I Wouldn't Care To Try Saying That After A Snifter Or Ten
No danger of that until next week, as Your Humble Scribe is still in the dry month of June so far. Currently I'm getting through about two-and-a-half gallons of tea per week, not to mention flasks and cups of coffee.
Which is frankly boring and not what either of us are here for. Yesteryon I created a blog that featured The Law Of Unintended Consequences, which I can illustrate with a telling picture. Art!
"Richard III"
No, NOT the thrilling sequel to "Richard II". This is the "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" scene, and Ol' Dick here would have had scads of horses if only they hadn't been lost for want of a horseshoe nail. Or perhaps a spark plug, given that in this interpretation he's driving a jeep.
Rather than weigh in with weighty political matters to do with Bunker Grandad managing to terminally tick off the whole of the Sorks, let us instead deal with an equally compelling narrative about horrible human beings and how miserably they treat their families. Art!
Don't be fooled by how they shrink Alaska to fit here, it's really about one-fifth the size of the rest of South Canada.
ANYWAY I hope this gets the idea across that South Canadian states are extremely large, essentially countries in their own right. I believe the state of California's economy alone is twice that of Modern-day Mordor, which is a bit of a low blow. This tale begins when OP's mother told the rest of her family that she had to travel several states over to a job interview, which meant being absent for whole days thanks to the travel time. Art!
A bit OTT but it gets the point across
Days turned to weeks, weeks turned to months and it eventually came out in the wash that Dear Old Mom had absconded with her affair partner, hubbo's cousin. They had indeed moved to another state, meaning thanks to South Canadian distances, that there was 0% prospect of their paths ever crossing by accident or happenstance. OP and her Dad were left emotionally gobsmacked by this move, which happened when she was 10. You may be utterly unsurprised to know that there was a divorce. Who knew!
For ten years there was no contact between the bright shiny new family all that way off and OP & Dad. Art!
When OP was 18 Dad jitterbugged off this mortal coil, to her eternal sadness, and she moved in with her grandparents.
Word must have winged it's way via flying monkeys, because after another 2 years who turns up on OP's doorstep but Dear Old Mom, with 2 kids, loudly declaring that they can now all be one big happy family now that evil Dad is out of the way.
You can probably plot the course of this attempt at establishing a 'relationship'. OP told DOM to take a hike and, when she reached destination, there to pound sand for a goodly length of time.
Then the nature of the contacts changed. Suddenly it was all about money, and DOM demanded she be given Dad's inheritance, because she needed it, as <cue sad oboe and violins in background> her children had to have a new home. HAD TO! Art?
The dream home
OP then took legal advice, which confirmed that, since Dad and DOM had been long-divorced by the time of his passing, Old Mother Dearest had no claim on so much as a cent of the inheritance. OP messaged OMD about this and thought the matter settled.
This is where TLOIC comes into play. OMD refused to take a very loud 'NO' for an answer, and told OP that one of those children was actually her Dad's offspring, so give her all the $$$.
OP, being either sly or naive, contacted Mother Dear Oldest's husband - she was still married to Dad's cousin - and informed him about this potential cuckoo in the nest.
Yes, he resorted to a paternity test, which SURPRISE! revealed that the child wasn't his. Ooops. We're not done yet, because neither was the child Dad's, either. MDO is now in very hot water as her husband is divorcing her, so she might have to track down the real father to get money out of him. Good luck with that after 10 years!
One bets she did not see that coming.
GIANT DEATH-SHED ON TRACKS!
No, this is nothing about the embarrassingly bad Ruffian turtle tanks. Rather, it's a brief item about the FV4005, a monstrous piece of Cold War kit that Perfidious Albion made a couple of prototypes of, in order to test it's gigantic gun. Which was so large it needed two men to load, thanks to the size of the shells. Art!
You can judge it's size by the low-loader it's being carried on. This is no shrinking violet that has to hide in ambush to kill enemy tanks. Art!
What we really need is a puny member of Hom. Sap. to give a sense of scale for this behemoth. Art!
This interim beast was intended to take on Sinister tanks if the Cold War turned even the slightest bit tepid. The gun was a 7.2" monster firing a 200 pound shell that was nearly five feet long - which explains why two loaders. The FV4005 was painstakingly restored to working condition from a very run-down basic model. Art!
Previously a gate-guard at Bovvie*.
Conrad - STILL ANGRY!
About what? Give me a minute and I'll find something. Yes, yes, yes, this is about Codewords again, thanks for asking, and the accumulated opprobrium for a clutch of them.
VISCID: Hmmm I was guessing that this one would be to do with thickness or the density of a liquid, as in blood or gravy. Conrad was on the right track; my Collins Concise determines it to be 'cohesive or sticky', which is close enough. WHY they couldn't just use STICKY is rather beyond me. Art!
Quite sticky
SKIVVIED: Really! This one is stretching a point, being the past tense of SKIVVY. Where on earth would you ever encounter this word, unless in the works of a scribe such as Charles Dickens? Nor does there appear to be any consensus about where SKIVVY itself originates from, which is a thoroughly unsatisfactory state of affairs. Art!
From Down Under
GNARL: I snarl at GNARL! Dog Buns, there are only 19 words in my CC that begin with "GN" from a total of hundreds of thousands. How desperately unfair is that for any word that's not "GNU"? It seems to have been back-created from GNARLED, which itself is a variation on KNURLED. Art!
A railway ferry, because I'm annoyed
"City In The Sky"
Arcology One is slooooowly descending from the heavens, almost entirely intact, and apparently undetected by the Lithoi.
She peered
closer. Not only intact, but with a
reinforced hull. A swathe of strange
grey material coated the lower sphere.
‘He second-guessed me,’ she said,
aloud. ‘That sphere is coming down
directly over the Lithoi’s base. If they
have a blind spot, that’s it.’ She
paused to think for a second before smiling a lop-sided grin at Ace. ‘He’s a sly dog, your pal.’
Ace’s temper briefly curdled before she
came to a sudden realisation. “After my
flyswatter, I need to work on a hammer” had been the Prof’s phrase days ago. She remembered it well, as a strange piece of
prose that made little sense at the time or afterwards.
‘Alex,’ she croaked, trying to spot the
descending sphere. ‘I know exactly where
Arc One will land.’
‘Oh, really?’ he crowed happily. ‘Expert in ballistics, are you?’
‘No.
Just in working out what Doctor Johnathan Devious Smith means by a
“hammer”. Arc One is going to come down
right on top of the Lithoi base.’
Kirwin and Alex were initially horrified at the idea, before thinking it through. Arcology One’s descent was sufficiently slow to allow it to land – or impact – without terminal damage. Obviously that was the intent behind the giant parachute.
A descent speed of only ten miles per hour doesn't sound like much, unless it's backed up by ten thousand tons of spacestation. Ooo-errr!
I Can Hardly Wait
Wellllllll when I say that I can, really and honestly, wait indefinitely and not be bothered. To what am I referring? Why, the imminent televised debate between Somnambulist Joe and the Farting Fraudulent Felon. Biden's team are going over all sorts of strategies and responses, working out what slant to take on a particular topic, what language to use, what issues to avoid, all that jazz.
For Donald Judas Trump? Art!
Like the seven-year old he is, he is now fuming about these terms and claiming that they're unfair and restrictive and if he loses it's proof that it was all rigged and he won really <Cont. page 94>
Finally -
It's not been a good week for Putinpot. Now Chinese banks are refusing to do business with Ruffian banks due to the threat of sanctions. Tee and Hee!
* BOVINGTON TANK MUSEUM you pikers. Sheesh.
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