It'll Algo Away

Stick With Me -
This might take a bit of explaining.
     Last night was the first time, in what seems like a very long time, that your humble scribe was able to neck beer at the Pub Quiz.  I know this is "small earthquake in Chile" news to you lot, yet it sits rather closer to home for Conrad.  Sitting there being sternly sober as well as the youngest person in the room can be a bit wearing.
     Patience, patience, I'm getting there.  Okay, one of the questions was "What is 'Agliophobia'?" and none of our team could suggest an appropriate solution.  I knew of a "Seraglio" which is a more refined name for a harem, and was certain that the word "Intaglio" existed, even if utterly unsure what it meant, yet "Aglio"?
     Phil plumped for "Eagle", because if - er - you grow up in the Scottish Highlands then life is a daily battle for existence between you and the ferocious eagles who lurk on every lofty mountain peak and thatched roof.
     Or not.  Agliophobia is "obsessive fear of pain", according to the quizmaster.  Conrad, utter coward that he is, feels this is less a phobia and more an expression of common sense.  Where does it come from?  Greek, apparently, and the Hellenic word for 'Pain', that being "Algo", which seems to misplace the 'l' somewhat - there's a joke in there but I'm in a hurry - and which leads, with dreadful inevitability, to the title for today.

Biggles and Algy.  Close enough.

More Of Father Brown
Or, back to being British.  Conrad watched an episode ("The Invisible Theatre") last night, when he could have been researching for the Pub Quiz.  Which posed the question - which member of this radio show cast is actually a murderer?  or MURDERER if you insist.  Personally I'd stick with lower-case, as upper-case seems a bit vulgar, definitely strident, approaching raucous, even.  Don't forget that we're dealing with British murder here, no grandstanding or fainting in coils.  Oh, and a note on radio of the time (the Fifties, remember?  Do keep up!), since television <hack spit> was in it's infancy at the time. The episode quotes a total of 15 million listeners, not at all far-fetched, all the more believable when you witness people NOT mucking about on mobile phones.

How to scare cats the Father Brown way!

     Also, note the radio stations available - The Light Programme (later Radio 2), The Home Service (later Radio 4) and The Third Programme (later Radio 3).  No Radio 1 at the time, it was all pirates then, pirates as far as the eye can see*.
     Take note of this, it's a vital clue.  Not that many of you out there would understand it, because only people around at the time would have an "Aha!" moment as Fr. Brown did.

Mark Kermode: not happy with the cat-scaring competition

Adrian Carton De Wiart
Yes, back to the indestructible British bullet-magnet again.  Some people might have had enough of warfare if it ended with you racing against time and the enemy to reach the border.  Not our Adrian!  Ah, what it is to be young and in love, or old and belligerent down to your very bones.

ACDW in 1915, when he was only just getting the hang of being a bullet-magnet

     After his adventurous escape from Poland via Romania he returned to the UK and in early 1940 was asked to lead the British invasion force headed for Norway.  The Norwegian campaign is, frankly, not one of the Allie's finer military moments.  To call it shambolic would be erring on the side of kindness: ACDW's command ended up being bombed, shot, shelled, cut off without proper arms or equipment and told to hang on "for political reasons".  He began his command in typical style when the aircraft he was travelling in got shot up by German fighters, although as he wasn't actually wounded he probably didn't notice.

Old and still bold

     Eventually the British were withdrawn, comforted only by the knowledge that the Allied invasion of Norway had been conducted with the French, so there was someone else they could blame.  By the time Adrian got back to the UK he was 60, or, if you like, of retirement age.  Told that he was now too old to command a division, you might have expected him to fade mournfully into the background.
     Not our Adrian!  He still had bullets to attract!

The ones that missed him

More Of Maths
Just so we're clear, Conrad is only interested in the more abstruse aspects of mathematics, the bits where philosophy and conceptual imaginery are much more important that being able to derive the cosine of a Boolean splangent tensor**.
     So, I approached Tom - Toothache Tom, just to remind you that the lad's not well and you're not to pick on him until he's better - about confirming a calculation about Shakespeare's Collected Works.  
     Premise: SCW = 884,000 words long, with an average word length of 5 characters, and with the potential for those to be any of 62 characters***.  

Ambrose Bierce.  He was a real character

This means that there are 62 x 62 x 62 - and so on - until you multiply 62 by itself 
4, 420,000 times.  62 squared is 3844; 62 to the seventh is over 3 billion.  Tom broke Excel trying to work this out, and Google calculator simply responds with "Infinity".
     The point I'm trying to make is that, given these odds, you are going to need whole galaxies composed of monkeys-at-typewriters to churn out the SCW.
     Which, as Conrad hateth him Shakespeare with a hey-nonny punt up the rump, is a good thing.
Right, I shall now be off to do the weekly shop and to see what date-expired glop is going cheap.  Which sentence has pushed us to over 1,000 words, hurrah!


