Let's Get A Move On

I've Got A Lot To Witter About -
 - and its already late.  "Why?" I can hear your plaintive voices raised in querulous lamenta - Ow!* - "Why?"  Because I did a late shift tonight, then did the shopping and put it away (doing this solo is not necessarily a bad thing as it means nobody else knows what I bought, heh heh!).  And there was quite a bit of shopping.
     So!

Today's Cake Is - 
     Banoffee Cupcakes.  A Hummingbird Bakery recipe, which means more fiddly than your average recipe, but a nicer end product.  These were fiddly little rascals (or rapscallions, if you prefer).  Because they needed to be in on Friday and I went to the pub on Thursday, the sponges got made on Wednesday. They were thus cool for Thursday, but I didn't put custard on them for fear it would make them soggy.

Covered caramel creme custard cooling

      Horrors!  After the custard cooled it was lumpy, so Conrad had to put it through a sieve.  He also over-whipped the double cream to fold into the custard, so the entire mix had to be sieved again.  Then I was up early this morning to put the topping on, and because it's soft and runny, there could only be one layer in the tin, which had to be held carefully level.
     People at work expressed polite enthusiasm in them, so much so that -

Chocolate-covered caramel cupcake

Whoops!  Almost NSFW
I have today finished reading "I, Claudius" although don't sigh with relief as there is still "Claudius The God" to read yet.  Anyway, I came across Claudius mentioning a "scented pathic" and obviously - obviously! - Conrad wondered what that was. From the context it appeared to be a medicine or medicinal artefact, so of course come lunchtime** I did a quick Google, and, do you know, it's not a medicine at all.  No, the words "Homoerotic", "Homosexual" and "Catamite" all came up in the search results, along with some classical statuary and paintings.  So it's all in the best possible taste, although Conrad suspects he might have to bookmark that page in the novel in order to prove exactly why he was looking for that word.
     There's a thought - Matt, the Classics graduate works in my team.  Perhaps I should approach him for advice ...

Catamite, Mighty Cat, often confused ..

Irksome Thing, Begone!
As I have posted before, some of the high-gloss that every day has in Conrad's world does get tarnished by those irritating, irksome little things that nibble away at your sense of sang-froid.  So, behold the awesome elegance of a Squeezy Honey Bottle:

"The bees - they've always been our friends!***"

     This is an irk-perk item, since Conrad found that runny honey always, but always, inevitably, always always ALWAYS dripped across the lip of the jar and ran down the side to leave a sticky, finger-licking line of lint-defined sugar behind.  No such problems with a squeezy honey bottle!
     It's not earth-shaking news, although it does mean not having to trot off to the kitchen to wash hands every time a jar gets handled.  Ergonomic efficiency, you see, Team Leaders!

Confusing English: "Out, vile jelly!"
No, nothing to do with Rowntrees or Robinsons, nor gelatin or trifle, or Jelly Babies^, in fact not anything you'd normally associate with eating.
     In fact, if Conrad's memory serves properly, it is a line in Shakespeare (Macbeth?  King Lear?  Romeo & Juliet? Hansel & Gretel?) and is all about POKING A MAN'S EYE OUT WITH A DAGGER.
     There.  Bet that made you considerably less hungry, eh?  Well, don't go away.  On a programme about enduring or surviving an Army endurance course, one of the instructors explained that one source of liquid with a high water content was - eyeballs!  After killing a chicken he proceeded to suck the aqueous humour out of it's eyeballs.
     Now, that really is vile jelly.

Lemon Jelly.  Close enough.

The First World War, JRR Tolkein and The Lord Of The Rings
But first!  A little-known cult author called Stephen King, who is a good story-teller and doesn't wax precious about the art of writing.  His quote, if I may borrow it, was that "Tolkein swore in and down that Sauron was not Hitler in fancy dress", which does rather confirm the view people have taken of LOTR, seen in the perspective of the aftermath of WW2^^.  Conrad, however, just to be perverse, invites you, dear audience, to consider LOTR in light of World War One.

A slide rule.  The pocket-calculator of JRR Tokein's day.
(I know, I know, it's a thin excuse but hey!  it's a slide rule!)

     Why?  Well, principally because it was an experience that JRRT went through himself.  He was present for most of the Battle of the Somme, one of the most unparalleled and awful bloodlettings in human history, including time spent at the "Schwaben Redoubt", a spectacularly horrible place.  Recall, if you will, his writing of the plain north-west of Mordor, "Dagorlad", a swampy wilderness full of bodies left after an apocalyptic earlier battle.  Then, too, one can read Mordor as a metaphor for Wilhemine Germany: militarised, expansionist, brutal and very dangerous.  Sauron?  Obviously an analogy of the Kaiser, the chief Warlord whose physical deformity (a withered arm) echoes the Dark Lord's mutilations.  You can go further - the Corsairs of Umbar?  An analogue of the German High Seas Fleet.  The satrapies of the south and east that pay homage to Sauron and supply armies for him?  References to Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey.  The tower of Orthanc, residence of the turncoat Saruman, might be interpreted as Vienna, home of the Hapsburg monarchy and a "little Satan", if you like, as compared to the "great Satan" of Germany itself.
     Wow, there seems to be mileage in this one!  I feel that we may return to this topic in future.

