It's Got To Beef Perfect

Ha!  This Intro Is One With A Core I've Been Saving For Ages

It just needed a bit of a framework to hang it upon, which came into sudden focus earlier this evening as I was grilling aubergine to put on a sandwich.  You can't leave eggplant too long in the fridge or they go brown and soggy.

     ANYWAY today's title is a not-very-subtle reference to that irritating hit by Fairground Attraction, "It's Got To Be Perfect", from thirty-five years ago.  Art!

     Alright, I admit this is nothing to do with either the song or group, and is in fact the AI Art Generator's vision of my short story "Attack Of The Killer Potatoes", where a Hungarian biotechnology lab is mistakenly gi

     ANYWAY AGAIN back to that song title, and the word we want to emphasise here is 'Perfect'.  Which, inevitably, has a Latin root <hack spit>, that being 'Perfectus'.  Art!

     You will, of course - obviously! - recognise Peter Perfect and the Turbo Terrific from "Wacky Races", which is one of the few vehicles there present that actually looked as if it could race competitively at Brands Hatch.  Conrad is unsure why you'd wear jodhpurs in a car.  Doubtless there are fan theories.

     Back to the concept of 'Perfect'.  Whilst casting around for a bit of structure to erect for this Intro, Your Humble Scribe recalled a short story by Bob Shaw that was relevant.  Art!

Ol' Bob

     Serendipity again, as Bob used to be a structural engineer.  He was a native of Northern Island, noted for his dry, sardonic wit, and for sci-fi stories that were always firmly based in reality - that engineering background no doubt.  Conrad met him briefly once, at a book-signing in Odyssey 7, where he signed my paperback of "Ship Of Strangers" and informed that 'Orbitsville' was going to be published in a new edition.  Art

My edition long gone, alas

     If you're wondering about that cover illo, what you're seeing here is the survey ship 'Sarafand', which has sent out six manned exploration vehicles on a supposedly barren alien planet.  Trouble is, seven vehicles have now returned .....
     ANYWAY AGAIN the short story I was thinking of is "A Full Member Of The Club", which YES WE'LL GET TO THE 'BEEF' PART SHORTLY BE PATIENT concerns artefacts that are so perfect they are almost other-worldly, and which are marked unobtrusively with a 'P' on their corpus.

A Full Member of the Club - Shaw Bob :: Режим чтения

     That's a link to a free version of the story, should you wish to peruse.  Ol' Bob has fun with perfect cigars that are the best smoke ever, perfect television screens that do not sport scanning lines even close up (this was 1978, long before LCD monitors) and, especially, coffee that tastes as perfect as it smells.  Art!

     Now, onto the meat of the matter, if you'll forgive the pun.  You see, over on Quora the question was asked: Why do hamburgers at restaurants taste better than the hamburgers I make at home?

     You can substitute beef for ham here to get today's title.  

     The question was answered by a Quoran whom had worked in a South Canadian burger bar before the days of MacDonalds, namely "Swift Arrow", where he grilled up to 460 burgers per hour (7 every minute) for a total overall of 5,600 per week.  Art!

Soz, no 'Swift Arrow' to be found

     The beef patties were cooked on a five-foot square flat-top grill, which had been in use for 16 years by the time our Quoran quoth, meaning four million six hundred and fifty-nine thousand, two hundred burgers had been cooked on the grill.  As he explained, each burger added to the flavour of all the subsequent ones, so for your home-cooked burgers you need a special dedicated decade-old grill used for them and nothing else.
     Cleaning the flat-top was done very carefully so that liquid never reached the cooking surface, because that would have removed the flavour patina.  Art!

     The kitchen grunts went at it with paint scrapers to remove physical grunge, then wiped with a DRY cloth, then covered it in coarse salt, wiped that off and then ground it clean with pumice stones as shown above.  The owner was a stickler for cleanliness and if he wasn't satisfied with how the grill looked at close of business, why the lowest grunt on the staff ladder had to clean it again.

     That's how you get a perfect beefburger.  Possibly a little too contrived for your kitchen.

     Great, now I can delete that article I copied out months and months ago.

"The War Illustrated Edition 205" 29th April 1945"

We're back with what might be called the fag-end of the war in Europe, as the Rhine is crossed and Teuton resistance begins to get spotty and unpredictable.  Art!

     The small bloke wearing a fleece is in fact Monty, more formally known as Field-Marshal Montgomery, here addressing British paratroopers of the 6th Airborne Division, who had successfully formed an airhead on the east bank of the Rhine earlier in March.  Here they are acting as ground troops, because as I said, resistance was crumbling and you didn't want to reserve a whole division for an airborne drop that might never happen.  Art!

     This picture shows the aftermath of the airborne landings of March 24th.  I'm afraid the text is too blurred to resolve, so allow me to enlighten you that it gloatingly boasts that the Allied glider train for this attack was 500 miles long.  Here there are portraits of two Britons responsible for planning, gliders in a field and dropped paratroopers forming up to march on their target.

     Herr Schickelgruber must have been enraged by this event.  After all, it was the Teutons who demonstrated how effective airborne warfare could be in 1940 and 1941, a fact now proven in reverse.  Tee hee!

My Spidey-Sense Is Tingling

Ha!  You'll see what I'm bloviating about in a minute.  Art!

   Do you see wh - O you do.

   This - and don't snigger at the back - is SIMP 0136, a peculiar object that has been dubbed a 'singleton' in the past.  More formally, it's a "free-floating planetary mass object" because it travels through space without being part of a solar system, a kind of galactic orphan.  Whilst it is approximately the same size as Jupiter, it has over ten times the mass, implying that it's certainly not a gas giant.  It also turns extremely quickly, with a single SIMP 'day' being only 2 hours 12 minutes long, which is quite a dizzying rate and - more strained analogies with spiders - makes it an outstanding spinner.  

     One suspicion is that it might be a 'brown dwarf', which is a species of planet that never got quite big enough to turn stellar thanks to fusion processes, except it's much too bright to be a dowdy brownie.  There are various models and proposals as to why the atmosphere of Ol' 0136 varies dramatically in brightness, yet nothing definitive.  No, Dougal, that does not automatically mean aliens <heavy sigh>.  Art!

As never featured in 'Snow White'

Erk!

I was just doing a quick search to find an image and - Art!

     I'm not sure how on earth that juxtaposition occurred.  Let us move swiftly on!

Snowy White And Dirty Slush

Yes, the days are counting down to 21st March 2025, when Disney release 'SNow White' to the eagerly awaiting public.  Or not.  Going by the statistics in the official trailer on Youtube, nobody wants to see a film that nobody asked for., nobody likes and nobody but the critics will attend for  One of the more trenchant observations was "I'm rooting for the poison apple!".  You may not be aware, but Zegler, the unappealing SW character who looks like a Lord Farquad clone, and Gadot, who plays the much nicer Wicked Witch, do not get on.  At all.  Art!

     Yes, they both presented a whatever at the Oscars, and the palpable seething actinic hatred between them was almost visible.  Art!

     Neither dared turn their back on the other.
     Bring on the wheelie-bins of popcorn!  Another tee hee moment.