What A (Larte)Guy!

Jean Larteguy, That Is

I doubt many English-speaking readers of the blog will be aware of Jean Larteguy, but the Francophone ones might.

     It's the pen-name of Pierre Lucien Osty, who Frenchman decided that he didn't like the Nazis, the Nazi occupation of France or not fighting back at the Nazi occupation of France.  So he went off and joined the Free French and got in plenty of fighting.  Come the end of the war he became a journalist and also wrote novels, a couple of which ("The Centurions" and "The Praetorians") have been translated into English.

Hmmm.  They don't look Roman to me.

     As a journalist he worked as a war correspondent for Paris Match, including coverage of the war in Korea.  Get this: in order to obtain a story he joined the French Battalion* and for his pains got injured in the battle of Heartbreak Ridge.  That's commitment!

     Are you paying attention The Metro?

Ha! Conrad's Trenchant Critiques Hit Home

 - following right on the heels of that, we notice that The Metro is no longer lying about it's "Four Pages of" over-hyped one-name "celebrities" with big text and bigger photographs. 

The now-truthful front page

     Because they really can't sustain the concentrated vitriol of BOOJUM!, and also one page is taken up by an advert:

POW!  Smack in the kisser with the cricket bat of verity**

Another Freaky Exoplanet

The more we look, the more we see, and the more we see, the more strange things get.  I refer, of course, to the observation of extra-solar planets.  This time a study has found a planet (probably a "Super Jupiter") with a ring system 200 times larger than that around Saturn.  Herein the link to Aunty Beeb:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31001936

With an impressive artist's impression of the rings and what they would look in our Solar System.  Pretty spectacular.  Art Department:

What the heck.  Close enough.

Bus Poster Shortage

Not really a shortage of bus posters, just that they are all advertising the same Dog Buns! film - "Mortdecai".  Whilst waiting at the bus stop three 409's went past, ALL WITH THE SAME POSTER!

     I can rant, tant, vent and dissent but, dammit, I need material to work with.  I'm a writer, not a high-energy physics scientific researcher***.

Less Decay, thanks.

Irony, Thy Name Is "First Bus"

Conrad decided to venture into Royton, just to see how it was getting on.  A few new shops, none of them bookshops so I have no interest in them and would be hard pressed to remember what they were.

     Anyway, that's not what this post is about.  Oh no.  To get to Royton Conrad has to catch the bus, which is normally the 409, touted as arriving "every 10 minutes or better".  Not that there was any sign of a 409 turning up, but - what's this!  It's that rara avis the 24, turning up when I don't need it!

     Needless to say on the return leg, with low traffic and few passengers, the 409 still managed to be late.

     Oh, there is a link on the Beeb website about Artificial Intelligence and how big a threat it poses to humanity.  

     Conrad's solution?  Assign AI research to First Bus.  After a decade or so they'll have gotten to the stage of producing a ZX81.

After 27 years and £180 billion, First Bus show off their new AI.

"The End Of An Ear"

No!  Not Conrad playing around with language and puns, this is the title of an album by Robert Wyatt.  His solo debut, in fact, made in 1970 and which Conrad has not heard for decades.

 - is a lobe?

     Er - it might be described as "free form" and also "experimental", or what Wonder Wifey would call "That bloody racket!"

     Since I was playing it in the kitchen while she was out, and she suddenly returned, Mr Wyatt's efforts went to "Pause".

* Who earned 3 Presidential Unit Citations when attached to the US 23rd Division.  Those things don't come in cereal packets.

** "Verity" as in "truthfulness", not Phil and Rosie's daughter.

*** As you may have noticed.

Lemon Barley Water!

No, It's Not Code Nor An Officially-Sanctioned Swear
It is a drink, of old used to treat those who were weak and sickly and unlikely to see the week out unless they got LBW*.  Conrad, having had it pop up in his mind, decided to make some.
     You boil the barley for 30 minutes, strain the hot water into a bowl, add 6 ounces of sugar and 3 peeled, chopped lemons.  Strain and cool and you get

This!

