What Ho What Ho - It's Edgar Allan Poe!

Anyone Saying "Who?" Will Be Put Out Of The Airlock
I know we're not in orbit but that's how serious I am.
     EAP, American author and promoter of the short story.  He only lived to the age of 40 but was immensely influential at the time and afterwards.  The detective in literary fiction was invented by Poe.  He pioneered what later became known as "science fiction".  He was a perceptive, analytical literary critic.  His poem "The Raven" was an instant success.

NO!  Damn it, Art Department -

  He put forward the Big Bang theory 80 years before it became accepted.  He also influenced cryptology (via the story "The Gold-Bug") and inspired the chap who broke the Japanese Purple code in The Second Unpleasantness.

Thank you.

     There are far too many film and television adaptations of Poe's works to go into here, but here's a link to the relevant Wikipedia page, should you desire to know more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe_in_television_and_film
     And that's this Intro over.

"Are You Doing Anything Nice This Weekend, Rob*?" Asked Rabina
We were in the lift and there were 7 floors to go.
     "Why yes!" I replied, "But some people would think it to be cruel and unusual punishment."
     Curious looks from the others in the lift.  What - did Conrad strap himself into a chair and taser his Hairy Underside?
     "I've got a "History of the 51st Highland Division" but it doesn't have an index.  So I'm writing one myself."

The evidence

    I lied about not starting it if I'd known how long it would take; by now you know how my mind works and I simply love hair-splitting pedantry of this sort.
     Slow work, however.  I am now up to page 318 - only another 82 to go! - after picking up from page 300, and that took an hour and a half.

Sitting Cat And Dog Sitting
Usually when I sit down at the kitchen table I am rapidly joined by Jenny, who emerges from wherever she's been hiding, purrs loudly and proceeds to sit on my book or notepad.  She knows not to approach if I'm eating; well, not to approach all at once.  Her tactic is to sneak forward a little at a time ...
     No sitting on books today.  Perhaps I am out of favour:

She loves that box

     I was certainly out of favour with Edna whilst sitting at the table; non-stop whimpery-whiney pup performance until I went into the lounge and lay down on the settee, whereupon:

Presto - instant dog bed

     She got off at times, and when she returned would head-butt my writing pad out of the way so she could lie down.  Then there was the alternative lying position, almost a dog boa:

Jowly old men make excellent lying-posts, apparently

Smoke Fairies
This is kind of tangential to my continuing references to Public Service Broadcasting and "The Race for Space".  I'd never heard of Smoke Fairies before listening to the album, where they perform vocals on the track "Valentina".  Wikipedia lists them as "dream pop", which they most definitely weren't when playing live.
     Why did J. Wilgoose Esq. arrange to have them sing on that track?  Here's a hint:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZaHXiNWKGM

Apollo LEM for the hard of sight

     And what is on the cover illustration of "The Race of Space"?

Again, Apollo LEM for the hard of sight

     Artistic minds thinking alike, eh?

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Ice Cream
Conrad is getting back into making his own ice cream again, after an hiatus of about a year.  Having rediscovered the recipe for Strawberry Ice Cream, I now need strawberries.  A visit to the Co-Op in Royton beckons.

As seen on that most fruitful of sources, a bus

     Conrad also has to approve of this ad and the ice creams thus displayed.  Black ice cream - a tough sell.  I wonder, what flavour of ice cream I could make that would suit black?  Treacle?  Liquorice?  Tar?  I do have black food colouring**, so - you know, this intrigues me.  I'll get to you on that.

The Mystery Towers
I've blogged about these monster constructions before, although not for some time.  They were M and N towers, two of a planned twelve that would have been spaced out across the English Channel to prevent German U-boats slinking past the coast.

No sense of scale, sorry

Somewhat better

     The First Unpleasantness came to an end before they were joined by the rest.  One of them was towed out to the Nab Rocks and became a lighthouse that's still there:

- if a little rusty

     What happened to the other?  It remained in harbour for several years, as it was allegedly 6 feet too wide to get out:

And there it sat.

     Then it got broken up and used for local construction.  A bit of a sad end, really.

Right.  Time to go get strawberries.

UA-61206227-1


* Conrad's Sunday-best name
** No, I don't mean fountain-pen ink.  Proper black food colouring.

M.O.G.H.A.D.I.S.H.U.

No, Not The Capital Of Somalia
Me!
     Well, me being clever.
     "Man Of Good Humour, Amiable Disposition, Inherent Silliness & Hairy Underside".
     You can attest to the truth of the first three qualities merely by reading the blog.
     The Hairy Underside is also true, but proving it would render BOOJUM! very, very NSFW.  So we'll not go there.


