An Olympian Perspective

Once Again, A Little Circumspection

There is currently a sporting event going on which has it's title derived from the Greek, which I'm not going to name in case the Facebook twod mods decide that I'm spamming the world and delete another post.

     Okay - where did the gods of ancient Greece hang out?  Mount Olympus, of course - obviously! - and if Art will do his thing - 

CAUTION!  Property taxes and insurance are sky-high

     For yes, we are back on "The Aeneid" again.  The gods of Olympus come into the equation as they are always interfering in the affairs of men, specifically Aeneas.  This is partly because of prophecies concerning his future, which threaten Carthage (the godess Juno's most beloved city), and his mother, who was Venus.  Believe me, if your mum is the Godess of Love, you have a very heavy hitter on your side.  Her yin, if you will, counteracts Juno's yang, otherwise  TA would be a very short epic poem.

     ANYWAY Juno sends Iris to inform Turnus, leader of an army hostile to Aeneas and his ally Evander, that Ol' Aeny is far off, away visiting potential allies.  Art!

Actually 'Hera' in Greek mythology.  Let's not get into that.

     This act is typical of Juno's meddling from her lofty vantage point; see all, hear all and stick your thirty-foot oar in when you feel like it.

     So, with this god-like equivalent of the Enigma code, Turnus rouses his army and allies and prepares to attack the Trojans.

     HOWEVER - first use today - Aeneas is not only a mighty warrior, he is also a sound tactician and strategist.  Art!

     There is no adequate single picture, so two will have to do.  You recall, I hope, that the fleet of Trojan refugees had arrived on the coast of Italy after many wanderings.  They had drawn up their ships on the shoreline and then, as per recommended practice, constructed a military encampment.  The translation mistakenly calls it a 'city'; no, it was not.  It was a large military camp with defensive ramparts, gates, palisades (guessing but reasonable), ditches, sentries and patrols.  It was thus a field fortification that would require siege warfare to reduce.

     Here an aside.  The medieval and Renaissance artworks that depict this part of "Book 9" are useless, as they depict military fortifications of their time, not that of 750 BC.  Art!

They also mis-understood 'city'

     So, the army of the Rutuli (the enemies of Evander and thus Aeneas) led by Turnus roll up like a tornado in front of the Trojan camp, at which point Juno is probably rubbing her beautiful yet bloody hands in glee.  I say 'tornado' advisedly, because this event most surely takes place in summer; the advancing horde thus throws up a dust-cloud that the alert Trojan sentries spot.  They recall everyone inside the ramparts, close and bar the gates and man the walls.  Art!

Wise chap

     Aeneas, you see, had given very strict orders that, should the camp be attacked whilst he was gone, the Trojans were NOT to offer open battle but to remain strictly on the defensive.  According to the narrative of Virgil, this kind of tactic was almost anathema to the Trojans, who deemed it honourable to face off against an enemy and indulge in an all-out battle.

     Juno thwarted, at least temporarily!  For the Rutulians had also anticipated a single glorious engagement that they would win thanks to weight of numbers, armament, chariots and cavalry.  Turnus, for one, was extremely angry at not being able to get at the enemy and rode around the camp, alternately raging and mocking.

     Devoid of any siege engines, the Rutulians were forced by necessity to carry out a circumvallation of the camp - that is, they surrounded it.  Art!

A slightly more modern equivalent

     Virgil notes that " - the guards kept awake by gaming the night away."

     So this has become a siege, where the defenders have to either outlast their enemy or risk a pitched battle.  However - second use today - the besiegers also have problems, because their forces need supplying with food and water, and must keep watch for a relief force, which Aeneas will surely raise.  Leaving the watch to their guards, they imbibe a lot of wine and go to sleep.

     This is unwise, because having interfered once, Juno doesn't bother to come back and check on her meddling.

     More to follow.

"The Long Goodbye"

Yes, I've finished reading it.  However - third time today - I've not finished detailing all the annotations I made, which you are very definitely going to hear about.  At one point in the narrative, Bernie Ohls, the closest thing Marlowe has to an old friend, details a list of slang names for drugs, to wit -

BLUEJAYS: Which is slang for Sodium Amytal.  I have no idea what it does, so allow me to Google a little.  Art!

