Good Friday, Better Saturday

Because Of Ice Cream!
Yes indeedy Ally Sheedy, Conrad of ice cream is needy.
     It makes sense to me.  Yesterday I had no ice cream left, having scoffed it all at work as my Start The Day The Ice Cream Way breakfast.  Today I had Mint Chocolate Chip!

Just out of shot: six toasted crumpets

     Any day that begins with ice cream is automatically better than one without; don't forget, we're talking about ICBM* here.

A Very Rare Event
As part of my dog-sitting duties, I make a point of lying on the settee, so that Edna can lie on me - when in the Upstairs Lair I'm on an Ergonomic Stool that pitches my lap at 45 degrees, so she can't sit there but tends instead to sulk on the bed - and whilst there I thought "Let's put television on, and on a commercial channel, so I can be annoyed at the adverts!"

Edna, comfortable on well-padded Conrad

     Actually I happened to intercept an episode of "Agents of SHIELD" at the very beginning, and what do you know, it passed the time very pleasantly:

Evidence

  I think it was called "Who Are You" and focussed initially on Lady Sif, who - drama staple and cliche combined - had lost her memory.  There she was, wandering on the shore carrying a whacking big sword, proclaiming "I must find Cava" to all who were listening.

Available in all good off-licences and supermarkets, love

     There were some references that meant you needed to see previous episodes - the Obelisk, HYDRA, Howard the Duck** - but it chugged along as a standalone episode well enough.
     One scene bothered Conrad the Pedant - when the VTOL "Bus" comes in to land and turned it's jets to vertical, not one bit of clutter, paper or dust comes up from the hangar floor.  How realistic is that?
     Although, given that we have Asgardian warriors, memory-sapping Truncheons, a man brought back from the dead and force-fields, this may be quibbling a little.

Ah Yes The Meerkats
Unfortunately - or fortunately, depending on your point of view - the adverts during "Agents -" were mostly bland and uninteresting, apart from the latest Meerkat one, which was as amusing as ever.  They got to knock down Arnie and scald him with coffee.  Snicker.

Sergei, time to engage Reverse

     - er - what are they advertising, again?

"The History of the 51st Highland Division"
If not interested in military history or the official volumes on British divisions that fought in the First World Unpleasantness, you are permitted to move on.
     For the rest of you:  Conrad didn't realise that the 51st was a Territorial division. This meant it's members were not obliged to serve overseas when war broke out.  No statistics are given for how many refused to go overseas, but for the Seventeenth Division the refuseniks appear to number about ten per cent.

Also known as "Devils in skirts"

     Next up was the battle of the mines, which sounds at times like a description of war between trolls and dwarves straight out of Tolkein, fought underground and occasionally in pitch darkness.  A little explanation: both sides would drive a shaft vertically in their front line, then dig out horizontal galleries to a position underneath the enemy, place a ton of explosives there and then blow it - literally - sky high.  They would also attempt to detect the other side's galleries being dug, and "camouflet" them - that is, use a small explosive charge in their gallery to shatter the enemy's.  The author describes how the Scottish tunnelers took particular professional pride in doing this successfully, being far more impressed with this than blowing up "mere infantrymen".

Danger!  Killer troglodytes at work

     Then there is the "Stokes Gun", as it was known then, or Stokes Mortar as we call it now.  The descendants of this lethal drainpipe still serve with the British army now.  The Germans detested it, as a well-trained Stokes team could put 10 bombs in the air before the first one landed, and the History recounts an ambitious shoot on the German trenches that fired 1200 bombs over the course of a day - over 5 tons of bombs.  

 - also breaks down for convenient carriage to any party you get invited to.

It was also used in  1917 as an improvised anti-aircraft gun - not sure how they fused it to burst at altitude - with a range of about 800 yards.  They didn't down any German aircraft but did force them to stay at height.  Conrad's never heard of the Stokes Gun being used in this way elsewhere.  Singular.

The great-grandson in action

Enough of war and misery!  On to more cheerful matters -

"Mason And Dixon"
Well now what have we here?  A giant invisible Golem, standing as tall as the trees in the forests that Mason and Dixon are chopping down to measure their boundary line all the better.
     Conrad is not - let's first explain what a "Golem" is.  It's a staple of Jewish folklore and the classic example is the Golem Of Prague, a clay man brought to life with the inscription in Hebrew on it's forehead of "Emet"  ("Truth").  To deactivate your golem, the first letter is removed, yielding "Met" ("Death").

NO!  Get it right or Mister Hand and his Bamboo Skewer of Pain will pay a visit.
I'm sorry, Art is such an idiot.

     Quite why and how a sixty-foot Golem turns up in the woods of Pennsylvania is another question, which will probably get answered about the same time as the Glowing Indian, the Black Dog and how Lepton Castle was discovered in a rustic cabin in the woods.

The Golem and his dad

This Is A Bit Dull -
Conrad took a look at the corner kitchen cabinet and realised he'd forgotten what was stored in there.

Before

     This is a four-day holiday, he can afford to give up some time to a bit of sorting out.  Still, there's no denying kitchen cleaning is dull, dull, dull, so here's a screenshot from "Harvey" to tide you over:

Aunt Veta confesses all.  Rashly, as it turns out.
(They lock her up)

     I did discover a few items that I'd forgotten about - the cookie-cutters, camomile tea, a glass bowl, cupcake caption markers - and decided to keep the ready-to-roll icing.  After all, a best-by date of 2013 is practically up to date, isn't it?