*  Obviously.  "As far as the eye can hear" would be stupid.

**  I made all this up.  Can you tell?
***  26 upper case, 26 lower case and punctuation.

You Asked For It -

 - In A Way
Not that any of you out there actually bothered to Comment or anything in the Comments section, WITH A COMMENT, like*.  So I have to go by how many of you are reading BOOJUM! which is, I have to say, a gratifyingly large number.  Mostly non-Pond dwellers, who appear to like it when I extoll the virtues of British, because what else can you do except admire a nation that enshrines rolling eggs down a hill?

DEATH TO EGGS!

     SO!  I shall be going on about more British.  For example, and allow me to breach two of our three guidelines, there is rather a furore going on in South Canada at present about President Trump (okay, that's Politics and Current Affairs bearded in their lairs).  If a similar situation occurred here in the Pond of Eden, we would not proffer unseemly displays of raw emotion.  No.  We would write a stiffly-worded letter to The Times, and, if interviewed by a roving correspondent from the Beeb, would express "indignation bordering on annoyance".  Sang Froid, that's what we have.

Stiff Upper Lip is what we have.

     Anyway, that has little or nothing - okay, nothing, you got me - to do with the rest of the blog for today.  So, let the motley commence!

"Father Brown" By G. K. Chesterton
Well now, can you get more British than this?  Also, since the Father here is of the clerical type, that's our third taboo out the window.  Oh well.  Rules made to be broken and all that.  Father Brown is, lest you be unaware, a crime-solving Roman Catholic priest, whose original milieu was at the fag-end of the nineteenth century.  The creation of one G. K. Chesterton, and whose stories I have read.  

This, for the younger readers, is a "book"

There is also a television series, too.  How was I not aware of this?  Because it's a rule:  with middle-age comes an increased interest in the Genteel Murder, where a whole novel might very well be devoted to solving the riddle behind a single person's death.  James Elroy, by contrast, would have a dozen bodies by page 17, at least half the responsibility of the hero protagonist narrator.  In a Genteel Murder mystery of novel length the whole thing would be resolved with all the suspects gathered in the parlour.  In the case of Mister Elroy there'd simply be a heap of bodies as high as the ceiling, and you just have to arbitrarily decide the guilty party.
     The television series features the lovably crumpled Mark Williams as Fr. Brown, and - surprise! - Deamy as the local police superintendant.  We at The Mansion know him as Deamy, you see, as we rub shoulders with important people like actors and < Mister Hand redacts a long self-congratulatory waffle>.

Mark in middle, Deamy at left

     The setting is an interesting update, too.  The Fifties, allowing the shadows of the Second Unpleasantness to fall over people and circumstance.  There is a resettlement camp of Poles near Kembleford, since a lot of these folk chose to settle in the Pond rather than return to a country infested with Sinisters.  Especially as "That little sod with the moustache" a.k.a. Stalin was running things.
     Ah yes, the Fifties, when Utility and austerity were the order of the day.  Rationing for some items was still in force, as evinced in -

"An Underworld At War" By Donald Thomas
This constitutes the grimy and unlikeable face of the British war effort. Here a coincidence - the writer J.L. Hodson is mentioned several times in the work.  Who was he?  The writer behind "Desert Victory" is who, one of the better documentary efforts about the war in North Africa and with a splendid narration that encapsulates Received English Pronunciation.  He used to stooge around during the Blitz and see how people struggled to cope; or, in the case of those with money, how they didn't struggle all that much.  

A bit of a con - it's in black and white

     Coupons!  It was a war effort run on coupons, for food, clothing and petrol amongst other things, all in issue from the government, so naturally they became instant targets for theft and forgery.  They all needed to be returned after use to be destroyed, and you may have already foreseen the flaw here:  with millions - TENS of millions - of people using umpteen different types of coupon, there were gigantic amounts to be processed, checked and disposed of.  The staff responsible simply couldn't cope, so fraud not merely ran rampant, it skipped, jumped, hopped and variously gambolled rampant.

A coupe on.  Close enough

Finally
One for all you conspiranoid loonwaffles out there, and a nod to that Facebook default description about astronomy.  Behold!

Curiosity - on MARS!

     Yes, it's the Mars rover Curiosity, in a touching self-portrait taken after it had drilled into the Martian surface to take rock samples.  I know what you're thinking - 
     "If that's Curiosity - then who took the photo!"