JRR Tolkein: The Serious Years

* Mister Hand removes the Anti-Pseud bamboo skewer from Conrad's ribs
**  Diligent and conscientious as Conrad is, he never misuses the internet at work. Honestly.
*** I nicked this from a line of dialogue Michael Caine has in "The Swarm"
^ Which, with gleeful maliciousness, Conrad likes to dub "Jellied Baby"
^^ World War 2.  The 20th Century's other major unpleasantness.

Under The Whip

Yes, Thursday's Multi-Media Mode Melange
Conrad is off to the pub quiz at 9:00 if not slightly earlier as the Halfway House has it's quiz mojo back, if not the quizmaster, and reportedly no sandwiches either.  In between getting home he's also made tomorrow's lunch and sorted out caramel custard for yesterday's banoffee cupcakes and is now clattering away on the keyboard counting each clock tick.  The tock, you might say, is clicking.

A metaphor for Conrad's mind

"Avatar" - A Plot Hole
  This film, which Conrad likes to call "Pocahontas In Space*", does have a bit of a plot hole at the end, unless another Bare In The Big Blue House is going to follow on as a sequel.  If you haven't yet seen this tatterdemalion potboiler, then I am going to spoil the end for you - the evil Earth garrison and miners are expelled from - from - Pandora! that's it, Pandora, with a few noble-hearted souls choosing to stay behind.
     Okay, Noble Stay-Behinders.  The next starship that comes out from Earth isn't going to be carrying a couple of hundred soldiers and a ton of mining equipment.  No.  It'll be carrying a couple of dozen gigaton-yield FFF** missiles which it will  launch at the planet, destroying all life for good.  Wait a bit till the background count dies down, send in people in suits, Unobtanium mined with no problems.
     As a sequel it would probably be pretty short.

1.28 seconds, actually

"Catch The Pigeon"
If you had any kind of childhood at all, then you cannot have failed to encounter "The Wacky Races", which featured an oddball assortment of racers in all manner of strange cars.  Chief cad of the cars was Dick Dastardly with his despicable dog sidekick, Muttley.
     What you may not know is that Dick apparently served long, long before the Races, in the American Expeditionary Force air arm, as commander of "Vulture Squadron", adventures encapsulated in the cartoon series "Catch The Pigeon".  I'd like to know how he manages to look exactly the same in 1918  and 1968.  Good genes?  Makeup?  Bathing in the blood of virgins?

"All three, Conrad!  Hee hee!"

     A better name for the show would be "Never Catch The Pigeon".  Despite having at least three aircraft, Vulture Squadron are consistently out-performed and out-flown by a pigeon.  "Turkey Squadron" would be more appropriate.  The squadron comes up with any number of Heath Robinson gadgets to Catch The Pigeon, none of which work.
     Now, were Conrad to be in command of Vulture Squadron, he'd have a pre-planned airburst shrapnel barrage*** laid across the pigeon's path.  Let's see him dodge thousands of steel-and-antimony shrapnel bullets!
     Of course as a cartoon it would be even shorter than "Avatar Part 2".  And probably not suitable for children, either:  "Mummy mummy - they killed the pigeon!"

He served his country
 - along with a bit of potato and gravy

"The Book of Life"
Conrad has seen this on bus posters passing by and judged the film by the posters.  Sticking to long-established BOOJUM! tradition, I refuse to look at IMDB to find out exactly what it's about and will interpret it myself.
     It's a cartoon.  Ergo for kids.  Not a comedy, either, because whilst the right and left sides of the poster are bright and jolly, the centre is a lot more subdued and darker.  So, a cartoon drama for kids.  Let me guess - the lead villain will be voiced by a British character actor.  There will be <shudders> songs.  And merchandise to go with it.
     Bah!  I hate it already!

Dog Meet Bear
As you know, Conrad likes to exploit the cute and cuddly to lure passers-by into BOOJUM!, whereby his electromechanical wizardry will forever after cause their browsers to mysteriously return to the site -^

"Follow BOOJUM! - or the bear loses a leg!"

         Quite.


* Because it is.
*** Fission-Fusion-Fission.  Essentially very naughty nukes.
*** Perfectly feasible in 1918
^ I can dream, can't I?

Irony O Irony!

No!  It's Not What You Do With The Laundry
I refer to the Great British Bake Off - some of which I shall miss because I will be - 
  No!  Not plotting to take over the world*- I shall be baking.  Fortunately, thanks to a bit of forward planning I didn't miss much.  I have baked a batch of banana muffins which now have to cool, and tomorrow I shall be making a caramel custard to go on top, before zooming off to Pub Quiz.  I missed it last week because of rash promises to make cakes and humus and bread sticks.  None of that this week!  Although we did raise £150 for the MacMillan Trust.
     Yes, as Conrad like to say - eating cake for charity - it's a dirty job but someone's got to do it ...

