Polenta!

No, Sorry, Not Garibaldi*'s Call To Arms
Polenta, or, as you may know it better, cornmeal, is used in baking.  Usually savoury (e.g. the Polenta Pizza) goods, but thanks to Paul Vickery and his gluten-free cookbook, Conrad has now baked two cakes with it.
     Is this news?  Well, all it needed was about twice the amount of baking powder that wheat flour cakes would require, so Conrad wonders what else might be made with polenta as a substitute.  Ain't going to try it tonight - hey, I have a blog to create! - but come the weekend your humble scribe may have a baking bash.

Vulgar Latin
Not to be confused with "Vulgate", which is a 5th Century approved version of the Bible.  Nor is it swearing in Latin, although Conrad does have a book of Latin-to-English phrases where "Bl@@dy hell!" is transposed as something like "Sanguinum Hades!"
     Where was I?  Oh, yes, Vulgar Latin.  So-called to differentiate it from Classical Latin, the vulgar was a provincial spoken version that doesn't have a written equivalent.  If you like a contemporary comparison, take Her Majesty The Queen and her impeccable cut-glass spoken English, then contrast this with the gutter-drawl of the bagheads found plotting outside Salford Precinct.

Vulgar Latin is dull, baby, dull.  Have an EXPLODING MELON instead

Art Versus Real Life
Last week Conrad was burbling on about the cartoon "Catch the Pigeon", mocking the ridiculous flying machines that Hank invented:

Utterly ridiculous!

Nonsensical!

This is just silly

Then there is real life and the aircraft of WW1:

The Voison 10.  Er - bathtub with wings, anyone?

The Caproni CA4.  Because you can never have too much wing!

The Ilya Muromets.  I have no idea what they're doing standing on the fuselage.
But they are Russian.  A dare, perhaps?

     Okay Hank, I apologise.

More Strained Analogies About Lord Of The Rings And WW1
That loud whining noise is probably JRR spinning in his grave at 150 revs per second ... Anyway, do you recall those giant bat-like creatures that the Nazgul whiz around on like helicopter cavalry?  Of course you do!

Cheaper than Ryanair.  Nazgulines - you know it makes sense!

     You may also recall that they rely on fear to be effective, and when I say "fear" I mean "pant-wettingly terrifying horror", and this fear, akin to taking a library book back a bit late bicycling in Parisian traffic whilst blindfolded and naked, derives from the wrinkly old Nazgul being all Nazgul-ey.  The Big Bats prove to be rather crap at real fighting, especially since a mere girl** chops one of them into dogfood.
     "But!" I hear you expostulate***, "Conrad!  How can this possibly be relevant to World War One as Tolkein experienced it?"
     Ladies and gentlemen, I give you - the Zeppelin!

Zeppelin and pylon snogging, it seems

     Before the war broke out, the cassandra's amongst military commentators bewailed the Zeppelin as a city-smashing superweapon that would overwhelm the Entente in exactly 18 hours, that being the time it took for a Zep to cruise from Bremerhaven to Belfast^, bombing all below into <thinks> a bloody batter^^.
     Real life proved a lot less worrisome.  Zeppelins, you see, were full of hydrogen.  Hydrogen is extremely ready to go BANG at the slightest provocation.  A single tracer bullet could (and did) turn the city-smashing superweapon into charred scrap metal in a couple of minutes.
     There you go.  Big Bat and Zeppelin - both with feet of clay.

The Strain
I am currently about to view Episode 8, and a comment from Claire several years ago came back to me.  She'd seen "30 Days Of Night" and was complaining how gory and scarey and unpleasant it was.
     Er, Claire?  "Horror" film?  There is a clue there.  One suspects she expected some post-modern ironic humour or a bit of heavy-breathing-and-biting, and instead she got BLOODY^^^ SHOCKING HORROR!
     Just so with "The Strain".  I dub these vampires Genderless Ghouls, because they are, and I will say no more.  BOOJUM!, after all, might be read by children.

The cuddly-on-the-inside kind of vampire, I guess

Minor Domestic Matters
Wonder Wifey occasionally looks at your aged and humble (but quite large) scribe with disbelief, firmly believing that I subsist on beer, buns and Moroccan tinned sardines.
     Not true!  Behold Conrad's Blueberry and Strawberry Smoothie:

With milk and yoghurt

     I timed drinking it: gone in 40 seconds.

This will get me into trouble, but - honesty the best policy.

You could hear it's gnashing mandibles
(In-joke)

     This monster was squatting on the wall.  Hitting it with one of my size 10 shoes would have splattered it across the nice white paintwork.  So my cunning plan was to blow it off the wall with a mighty breath, than stamp on it.
     Er - it fell into the hand-towels pictured.  A cursory and extremely rapid look - for as you very well know Conrad is an utter coward - did not reveal it.
     it has surely moved on by now, though.  Right?

* Italian patriot, soldier, politician and author.  Big cheese in Italy. Biscuit in UK.
** Okay, "a girl"
*** No this is not a rude word.  I stretched things enough with "Bl@@dy"
^ These statistics are <ahem> elastic.  That is, completely made up.
^^ The kind of batter you make cakes with, not the batter as in to hit or to play cricket.
^^^ This isn't a swear, it's a description.

