Golden Frown

 "Conrad Narrowed His Eyes -"

"In what he fondly imagined was a menacing expression, but which merely made him look as if he had a migraine" <creative capriciousness courtesy Mister Hand>

     chop him off if I had a choice!  To start again, NO! this is not a typo about that song by The Stranglers, which they had to pretend was all about TOAST HONEST TOAST NOT DRUGS.  TOAST.  I don't suppose many of you out there recall it, because it's pretty ancient now.  Art!

     Dog Buns!  Forty-three years old.  

     ANYWAY in today's Intro we're going to be looking at a class of what you might call 'natural philosophers', one of whose aims was to convert base metals into gold, a task that was mighty difficult.  So difficult, in fact, that it's impossible.  Which explains the frown.  The alchemists!

     Here an aside.  Yes, already!  Conrad stopped getting migraines when he stopped using aftershave.  Strong smells, you see, trigger them.  Art!

     I am delighted to inform you that the word 'Alchemist', coming from 'Alchemy', has an Arabic root, instead of the usual Greek or Roman one HURRAY!  It is a transliteration of 'Al-Kimiya', Arabic for 'The Transmutation'.

     You will be aware, if you are sentient and over 31, of a - I hesitate to call it a 'Holy Grail' as this is mixing metaphors like bad cocktails - goal that the alchemists had, an artefact known as the 'Philosopher's Stone'.  Go on, Art.

     This plotline rather clashes with later info, so stick a pin in it for the moment.  The PS, you see, was held to be created by a compound of the purest sulphur and mercury, which rings alarm bells straight away, as neither of these are elements you treat with anything but sincere respect.  Sulphur compounds tend to be horribly corrosive, and mercury is incredibly toxic, so trying to combine them by heating in an alembic or crucible and - Art!

An alembic doing it's Clanger impression

     That's not all.  Imagine if these poisoned peely-skinned lunatics had achieved full transmutation and created a Philosopher's Stone, turning base metals into gold.  The market would be immediately saturated and the price would plummet.  There you are, eating your fish and chips off a gold plate with a gold knife and fork, quaffing your mead from a gold cup, and combing your ebon tresses with a gold comb - the Chancellor would have kittens.

     I ought not to call them 'The Alchies' as that sounds unpleasantly close to "The Alkies', even if The Alchies, too, had a 12-step plan.  This was explained in a treatise on how to create the PS thus: Calcination; Dissolution; Separation; Conjunction; Putrefaction; Congelation; Cibation; Sublimation; Fermentation; Exaltation; Multiplication; Projection.  Art!

     I looked up 'Cibation', which fell out of use in the seventeenth century.  It means to stoke up a crucible whilst carrying out a process.

     To cynical old Conrad, that '12-step process' looks more like an alchy took 12 nouns at random, wrote them on slips of paper and selected them blindfold.  Since when was 'Exaltation' part of a chemical process?

     ANYWAY enough of Philosophers and their liths.  Another of their goals was to create an 'Elixir of Life', which would, if successful, extend the user's life indefinitely.  Art?

     Not quite, Golly, you toothless slavering loony*.

     Once again Conrad foresees terrible financial problems with a select few immortals.  What if matey or missy deposits a humble £1 in a financial institution in 1730, at a modest interest rate of 4.5%?  By 1830 they'll have £2,000.  By 1930 they'll have £165,000.  By 2030 that would be over £13 million, and heaven forfend if they were to split up and re-invest their ill-gotten gains after, say 50 years.  Art!

No comment

     Incidentally, this is another word with an Arabic root.  In this case 'Elixir' comes from the Arabic 'Al-Iksir', which means 'The Elixir', and since this derivation is possibly from the Greek I'll end the Intro right here.

The Vegetables Of Vice

No!  We are not talking about sinful swedes or tumescent turnips.  No, I want to highlight one of Ol' Heinie Himmler's more disastrous ventures, one of several we have mentioned of late.

     KOK-SAGYS! which does have a naughty ring to it.  Art!

Taraxacum Kok Saghyz

     You see, Nazi Germany had a few resource problems thanks to the Royal Navy's blockade, including rubber.  This, lest ye be unaware, is essential for providing tyres and road wheels on trucks and tracked vehicles, and Lo! the rubber plantations of Malaya were not about to supply the Teutons.

     So, a search was made for rubber substitutes, and the plant above, the Kok-Sagys, was discovered to be a not even barely-adequate rubber substitute.  However - O that word again! - Ol' Heinie oversold it to Herr Schickelgruber, who promptly appointed the Reichsfuhrer to be in charge of making rubber from it.  Heinie got this dumped in his lap thanks to having agricultural qualifications.  Art!

     The SS took hundreds of thousands of hectares under cultivation to produce KS, in various places across Occupied Europe, all to the tune of 0% rubber substitute.  'Dismal failure' is how to quantify it, with all the time, money, manpower and fertile land wasted for over a year.  There are no records of Ol' Heinie getting a rocket for this, perhaps because he was too big to fail.  Art!

This Is How It's Done

Conrad is unaware if any of his poor benighted readers who reside beyond the hallowed shores of This Sceptred Isle are familiar with a bunch of bafunes known as "Just Stop Oil", whom I am not going to honour with either bold or taupe.

     They are a bunch of bored middle-class numpties who seem to think that obstructing or vandalising stuff in the UK will - by alchemy? - magically convince Riyadh to cut production or have Venezuela turn to coal and nuclear power.  Art!

     Note the presence of large amounts of plastic.  Which is derived from oil.  I bet they all drove there, too.

     Art!

Where's Greta Thunberg when you need her?

     This is an oil depot near Feodosia in orc-upied Crimea, burning with an especially dirty orange flame, courtesy of Ukraine.  I don't intend to suggest that JSO begin blowing up oil depots, merely that this is the most direct way to stop oil, yes indeedy Ally Sheedy.

     

Que?

Conrad, thanks to having a mind like the proverbial skip, and a perpetual need to create content, remembered seeing this title on bookshelves back in the Seventies, and it came up in a set of picture results on Google when I typed in "Disreputable sci-fi covers".  Art!

     It seems to have been very much of it's time (July 1974) and I will post here a rather jaundiced review created by a reader who made a mistake: 

"So my copy didn't note anywhere on the cover it was the third in a trilogy, so having not read either of the others, I found it complete nonsense. Sone kind of all powerful sorcerer king taking on an evil cult and the mafia via various psychedelic dream sequences. With added sweeping generalisations about various world religions."

     I remember a citric review of novels like this, possibly by John Brosnan, which dubbed them 'a mish-mash of hippy gabble and soft porn".  They may be correct, I ain't buying this to find out whether or no.

Work For Me, AI!

Conrad is still not entirely sure about those AI art generators, which seem rather arbitrary in how they operate and conceive, quite besides the fact that they jib at potentially dubious words or phrases.  Take the prompt "sentient evil pumpkin making a speech to a crowd whilst eating a big mac".  Art!

     It looks to have already eaten the Big Mac.  That's the advantage of having two mouths.

Finally -

Looking out of the window at our wildly variable autumnal weather, I am reminded of the conspiranoid swivel-eyed loonwaffles over in South Canada braying about how The Government And The Deep State And The Jews And Tom Swift And His Flying Carpet are all creating hurricanes using HAARP.

     Reality is wasted on some people.

*  Ex-alchemist?