant getting out of the war in Italy at Cassino. This truly was industrial warfare; the lower photo shows Allied aircraft bombing Cassino town, which was obliterated into a gigantic pile of ruins.
Let's look at an earlier war and a fictional take on it. If you're fed up of conflict you may skip this next BUT I WILL KNOW ABOUT IT. Thanks.
"The Big Parade"
These things were disliked by troops as their parabolic
trajectory allowed them to land bombs directly in trenches – or shell craters.
Eventually our
surviving hero is saved by a large South Canadian attack before dawn, where the
line-abreast formation takes a temporary back seat. Art!
Note the
tinting, which is to show that this is night-time. There’s a quite brutal scene of a Teuton machine-gun
team getting over-run by the troops they had been shooting at mere seconds
before, and there’s no merciful shooting, it’s all bayonets and clubs. Art!
This, believe
me, is entirely realistic and probable; machine-gun crews were lucky if they
survived long enough to be taken prisoner, on both sides, as they were detested
for the heavy casualties they caused.
There’s a
struggle for a contested farmhouse, which is then blown up, presumably by a
large-calibre shell, as the explosion looks Dog Buns! Dangerous. Art!
"City In The Sky"
Our peripatetic time-traveller is searching old records for clues as to how the Big Crash began, and he's keeping his cards close to his chest.
She followed Alex back across the worn
plastic paths, where the middle lay visibly lower than the kerbs, eroded by the
traffic of ten thousand pairs of feet over half a century. Compared to their first visit, more people
were visible on the walkways, looking like columns of ants on the overhead
paths. Their marching in columns made
them seem even more ant-like. Nearer to
the township Ace could see other teams of workers coming back from doing manual
work in the fields and orchards, bamboo thickets, hemp shrubberies and
bean-sprout tanks. Logically it made
sense to have even more people working on agriculture than before, since the
sphere needed more food and more oxygen to supply excess population.
‘Do you want to come back to
Such a reputation made Ace uneasy.
The two time-travellers tried to observe history, or get it back on
track, not to actually create it. She
was, though, at a loose end for the moment.
To Alex’s open glee she agreed, and five minutes brisk walk brought them
to the low-rise cluster of buildings that composed
Okay, okay, there's no Doctor in this section. BE PATIENT!
Because Crude Humour Is Still Humour
Your Humble Scribe was just looking for a little item to pad things out and round them off, preferably something light and frothy that doesn't involve tanks, zombies or atom bombs. Art!
You can get away with a lot if you claim it's an 'emotional support porcupine', I believe. The airline might jib at an 'emotional support donkey', I suspect.
I wonder what the dog thought of them?
Finally -
I need to go box up that Sunday Stew I was making, and have a taste to test it, too.
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