The Theme Tonight Is - Kites

Yes Indeed
Why?  Well because we've not had a theme for an age, and I thought I could string one along from a few vague concepts and one crystal-clear item.  The risk of announcing a theme, or intending to have one in the first place, is potential lack of material.  Choosing the Marvel Universe or films of Shakespeare or depressing Russian novelists - plenty to go with there.  How The Spark-plug Changed The World, or Bog-Snorkelling: Potential Olympic Sport - you're on much shakier ground.
     Enough of being a blatherskite!  Let the show commence!

From The Kites Of San Quentin
These - or perhaps they - are - maybe even them - are a band, a trio of vocals, keyboards and guitar, except with lots of electronic gadgets and a tableful of effects pedals.  "Epic electronic soundscapes" just about sums them up, and they definitely come across better live, when the amplification renders things LOUD.
     I have an inside track here, I should confess, as I work with Alison, the vocalist.  This is how I come to have a copy of "7.83 Hz Earth Chorus" and you, gentle reader, do not.
     Their website:
http://www.fromthekitesofsanquentin.com/
     Alison shared info with Conrad today, but he deems discretion dictates a distinct dearth of drivel on the subject.  More anon.

The Kites playing inside a great big plastic box whilst being bombarded with lasers
(Yes really!)

Simon Dupree And The Big Sound
"But Conrad!" you exclaim.  "There are no kites in this strangely put-together name, redolent of a dire Sixties pop programme that played on Friday afternoons after "Crackerjack"."
     Close but alas! you shall remain cigarless*, dear audience.  "Simon Dupree" did not exist at all, although the Shulman brothers did, and they were the band.  I bang on about this because they had one big hit - "Kites".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQAm4wcK0vo
     - which they hated, as it was entirely unrepresentative of their work.
     So they broke up and went on to form Gentle Giant.  Who never mention kites in any of their album or song titles**, so it must have really rankled.

Kite Balloon
Ah, yes, another excuse for me to bang on about WW1 again.  The Kite Balloon was a steerable lighter-than-air dirigible, filled with gas and with a basket slung underneath for observers.
     Here we have a frankly rude-looking German model***:

No, the ship is a long way away.

     Better find a more SFW British version:

There you go!

     The idea was that these gasbags would be guyed out to several thousand feet above ground, where their observers could have a nosey at what the other chap was doing, and unsportingly direct artillery fire upon him.
     Great fun, eh!
     Well, no.  Kite balloons were full of hydrogen, because it's light and easy to produce.  It also burns spectacularly well.  This meant that the other chap's aircraft, toting incendiary ammunition, liked to make sport of setting gasbags alight.  Yes, they did have parachutes for the observers, great big clumsy things that one had to dive into - and which on more than one occasion were missed by the observer ...

More Cheerful Matters!  Kites
The bird, that is.  When I say "more cheerful" I refer to the kites, rather than the rodents that they eat.  For the Elaninae and Milvinae are a species of predatory birds commonly found in worldwide^.  Here's a Black-Winged Kite:

Ah, thou bloody-eyed raptor, as Bill the Bard might have said.

     There's a lot of info on Wiki about kites, far too much for me to cram in or paraphrase here, so have a link if you like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kite_(bird)
     Basically they are winged killers in the sky, and if you happen to be a rat or a squirrel then you're a four-footed furry meal for them.

Kites
The aerofoil type, obviously - obviously! - which flies by creating airflow over it's lifting surface, high-pressure air underneath, low-pressure air above, creating flight.  The supporting framework needs to be resilient and light, as kites made with lead piping went out of fashion the instant they were invented.
     A kite may have a single tether, allowing the user to fly it in a limited fashion:

Far too chirpy and cheerful for Conrad!

     Or it may have multiple tethers, allowing much greater control:

Ahhhh!  It's shooting with it's laser eyes!  Oh, no, hang on -

     Our Transatlantic cousins, whom it amuses Conrad to sometimes dub the South Canadians^^ - but not in their hearing as he is a fearful coward - are also aware of the daredevil Benjamin  Franklin's attempt at determining whether lightning was electrical in nature.  Ben did indeed discover this to his satisfaction, with the added bonus of not killing himself - always a big deal in risky science experiments.

Conrad suspects this is more poetic than practical. Generally, having electricity run itself through you is a Very Bad Idea.
And what's with the small half-naked boys in the background?

Blatherskite
I really had no idea where this word came from, so let me quote the Oxford Dictionary:  "mid 17th century: from blather + skite, a Scots derogatory term adopted into American colloquial speech during the War of Independence from the Scottish song Maggie Lauder, by F. Semphill, which was popular with American troops"
     Coincidence?  Only you^^^can tell!

"Your reality-fu is a bit  goozlery, Conrad."

* Which is a good thing as cigars are a bad thing.
** I know because I went and checked.  Thorough, that's me.
*** Their German nickname is not repeatable in BOOJUM!
^ "Damn!" exclaimed the solitary rat reading BOOJUM! by candlelight in a cellar.
^^ Conrad still hasn't quite accepted that the American Revolution was final and lives on in the hope that one day, one day!  the rebel colonies will come to their senses.
^^^ - and the aliens.  Let's not forget them.