After.  Yes it IS different!

* Ice Cream Breakfast Man
** Only joking

Beer O'Clock!

That's Right, It's 18:00 At The Mansion
Any earlier would smack of desperation; any later leaves insufficient time to down the pints.  Six p.m. we deem just right.  And Conrad has 4 cans of John Smith's that were going for 60p each as they were dented.  Doesn't bother me - even if you have to bash the tab in with a pair of scissors, it still tastes the same.
     To quote a quote from the incomparable PG Wodehouse, "The lark is on the wing, the snail is on the thorn" and Conrad is on the beer.
     That's the intro out of the way, on to the main course -

A Short Discourse On Cats
Here we have a scene loaded with irony:

     Because it's a dog bed, before you ask.  Jenny moved in when Edna moved off, and then sat there for three hours fast asleep.  Edna not daft enough to try and challenge her for it.
     I am sure there's folding money and/or a Nobel prize for the scientist who determines why cats always, but always, sit where they shouldn't.  When I did my Weekend Morning impression at 10:05 Jenny was happily asleep on a kitchen chair.  I put my plastic board carrying all my kit down on the table:

"Thank you for my new sitting place, puny human"

     Later, after I had chivvied her from sitting on my books, I got up to pour more tea and returned to find:

"Yes, puny human?"

     One day, Jenny, one day we'll identify the relevant DNA strands or that particular bit in the feline cerebellum - and then watch out!

Ah.  Coincidence.  That's MY Seat
Been hit twice by the Coincidence hammer, last night and this morning.
     Whilst Conrad composes the blog he usually plays music, via i-pod or a list assembled on Grooveshark; silence is our enemy!  Last night the tunes were from Grooveshark, including Orbital's covers of the "Doctor Who" theme tune.
     Blog finished I zapped on over to Twitter to promote things and Blimey!  First Tweet at the head of the list is one by Neil Gaiman - about Doctor Who.  It being ten years since it came back.*
     Then today, a concatenation of coincidence arrives.  My current reading material is two books,** "Mason And Dixon" and the "History of the 51st Highland Division".  Whilst reading Chapter 50 of "M & D" I came across a mention of the Black Watch and Scottish pipers present in Continental America.  Here is a supporting photo:

Chapter 51!

     This is an echo of a coincidence last year, reading about the 29th Division who were present at Gallipolli; and a scene in Tom's "The Crying Of Lot 49" is also set at Gallipolli.
     Thomas Pynchon: to read him is to automatically generate coincidence, it seems.

"Harvey"
I beg your pardon for bringing this splendid film*** up again.  I neglected to report that it's IMDB rating is a colossal 8.1, meaning a work of absolutely outstanding quality.^

NO!  ART DEPARTMENT GET IT RIGHT!

     Oh, and in these days of astronomical sums paid for film rights and screenplays, Universal acquired the rights for $750,000.  But those are 1950 $$$, so they probably need to be multiplied a few times to bed-in 21st Century style.

Late-breaking news:  Art Department redeem selves and avoid hideous punishment

     I also neglected to say that Harvey is actually a "Pookah", a type of spirit described in Irish folk-lore.  Here's the Wiki link if you wish to know more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%BAca

     Okay.  Enough Harvey for one day.

Back To Bedlam
In spirit if not actuality.  I did make a comment yesterday that skirted current affairs, getting away with it by referral to the Eighteenth Century, and it is to The Age Of Reason that we now return.
     This is a rather pompous way of referring to - writing.
     As you may know by now, Conrad never ventures to work with anything less than 8 pens, usually 10, with half a dozen more in his pen-case, and a few also left at work just in case.  He works with the fibre-tip out of convenience, but prefers the fountain pen - go away and Google it, I'm not explaining here.
     He also possesses a facsimile quill pen - hang on let me get a photo - 

The pen is mightier than the sword, just mind your spacing

     As used to write in the Age of Reason, and, as should be evident, to write with this one dips the nib in a bottle of ink or an inkpot; there is no reservoir of ink so this needs to be done very frequently, which is rather time-consuming.  Imagine how long the Bard Of Avon took, scratching and scribbling his works out with one of these!
     Conrad, being mighty long in the tooth, remembers at primary school that the desks did have a space for an inkpot - although they were actually long gone.
     Well, here we get to the essence of the article.  Yes, yes, I know I've taken ages to get here.  Whose blog is it?  I won a leather-bound notebook on Red Nose Day and have decided that it will only ever be written upon with a quill pen.

     It really is very inefficient writing with a quill pen, yet I love the end result.  And - bear with Conrad The Unpublished Writer here - it does give me a feel for those authors of yesteryear, scratching away by candlelight.

Well that's the 60 minute deadline up.  Time to scatter BOOJUM! to the electronic corners of the earth!

*  I know I'm old but this makes me feel old.
** One fiction, one non-fiction.  The way I role.
*** The Jimmy Stewart version, obviously - obviously!
^ You don't have to see it.  But we won't be friends again till you do.
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