     Hmmm so it's a barbituate, thus a sedative, and long-term use (or abuse!) may result in dependency and potentially fatal withdrawal symptoms.  There's also a list of at least 20 different drugs contra-indicated for users, including quinine, so no gin and tonic for you, matey.

REDBIRDS: Or Seconal, whatever that may be.  Art!

     Aha.  Another barbituate, with all the attendant problems associated with the bluejays.  Plus a list of potential side effects eighteen items long, and withdrawal effects that once again include death.

YELLOWJACKETS: Nembutal.  Probably another barbituate.  Let's check.  Art!

     Yep.  Once again no longer in use, being replaced by benzodizepanes.  In addition to all the side-effects and withdrawal symptoms noted above, it is also used for lethal injections for prisoners sentenced to death.  Yike.

GOOFBALLS: Ohls didn't give a brand name for these, merely that they were barbituates mixed with benzedrine, so a powerful sedative with a powerful stimulant.  This is not a good combination, in case you were unaware.  Art!

And he was only thinking about taking them

Just Say NO! To S.H.A.D.O.

For those unaware, we have been in an undeclared war with aliens since the 1980's, being defended by a Beyond Top Secret organisation called S.H.A.D.O. which is the acronym for "Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation".  It has a forward operating station on the Moon, called - you may be ahead of me here -  Moonbase, and all kinds of exotic kit besides.

     Well, if "U.F.O." were real, that is.  Art!

     Conrad was, of course, tempted, and had to check out the price.

     £73 on Abebooks.

     Hmmmm give it a year or two and some may turn up second-hand and cheaper.

     But - I am tempted.

Small Earth Tremor In Royton, Nobody Bothered

I was poking through the small freezer atop the fridge, when I discovered another frozen pizza at the very bottom back, making three in total in that freezer, plus another giant one still in the fridge.

     I forsee much pizza in the future.  Which is no great problem.

Is Skynet Already Here?

If you have seen "Leave The World Behind" then you'll remember one of the creepier scenes, which features an army of crashed self-driving cars, all along one road.  Art!

     Well, there is a parallel in the real world as of right now.  With Tesla cars, there is a phenomenon known as 'phantom acceleration' where they randomly accelerate until stopped by an object solid enough, with the driver being unable to brake.  Art!

     In this incident, only 2 people were injured rather than killed.

     Kind of worrying, nicht wahr?

Finally -

I finally started on that biography of Himmler and am now 2 whole pages in.  Only 1,029 to go.

The End Of The Line

Yes, That's A Tad Ambiguous

I need to be careful in the Intro from now on, as apparently the Facebook mods have decided that BOOJUM!s abrupt switching from one topic to another in the promotional blurb constitutes SPiced hAM in a very peculiar definition of the rules.  So - this 'End Of The Line' is nothing to do with the penultimate scenes in "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome", where the escapees on a runaway train come, indeed, to the end of the line.  Art!

     That locomotive's not going anywhere.  Quite why the railway lines stops in the middle of the Australian outback is another question entirely; perhaps there was more, except it got destroyed in The War?

     ANYWAY there is another end-of-the-line-scene in one of, if not the, best animated films ever made: "Spirited Away".  Art!

chihiro and No-Face, last passengers on the train

     There's no clocks visible so we can only guess at how long it took them to reach this 'station' (more likely only a halt), just consider they set off on this journey in broad daylight - and now darkest night has fallen.  That's a metaphor we may come back to.
     ANYWAY AGAIN onto the meat of the matter in this Intro, which is, of course - obviously! - the Ruffian economy.  You may not be aware that the Ruffian Central Bank had a meeting on 26th July where they raised their interest rates again, and where Elvira Nabuillina, their CEO, gave a gloomy prognostication:

"The reserves of labour force and production capacity in the economy are "practically exhausted," the head of the Russian Central Bank Elvira Nabiullina said at a press conference."

     Art!

"This is how I scare cats."

     There is a very real sense that the Ruffian economy is about to reach the end of the line.  If Ol' Nabby is quoting misery like this, then things are indeed very very bad.  Up to now she's been tea- and window-proof because Putinpot needed her to run the economy, a defence she may no longer have if said economy is now heading for ruin not being run.