TWTIK
I have now finished reading this remarkable book, so I can tell what you're thinking "Hooray! Conrad can cease to bore about battles of old."
     Not quite, dear heart.  There is, after all, "Duty Done", a scholarly work that analyses the book, the officers, the NCO's, takes a timeline, mentions the honours and medals won, etcetera.  What better way to spend an evening that switching backwards and forwards between the two books!

Pylon-spotting, that's what!

     I have still to read any of Siegfried Sassoon's works about wartime, so your trial by fire isn't over yet.  As the fag-end of comments about TWITK, this leads to -

Wheels Of Steel
No!  Not the 80's rap group that backed Grandmaster Flash.  The 2nd Royal Welch - and we are talking about 96 years ago to the month - captured a German truck that had solid steel "tyres".  This is because Perfidious Albion** had a naval blockade that deprived Germany of rubber, hence the resort to literally wheels of steel and an inability to get rid of embarrassing spelling mistakes.
     Conrad, reading this on the bus, thus naturally wondered what the consequences of such dire straits would be.  The positive is that they would be very hard-wearing and, one suspects, highly puncture-resistant.

Voila! Or, more properly, So!

     The negatives, however, are many.  Weight, for one thing.  Your Opel would be hard to Propel.  If the steel were substandard in any way, you might well get a shearing failure and the wheel cracking apart.  Then try taking it off and putting another 150 kg spare in it's place!  Oh, and the suspension would suffer appallingly, with every bump being faithfully transmitted, causing a much higher chance of suspension damage or failure.  Anyone driving or being carried as a passenger would have a driving experience similiar to that of travelling on the inside of a skip whilst it was towed over rough ground by a Challenger tank driven by a monkey.
     The test of success is that today, we only see steel-wheeled cars in North Korea, where the expression "put the pedal to the metal" means that the driver has to cycle faster.

Formula One at Pyongyang People's Racing Circuit Number One (Dated to circa 2005).

More Of Transport
There is mention in "I, Claudius" of a "catafalque".  What can this be, I wondered.  From the context, a vehicle.  Looking at the term closer, it can be a vehicle, used to display and transport the body of a person particularly well-regarded.
     The word itself comes from the Italian "Catafalco", which itself derives from Vulgar Latin and "Catafalicum" which in turn derives from the Greek "Kato" meaning "down" and the Latin "Fala" which means scaffolding.

Close enough

Good Books Do Furnish A Room
This being so, Conrad is able to do some little decorating with almost no effort.  Why ever so? I hear you ask, gentle reader.  Because Alison at work*** donated another four Robert Rankin books to me.
     Who is Robert Rankin?  He had the sound common sense to have a splendid first name, and then went on to be a humorist, which is not quite the same as a comedy writer, as some spectacularly dark and horrid things happen in his novels.  The way one antagonist is killed by a unicorn still makes one's nethers pucker in sympathy.

"The Strain"
No!  This is not what Conrad suffers at work, or after.  His diet of liquid nitro-methane sees off any kind of strain, sprain, pain or dead cells in brain.
     No, I refer to the television series, brainchild of Guillermo Del Toro.  In more irony he wrote a horror trilogy with Chuck Hogan, after getting his television pitch rejected.  The novels then became sufficiently popular for television to woo him.
     I don't want to create spoilers but this is a series about vampires.
     No!  Not the effeminate glitterghouls of that film series and - are there books as well?  Conrad cares not - their pomaded faces and exquisite bone-structure.
     No.  These vampires are worm-ridden zombies with a Nazi background.  Not so attractive, are they now?

NO!  Get it right!

I guess that answers my age-old question: "Where are all the ugly vampires?"

The Great British Bake Off
Ah, the semi-finals tonight, with Patisserie as the theme.  Only Luis, Nancy, Chetna and RIchard left of the original thirteen.
     First off in the Signature - Baklava.  I love this stuff but I buy it, because it is fiddlerly-beggurly to make from scratch, and I've only ever made it once and not found I miss not making it.  This is how the contestants felt - why make filo pastry when you can buy it?
     The Technical was another horrid challenge, a "Schichertorte", being a cake that you made from successively grilled layers.  Conrad has tried to make torte once or twice and not been very successful.  That's without any judges or roving camera teams or baking against the clock, too.  
     The Showstopper was another unfamiliar dish - Entremets.  Layered sponge and mousse and layers of jelly and chocolate and this and that.  This was about organisation and time-keeping as much as baking.
     Who got sent home?  See under ^

Enter Eminem.  Close enough

* That comes tomorrow ...
**  England.  You and me.
*** A lady who is inordinately chirpy and cheerful.  If you could bottle what makes her endlessly sunny, you'd solve the world's energy crisis overnight.
^ Chetna.