No! This Is Nothing To Do With "The Addams Family"
Whom I always preferred over "The Munsters". Although the Munsters did have the far cooler car.
ANYWAY none of that preamble has to do with London's subterranean rivers, which I need to mention in order to make sense of what we'll be talking about later on.
'Subterranean rivers' may conjure up images of "Xanadu" THE POEM "KUBLAI KHAN" NOT THE DREADFUL FILM thank you very much. Art!
He's flirting with disaster there. Mrs. Tazer and the Cat-o-Nine-Tails will be seeing you later, Art. Shall we try again?
ART!
"Where Alph the sacred river ran, through caverns measureless to man -"
What I want to refer to, you see, is the River Fleet, one of London's 'lost' rivers, in the sense that it's now completely covered up for the length of it's journey to mee the Thames. It's the longest and best-known of these streams, and is responsible for giving Fleet Street it's name. Art!
The Fleet when not beneath the street
There are a couple of points along the Fleet's urban course where you can hear it rushing along below. Today it performs all the functions of a sewer, with an outlet near Blackfriars Bridge, which is visible when the tide is very low and there's been lots of rain. Art!
CAUTION! not suitable for bathing as typhus and dysentery can annoy
Mention of London's covered rivers came up on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, when one Tweeter - possibly "Sir Fatuous Pauper" whom I doubt is either en-nobled or penniless and who's definitely not fatuous either - about the Redhill Brook. This didn't crop up in any lists of London's subterranean rivers that I've seen so far, so a little digging is in order. Art!
Note how it vanishes when it reaches the outskirts of Redhill, which is a dead giveaway that it's been either culverted or completely covered for it's length. A little more digging is required, one feels. Art!
It's not easy to discover where it runs when covered over, but I think this is one entrance. There appears to be a short stretch of the Brook exposed to daylight alongside Noke Road, visible on a town flood preparation plan. Art!
Let us now skip lightly o'er the landscape and across to Asia, specifically to South Korea, which you may be aware is highly urbanised and modern, especially in the cities. Mark my words, they'll have self-driving cars that pour you a beer, tell jokes and offer a massage before 2030.
ANYWAY to prove that they're not merely obsessed with the material, money and motorways, they took aim at a particular autobahn that had been a fixture in the city of Seoul for decades. It stood squarely upon what had been the Cheonggye Stream, an urban waterway that had become little more than an open sewer (say Hello Fleet!). Art!
Come the end of the Korean Unpleasantness, and the Koreans concreted it over, the better to build motorways. Let no slummy scummy stream stand in the way of progress! Art?CAUTION! not suitable for bathing as typhus and dysentery can annoy
In time, the natural ecology of Seoul came to mean that it became a motorway, for is the car not mightier than the minnow or duck? or some such Confucian aphorism. Art!
In 2005 this monument to the God Of Gridlock was demolished and the Cheonggye Stream uncovered, excavated and canalised. It is highly-managed as a waterway, true, yet it looks like a haven of tranquil bucolic charm in the middle of one of the world's most up-to-the-second cities. Art!
Airborne pollution decreased sharply, as did temperatures in summer thanks to water replacing concrete and rubber. Property prices nearby rose as people and businesses wanted to be near the easy-on-the-eye river. As you can see above, the locals like having a water feature they can dabble their feet in.
The technical term of this is 'Daylighting'. There is a proposal for it at Redhill, which is quite acceptable. The Fleet, on the other hand, would need canalising separately from the sewage it serves and surges at present.
We may come back to this, it has legs (or fins).
Conrad Is ANGRY!
First of all, Art has been at the medium-level radioactive isotopes again, which always sends him further round the bend. Then, my lack of posting vitriol about the liberties that Codeword compilers take has been assumed as being no longer full of Frothing Nitric Ire.
WRONG! O SO WRONG! SO VERY WRONG!
It's because I've had lots of other work on. Now it's time to explain why the Remote Nuclear Detonator is getting overtime in.
IMPUGN: To variously carp, cavil or criticise, and yes, it has it's origins in Latin <hack spit>. Come on, when's the last time you read or heard this word in use? It might have been fashionable in the days of Dickens, not now in the days of Tony Parsons. Art!
You can impugn
This bafune
ERNE: "A fish-eating sea eagle" according to my dictionary, and the only reason I didn't look askance at this solution is that I remember it cropping up in a sci-fi short story, by Cyril Kornbluth, I think.
Ah, it was actually by Fred Pohl, who collaborated frequently with Cyril. Art!
Close enough
BIJOUX: For this one I hit the RND eighty-seven times. That'll teach those compilers! Yes, it is Breton, which folks would rather you didn't dismiss them as merely 'French'. Of all things, it refers to a finger-ring 'Bizou' and has, apparently, come to mean a small delicately-worked object. Bah! Art?
The very definition of bijou
Clickbait Check, Mate
Another thing that annoys, or even irks, Your Humble Scribe, are the news pages on Bling that try to cause a click to find out more information, because they don't supply enough in the first place. This is a prime example. Art!
They are at pains to NOT mention the title involved, nor even add in a picture. Well, Conrad had the last laugh on the Daily Malice, because I went and Googled that headline, and do you know what? Art!
Never heard of it.
I Found It!
Conrad has mentioned a BBC News item he wanted to go back to, which had timed-out on the main page and which didn't come up on any searches I tried. Well, I did say I wouldn't be beaten, and now I've tracked it down. Art!
I now need to dig up a few 'Malicious Compliance' or 'Pro-revenge' stories on Youtube to go with this title. I guarantee 99.9% will be from South Canada, whose employers think that paying a salary makes their workers indentured serfs but one step above outright slavery.
Bring It On, Bernie
Conrad is somewhat miffed at "Print", who have a long selection of Bernie Wrightson artwork, without bothering to give even basic details such as date of publication, media used, title and which comic it featured in. Take this one - Art!
The attention to detail here is remarkable. Note the creased fabrics, and the weeds growing in the stonework, not to mention the crumbling facade. Yes, the lady looks a little like a scarlet harlot, especially with that off-the-shoulder style, and the chap with an axe seriously needs to get himself another hobby.
This being Ol' Berni, you can guarantee what the shadow hides here would scare the ever-loving bejesus out of Ol' Axey. However, that's all there is for this artwork, it seems to have been a single page in his "The Monsters: Colour The Creature Book"
Finally -
Payday, and not a day too soon!
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