Conrad Is ANGRY!

Angrier Than Usual, That Is

Which is usually pretty seethe-y in the first place.  For one thing, the weather is dreadful at present.  Your Humble Scribe is highly chuffed that he took his constitutional into Lesser Sodom early this morning, when it was quite balmy, and that it was only spitting when Edna got to go walkies.  At present I think the fish in the River Irk could swim out into the open and survive.  Art!

     No, this is not one of the creatures lurking at the bottom of the Irk.  At least, I hope not.  It's a 'Spring Croc', an imaginary entity that lives on 'Epona', the third planet of the star 82 Eridani, which a collection of aspiring intellectuals created way back in the Nineties.  They intended to create a believable world from the bottom up, with credible flora and fauna; none of those green-skinned alien princesses who resemble the female of Hom. Sap. except with <REDACTED><REDACTED> covered with wisps of chiffon that somehow don't fall off.  Art!

The poster girl for 'Exotic alien female'

     The Spring Croc is an ambush predator, lying in wait semi-submerged until prey arrives, when it presumably uncoils itself in rapid fashion, all the better to consume with.  One saving grace is that it doesn't possess much in the way of an intellect, being mostly concerned about filling it's stomach on a daily basis, so you can easily beat it in a game of Snap or five-card stud poker.

     The reason I have hammered the Remote Nuclear Detonator into a creaking wreck this afternoon is because of, yes you guessed it, CODEWORDS.

     This may not seem connected with Springcrocs and Epona.  Bear with me.

     Okay, the reason I am cranky and curmudgeonly is because the following sequence of ridiculously obscure or foreign or botanical words come from the "Puzzler", a periodically published magazine that has, up until Page 63, been scrupulously honest with solutions.  Art!

  Not any longer.

    "JOJOBA": Prequel to "JoJoRabbit"?  Nope.  My trusty Collins Concise states: "A shrub or small tree of SW South Canada, having edible seeds containing a valuable oil that is used in cosmetics".  WHAT ARE WE ALL BOTANISTS AND COSMETOLOGISTS NOW?  How in the ever-sundering Dog Buns! is a chap like Conrad supposed to guess this one - do you think I ever use cosmetics?  Art!

JojoBAH!

     "ORFE":  Conrad, again, wondered if this wasn't another reference to another artistic work, just edited down a bit - "Orfe In The Underw"?

     Nope once again.  Reference to the diligent CC reveals:"A small slender European cyprinoid fish, occurring in two colour varieties, nam

     ANYWAY my point is made.  Who on pulchritudinous piscine planet Earth would know what, were they not a tropical fish enthusiast?  Art!

The oreful fish in question

     "EBONA":  NOW we get to the meat of the matter, hmmm?  Just as you were getting impatient.  You can see why Conrad, with a mind like a skip, immediately made the connection to The Epona Project, which he hasn't checked up on for probably twenty years.  The advantage of having a mind like a skip, I feel.  I have briefly explained about EPONA, but have absolutely no idea what an 'EBONA' is, whether you wear it, eat it, hunt it for sport or use it to calculate differential equations.  Let us consult the trusty CC. 

     Aaaaaaaaaand nothing.  Okay, let us gamble on the collective knowledge of teh Interwebz <crosses fingers>.  Art!

     No, I'm not having that.  Let's try again.  Art!

          Ah, there you go, an obscure pharmaceutical retailed in India.  I have no idea what it does and am not inclined to waste time finding out.  As for those compilers, I should have turned a Spring Croc loose on them, that would serve them right, and it would be a lingering death, too.

    We've not finished with my Frothing Nitric Ire, not by a long way, but I will call a pause here in the interests of mercy.

Thought For Food

Yesteryon the family took a trip to Chorlton, in order to dine at 'Benitos', an hostelry in that environ.  The reason for same is that Degsy had acquired another lap around the Sun, so it was incumbent upon us to point this out.  The menu features gluten-free items, which is good for Wonder Wifey, as gluten turns her alimentary canal inside-out.

