Dead In The Head

No!  To All The Naval Or Marines Persons Out There
For in Royal Naval or Royal Marine parlance (we shall ignore those parvenus from South Canada the USN and the USMC*) "head" is what the rest of us call "the toilet", and we will stop right there as BOOJUM! intends to retain it's SFW mantle.

NO, ART NO!  "SFW" means 'Safe For Work' NOT 'Special Forces Warfare'

     If we can continue, o'er that sizzling sound which is Art skittering around at the end of a 750 tera-joule cattle prod, by "Dead In The Head" I refer to those saddoes who retire from work on week 34 of the tax year, and whose lifeless corpse is discovered by the milkman at the start of week 43**.  Nothing else to complete their empty hollow lives, one presumes.
     Does, or will, Conrad suffer from this weakness?  That is, will he ever be 'Dead in the Head'?

A head that is, undeniably, dead

     Not a bit of it!  Your Modest Artisan would have trouble fitting a week's worth of planned activity into a real day. Am I not typing out this blog even as we read?  Yes I am, it was a rhetorical question.  There is the Mountain Of Books, and the wargaming, and crosswords and codewords, not to mention a dozen different television programmes or films, and the baking - Conrad would have trouble even if we went to the metric twenty-five hour day.
     I guess you will have to reconcile yourselves to both BOOJUM! and Conrad being around for a while longer.
     I say, motley, would you like a nice relaxing massage with scented oils, followed by a plate of zakuski and a jug of chilled vodka?

ZAKUSKI!

Here An Aside -
If you were not already aware, 'zakuski' are Russian hors d'oevres, which, as you can see from the picture above, they do not do by halves.  In fact, from a Western European perspective, they seem intent on killing you with food.  Conrad recalls an hilarious moment from one of the "Hornblower" novels where our hero informs his Russian hosts that he has "dined sufficiently", where in reality he has only been stuffing himself with the appetizers.  He goes on to have a complete gustatory coma and metabolic collapse when the Actual Real Meal begins.

"Hornblower was peculiarly possessive about his telescope"

     Damn it, none of this is what we're supposed to be blathering on about.  Retirement and appetizers, it does not make for an awesome interwebz experience.  Let me just kick the Reboot Button -

In The City Of Grinding Blights -
Also known as "Manchester", or "Gomorrah-in-the-Irwell", so heavy has the rainfall of recent been.  I took the following picture after Shelli - whom we shall dub "Mischievous Cello-dier" had stopped throwing up her arms and interrupting on a visual level -

     What you're looking at here is a picture of Unparalleled Greyness, as those rectangles of solid grey ought to be vignettes of Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell.  This is what happens when the rain-clouds roll in; hope, beauty and A Better Tomorrow all roll out.
     That blob of hirsute in the foreground is Shelli.  I shan't mention her again for a while, as Anna will probably get 1) Curious and perhaps (fingers crossed!) 2) Jealous.

     Also, we had a fire-drill today.  The assembled hordes of the Dark Tower assembled under the walkway, abuzz with conversation, and very luckily in the dry part of the day when the sun was shining.

The Love Of Language
Very definitely not the same as the language of love.  The BBC's website had a verrrry interesting article about Viking words that had worked their way into English.

     I am afraid that - you know what I'm like - I had to rather jib at the list of words that the Vikings introduced into the Pond of Eden, because although the BBC's website linguists legitimately included words such as "knife" and "club", they also included "gun".
     Sorry but NO!
     Given that they are talking about the Ninth Century, and we do not see gunpowder-fired bombards until the Thirteenth, this is an anachronism, all the more so since hand-held gunpowder weapons that accord to the general principle of "gun" take another century to arrive.
     Apologies for being a grammar and concept Nazi, it's just how my mind works.



Avoiding The Inevitable Pun
If you have a memory more persistent over time than a goldfish, then you know there were serious issues over in South Canada because of a dam and un-seasonal flooding.  Of course, this kind of exciting and dangerous thing would never be allowed to happen in the sleepy and well-mannered small towns of Derbyshire, would it? Yes, well -
     Sorry but NO!  Art?

     Hay Pesto.  Conrad had seen some photographs of the dam's slipway collapsing, which gave no sense of scale.  With this picture, you get the sense of scale alright, and then some.  Engineers are already lowering the water level in the reservoir, as well as crossing their fingers that the CEASELESS EVER-POUNDING RAIN holds off for a day or two, because if water tops the dam again, it will continue to scour away the slipway's underburden.  Given the level of water in the dam, the retaining wall holding it back might give way under all that water pressure, in which case a mighty torrent would erupt and head downstream.

Oops.

     Right in the sights of the flood is the town of Whaley Bridge, which would indeed be suitable for whales, i.e. whale-y***, as it would end up underwater.  The river, after all, used to run in that direction before it was dammed to create the reservoir.
     What fun water is!


Back To Bedlam
Yes, that pamphlet again!

     Notice no title.  I think the idea was to show the variety of terrain present in the North African War.  Yes, we get it. 


Another oops

     Sorry for the angle here, and I don't have the ability to rotate this file as I'm working from an office PC, so cannot jigger about with the original.
     Anyway, this is supposedly a picture of 8th Army tank crews -
     Sorry but NO! - I do seem to be saying that a lot today, don't I?
     That protective head-gear is South Canadian, so I presume these crews are members of a Honey squadron, as that was the South Canadian tank of issue at the time.
     HOWEVER!  British tank crews NEVER wore protective head-gear, as it was considered sissylike and pansyish or something.  Their headgear was a black beret, and that's it.  It engendered a sense of esprit de corps, even at the cost of significantly higher levels of head injury than the tank crews of other, more sensible nations.  Art?
                      

