Back To Bulgasari
I did threaten you with this yesteryon. So far we've covered the two films that were made about this mythical Korean beast, rather than the folklore original. It was composed of elements from many different animals: the body of a bear, an elephant's trunk, the eyes of a rhino, the claws of a tiger and the tail of a bull. Bit of an anti-climax, the tail. One has to wonder how familiar medieval Koreans were with the African rhino, too. Art!
One doesn't really get a sense from this particular picture but it's fur was made out of needles <bites tongue to avoid bad punnery>.
The most interesting thing about it, to Conrad's curious mind, is that it ate metal, specifically iron (and presumably steel, too). The legend goes that it was created in miniature form by a monk, from rice grains, and fed upon needles, which helped it to grow. Having acquired a taste for metal, the Bulgasari grew bigger the more metal it ate - Art!
Yes indeed, because thanks to the inverse square law, the bigger the beastie got, the more metal it needed to consume, which inevitably led to a clash with the authorities of that time. Property damage is property damage even a thousand years ago, matey.
There is no satisfactory end to the Bulgasari's tale, as it was either vanquished by monks - soldiers proved woefully ineffective as it simply ate their arrows and swords - or it's still out there and, if you have a problem no-one else can solve, and you can contact it, you may be able to hir - no, wait a minute, that was "The A-Team" wasn't it? Quick, Art, a picture!
Conrad strongly suspects that it will be found lurking near scrapyards or ship breakers, as only thus is it going to assuage it's dietary requirements. Art!
This is Ro-Jaws, one half of the terrible pun "Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein", being a stand-in. There was a one-off story in "2000AD" with art by Dave Gibbons about a pestilential plague of metal-eating invaders, which looked rather like metallic starfish. Can I find a single picture from this story? No I cannot! "Dan Dare", "Harlem Heroes" and "Rogue Trooper" yes in abundance, but nothing under "Future Shocks" or "Time Twisters". So Ro-Jaws it will have to be. He - definitely a 'he' - is a cheeky sewer droid, designed and intended to clean out sewers, so he's pretty much an omnivore with an irreverent attitude. We'll not go into any detail about what a sewer droid eats, and in fact - Art!
This is an hilarious Czechoslovak sci-fi satire from 1977, which features an extremely handy cleaning agent in a bottle. Dirty dishes? Just sprinkle a little of the magic organovore on them and Hey Pesto! the dishes are clean again as it just ate all the remains. Art!
Okay, okay, it dissolved the dishes as well, so what, this is the future where crockery is endless and cheap. That stuff is pretttttty potent, so much so that - Art!
Dead body you want to keep out of sight? No problemo! You see, matey left that bottle of "Bio" at the side of the bath WITH THE CAP OFF -
Ooopsie.
Abracadabra no more cadaver. They really ought to put a warning on that bottle, or a valve in the neck.
Equally futuristic, if unremittingly bleak, was "Doomwatch", which was available on a couple of BBC video cassettes back in the day, and surprise surprise, what do we have here but - Art!
This is the cautionary tale of an artificial virus created to consume all plastics, in order to minimise the effect of said plastic waste on the environment. Trouble is, it gets loose from the test environment it was used in and out into the real world, where it proceeds to cause havoc and a plane crash. After all, if your electro-mechanical controls function thanks to plastic parts and plastic-sheathed wiring, losing all that is going to be rather terminal. Art!
The killing joke of a plastic cassette housing a plastic tape, all inside a robust plastic box is not lost on me.
Right, I've made myself hungry thanks to all that talk of eating, time for lunch.
The Killer Klackers Of B A Baracus!
Because I mentioned the A-Team earlier and because it rhymes, not because it has any basis in fact. For Lo! we are back on the Dangerous Toys For Girls And Especially Boys, this time with an equal-gendered risk. Art!
They don't come much simpler than this: two plastic balls connected by a string, with a tab on the string for holding this infernal device. The idea, as you may have already gathered from their title, was to jiggle the tab up and down until the balls collided with each other. Whoopee. They must have been easily pleased back in the Sixties, hmmmm? Art!
You, madam, are old enough to know better
They only just make the Sixties criteria by coming onto the market in 1969, and by 1971 they were banned in South Canada and British America thanks to their occasional habit of shattering when impacting together. Conrad remembers a much slimmer version of him at school when they were banned there in 1972 or 1973. Conrad himself would have been safe thanks to wearing glasses, which is selfish but honest.
"The War Illustrated Edition 198 19th January 1945"
I cannot recall what I took photographs of, so this will be a journey of mutual discovery. Art!
You can guess that this is Holland thanks to the flatness of the terrain and that windmill in the background in Picture One. You can also tell this is winter thanks to the snow on their position. What a miserable job they have, waiting patiently for a Luftwaffe that was on it's last wings and which might never appear, whilst they grow gills. The Teutons, you see, had demolished Dutch dykes in order to create flood conditions, the bally swine.
The sappers at bottom are laying logs to create what is known as a 'corduroy road', thanks to the original road surface doing an impression of a swamp. Yes, it might freeze solid, but then again it might thaw loose again. Art!
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| A Teutonically precise corduroy road |
When Getting A Horn Is A Very Bad Thing
Art!
This is a physical representation of a dilemma, and being on the horns of one. Typically, a dilemma leaves the victim two options, each as bad as the other. Not a situation one wishes to be in, yet this is where Putinpot finds himself as of this week. You see, his low-profile involvement in Syria has just erupted into the headlines in the worst way. In a comeback as startling as that of the Orange Land Whale, the Syrian rebel army has just conquered Aleppo and is pushing south. Assad's army has abandoned a ton of kit in order to be able to run away faster, and their Ruffian allies have also established land speed records in retreating. Art!
Ruffia stands to lose their naval base at Tartus, on the Syrian coast, their only base in the Mediterranean, and their airbases are also under threat. Before the Special Idiotic Operation, Putinpot would have thrown air power against the rebels, but he can't do that now - not only has the VDV lost over 300 aircraft, it remains committed to the war on Ukraine. He cannot send 10,000 soldiers to prop up Assad as he needs every single one for the war on Ukraine. He can't send in the Wagner Group as he dismantled it. He will probably make a lot of noise about how he's going to help and then do nothing. I wonder if we'll see another video of him looking as if he had toothache in his rectum whilst Gerasimov lies remotely to him?
Sorry, that was supposed to be a map and a note, not a minor essay.
Finally -
Off to take pictures of fridge.
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