Have Fun Gus!

Conrad Is Winging It A Bit Here

I have perhaps eight minutes before having to start work, whilst Mrs Entitled (Edna) is scratching and whimpering at the Sekrit Layr's door because she wants O so desperately to lick out the porridge bowl.

     Now, you are doubtless wondering which 'Gus' I refer to, and were this a normal blog then I, the author, would simply tell you.  Well, this is BOOJUM!  Art!

     The guy to port is 'Gus' Grissom, a strange name to have when he was actually called Virgil.  You wondered where "Thunderbirds" got their character names from?  Well, now you know.  Gus was one of the Mercury Seven, and one of the three astronauts killed in the Apollo One fire, which is a bit of a bum note in an Intro all about FUN!

     Except not.  This is, as I warned you above, BOOJUM! and we are, at best, an unreliable witness.  So we are rather less about Virgil playing hopscotch with fluffy bunnies under a sky full of rainbows, and more about horror, terror, misery and late-returned library books.

     FUNGUS being the operative word here.  Let's go on a little journey.

     "Hugh Walters" bobbed up to the surface of the festering mucky mire that is my mind - sorry if you can't unsee that! - out of nowhere in the kitchen earlier this week.  Art!

Stupid artist gives away a major plot point

     In reality <gives two-fingered salute to reality> his name was Walter Llewlyn Hughes, and he was a pillar of his community, being a successful businessman and a magistrate back in the Fifties, when things were a great deal more strait-laced than they are today.  Thus he adopted a pseudonym, in order that he not be mocked and jeered by the cruel (pronounced 'Krew-el') reading public, who can be a bit fickle at times.

     The novel above is one of a series of Young Adult sci-fi novels he wrote, which featured a lot of kit he'd invented out of his imagination that were later to become real.  The series began before Sputnik was a thing, pilgrims.  Art!

Ol' Sputty with puny human for scale

     The unpleasant thing in EV is a fungal spore than hitchhikes on an unmanned probe returning from Venus, which crashes in central Africa.  The spore, finding Earth to be a balmy paradise compared to the hellish landscapes of Venus, promptly spreads and prolifigates, uncontrollably.  There are no rate-limiting factors or competitors on Earth and it becomes a dangerous blight on the planet, necessitating a trip to Venus to find out if there is any native micro-organism that will challenge or kill it.  

     Ooops!

     It's been a good fifty years since Conrad read it, and he still remembers a pair of haz-mat suited scouts observing acres of fungal blight, with a large blob of fungus-covered matter painfully crawling amidst the grey acres.  They didn't have time to get kitted-out with radios, so they communicated with tablets and pen.

     "Dog" writes one scout, pointing to the amorphous blob.  Art!

Not grey but you get the idea*

     This idea of a fungal plague has most recently graced television screens globally thanks to "The Last Of Us" wherein Hom. Sap. becomes an endangered species thanks to a fungus getting ideas above it's station.

     However - first time today - Conrad was minded of the entirely un-necessary remake of "The Andromeda Strain", which features a kind of fungussy invasion covering acres of South Canadian real estate.  I think, it's been a while.  Art!

     Time is tight so I don't have time to track down the blighted landscape, so have a big bunch of dead birds instead.

     In the original "The Andromeda Strain", the central MacGuffin was a space probe that returned to Earth, contaminated with an evil little alien microorganism.  Art!

Unwanted tourist

     Which, if it's not quite where we came in, is close enough.

Desolation Angles

I have come across a link in my favourites that was bookmarked weeks ago, which I completely forgot about and which can thus be plundered for content.  The theme was 'Abandoned Islands', hence this item's title, which has nothing to do with Jack Kerouac, for your information.  Art!

     These rather steep-sided rocks are the "Antipodes Islands" waaaay off in the southern waters off Kiwiland, and - are you kidding?  Just look at them.  Who'd want to live there?  Hmmmm people with a business angle, trying to raise cattle there.  Who failed.  Art!

     Barren, desolate, isolated, amenity-free, off the shipping routes, cold wet and windy - again, is anyone surprised these islands are abandoned?

"City In The Sky"

We are back on terra firma again, where the alien Lithoi's flying death kit has arrived, amidst sleeting squally weather, with waters ebbing about the protagonist's feet.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Still Falls the Rain

      The battle of New Eucla didn’t occur as either party expected  First blood went to the Lithoi; no trace of Brogan ever came to light and the bleak assumption was that he’d been completely disintegrated during the messy skirmish.

     The Doctor also found himself embarrassed; there were two Lithoi aircraft, not one, which multiplied the risks immensely.

     The Lithoi found themselves almost visible.  The rain that sleeted down revealed the outline of their normally-invisible craft, which is how the defenders realised they faced two alien craft, not a single one.

     Another of the Timelord’s guesses proved wrong.  The two ghostly outlines in the driving rain never worried about the amount or direction of the squalls that hit them – he’d assumed that the Lithoi pilots would perform poorly in conditions that involved free water in very large amounts.

     New Eucla’s principal construction material, glass, also proved far harder to destroy than the all-wooden structures of Forrest.  The tinted overlay helped to reflect a lot of energy directed at them.  The Doctor stood behind a safely distant shearing shed and watched one of the ghostly craft spend thirty seconds destroying a single house from high up.  A second flaw in the rain slowly descended to thirty metres above the town and fired at an abandoned house where Mike had been hiding.

  Both parties somewhat discombombulated, hmmmm?

It Wouldn't Be A Proper Blog Without A Delicious Slice Of Schadenfreude

Don't forget, it has no calories and can safely be consumed by those with allergies, although it can bring about a bit of soul-withering if overdone.

     To what do I refer?

     Why, a great big article on "The Daily Beast" about Bloaty Biffer Bafune Boy.  Art!

     I am shortly to head out to do the weekly shop - O my rock 'n' roll lifestyle - so there isn't time to thoroughly investigate what's happening here.  Judging from the tagline beneath, Toxic Tangerine Toad is having trouble keeping his coffers filled, because he needs to pay for his battalions of lawyers and his campaigning expenses, and his loyal MAGA crowd only have so much disposable income.

     Tee hee!

Further To The Above

Xi Jinping has been a decidedly lukewarm 'friend' to Putin and Ruffia since day one of the Special Idiotic Operation.  Not only does China expect a whopping big 50% discount on Ruffian crude oil purchases, they've not bought any greater monthly volume now than before the invasion.  Also, the Chinese economy is by now about 15 times larger than Ruffia's, a balance they are not willing to jeopardise by risking secondary sanctions.  Art!

     Not only that, Xi got a rather acquisitive look in his eyes in the aftermath of Putinpot making up history in order to justify Ruffia's empire, because if one dictator can mangle reality that way, so can another.  China wants Siberia back.  Not tomorrow, not next year, probably not next decade, but they are going to get it back, bloodlessly, by quietly taking it over bit by bit.  They've already started re-naming Ruffian cities with Chinese names on their own maps.

Finally -

Time to go stock the kitchen cupboards!

*  "Europe After The Rain" by Max Ernst