I Did Warn You
Typically, we here at BOOJUM! - Art, Steve, Oscar, myself, the long-absent Motley*, the Guard Hog and the Hard Hog - rarely take the most direct route to a topic, because straight may be logical and efficient yet is also boring. If you're sailing to Ayers Rock by jet wouldn't you just love a diversion via Whitescar Caves?
ANYWAY this Intro isn't going to be what you fondly expect. Art!
Say hello to, respectively, York Street, Ducie Street and Moseley Street, all three environs within a short distance of each other in the noble environs of Gomorrah-in-the-Irwell. Manchester if we're being formal. "Why are you featuring the mid-Victorian architecture of 'Cottonopolis?' " I hear you quibble.
Because the common link between all three, literally, is the 'Electric and International Telegraph Company', of mid-Victorian vintage. Art!
Here we take a slight detour and bring in a Canny Scotsman, William Murdoch, who was sitting around one cold winter's night, sipping his whisky and porridge, and he decided to invent the pneumatic tube delivery system. A man's got to have a hobby.
By 1853 this system was being used to send cylinders containing stock market data, which was time critical, from the London Stock Exchange to the nearby offices of the Electric Telegraph Company, because propelling these sabots by virtue of compressed air was far quicker than using a runner with a cleft stick. By 1864 this pneumatic tube delivery system had been involved in The Venice Of The North, between the EITC's HQ at York St - Manchester! I meant Manchester O I give up - and branch offices at Ducie Street and Moseley Street. Art!
A pneumatic mail cylinder
As I recall, years ago the Co-Op in Royton used a pneumatic tube system to send cash from the tills to the safe room, where it could be counted and stored in safety, without the need for transporting cash by hand, lest there be footpads. Art!
No, it isn't the Co-Op. Sue me.
You can't get a plainer example of matter being transmitted, can you? A big physical lump of it. Just not how you expected.
I did warn you.
In fact, pneumatic tube systems is a subject in it's own right, rather like VHS video recorders or steam-powered cars, so we may come back to it. Art!
Bed of wails?
Yes, we are back with "Doctor Who", the BBC's premier dramamentary series, and this time we have a twofer within "The Ark In Space". Yes, that's plucky young Sarah Jane Smith, looking a bit groggy, as she's unwisely lain down on a 'tranquilla-couch', which performs the dual function of doping a person into unconsciousness and then teleporting them into cryogenic stasis. Saves on medical orderlies and gurneys, one supposes. Art!
Aha! You see, the Ark not only has an internal matter-transmission system, it also has one that allows teleportation down to the surface of Planet Earth, three people, or three people-sized boxes of stores, at a time. For all we know there's a much larger version that can teleport down vehicles or large structures all in one go. Art!
This is the Reception end of the Ark's matter-transmission system. You know, considering that several thousand years have elapsed since the Ark was assembled in orbit, those transmat Macguffins look pretty hale and hearty. Especially since the surface of the Earth was supposedly ravaged by solar flares. Remarkable!
There is also another, rather more obscure, serial that features matter-transmission, albeit as a function of time-travel: "The Time Monster", where The Master ("That jackanapes!") under the pseudonym Professor Thascalos has been inveigling scientists to Meddle With Things Best Left Alone, like a three-week old cod sandwich. His invention is "Transfer Of Matter Through Interstitial Time" and yes the acronym is TOMTIT, which surprisingly got past the studio suits, whom one would expect to jib at such an outrageous pun. Art!
The Master: a little-known adept of feng-shui
He uses his gadget - no, I'm not going to besmirch the blog by calling it by it's acronym - to move objects through space (and time) in order to attack UNIT, including a passel of Roundheads from the English Civil Unpleasantness. Art!
By the time the startled UNIT troopers respond and fight back, the Roundheads promptly vanish, back into Interstitial Space one presumes, with a story to tell the grandchildren. Art!
Don't worry, it's only a one-horsepower attack. Art!
This one was a lot more serious - a V1 directed on the UNIT convoy. IIRC they were transporting the TARDIS, which is indestructible, but it needed to be moved from A to B, a difficult feat if your trucks are all in flinders.
Annnnnd once again we've only covered a fraction of what I'd intended. Well, that's the penalty of having an over-active imagination. Don't worry, we will come back to this. O yes indeed, John Steed.
Charybdis
I gave Steve and Oscar, two of the editorial staff here at the blog, an honourable mention above, because they help to generate content in ways I don't or can't understand. This item's title is a case in point. Thanks to these two wardens of my memory and subconscious, this word popped up in my mind a couple of days ago, and since I didn't write it down - for Your Humble Scribe is a dinosaur like that - it promptly vanished into the ether. Art!
Charybdis is in
Today it cropped up again and this time I had my "Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable" to hand, ha hah!
Charybdis is the name given to a whirlpool off the coast of Sicily, which is paired with another whirlpool, Scylla, and both were proverbial in the ancient world for being equally dangerous; steer to avoid one and you encountered the other. Art!
In mythology, Ol' Char lived under a fig tree and passed the time of day by drinking up the sea and then throwing it up three times a day. I keep saying, a man's got to have a hobby. He unwisely stole the oxen of Hercules, was consequently slain by a thunderbolt and Hay Pesto! transformed into the whirlpool.
Hence the AI Art Generator's image.
Conrad Has Been Wrong
It does happen. Were I to say "Davos" then I'm pretty certain you'd be jumping all over me with hobnail critic's boots, saying "TYPO! TYPO!" and putting up pictures of one of the scarier villains that The Doctor has faced. Art!
One eye, one arm and no legs
Hence 'Davros'.
In fact it is YOU who are WRONGITY-WRONG-WRONG. I did mean Davos, absent the 'r'. You see, yesteryon I read that Prez Zed met up with someone from Switzerland at Davos. Art!
This is how I pictured Davod; an idyllic Greek island in the Aegean, basking in sunlight, lapped by mild blue waters and with an execreable plumbing system. It's where lots of G7 summits take place.
Well, I found out the bitter truth yesterday. Art!
It's in Switzerland. No mild blue waters nor baking sunshine <sad face> but it will have an incomparable sewage system connected to their toilets.
Phew
As you should surely know, Conrad buys lots of books but I can give it up any time I want to although not for the past month as I've got plenty left-over purchases from December to wade through. One of my more frequent haunts is Waterstones, so I felt a frisson of horror when I spotted this news article. Art!
This outlay looks suspiciously similar to Waterstones in the Arndale Centre, does it not?
Well, it isn't - hence the 'Phew'. Dog Buns! clickbait article, it was about a South Canadian business, so it serves the treacherous back-stabbing colonial upstarts right. Not that I'm bitter or anything.
Finally -
Sally and Tom didn't touch the John Smiths' I got last week, so Conrad now has to get rid of them. O what a problem.
* Interpol are still searching
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