Suite Sixteen

You'll See Where The Title Comes From Later

But, to preface a little, here's a picture to explain what kind of suite we're talking about.  Art!

     The story I'm about to relate comes from another Youtube Reddit recaller, and might also be called 'What Were They Thinking?' or 'That Escalated Quickly' or 'Some People Abuse Their Right To Be Stupid' or an unholy amalgam of all three.

     It began when the Background Uninvolved Narrator'*s wife took on an after-work childcare class for 3 children, 2 boys and a 5-year old girl.  The girl's mother was given the name 'Karen' and seemed to care not one whit for her daughter, merely dropping her off with no farewell hugs, kisses or blandishments.

     There were no problems for the first few days.  Then -

     Karen came by so early that BUN's wife wasn't home yet, so the daughter got dropped off, alongside a very large duffle bag, which BUN merely took note of, not being aware of the technical side of child care.  Bit of a numpty, BUN, to be honest.

     When his wife turned up after 15:00, she asked where the Young Abandoned Girl's mother was, to which YAG - I had to delay that title to avoid telegraphing the plot - replied that her Mom was going away for five days and YAG was going to stay with them for that time.  Hence the large bag of supplies.

A screeching halt, which is what happened to the conversation

     As you may imagine, BUN and wife were floored and glabberfasted by this information and immediately tried to contact Karen by phone.  No luck.  It went straight to voicemail.  The other Emergency Contact, for 'Dad', didn't exist.

     Clearly, skullduggery was afoot.

     By 22:00 there was still no contact with Karen, until BUN, using his wits, traced her on Facebook.  There was a brand new profile picture, put up that afternoon, of Karen on a cruise ship, with a man who was not her husband.  Unfortunately for Karen, she had left up valid contact information for her mother, YAG's grandma.  A telephone call brought grandma and YAG's father pronto.  This is where the plot thickens.  Art!

     YAG's dad said that he had noticed his wife getting increasingly cold and distant, which to this Reddit reader are clear red flags that an affair is in issue.  He came home from work one day to find a spiteful goodbye note left on the kitchen table, merely stating that Karen had taken YAG and he'd never see either of them again.  I say 'spiteful' advisedly, because Karen clearly didn't give a stuff about YAG and was only out to cause lamentations and heartbreak.  

     After weeks of fruitless searching, YAG and dad were reunited, whoopee, chorus of trumpets, happy ending, right?

     WRONG.  The police were involved by this time, and they interviewed all four adults and decided to track down Karen and have a little chat with her.

     There was radio silence for three weeks, which BUN and wife thought very odd, as they fully expected a foul-mouthed telephone rant from Karen at the very least.  Art!

                                         

     Remember this?  YAG's dad filled BUN and wife in on the details after a further week had passed.  Karen didn't ring to shout because she had other fish to fry, namely criminal charges that included: Child abduction; child endangerment; child abandonment (I bet you don't get those three together very often!); possession of a controlled substance; resisting arrest; vehicle theft.

     She got hard time, sixteen years of it, which is where today's hilarious title comes from.  Unsurprisingly, YAG's dad got full custody of his daughter.  Then he got a job at the restaurant BUN worked at and now, ten years later, co-owns it.

     The story doesn't finish there, though.  O Noes!  You see, the rich man that Karen was having a dalliance with wasn't rich through his own exertions.  He was rich through marriage, which marriage rapidly ended as the police caught up with his romantic partner a.k.a. Cheating Karen.  He got no criminal charges laid against him, only a divorce from his wife, who kept the family money and left him broke.

     A double-dose of revengeance! and a glimpse into the minds of shockingly stupid people.

Oh Boy!

If you are a regular reader of this scrivel then I sympathise with you will probably be aware that Conrad likes to complain about Thomas Pynchon not having written a new novel yet.  This is a bit of a pseudy boast, as lots of people like to claim they've read 'Gravity's Rainbow' or 'V' without actually having done so.  Well, I've read GR three times and the next time I'm going to make a note about that Josef Stalin II tank Tom mentions, as I think he got the muzzle calibre wrong.  Call me a pedantic hair-splitter.

     ANYWAY what's this?  Art!

     I haven't read the article yet, but I can guess that this is going to be a very long novel (his last one, "Against The Day" is over 1,000 pages long) with a lot of characters and a complicated plot and structure.  Just the way I like them.  Art!

     I see the article is still using that photo from the Fifties.  This is because Pynchon is notoriously camera-shy, and always had a sixth sense about people about to snap him.  Plus, he's had corrective work done on his tell-tale gnashers, so good luck identifying him from a seventy-year old grainy monochrome photo. 

Despite his fame, he has carefully avoided public appearances, and only a handful of photographs of him are known to exist.

     I believe there's one of him in Navy uniform which is equally unflattering and aged, so I'm not going to post it.  Ha!

Let's Fact-Check The Fact-Check

I now need to watch that video I briefly posted about yesteryon.  Art!

     Not going to argue with Dan Snow about that.  In fact, some of the photographs from Bakhmut in Ukraine could be mistaken for Passchendaele of 1917 vintage, except they're in colour.  The Burma theatre of the Second Unpleasantness was also utterly awful thanks to the terrain, the climate, the diseases and the Japanese had a bit of input there, too.  Art!

     Sadly not, the bloodletting of the Second Unpleasantness was a lot worse.  There you go, Myth 1 debunked in a single sentence.  Dan also relates deaths to size of population and found that, proportionally, the Civil Unpleasantnesses of the seventeenth were worse.

     Dan also bangs on about the Taipeng Rebellion, which he claims experienced 30 million deaths.  Not sure about the provenance for that Dan old chap.

Here's One For The Proggers

Prog rockers, it's a nickname I just made up, can you tell?  Art!

     This is three-quarters of Pink Floyd, and is one of the photos to grace their album "Meddle" which, horrifyingly, is over 50 years old.  It features two of their best tracks evah, "One Of These Days", still a live staple, and "Echoes", a 20  minute excursion featuring crows and whale-song.  It also features what is widely seen as their worst song, "Seamus".

Apologies if any of you anticipated the return of "The War Illustrated", which I've held off posting about while the Grumpy German Gefreiter was giving his liverish commentary.  I've now forgotten where I was with the photographs in the edition and cannot even remember the number.  Old age and gin conspiring again.  Your Humble Scribe will need to check the blog's past numbers.  In the meantime, here's a Canal Defence Light.  Art!

     The CDL was an idea in search of a use and because this item was only intended to be a bit of filler and to boost the Count, I'm not going to go into any detail about it.  Tee hee!

Our Journey With Bernie

Is effectively over for his 1993 Bernie Wrightson Master of the Macabre (Frankenstein Subset)  because I cannot find any more cards and notes.  I'm guessing this is because it was a smaller set than the original 1993 run, having only 45 cards, none of which were in colour.  In the spirit of Ol' Bern, though, here's another artwork of his.  Art!

Make of this melange what you will

     Later, pilgrims.

*  Hereafter BUN