Eye Of The Lens

You Ought To Know By Now Conrad Is Essentially An Idle Soul

His idea of a wild evening is to sit in his comfy chair and read a book.  Perhaps even annotating it, just to be even wilder.  Thus this afternoon's sojourn to Glodwick Primary Health Centre was more than a mere speed-bump in my daily activity.  This trip was for a diabetic eye-test - half-way towards today's title - since they stopped doing them at Royton Health Centre in January.  Art!

     Since I had taken the precaution of bringing my notebook along, I wondered how to extort content from this contumely?  First things first: take a picture.  Art!

GPHC through a camera lens (there's the other part of today's title)

     Yes, the Comsats have a track called "Eye Of The Lens" in their repertoire.  What Conrad was thinking about was a sci-fi short story going by the same title, which was the title of a collection of short stories by an author whose name I couldn't remember.  Curse old age and gin!

     Being a hip and up-to-the-minute kind of guy, I immediately Googled for the name on teh Interwebz, and it brought up this.  Art!

     Langdon Jones, if you're having trouble reading it.  Conrad only remembers vague details about the first story, "The Great Clock", where some hapless lackey maintains a great big clock, so big he lives inside it.  The twist is that, to keep it running, it ages him incredibly quickly.  I seem to recall that it all ends badly when he revolts and smashes up the clock and time stops for everyone everywhere.  There was also a mock biography of Ludwig Beethoven II, which I remember as being darkly amusing, and that's it.  Art!

     That's him right there.  He was a staple of the experimental, controversial and occasionally-banned "New Worlds" magazine, editing it for a time as well as contributing.  Perhaps his other short stories in TEOTL were a bit too experimental for a much younger Conrad to either appreciate or remember.  He did seem to one for the Bleakness And Anomie Of Human Existence school, and was probably terrific chums with J. G. Ballard.

     We're not done yet, matey, sit back down!

     Returning to cold hard reality, the thing about Glodwick and GPHC is that they sit outside any bus routes, making them very awkward to reach on public transport.  No, Your Humble Scribe could not drive there: the eye-drops used to dilate one's pupils prior to testing contain Tropicamide, which is a controlled substance in the UK.  If the police administer a drugs test to you once they see you peering about like an owl, you will fail.

     Here's a medical professional being economical with the truth about it:

"Tropicamide has a rapid onset of clinical effect and relatively short duration, which makes it an optimal medication for a clinical setting."

     I had to sit and wait for thirty minutes I'll have you know.  Art!

   GPHC is situated about half-way down Glodwick Lane, and I see now that cutting down Waterloo Street would have halved the journey.  O well, wiser for next time.  I did try to illustrate a map with a coloured route and an "X" at destination, but it wouldn't save, so use your imaginations instead, it's good practice.

    The bonus of having to travel two-and-a-half miles was that my step count is really high and Conrad will definitely hit 10,000 steps tonight.  Art!

 
     Inevitably, it took ages to get home thanks to hitting school traffic, especially at the bottom of the hill near the Hospital where it can take 10 minutes to move  hundred yards.

     And that, gentle readers, was my Thursday afternoon.

Less Than Lethal Part The Second

I did neglect one quite famous non-lethal weapon in yesteryon's blog, because there's only so much time and space in the universe.  I refer, as you may have already guessed, to the "Star Trek" phaser, which was never precisely defined at the time*.  The name implies that it's a beam-weapon, and it has different settings.  Art!

     Yes, you can set your phaser to 'Stun' as a merciful alternative to 'Roast', 'Vapourise' or perhaps even 'Agony'.  Moral folks, the Foundation.  Art!

     

     There you go, a second picture just to prove that Ol' Jim hadn't killed Gary Seven, only rendered him into what resembles a sackful of boneless jelly.  Art!

     

     

     That's a rather - um - under-indicated power control.  Hopefully it has an extremely positive turn, meaning you can't accidentally bump it into the wrong setting, thus turning your victim into a cloud of plasma, or only annoying the Gorn.

Conrad: Obstreperously Ignorant

Your Humble Scribe is not fond of news media or publications that edit a person's name to merely their forename, fondly imagining that all their readers will instantly know who they're talking about.  How much worse this is when your readership is global and have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what you're whanging on about, and here's proof.  Art!

  - asks "The Daily Beast"

     Who is 'Drake'?  Is that a first name or last name?  Which of those pictured is he?  Who is 'Kendrick'?  Kendrick Who? or is is Who Kendrick?

     Above all else, WHO CARES!

"City In The Sky"

The tension is climbing as the Dart is diving.

.  Eventually their instability, fragility or an excessive gust of wind would collapse the balloon and a torrent of aluminium foil would begin to descend.  This was the “chaff” Kirwin spoke of, and the Doctor’s intent to baffle the alien radar had come to fruition.

     So, the Lithoi were responding to the diversion as expected.  The miniature balloons were difficult to detect, having very little mass or metal, and the launchers varied their release spot to avoid having the balloons follow a predictable route.

    

     If any of the humans who had been working on the makeshift balloons could have seen the consternation caused within the Lithoi baseship, they would have felt immensely gratified.

     Arkan 22, as nominal head of the mission, had been notified first by startled scanner teams that an aerial assault against them was underway.  He had frantically raced to the sensor suite, only to find when he got there that the threat had been amended to an aerial “probe”.

     ‘What is this!’ he’d hissed in anger and alarm.  ‘How can these primitives have aircraft!’ 

     The lower-caste workers monitoring their sensors bobbed their heads, looked at each other and widened their eyes, all Lithoi non-verbal signs for “I don’t know”.

     Also "I don't want to be vapourised by the boss who isn't interested in non-lethal weapons"

Serendipity!

You know, accidental discovery, in this case as I was perusing the BBC News website for any potential tit-bits that could fill up a hundred words or so.  What did I espy?  Art!

     Now that there's no muddying the waters with this 'Kendrick', whoever they might be, we now know which one Drake is!

     Not a big win, not even big news.  Just that it clears up a minor mystery.  And also increases the word count a little.

Shades Of Deja Vu

You may be aware that the regime in Mordor celebrates 9th May as 'Victory Day', because they like to claim that the Russians won the Second Unpleasantness without any help from anyone else, and that's five years in the gulag if you dispute this 'fact', matey.  I've only seen a couple of referrals to this event, including this one on YouTube.  Art!

     According to that timestamp, this clip is from 2024, not 2023.

     Watch out for September 17th, when, in 1939, the Sinister Union invaded Poland in conjunction with their best mates at the time, the Nazis! or - don't they acknowledge that it ever happened and that's another five years in the gulag for you, matey?

Finally -

That's enough of that.  I'm hungry and deserve tea.  Laterz!

*  You can bet fans and nerds across the globe will have been retro-conning exactly what a phaser is and how it operates.