     Let it cool and drink.  It tastes like water with lemon and barley flavouring, pretty much what you'd expect.
     Oh, I ate the barley later on with some sweet chilli sauce.
     Okay, Intro over - let us proceed with the yeltom!**

"Lillyhammer"***
Given his knowledge of Norway (they have lots of snow, fjords, Jo Nesbo and pine trees), and his extensive experience with Norwegian cinema (Orion's Belte, Trolljaeger, Thal, Dod Snow, Rare Exports), Conrad was surprised  about this television series, now having completed it's third season.  He'd never heard of it.
     It stars the talented yet lugubrious-looking Steve Van Zandt, whom some of you will recognise as a talented musician and others as starring in "The Sopranos", and he co-writes "Lillyhammer".  Which is an odd yet evocative name.
     It is a fish-out-of-water drama comedy.  Steve plays Frank, ex-mobster relocated under the WPP^, a city-boy down to his bones.  He chooses to relocate to Lillehammer, a provincial town in deepest Norway.
  
     Here an aside.  You can't really be anything like "deep" in Norway as it is like string, long and thin, but Lillehammer is probably the closest you can get to "deep" - 

Norway.  Lillehammer north of Oslo.

     Back to Steve.
     Frank, actually.  Okay, I wonder if they have Royksopp on this program?  That would be rather awesome.  Steve, being a musician, must have heard of them.  

<scrinch>

     That's the sound of Conrad crossing everything he's got for Royksopp.

Syncopation
I was going to comment on this but it looks dull and complicated so instead we'll hurry right on to -

Mesembryanthemum
Conrad has a vague memory of writing about this entity previously, although it might have been the chrysanthemum or the Baluchitherium.

Don't pull it's tail, mate!

     What is the Mesembryanthemum, and do you need fear it's razor-sharp talons or it's poison-injecting incisors, or it's 20 ton mass that will crush you flat as it undulates across the landscape?
     None of the above.  It's a flower, from South Africa:

Mesemb - Flowers.

Some Would Call This Cruel And Unusual Punishment
Conrad quite enjoys it.
     "What are you talking about, Conrad?" I hear you ask.  "Surely the man's not been necking the nitromethane again?"
     I speak of my copy of the "History of the 2nd Division - Volume 2".  This volume has been printed from a scan of the old original history which will have been published 80 or 90 years ago, a process which creates the odd typo here and there - a ratio of maybe 199:1 in the text.
     

     In the photo above I've highlighted the original page numbers and added them to the page at the bottom, e.g. PP443.  
     This is significant because the actual page numbers bear no relation whatsoever to the original text - the pages above are number 35 and 36.  I have been marking the index as well, so that I can relate the page numbers there(numbered in relation to the original text)  to the latter-day pages.  Thus:

A slow process!

     This might take a few weeks to complete.  We'll see.

Xenta
No!  Not the name of my icy alien homeworld.  A species of electrical equipment, to wit, headphones, viz:

     These are far better than the computer speakers, which is a good point as, if Conrad wants to play his music LOUD then he has to use the head- or earphones on account of the neighbours^.
     They will also serve on the bus to work, as my current earphones simply can't keep out the noise of other passengers, the bus, traffic and all other ambient noise sources.
     Thank you Wonder Wifey!

Darling Daughter
I did mention that the first thing Sally did yesterday when she arrived was cut up a giant bone, then boil part of it.
     What, asked curious Dad, was she going to do with it?
     Make it into the handle of a glass cup, she replied.  This seemed a bit ambitious, but -

She made this herself!

     She has experience of blowing glass.  A bit worrying given that molten glass is, no other way to put it, Dog Buns! hot, but curious Dad is proud of her artistic skills.
     Oh, and her knitting as well.  How many other youngsters knit nowadays?  She can't sit and not knit.


* Lemon Barley Water not Leg Before Wicket, because one is a drink and the other's  cricket.
** "Motley" backwards, just for a bit of variety.
*** Yes I KNOW it's spelled incorrectly.  Look, I didn't write the thing!
Witness Protection Programme, not Winnebago Purchase Plan, as the first sends you afar and the second is a car.
^ Bad neighbours!  Wicked neighbours!