I Say, That Sounds Rather Forbidding, What?
In fact it sounds as if you've volunteered to venture across the Straits of Hormuz in a day-glo green pedalo, trailing a banner proclaiming 'I'd bomb the Ayatollah for less than a dollar!', covered with stickers of Bibi mooning them and playing a tape loop of 'The Star-Spangled Banner'. Art!
Mooning stickers would be too much for the algorithm. Art!
BUT NO! We are not here to point out that Iran controls one of the world's most important marine choke points on the planet because all the grown ups in the room already knew that and had planned accordingly, right?
ANYWAY we are scorning to mock these benighted poltroons, and instead are going to be focussing on far more important matters, to wit, Codeword solutions. Art!
No idea what's going on here, just approving that it looks spooky, dangerous and enigmatic. Like me.
ANYWAY I'm going to work through a batch of Codeword solutions whilst complaining at how hard and unfair they were, except that of course - obviously! - I solved them.
BUNGALOW: From my Collins Concise English Dictionary: "A one-storey house, sometimes with an attic. 17th Century, from the Hindi 'bangla', meaning 'Of Bengal'. Well, that explains the bangla music genre. The word owes it's existence to the British living in India during the Raj, where such domiciles were built, having a veranda all around the house, all the better to enjoy air outside instead of fetid inside. Art!
Yours for £550,000
Here's one I walked past today whilst taking Edna for trotties. It's now been sold and has planters and garden sculptures up.
CICADA: Not a creepy-crawly one it liable to encounter in This Sceptred Isle, as they favour warm climates, so I deserve kudos for working this one out. Art!
How perfectly hideous
<sigh> if you want the technical details, they are "Any large broad insect of the Homopterous family 'Cicadidae' ... males produce a high-pitched drone by the vibration of a pair of drumlike abdominal organs." They are generally accepted as harmless, apart from their inept flight, which regularly sees them impact objects en route, and if you are the object in question, a flyswatter would be a sensible investment. Art!
A swarm. Singular, not definitive.
COVEY: No, the solution wasn't COVES or COVER or COVEN, but an even more obscure word. Conrad, not being the kind of chap who puts on tweeds at the weekend and goes out with a twelve-bore, was vaguely aware that it had to do with hunting and shooting and fishing. So it is. The CCED states: "A small flock of grouse or partridge, from the Old French 'Covee' meaning 'to hatch'."
Come on, really! How many people nowadays have the time or money or inclination to go onto the moors with a group of beaters and blaze away at fleeing birds. Just pop into Sainsbo's and ask if they have any lovey-dovey ex-covey. Art!
EQUIVOCAL: Another wretched derivation from the Latin <spit hack>, yet with a meaning quite sundered from the direct translation. Which is 'Equal voices', meaning a situation where all voices are of equal volume. The term itself means to be 'Capable of varying interpretations; ambiguous', i.e. no voice stands out as being the definitively truthful one. Art!
Hmmmm Conrad wonders how this worked with the Round Table and all those knights. If everyone's voice was equal, how did anything ever get done? Voting and cliques, one suspects.
There are two other definitions in the CCED: for the second, EQUIVOCAL means to be deliberately misleading and vague, and you can't see a better example of it than Pete Hegseth avoiding giving any answers to hard questions over the past 10 days. He also embodies the third meaning, which is to be of questionable sincerity and dubious nature. Art!
JOCUND: Conrad is unsure if this has any relation to JOCOSE, but suspects they have a common Latin root <hack spit>. I recall Dougie, the mate, using the latter word when describing the crew of 'The Vital Spark' in 'Para Handy Tales'. Now, looking at my CCED, I see that JOCUND is defined as "Of a humourous temperament, merry". Art!
Why do we have a still here from 'Planet Of Evil', one of the best-dressed sets in the whole Tom Baker era? O I thought you'd never ask! Because of a quote our favourite Gallifreyan comes out with - "And jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops" meaning the terrifying night-cycle on Zeta Minor has ended.
Another Not-So-Gentle-Shoeing
Yes, let me allow a picture to do the talking. Art!
A somewhat dishevelled, sweaty and saggy Donnie Dorko, carefully holding onto the doorframe as his balance is pretty bad nowadays. Thankfully no tie so we are spare the hideous sight of his turkey-wattle neck being constricted into vile shapes.
More Of SPEW And SLEW
We recently did an Intro about SPEW, SLEW's soon-to-be-ex-wife, whom had filed a bogus restraining order on him in order to keep his car, whilst she lived with her boyfriend, SLAB. Remember that, it comes into play later.
SLEW, proving to be an absolute Chad and master of documentation, turned the tables on her and she ended up carless, jobless, penniless and homeless.
Then came the divorce itself. Art!
Don't ask me, I don't know either
SPEW missed the first two court dates, thanks to living two states away and no longer having a car. When she did turn up in front of the judge, she demanded $5,000 for any property of hers that might have been lost, stolen or damaged during the marriage. The judge asked for receipts. She had none.
$5,000 disbursement dismissed.
SPEW then wanted SLEW to pay her student loans, because It Was His Fault.
The judge noted she'd started at college after leaving SLEW and was only there for 6 months. Request denied.
SPEW then wanted the restraining order lifted, as it was interfering with seeing her boyfriend. The judge explained that, once the divorce was final, the RO would no longer apply.
SPEW then wanted as much alimony as possible, because It Was His Fault - at which the judge dropped the bombshell that, due to her romantic relationship with SLAB - she wasn't entitled to ANY alimony.
Ooops. Art!
SPEW ended up walking away with 2 boxes of random household items and 1 box of her grandmother's dinnerware, plus thousands of dollars of student loan debt, instead of the $10,000 she'd fondly imagined and years of free alimony money. Also, by the time the court case rolled around, she would have been 6 months pregnant with SLAB's child. What a wonderful relationship those two are going to have!
Get Thee Behind Me, Clickbaiter!
Another in our occasional series of Conrad proving how clever he can be, and also helping you to decide whether you want to watch or not.
The film is 'Sicario', featuring 2 Brits, Emily Blunt and Daniel Kaluuya, whose South Canadian accent was so convincing I didn't realise he was from This Sceptred Isle. It's a very good film but the Tut Factor is quite high, so not for the faint-hearted.
And you're welcome.
Less Than Good News For Putinpot
Let Art earn his coal ration for today. Art!
That's General Syrski, who was nicknamed 'Butcher' when he took over, a nickname that appears to have been quietly dropped along the way. Also -
"Despite a numerical advantage almost three times larger, the enemy is forced to postpone dates of planned operations, patch holes in defense, and redeploy troops from other directions, the commander-in-chief reported"
This is revealing. The orcs cannot generate enough combat power on the front lines and have to shuffle forces around rather than having reserves to cope. One more reason the serfs of Mordorvia are getting twitchy about a new mobilisation. Watch this space.
Finally -
That's it!
No comments:
Post a Comment