What's Different About Today?
Not merely that there will never be another 8th May 2015 again, but rather the eternal battle between Good and Evil between BOOJUM! and The Metro might have taken a new direction.  There was no promotion of their "Guilty Pleasures" on yesterday's cover, and - why what do we have here!  Nothing about "GP" on this edition either.

See!

     Of course - er - well - there is the General Election on the front cover, so that might be an issue as well, mightn't it?
     Nah! Can't possibly have had any influence.

"The Die-Hards"
Mention is made in this volume of "Albuhera Day", which couldn't take place thanks to the whole Being In The Front-Line Trenches thing.  Conrad, naturally, being the pedant he is, had to check up on this*.

British army musicians.  Striking fear into the heart of the enemy for 300 years

     It dates back to 16th May 1811, when the 57th Regiment (which was to become the Middlesex Regiment) fought in the Battle of Albuhera.  Their Colonel was injured and shot off his horse, egging his valiant soldiers on with the call "Die hard, 57th, die hard!"
     This is pretty rock of him, in Conrad's opinion.  Were I in his position I'd probably be wailing after falling on my Hairy Underside, or thinking "Why aren't there safety belts for horses?" or "If I get shot with a lead bullet and it doesn't kill me on the spot, am I going to have to worry about lead poisoning, lead being a heavy metal and all that?"

Proof Of Quiz
Well, I don't doubt that you're positively thirsting - thirsting!** - to know about the pub quiz now on offer at The Halfway House.

The evidence.  And not a bit of Googling involved

     Our stalwart opponents The Bar Stewards pipped us at the post and won; and I have to congratulate Ham And Brown on their sporting spirit - with every opportunity to cheat on mobile phones, they were scrupulously honest because they did really really badly.

"Please Sir, Is There Any More?"
NO! No, Edna, there is not.  This is my tea and I will fight you for it.

Edna trying it on

     She's hanging around whilst I eat a pie, in the solemn yet deluded hope that Conrad will share his scoff with her.
     Fat chance!

Miserablechester Part Two
I shouldn't have hailed the arrival of blue skies and sunshine yesterday, should I?  When I left the house this morning it was lovely and sunny.  Over the day the clouds gradually rolled in, until over across the Pennines one could see a dirty grey blanket covering the land and obscuring visibility, until vertical river marched into Manchester.

A world of wet
A woeful world of wet
A woebegone woeful world of wet
A wretched woebegone woeful world of wet^^

     This is my view from the bus ride home.
     Only a person as sunny and MOGHADISHU as me could remain cheery in a situation like this.
     'Think of all the trees!  How refreshed and hydrated they must be!' I thought.

Conrad.  Not dancing in the rain so much as laughing at it.

Aha!  Thank You Bus Poster
What's this?  A new bus poster advertising a new film, more grist for the mental mill that provides the ***
    Okay, it's "The Age Of Adaline".  Let the BOOJUM! review begin!
    Either this is the looooongest and most boring film in the history of this galaxy, if not the local cluster - probably not the entire universe, as it's a pretty big universe; or it's the shortest and least interesting film ever.

Long or short - NO! is my retort

     "Why is this, Conrad?" I hear you cry.  "Tell us oh sage!"^ 
     Okay, the loooooongest film first.  Do you know how an "Age" is?  As an example, look at "The Age of Reason" - this took up half of the Eighteenth Century.  How numb would your bum be sitting through a film that lasted fifty years?
     Then there is the short option.  "The Age of Adaline" - and a shot of Adaline comes up, with a caption beneath:

34

     Ha ha!  And you paid £10 to see it!

* You know me so well.
** Do you see what I - oh you do.
*** My metaphor-fu ran out at this point.  Sorry.
^ This had better mean "wise man" because if it's the herb you're in trouble.
^^ Okay, that's enough now.

The Shorter The Title The Fewer The Hits So - This One, Longer It's

Am I Clever Or What?
 - Yes I am, before you even contemplate any other possible answer.
     Do you see what I did in the title there?  How I cleverly managed a citric yet wistful reference to the less-than-twenty visitors to BOOJUM! yesterday and how compact the title was (just two letters and a punctuation mark*) and how I'm remedying that today - and making it rhyme?
     I hope you people appreciate me.
     Perhaps my gloating self-promotion should give pause, however; I don't know if that title will actually fit ...

Coincidence!  We Meet Again!
Yes by gum petrolatum.  Last night Conrad was watching "Agents of SHIELD" and who does Agent Grant Ward claim he wanted to be?  Tom Brady.  Conrad has never heard of him and knows nothing about him.  
     Then what do we see on Twitter?

Upper Left

     "Tom Brady likely knew of "Deflategate"
     What are the chances of that happening?