 

 

Bad pamphlet!  Naughty pamphlet!  You are not being entirely truthful!

 

I think we'll hang up our hats for today, I've now got 30 minutes to do the MEN Cryptic Crossword.

Pip pip!

*  Partly because I know it will crank their shafts a bit.
**  Week 33 if it's a bad time.
***  Sorry.  Couldn't resist.

Go Tell It -

On The Mountainside, Where I Awoke, And Boy, It Was Chilly
This Intro has probably confused you.  Heck, it has confused me, and I wrote it am writing it.  I refer to that pillar of modern science fiction, James Tiptree Jr., who was 1) Named after a marmalade and 2) Was actually a lady named Alice Sheldon with a proper scientific career and everything.  Art?

Thus

     I cannot possibly go into any detail about above story, as it is not only about SEX, which we here at the blog avoid for fear of - er - the police? - but also about alien races doing the hanky-panky with Hom. Sap., which is probably against some law somewhere.
     And then we have the fun part of this morning, where I attempt to reconstruct what I was blathering on about last night <thinks really hard>
     Nope.  Not a clue.  Oh  well, it was probably all lies anyway. 
     Motley!  Have a cup of tea and a biscuit. Don't flinch so - no, they're not poisoned.  Or explosive.  Or incredibly acidic.

But it is mind-bendingly, scaldingly, roastingly HOT.
(Well, a bit above lukewarm, certainly)

A Brief Aside
Really, I'll keep it short.  Just to say that as of today, I have been working for My Still Anonymous Employer - in the Dark Tower, so if you know Gomorrah-in-the-Irwell at all, then you probably know of whom I speak - for two years.
     I remember being welcomed by Gary, on a baking hot day in summer, absent the CEASELESS EVER-POUNDING RAINS, and being told "Oooh there's no chance of you being kept on after December this year -"
     Your Humble Scribe needs this job - how else would I be able to afford all those books about TANK?

The Dark Tower on a rare day without CEASELESS EVER-POUNDING RAIN

I Have Some Sand
This is the difference between then and now.  For Yes!  We are back on that wartime pamphlet, as published in 1944, when they didn't know the full facts of the case.  This is a chance for Conrad to shine shine SHINE, as he can bore for England on the Desert War, O yes.  Art?

From the second paragraph onwards

     This is a bit of special pleading and no mistake.  What they are trying to do is explain away the 8th Army's poor showing in armoured warfare.  Since the text is small, I shall paraphrase some of it.  They declare the "Honey" as not really being suitable for combat, more a reconnaissance vehicle.  This is borderline; what they neglect to say is that the Honey, or Stuart M3 - Art?

Honey, I'm home!

     - was exemplary for reliability compared to Perfidious Albion's own tanks, and that the 37mm <shudders at having to use horrid metric measurements> with APCBC ammunition came close to the British 2 pounder.
     They then go on to claim that the Teuton's Mark III and Mark IV tanks were both considerably superior to British armour, which is a load of honk.  At this point in time the Mark III had a short 50 mm gun barely better than the 2 pounder; the Mark IV had a low-velocity 75 mm gun used for firing HE rounds in support of infantry.  It might give a Honey or Crusader tank crew a nasty fright if it hit them, knock them out it would not.
     What really did in British tanks were Teuton anti-tank guns - but I don't want to bore you excessively on this subject.  We will return to it, however, O Yes indeed!

 

     This is a nicely posed shot of a Marmon-Harrington armoured car to port, and the back of a Matilda tank to starboard.  The MH was an ugly beast, but - and here is that concept again - it was utterly reliable and would keep going until Doomsday.  Not only that, it was tolerant of adding various bits of lethal kit to it.  That Vickers gun on the turret didn't come as standard, for example, some thoughtful soul added it on.

 

     I don't want to cause you an encephalo-embolism thanks to a surfeit of information about the Desert War, so we shall move on to pastures different.

"Zatoichi"
Another of those words that bubble up in the seething protoplasmic purulent seas of septic sewage that constitute my mind (and that's on a good day), for no apparent reason. 
     Okay, "Zatoichi" refers to a Japanese film and television series following the adventures of a blind swordsman, and boy, were they popular.  26 films and 100 television episodes, not a bad total.  Art?

Z

Agh!  The cursor formatting has gone potty thanks to the photos I uploaded last night.  Okay, we shall continue.  Ol' Zat pretends to be a masseur and gambler as he ambles across the land, when actually he's a deadly skilful swordsman, capable of slicing you seventeen ways to Sunday in a split-second.  Ha!  "Split-second"  Do you - O you do.  He spent three years as a gangster and killed many people, which now troubles his conscience, so he is happy to get involved with other people's troubles if he feels he can do good by them.  Aw, a chap with a conscience!  I had to buy one and get it surgically implanted.                                                                                                              

Interestingly enough, Film #19 of the original series was remade by <spits> Hollywood, as "Blind Fury" with the late, great Rutger Hauer in the lead.  I have seen most of it, since the frankly dodgy video shop I hired it from had a version that blanked out before the end. 

CAUTION!  Possesses strong comedy elements

     One day I will find out what happened, and then that video shop owner will be sorry, you'll see ...
     Well, Your Humble Scribe may have to see some of these films for themselves, not to mention the television series. If I do, I hope they're dreadful, as otherwise I shall have the dreadful burden of 26 films and 100 television programmes to watch <sad face>.      Finally
I am having to type this before lunchtime, since it seems that folk like to look at an old man's vapid ravings earlier in the day than has been my custom.  The creative process was severely impacted at 09:30 when there was a fire alert, and we all trooped down from the 17 floor, which means 34 sets of stairs.  Consequently my legs feel like someone else's and I was a good 400 words adrift.  Until now.

Chin Chin!