Icke, Icke, Baby!

There's A Couple Of Things Going On Here

First of all, as I keep having to remind you tardigrades, NO! that is not a typo.  If it's spelled like that then there's a reason for it, said reason being me creating an hilarious pun HILARIOUS I TELL YOU!  HILARIOUS!

     Ahem <pause to regulate blood pressure>.  No, I am not going to post a picture of Vanilla Ice, because the twod mods are forever on the lookout for BOOJUM! spamming people.  Conrad firmly believes they've been egged-on by UNIT and MI5.  Art!

     That, gentle reader, is a tardigrade.  They are incredibly tough and adaptable micro-organisms that will probably inherit the earth when Hom. Sap. (and successors) are but a vague memory, with only crumbl

     ANYWAY allow me to prod Art with this handy electric-cattle-motivator.

"Then my head exploded.  But it grew back."

     To those unfamilar, David Icke is an utter bampot who believes in all sorts of woo, including that the elite of British society are shape-shifting lizards from Theta Reticuli, here to steal all our truffles, since truffle skins are the only things that their sinister alien replicators cannot replicate *- or similar.

     Now, imagine that Ol' Dave had gone into politics, not entertainment, and had risen up the ranks until he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, one of the most powerful appointments in This Sceptred Isle's establishment.  He manages this by keeping his - ah - 'peculiarities' under wraps.  Mostly.  Art!

Ol' Heinie

     Meet Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer SS and Chief of Police of Nazi Germany, and one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich.

     If HH got a bee in hit bonnet, or a bat in his belfry, then you humoured him because i) It got you a guaranteed salary and ii) It kept you out of 'protective custody' in a concentration camp.  Ol' Heinie had enough self-awareness to keep his more eccentric beliefs out of the public sphere, especially since Herr Schickelgruber had no patience or time for the occult or supernatural and would have given his minion a very hard time if these esoteric interests came to light.  Art!

Hail the hair of Hans Hörbiger!

     Enter Hans Hörbiger, an Austrian engineer with absolutely no knowledge of astronomy, cosmology or eschatology.  In the early years of the Twentieth Century he dreamed up the 'Cosmic Ice Theory', which was superlatively - what's the word? - O yes: stupid.  His theory held that the explosion of a small star over-burdened with water, after clumsily tripping over it's own corona and falling into a larger star, led to the creation of the Milky Way.  The Milky Way galaxy was, in his reality, made up of blocks of ice.  Art!

Now runs a very successful construction business

     Keeping an awful lot of blather edited, Hans reckoned that our solar system had been created with planets and ice blocks, and the more ice blocks a planet absorbed, the bigger it got.  This made Jupiter the glutton of the Solar System.  Contrarily, if an ice block hit earth, rather than causing an apocalyptic Armageddon, it instead triggered hailstorms over a wide area, because the pistachio crop in Novi Pazar, which makes quite as much sense as he did.

     Ol' Heinie, of course - obviously! - fell in love with this <ahem> theory.  Art!

No, it's a telescope, not an artillery piece

     I remember reading one of Sir Patrick's works many decades ago, and he took a critical swing at 'Welteislehr', remarking that it was so popular in Nazi Germany that various pronouncements were made that you could believe in Cosmic Ice Theory and still be a good Nazi.  Art!

     

Designed by a Dalek

     I believe this to be Grünwald Observatory, where Ol' Heinie set up a dedicated 'Research Centre for Astronomy', whose sole purpose was to prove Welteislehr correct, which is a mighty tall order.  Not satisfied with this, he also set up a 'Centre for Meteorology' to also prove Cosmic Ice Theory correct.

     HH constantly pestered his scientists with queries about Welteislehr and how - not if - it interacted with day-to-day events and phenomena.  Queries included: How the migration of butterflies from South Africa to Iceland was affected by CIT; whether the effects of fog (presumable caused by ice) on the sun could affect human genetic material; did the discovery of frozen mammoth carcasses in Siberia constitute proof of the CIT in remote times?  Art!

Less woolly mammoth than shaggy dog, I fear

     You think this is odd?  Feel sorry for Robert Longenrich, the author of Himmler's biography that I cribbed this info from, because the daftness is not over yet and he had to make sense of it all, poor bloke.  He couldn't have icked that much.

Our Journey With Berni

Okay, I am now going to delete that link to "Print" which I was using to select Bernie Wrightson's illustrations.  For one thing, they don't bother with any information about titles or date of publication or even what medium was used.  Bah!

     HOWEVER - O however, my favouritest word - I am now going to try and go through the list of 'FPG Master of the Macabre' card illos, which numbers about 90.  Being inexact there as we've already featured a few.  Art!

     So there you have it, Card #1 from the first collection, 'Lazarus Syndrome', done with sponges, towels and steel wool.  And paint, one presumes.

"The War Illustrated Edition 193 November 1944"

Once again I remind you about this publication's adherence to OPSEC.  Although I haven't seen the censor scratch out any unit markings on aircraft or vehicles so far.  Art!

     The first pair of pictures show British soldiers moving through Overloon, a Dutch town only a couple of miles from the Teuton border.  Close enough, in fact, for the Teuton locals being able to hear artillery and possibly small-arms fire if the wind was in the right direction.  Note the extra improvised armour of surplus tank-tracks added to the Churchill's hull and turret armour.  Note, also, the two tommies carrying The Soldier's Friend - a stout spade, indispensable for digging a shell-scrape, foxhole or field latrine.

     The lower photographs show South Canadian troops of their 1st Army battling inside the Teuton city of Aachen, which got a severe dose of what other non-Teuton cities in Europe had experienced; which is to say, large-scale destruction.

     The caption had the GI hiding alongside a tank as a 'sniper' which I doubt; he'd have rubbish vision of anything lying prone like that, and you'd have to be very much on your toes if the tank moves.

     O and that South Canadian anti-tank gun?  British, actually.  It was their variant of the 6 pounder, which they dubbed the '57 mm' because they don't like Imperial measures since we burned down the White House.  

Maudlin Maths Again

O dearie me, the stock value of "Trump Technology and Management Group" has fallen again, here's a hankie to dry your tears Donold.  Art!

     $19.50 with - what's the opposite of 'with a bullet'? - with a lead sinker.

     I don't think the markets trade over the weekend, which means nothing new until Monday 2nd September.  September being the earliest Donold Judas Trump can dump his stock before it declines any further.  We shall see.

You - WHAT?

Conrad had to check the calendar to make sure we're not approaching April 1st.  To what am I referring?  Art!

     This is the first I've ever heard of such a competition.  I haven't read the article because it's nine minutes to midnight and I'm off to bed soon.  What do you bet, it's a source of awful tree-related puns?  If it's not then the item that covers it here on the blog most certainly will be!

*  The truffle stuffle I stole from a Philip K. Dick short story.