Bus Wait Rate - again confirmed as more buses pass on the other side of the road than on mine this morning as I have places to be and a tight schedule.  Bus wait rate - it is a real things.

"A Royal Night Out"
Aha.  What do we have here but - a promising film poster, with the title "A Royal Night Out".  "Inspired by real events".  Meaning made out of whole cloth, I bet.
     So, let us review things BOOJUM! style.

Well, they're Royle's

     Okay, this has got to be one of the most boring films ever - a night out, a whole night, a film eight hours long.  Bummer!

Let Us Be Accurate
Yes, my darlings, yet more about the science behind making very loud noises that leave no echoes, as there have to be people left to hear echoes ...
     This is all a consequence of Conrad wondering if Herman Kahn's "On Thermonuclear War" has been rendered either less relevant or entirely obsolete, as it was written fifty years ago and technology has not stood still in that time.

Nuclear war being rather grim, here's a dancing stoat instead

     Accuracy is a major component of the effectiveness of any warhead, doubly so in the case of the ICBM, with ranges of several thousand kilometres.  The accuracy of these missiles is measured in CEP, "Circular Error Probable", a radius of n, within which 50% of warheads will fall.  The smaller the CEP, the closer to the target the warheads will fall.
     Why is this important or relevant?  Because of the inverse square law; if you decrease n by half, then your warhead yield can be decreased to a quarter and have the same effect - a Minuteman II with a CEP of 100 metres has a yield of 400 kilotonnes; the Russian SS18 had a yield of 25 megatonnes so how accurate need it be?
     All part of BOOJUM!'s happy laughy education about what one hopes remains an entirely theoretical area of study.


"The Die-Hard In The Great War"
Well now, what's this?  "Dayfield Body Armour".  The author, Mr Everard Wyrall, states that the British army tested this bit of kit, didn't like it and sniffily dropped it, although if individual soldiers want to buy it, they were welcome.
    Actually those buying it tended to be the worried relatives of soldiers in the field, rather than the soldiers themselves.
     But!  What's this?  In the "History of the 51st Highland Division" the author (Major Bewsher) describes how a large bombing raid used the Dayfield Body Shield, and judging by the number of fragments stuck in the fabric of same, they were pretty useful.
     What does this item look like?
     Oh I thought you'd never ask!

As worn by General Ironside.  Possibly

    Mention is also made in the Die-Hards of Perfidious Albion winning the battle of Messines Ridge by blowing it up with 1 million pounds of dynamite, which works out as 454 tons of explosives, nearly half a kilotonne - getting into low-yield nuclear weapon sizes, in fact, which rather brings home how wickedly unsporting the cricket-loving Brits could be.
     It's not mentioned in the text, but two mines were not detonated and their location subsequently lost.  One went up in a thunderstorm in 1955, and the other was discovered beneath a farmhouse and made safe earlier this century.

A crater.  Anything said is a bit superfluous

More Of Maths And Music
I know I keep banging on about Public Service Broadcasting's "The Race for Space" and am unapologetic - it's a good album.
     As you should surely know by now, most of the "lyrics" to PBS songs are in fact the soundtracks from various types of film, and for "The Other Side" we hear the commentary about Apollo 8 as it goes into orbit around the far side of the Moon.  This means that all radio contact is lost for 36 minutes; a long time to be out of touch 250,000 miles from the nearest human being.

The Earth as seen from Apollo 8**

     The speed of Apollo 8 as it moves into LOS is given as 7,777 feet per second - thank you America for using BRITISH IMPERIAL measures! - which Conrad converted to miles - 1.5 miles per second or well over 5,000 miles per hour.
     You can hear the relief in the commentator's voice when we hear from the capsule again:  "Hello Houston we read you loud and clear.  How d'you read us?"
     Sterling*** stuff.

Miserablechester
Not today!  No, today went from rather grey to pretty damn nice, which might get more people out to vote - it's the General Election in this country now, you may be surprised to know - but imagine if this was today:

Utterly woeful

Snoods: Indispensable Fashion Item
Belatedly, I realised I'd not told you what a snood is.

Rosie the Riveter and Sophie the Snood

     A hairnet.

999 words!  Oh.  Now there's 1,005.

* "GO!"
** Anyone mentioning "Moon hoax" will be crushed beneath Tony the Ten Ton Terror Toad
*** Yes, I know it's also BRITISH IMPERIAL currency.

GO!

No, Not The Chinese Game
Although Conrad has played and enjoyed it in the past, a physical game using black and white counters on a gridded board.  No point in describing it at length, as it's not what the title's about.
     Nor yet is it the Lemonjelly track from their "64 - 98" album, voice over courtesy of William Shatner.
    - I wonder, would there be a market for a 3D game of Go?  You'd have to have a wire cage to accomodate the lines, and use notched spheres rather than flat circular counters, and it would probably be mind-bendingly difficult to play - I'll get back to you on that.
     Where was I?

