First Of All, WASH OUT YOUR FILTHY MINDS!
I took the bother of referring to my "Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable", my second-most used reference work, and of course was immediately distracted by all the other entries that begin with "Cock-" NO SNIGGERING AT THE BACK!
First off, in this tangent to a tangent, was the name "Cockaigne", which I was vaguely familiar with thanks to - another tangent! - an album (as we called them in those days) by Soft Machine. This was in their jazz-rock days. Art!
Front cover Back cover
I remember reading the liner notes about how this land was one of ease, plenty and free food, where in fact the roast pork joints flew into your mouth and all was idleness and luxury. The catch - for there is inevitably one - is that to get there you had to wade through "swine's filth" as they coyly put it. For seven years.
BDOPAF uses a variant spelling, because the word is ultimately derived from Middle Low German's 'Kokenje', meaning 'Little Cake', said baked product standing in for all the wonderful edible goodies you could gorge yourself on. Although you might end up with diabetes and a weight problem if cake is all you eat.
ANYWAY dietary concerns aside, from Middle Low German we move to French, where the word is transposed as "Cockaigne". It's a well-known medieval peasant fantasy, a life utterly different from their normal poverty-stricken squalor. Art!
ANYWAY AGAIN we move back to BDOPAF, and the phrase "To cock a snook", which insulting gesture consists of putting one's thumb to the nose, extending all the fingers of that hand, and waggling. It also had an alternate name of "Queen Anne's Fan", which I never knew. Art!
Mister Unmade Bed demonstrates
I seem to recall it crops up in a "Biggles" story. Just an interesting detail for you. Where does this practice and phrase originate from? O I thought you'd never ask!
"Snook", you see, may be derived from an old word meaning "Headland" or "Promontory", where the nose becomes the projection in question. Art!
Snook with puny human for scale
It's also a species of fish. What that has to do with either your nose or an eighteenth century monarch I have no idea.
ANYWAY YET AGAIN I wanted to get you up to speed on obscure English insults, because I intend to cock a snook at our usual victims/subjects/deserving rascals <delete where necessary> the Ruffians, because Schadenfreude. Art!
Just to rub it in (and increase the word count) UK INTEREST RATES EXPECTED TO BE HELD AT 5%. With a potential cut in November. Gosh, I wonder how the businessmen in Modern-day Mordor feel about that over their breakfast vodka? Art!
I cannot be bothered to dig around for an up-to-date chart that shows the current Ruffian interest rate of 19%, sue me if you want. Bear in mind that the Ruffian economists and banking pundits are warning about an increase in November, to 20%, and that a rate of 24% has been mentioned previously. The logic behind this hike - which to a non-economist like Conrad seems to be worse than the inflation rate it's supposed to tackle - is that such a jump will definitively kill inflation. Yes, and the economy, too! Art?
This news came out yesteryon, but I didn't see it as I was too busy gawking at the chaos taking place in Lebanon. So, the South Canadian Fed is going to lower their interest rate to 4.75%, and the same article also quotes their inflation rate being at 2.4%. Art!
Conrad feels that the snook being cocked here is as big as a battle flag whilst also flashing in day-glo green and pink. It's almost as if there's an inexplicable background event having a malign influence on Ruffia .....
Productive Pedantic Piffle
Yes, more of the hair-splittingly didactic dealing with "The Great War In Europe" counters. As mentioned previously, I haven't simply put the counters, loose, into a ziplock bag, but am instead placing them on sheets of A4 arranged by type and numerical order. Art!
The green counters are South Canadian, who have a nice logical progression in the numbers of their divisions. Don't be fooled by the not very numerous counters, as a single South Canadian division was almost the size of the other combatant's army corps.
The dark blue counters are French, made more awkward by there being several gaps between divisional numbers. No! I did not drop them on the floor.
That collection in the cupcake holder are the Teuton units. I might skip laying them out tonight, a man can only take so much pettifogging detail.
ArachNOphobic
As we should all know by now, Conrad is a gigantic coward who gibbers in fear at the sight of an untrammelled arachnid inside the house, and just as much at them when weeding. This is why I said "NO!" to Wonder Wifey, who has been taking advantage of the nice weather to do nature shoots in the back yard garden for TakTik or similar. "Do you want to see this spider in a tube it has woven?" she asked and you already know the answer.
Now - Art!
These things are going to be everywhere in the run up to Halloween.
Bah!
Donnie Dimwit Drivels On
Donold Judas Trump, the grift that keeps on giving. This flub gives one an insight into the thought processes that move with all the speed of treacle in a fridge inside his pumpkin-hued (Halloween reference again!) head. Art!
Still insisting that he won the recent debate with Kamala Harris, DJ Tango insisted that "the crowd went crazy" because the moderators didn't fact-check Harris.
You may be wondering if this was a different debate on a different planet, because at the one we all witnessed on Planet Earth THERE WAS NO CROWD.
This minor but important detail had been agreed between the debaters before the debate and Trump knew all about it.
Ever one to ladle opprobrium onto a person we don't like, allow me to put up the latest detail of TMTG's shares as of earlier today. Art!
Tee hee! Bring on the buckets of popcorn!
Armour-Plated Angel
To nick a line from Hawkwind's "Damnation Alley", though this item is distinctly non-angelic.
I mentioned Roland Garros earlier this week and said we'd come back to him, as he was an interesting chap, despite being handicapped by being French. As a patriot and keen flyer, he leapt to enlist in the French Air Force ("Aeronique Militaire") when the First Unpleasantness broke out. Art!
Garros and his mechanic came up with the idea of slimming down the propellor and putting an armoured plate directly in line with the gun muzzle. This would deflect any bullet otherwise likely to hit the prop and turn it into sawdust. RG and his artisanal helper realised that, most of the time, there would simply be air in front of the gun muzzle. Art!
If it's stupid but it works, then it's not stupid. 93% of the time there were no bullets hitting the deflector and when that 7% came up, why the deflector lived up to it's name. Garros then promptly proceeded to shoot down 4 Teuton aircraft before being shot down himself (he survived).
Finally -
As work comes to an end, so does the sunshine. Traitor sun!
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