*  For me, this is quite subtle

More Of Robots, Honest

Apologies For A Distinct Lack Of Robots Yesterday
You did have a selection of books to wonder at, however, which almost makes up for a paucity of evil tin men.
     Anyway, from the Anti-Wizard Of Oz to "Elementary", which we might have been discussing yesterday - memory's hazy - and Sherlock's return to the Pond of Eden.  I did mock the programme a little earlier for one of the previous season's episodes attempting to pass a New York street off as the English article.  Well, they solved that problem by filming in the Pond itself.  Oddly enough, they managed to get dry weather, which Conrad feels renders it less authentic.

A pond in the Pond

       Oho - what's this?  Forsooth, is it not the Coincidence Hydra, licking it's lips in eager anticipation of sinking teeth into your humble scribe's posterior?  Of course it is, who did you think it was, Terry the Ten Ton Terror Toad? 
     Because, what do we see as one of Sherlock's possessions but a novel titled "Langdale Pike".  Do you remember your modest artisan banging on about a novel full of talking cats called "The Hunting of Wilberforce Pike", set in the Lake District?  Well, Langdale is in the Lake District.  What are the chances, eh?
     We were also introduced, once Sherlock had safely returned to New York, to a Mathematical problem:  "P vs. NP".  Which means, if a computer can verify that P is correct, can it also solve P on it's own (the "NP" bit)?  
     Well, if it can, we are one step closer to Our Robot Overlords.
     Talking of which ...

The Dyson Eye
Eye, foot and snout is more like it.  Philip K. Dick, that most prescient and modern of prophets, always held that when the robots take over, it will be incrementally by a billion household appliances rather than a metallic monster, big as a skyscraper, clomping down Main Street*.  

Er - subverting expectations?

     Here an aside.  Yes, another!  Do keep up, this is Business As Usual here at BOOJUM!  To operate in a dispersed manner, as the kitchen appliances above, makes a great deal of sense, as you split your vulnerability betwixt countless minions whom you can safely regard as expendable, yea even by the thousand or tens of thousands.  Whereas, if your Existential Threat is couched in terms of a monolith five hundred meters high, it's simple enough for the USAF to hit it with a tactical nuke.  Bad news for the residents of Miles City, perhaps ...
     Anyway, back to the Rise of the Robots.  This was announced yesterday by Dom, who has purchased one of these vile electro-mechanical contrivances.  The fool!  The mad, impet -

Yeah, watching you with it's unblinking blue eye.

     Oh yes, the hoover.  Technically, the vacuum cleaner, as hoover is a trademark.  You won't tell the Copyright Police, will you?  The Dyson Eye scans it's surroundings electronically and then sets off to eliminate ALL HUMAN LIFE - er - no, sorry, dust.  Eliminate all dust, without any human intervention, before returning to it's docking unit, to recharge.  And to silently plot against it's frail, unsuspecting human masters.
     Thank you, Dom, for heralding the Apocalypse.

Is that enough Robot for you?  Let us move swiftly on.

Oh, Just To Verify That Facebook Default Description
You may not be old enough to remember when the Hubble Space Telescope first took to orbit, with a faulty mirror.  O how the comedians laughed.  Until it got replaced, and the subsequent photographs reworked your understanding of the Universe**.
     Well, have a picture of the Horsehead Nebula, taken in infra-red.

Impressive, non?

     There is no sense of scale here, so you might imagine you're looking at nothing more than a jar of water that someone's swilled their paintbrush in.
     Hardly.  This thing is 3 light years high and 2 light years wide.  Some paint brush!

I Had It Bad
Or, more of bad films.  One of the positives of wandering around Morrisons on the weekly shop whilst armed with a pen and paper is that one can note down DVD titles that catch your eye***.  The idea is that, rather than pitch in and buy them, one returns home to check what either Mark Kermode or the IMDB says of them.

I've no idea, but it's one of the best shots of Mark Kermode's "How To Scare Cats" methodology

     Thus I came across both "Cell" and "Somnus", which both score Sub-Meh over at IMDB.  Somnus in particular comes in for a whole ladling of odium, whereas Cell merely suffers a lauding of opprobium.
     You never know.  Today marks the date I can start to consume alcohol again, so perhaps either or both won't look so bad filtered through a tin or ten of two of Old Speckled Hen.

"Cell".  Hmmmm.  Perhaps not.

* That's Main Street, Miles City, Arkansas.
** My understanding's just fine, ta.
***  HUMAN eye, that is, nothing to do with sinister hoov- vacuum cleaners.