Where was I?  Going on with myself.  Do you see - O you do.

     Oh, yes, "GO!".  I refer to probably the best track on the recently released "Race for Space" by Public Service Broadcasting.  This track incorporates an edited segment of the flight controllers in Mission Control, Houston, being asked by the big bird Gene Krantz himself if they report Go or No Go - essentially, are they giving the green light for the LEM* to land on the lunar regolith?  Conrad, because this is the way his mind works, listened patiently to the different flight controllers and tried to work out what they were - and then cross-checked with the real thing.  So we have:
RETRO - Correct
VITAL - not sure about this, it might be "FLIGHT"
GUIDANCE - Correct
CONTROL - Correct
G IN C - Actually GNC
DEECOM - Actually "EECOM"
SURGEON - Correct
DALCOM - Not sure about this, it might be "CAPCOM"
     Well it diverted me for a few minutes.

The Bus Wait Rate was once again confirmed this morning, since I was on a tight schedule - two buses and a coach passed by on the other side of the road.  Taunt me, First Bus, why don't you!

"The Die-Hards In The Great War 1914 - 1918"
Aha!  Don't try and sneak out and don't fall asleep, this is interesting**.  I've had this two volume history for several years and have never read it before, so my long ride into and out of work allows me the luxury of being able to peruse at length.
    As soon as I opened the supposed First Volume, 1914 to 1916, I noticed an error.  This was actually the Second Volume with an incorrect front:

The false front

     It began in January 1917.  That chap on the front is from 1915, too.

There you go, Volume II

     Now, have a look at the Index:

Very - index-y

     That's how it's done, "History of the 51st Highland Division".  A list of the battalions, then of officers - none below the rank of Major unless they won a VC - and then the operations or battles they were involved in.  A model of clarity.  I can only hope to reach this refined elegance with my index.

The Metro
I'm actually reviewing yesterday's edition of the Boot Wiping Implement.  Typical drivel - "Oooh!  Chris and Gwynnie!"  "Oooh! A royal baby!"  "Oooh! A woman in a long green dress!"
     This is news?  Pah!  Get out of my way! Well photo of the woman in a long green dress does take up a lot of room that they'd otherwise have to fill with words.

excuse me got to go check on the Norwegian Pear Cake

     And what do we have today?

Her hair is stapled to her head.

     A temporary triumph for BOOJUM! - look what they list "Guilty Pleasures" as - Pages 12 and 13, no lies about "4 pages" today, eh!
     Oh and the Ri-veal is a glimpse of this tartlet's chest.
     Who is she, again?

Still Out -
Yes, those burnt-out bulbs have yet to be replaced.

     I suppose there's less pressure to replace them at this time of year, when the days are getting longer, but - in fact BUT! - the longest day will be here and gone in about six weeks, Mister Bulb Replacement Man***.

"Something Misbegotten In The Estate Of Gen. Marek"
As I have titled my latest epic opus, and yes it is a pun on that quote from Hamlet.

An example of the story what I wrote..

     The setting is the bucolic East Sussex village of Eden Underwood, and here we have Niall, the hero, encountering some hostile chaps eager to interview the reclusive Mister Hinkley.  This is after Niall goes to inspect the consecrated and thus evil-free henge stones recovered from the riverbank nearby.  The henge, you see, had been broken up and used for building material in the sixteenth century, which was a mistake - the stones being cursed thanks to thousands of years of blood sacrifice.
     Also, Niall is getting down to learning electric guitar and can manage "Smoke on the Water".  He might have to tell you what it is he's playing first, but damn it that man is a trier.

O2!  Why No Love For The Weasel?
The advertising agency working for O2 continues with their rather baffling promotion of mobile-phone-as-dog, viz:

     Surely - surely! - someone somewhere in the advertising business must recognise the awesome pulling power of the weasel^.  I know I'm right here, don't forget I'm the genius responsible for -

FROCKODILE!

Let me kickstart things with an image and a name for you:

Wallace the Wild-eyed Wonder Weasel of Winterland^^

Oops!  Dangerously close to a thousand words and sixty minutes.  Hang on -

     I've been watching a lot of "Fortitude" and "Lillyhammer", so in their spirit, here is Norwegian Pear Cake.

* "Lunar Excursion Module" - that insecty-looking thing that touched down on the regolith i.e. moon soil.  Today's coincidence - and nothing to do with yesterday's Stanislav Lem.
** Yes it IS!
*** Or Woman.  No sexism here.
^ I wonder how large a weight it could actually pull.  This needs investigating, urgently.
^^ Possibly the most "W"'s you will see in on place ever.