     I realise this is rather along the lines of "Look What I Had For Lunch!" so I shall keep it brief.  Art!

     This is the set-up for their 'Paint Party'.  I didn't take a picture of those who partook, but they were painting "Starry Night" and having a whale of a time, all thirty of them.  Yes it was that popular.  Art!

Conrad's Bang Bang Chicken

Here you can see the Buttermilk Chicken, Smokey Joe Burger, Chilli and a Steak being et

Empty plates - the best accolade

Thunder And Lightning Part 2

Yes, more about Storm Shadows and how the Ruffians got their hands on one in July this year.

     For Your Information, the Stormzy is a missile produced by Perfidious Albion, which is designed and intended to be used on NATO aircraft.  The Ukrainians have managed to fit them to their venerable Soviet-era S-24s, and here is how.  Art!

"By the little house I have friends"
I think

     The 'pylon' or underwing attachment point is actually from an obsolete RAF Tornado, hence our puns about bad weather.  Heaven only knows what kind of software contortions they went through to make this work, but it cannot be denied that it works.  One of my truisms about the Ukies comes into play here: brave, clever and very good at improvising.

     Yes yes yes, I hear you quibble.  But - now that the Ruffians have their hands on one, doesn't that mean game over?  They will analyse the bits to bits.

     As Devin Stone of 'Legal Eagle' loves to say - it depends.

     For one, none of the Ruffian pictures show the sensor array mounted on the front of Stormzy, which may mean it was pounded into scrap when the missile crash-landed.  This is the hardware and software that they would dearly like to get hold of.  For two, the Ruffian specialist institute which carried out missile analysis burned down early in the war last year <sabocoughcoughtage>.  Art!

     For three, Stormzy is, like a lot of NATO kit given to Ukraine, quite long in the tooth, and has been around for over 20 years.  It's not cutting edge.  Well, not in the West.  If it had crash-landed in Buryatia the locals would probably have put it on a plinth and worshipped it.  Art!

Buryatia

     Let us move on from the intricacies of ALCM terminal-homing guidance hardware, sexy as it is*.

Caught Out - Again

If you are keeping up to speed on BOOJUM! then you will have noticed that we noticed certain UK newspaper media sites are re-using SOUTH CANADIAN Reddit stories, because UK journalists are a bunch of 'drunken reptiles', to use the immortal phrase Lord Kitchener deployed against them when a gaggle of them blocked his path, and they are both lazy and overpaid**, especially those from "The Sun" and th

     ANYWAY let me prod Art into sentience with this acetyl-cholinesterase-inhibiting-shark-stick -

     Let me translate that this total is from $100,000.

"City In The Sky"

We now take a short diversion from the Doctor, and Ace, and Alex.  Conrad has to build up the verisimilitude, after all.

INTERPOSIT THREE:

      It is a pre-requisite of nanotechnology that it be stupid.  Or, perhaps, unintelligent.  A self-replicating construct that utilises readily-available elements to reproduce is sufficiently a hazard not to make matters worse by giving it either a collective intellect or the ability to evolve.

     So.  The Lithoi’s seeding programme in the Northern hemisphere of Earth incorporated billions of minute robots with inherent design flaws that ensured they became worn-out within months.  They had no ability to communicate with each other or to be communicated with, to ensure that their unintelligence remained unevolved. 

     Thus, blindly following their engineered programming, the faithful workers began and persisted in isolating fall-out residuum, concealing it in a lattice of boron and transporting it onward to intermediate collection points, where other microbots would carry it further to specific sites for disposal.  Arcology One would have been immensely impressed by the technology involved, not to mention relieved at the explanation for background radioactivity declining so rapidly.

     I don't know if 'microbots' is patented yet or not, but I want my cut if it ever is.

Finally -

Better go audit the fridge.  There are bound to be transgressors that need seeing to.

*  Or is that just me?

**  Sue me if you like, I don't care.