Alien

Conrad Is Feeling Thoughtful

Having to wait until the potatoes come to a boil will do that; Thinking Time, as I like to call it, and it will have to make do thanks to the miserably wet weather outside, which obviously - of course! - prevents me from taking Edna trotties.

     Yes, Your Humble Scribe is casting a critical eye over that film from 1979, which began quite the franchise.  Art!

     Here an aside.  Yes, already!  That massive great structure above is not the 'Nostromo' but rather the autonomous refinery that the Nossy is towing, carrying out the refining process during the transit from wherever it transhipped the crude until it reaches Earth. Art!

     There you go, a giant space tug, or the 22nd century equivalent of a tractor towing a trailer.  Yo

     ANYWAY Conrad has been reading an article on the Beeb's website about the search for alien life in the cosmos, and also nearer home, which naturally got him to thinking about said film.

     Because who (or what) is the alien here?

     Consider LV-462.  It is the outer space equivalent of a desert, inhospitable and inimical to life, as one of the suits sitting in judgement on Ripley declares.  Art!

CAUTION! Not recommended by Cook

     The most advanced form of life on this rock would be micro-organisms.

     So, then we have a passel of Hom. Sap. who arrive out of nowhere after chugging the Big Empty.  Being humans, of course - obviously!, they assume that everything else is the alien, rather than themselves.

     Then they discover the inarguably alien spaceship, clearly designed along lines completely different from those that built the Nostromo.  The 'Jockey', dead these many thousands of years, is also an alien.  Art!

     Withal, no more alien and out of place than the humans, and considering how many eons it had been sitting on LV-426, it has a better claim to be the resident species than the upright apes.  Or it would do, were it not for the cargo.  Art!

     Not just alien, dangerously alien.  Or at least initially.  From retconning over the decades, these critters are less Death On Two Legs Personified than a bio-engineered weapon, so when it hacks apart the Nostromo's crew you can kind of acknowledge it as a feral apparatus merely doing what it was designed to do.  "Lethal Spanner" doesn't quite have the cachet of "Alien", though, does it?

     Then there is a plot hole as big as that in the Space Jockey.  One of the facehuggers got to it, and the resultant imago version of DOTLP burst asunder.

     Well, where is it?  These things grow at an accelerated rate, so where is the adult version?  LV-462 is a barren rock with nothing edible from horizon to horizon, so why didn't the Space Jockey get gnawed to a husk by a desperately hungry DOTLP?  Art!

Baby is - hungry

     ANYWAY that above is a fictional look at what may be in store for Hom. Sap. once they get to whizzing about between the stars, because real live aliens may have agendas totally incomprehensible, indeed actively hostile to you us.  Conrad thought up a headline and a tagline for a poster where Hom. Sap. is in very big trouble.

     Heh.

     We may conjecture tomorrow on more cerebral matters.  Or not.  Depends how I feel.

Putin Off The Inevitable

You may not have noticed, but that embezzling bottomhole Sergei The Slug proudly came up with a plan to defeat Ukraine, in 2025.  This is a date that crops up a lot in the Ruffian propagandist's broadcasts, because it's when the next South Canadian Prez enters office in January of that year.  Bloaty Gas Tout and his irksome minions are all desperately praying that a certain Orange Bloviator gets into the White House, when all will become hunky-dory.  Art!

     Ah - not so fast, chaps.  That's a year and a half away.  In the meantime - 

     Oooh, I bet Peter The Average is having kittens about this.  Expect another hike in Ruffian interest rates by the weekend.  Only yesteryon it was 98.00.

     Suddenly, from the Kremlin's perspective, January 2025 looks a very long way off.

     Tee hee!

Consolidation

You should know by now the unholy glee that Conrad experienced on Saturday at getting six packs of sugar-free sweets, as consolation for not getting any aqueous cream.

     Instead of having them sit in a bag, I determined that they ought to see daylight and trimmed an old box full of drugs (legal ones).  Art!

     That'll keep me going for a couple of days.  Weeks!  I meant weeks!

WORDLE

Is it supposed to be in upper case?  Whatever.  Your Humble Scribe's work team are now partaking in this on a daily basis, with the best scorer getting a free trip to Minsk, where they pay you to come holiday I believe, with bathtubs of vodka and gin to frolic in.  I think, my attention was diverted when the rules were being discussed, only the 'No Cheating' bit sank in.  Art!

     I used to do it at Sainsbo's, until they got rid of the entire department b<self-pity party redacted courtesy Mister Hand>

 "City In The Sky"

I think we're still getting the inside view of the sinister Lithoi, who masterminded the Big Crash for their eeeeeevil ends.  Aliens, you see.  No concept of the rules of cricket.

     Yes, let them breed.  That way, when their vendors arrived to take possession of Earth, there’d be plenty of upright local game to hunt and kill and eat.  Or did they eat meat?  Harken wasn’t sure. And he wasn’t sure they ever did things for enjoyment, the unpleasant lot.

     He went back to an exploded schematic of the basehip’s giant beam weapon, concluding a long time later that the weapon couldn’t be dismounted without dismantling the baseship itself, and doing that was probably impossible, in addition to being forbidden.

     We still have two flying eyes, anyway, he consoled himself.  ‘And nobody at all to stop us.’

     The Lithoi did not go in for dramatic literature, or Harken might have paused before committing such hubris.

CHAPTER SEVEN: Stranded

      Adelaide’s long-abandoned Botanic Gardens were disturbed by an unearthly noise, seemingly the product of a horrid mechanical howling routed via a Leslie speaker rotating at full speed.  Swarms of parakeets left the branches of their roosts in temporary alarm, circling back to land when the echoes died away.

     Ah, back with the Doctor and companions.

Time To Deploy A Strategic Wheelbarrow Of Popcorn

O my goodness, guess whose trial on fraud charges began today?

     NO! Not Lord Lucan.  Donald Trump.  In fact he's already been found guilty by a judge last week, so all that remains is to sort out how much he has to shell out, which is going to be an eye-wateringly large sum.  Art!

     Let me enhance his wretched tangerine physiognomy.  Art!

     He doesn't look very happy, does he?  All that bluster and braggadocio is reserved for playing to the public - typically, just before he had to go into court, he was slagging-off Letitia James.  Way to go, Donald Buck - insult the judge who will be pursuing another six cases against you.  Mind you, his lawyers would have to staple his mouth shut to stop his pie-hole from flapping madly.

      The Tangerine One has also been whining about how there's no jury in this trial.  No, there isn't; as Judge Engeron pointed out, none of Trump's lawyers asked for one.  You might expect that woman sitting next to him, Alina Habba, to make a gaffe like that as she's a rubbish lawyer, but the chap sitting next to Donald is Chris Kise, who was paid a $3 million advance.

     Ooopsie.

     It'll be interesting to see if what The Donald had to say outside court is repeated inside court.  One suspects not.

Finally -

I need to trip lightly down to the kitchen to clean some dishes and get my step count up.

Pip pip!