It's Always Entertaining When An Elderly Man Loses It
All the more so when he never had a firm grasp on 'it' in the first place. What am I scrivelling on about now? O I thought you'd never ask! Art?
Codewords, which is why there's a picture of an evil mutant mongoose army on stilts there, as a crossword grid is pretty dull by comparison.
Forsooth, we are going to have a different type of Intro today, just for a change: instead of harping on as a later item with three or four entries, I'm going to yark on about Codewords until I run out of steam, ink or content. Won't that be exciting?
YES IT WILL!
Incidentally, because Conrad cannot help but go off at a tangent, you may be wondering why a small carnivorous mammal has 'goose' in the title. Art!
Because, gentle reader, the word 'Mongoose' is derived from the Indian Marathi word 'Mangus', one of those rare words not derived from either Greek or Latin, hooray!
Where were we? O yes I was about to rage. Well, let's begin.
QUERN: This one had me seriously questioning my solutions up to that point, since I had QUE yet no idea what the remaining two letters could be. You may be rightfully wondering what the Dickens and Shakespeare a 'quern' is. Art!
'A stone hand-mill for grinding corn' says my Collins. The corn goes between the stones and the upper one is rotated, to produce flour. Not used in the Allotment of Eden for a good three hundred years, at a guess. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING!
WASABI: Another theme that the compilers love love love to throw in: foreign food, especially ones that end on a vowel. 'Japanese plant cultivated for it's thick green pungent root and used by Codeword compilers to cheat' it says in my Collins. Art!
SUSHI: The compilers prove my point. A foreign culinary item ending in a vowel. DO YOU SEE? DO YOU SEE WHY I GET IRATE! <ahem>
BHAJI: The compilers prove my point. A foreign culinary item ending in a vowel. DO YOU SEE? DO YOU SEE WHY I GET IRATE! <ahem>
If the compilers can get away with cheating, so can Conrad.
ELEGIACS: Another one that threw me before I got it completed, wondering what on earth it could be. ELEGY is a word I'm familiar with but this one? Collins! "Resembling, characteristic of, relating to, or appropriate to an elegy" except that was ELEGIAC singular, so of course - obviously! - the compilers make it a plural. Art!
AI Art Generator thinks this is apt. We'll go with this one.
MYOPE: Egad! Another wilfully obscure version, as yes I am familiar with MYOPIC, which is to be short-sighted either literally or figuratively. But the root of said word? <dramatic sigh>. Collins! "Any person affected by myopia". Thus myself. Great. The moping myope.
ATONIC: It would have been verrrry easy to flub this one and instead solve it as ATOMIC, which is a word we here at BOOJUM! are big fans of. Less so the actual solution, which - Collins! "Of a syllable or word, carrying no stress, unaccented, OR lacking muscle or body'.
No stress? How badly would it have beggared up my solutions if I'd gone with ATOMIC! No stress? Pshaw! Art?
Utterly novel to me, as well
PASTRAMI: The compilers prove my point. A foreign culinary item ending in a vowel. DO YOU SEE? DO YOU SEE WHY I GET IRATE!
Still, I think 'Atonal Pastrami' would be an excellent band name.
DICTUM: You can guess this is Latin, can't you? "A formal or authoritative statement", derived from the original 'Dicere', meaning 'To say.' Art!
Actually that's Atonal Pastrami, DICTUM was too dull to bother with.
KUMQUAT: I'm not going to merely copy and paste my angry response as there is the possibility you are new to the Kumquat, which once again is foreign and food, even if it ends on a consonant. Art!
They are a citrus fruit about the size of a cherry tomato, and one eats them whole, no nonsense about peeling. Their name comes from the Chinese (hooray!) 'Chin chü' meaning 'Golden fruit'. I carefully sought out a picture with a hand to give you a sense of scale, because I'm considerate like that.
That's enough Frothing Nitric Ire for one Intro.
Further To Oliver And Trains
Another illo poached from his excellent and very thorough website,
Engines of the Western Allies in WW2
and yes, we are looking at trains in the Western Desert again, because once again whose blog is it? Art!
Very evocative with the palm trees. The caption states that the troops are New Zealanders but that chap is wearing what looks more like the Ocker slouch hat rather than the Polite Australian's 'lemon-squeezer' hat.
What's noticeable here is the ten-foot embankment the rails run on, which is there to keep the rails at an acceptable gradient and avoid excessive rise and fall due to the original lie of the land. If you want a real example of this, look no further than Stockport Viaduct. Art!
I hadn't intended to put this illo up, yet it illustrates why you'd need an embankment if the land being traversed is not uniformly flat and level. Conrad is a bit perplexed here as he was sure the Western Desert Extension Line was only single-track, whereas here we see double. Unless it's a passing-place only a few hundred yards long.
The Last Of These, Honest
This is indeed a lazy way of upping the Word Count, yet I love reading the fulminating wrath and envenomed remarks of the BBC's 'Have Your Say', although be advised I do trawl to find the more amusing Comments.
Vincent Valentine
18:26 17 Aug
Samantha Ivy
21:57 17 Aug
Ouch. That one smarts!
"The War Illustrated Edition 212 August 3rd 1945"
I'm guessing at the date as I don't have Volume 9 to hand, nor the photo I took of the cover, so we'll just take that in our stride and move on. Art!
Interesting! That monstrous equipment at top is the Teuton's 'Karl-Gerat', a self-propelled siege howitzer (or mortar) of epic proportions. That gloating bit about not being used on 'us' would ring a bit hollow on the Eastern Front, where they were used, and amongst South Canadians, whom experienced it's charms in the Battle of the Bulge. They rolled off the Rheinmetall production lines in 1941, so TWI is being a tad presumptuous.
What looks like an oil pipeline designed by Heath Robinson is really the 'V3', a enormously long gun barrel with adjacent chambers full of explosives that were supposed to boost the shell it fired to tremendous velocity. Art!
It was a miserable, very expensive failure.
The 'banana-barrel' weapon is a 'Krumlauf', of which there were several flavours. One with a barrel bending through 90⁰ tends to shatter the bullets being fired, which is why ones with a smaller angle were used. Art!
The weapon at bottom starboard is described as a 'rocket-propelled guided missile' but a quick Google doesn't reveal any information about it, possibly because it's a prototype? that never went into serial production. Typically Teuton - excellent engineering, technically sophisticated, ground-breaking technology, and they made as many as five of them.
Other People Casting Eyes Over Ukraine
Not in a covetous way, more judging and assessing. Art!
I shall get a snifter of gin and peruse said item and sit in judgement on it.
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