     I would like to thank the inestimable Joe Blogs and also the mighty Prune60 for the following data and insights.

LOSE-LOSE DAMNED IF, DAMNED IF NOT:  It is already too late for Ruffia to avoid very severe long-term consequences of moving to a wartime 'Sovietised' economy, as has been detailed in a recent report by no fewer than 8 EU finance ministers.  For one thing, the Kremlin has been pumping trillions of rubles into military enterprises which has seemingly bumped up their GDP dramatically compared to other nations.  However - ah, that word again! - this wartime economy will cease to exist if and when the war finishes, meaning all those businesses servicing it today would be out of a job tomorrow.  Art!

WAGES:  In an aside, contract soldiers are now being offered almost ten times the original amount to sign up for service in Ukraine - ₽1.9 million, or about $20,000.  This is symptomatic of the increase in wages, because all the military enterprises can afford to pay top ruble, thus attracting employees, thanks to their 110% guaranteed state funding.  Thus other businesses are left scrambling and raise their wages, leading to a spiral, which in turn drives up inflation.  They have to do so because, as Ol' Nabby said, there are no spare employees lying around any more.  Art!

ECONOMIC METRICS: Sorry if that sounds dull.  You see, the Ruffians are boasting about their rising GDP and how the IMF predicts 3.2% growth next year, which the IMF will say as they parrot what the Ruffians tell them.  In fact things are a whole lot gloomier than that, as GDP alone does not accurately reflect how a country's economy is faring.  Of rather more import are the interest rates, as mentioned now at 1/8% as compared to Western rates of 5%, and the rate of inflation, which is comprehensively cooked by the state.  Officially it stands at 9.2%, except the unofficial rate is at least twice that and possibly even 24%.  Also, GDP is calculated against the previous year's statistics, which were outstandingly awful for 2022, making 2023 look good by comparison.  Art!

The theory is, Feral Kid from "Mad Max 2" grew up to be the Tom Hardy character

     Er - yes.  Nothing to do with economics.  Sorry about that.

COSTING THE CATASTROPHE: This is where the railway line analogy turns into a Moebius strip, if you'll forgive the tortured metaphor.  You see, Ruffia cannot afford to lose the war, as reparations would cost in the region of $500 billion.  Art!

     

     Looks bad, right?  

     HOWEVER - there we go again - the cost of Ruffia winning would be almost as awful, since it would cost them at least $400 billion to renovate and rebuild in the occupied territories.  The end of the Sovietised wartime economy would immediately trigger a massive recession, rather like a runaway locomotive hitting the buffers.  Art!

The Haul

Today I ventured into Babylon-Lite (or Oldham if we're being formal), which usually involves the purchase of books and DVDs.

     Not today!   No, I was resolute and avoided the charity shops, especially the Oxfam shop which always has interesting old books in stock.  Instead - Art!

     There are only four packets of loose-leaf Darjeeling present because that's all they had on the shelves at Sainsbos.  I now have four pizzas in the fridge and freezer and need to eat a couple to make more room, which won't be a bother in the slightest.  That packet you can't quite see is Pierogi, Polish stuffed dumplings.

Someone Else Is Probably Unhappy Today

Donald Judas Trump has ju - excuse me, Donold Judas Trump has just received more bad news, which he probably hoped would be delayed until after the November elections.  Art!

     The Supreme Court of The United States ruled that Trump had presidential immunity, which he probably cheered at, but only for official acts, which will have him spooked as he knows he can't claim everything was official.  The issue now is for Judge Chutkan to carry out an investigative briefing on what was official and what wasn't.  Expect Agent Orange to prate loudly that everything he ever did was official, especially anything illegal, immoral or otherwise Trumpian, and that he's the bestest ear-healer ever and that ought to be enough to get him off the hook.

     We shall see.  Lay in stocks of popcorn!

Here's A Contrast And Then Some

You may not know it - I knew the bare <ouch> outline but not the details - that Romania has the largest population of brown bears in Europe.  They live in the mountains and, if you know how to behave in a bear-on-human encounter, are not usually a problem.  Except - Art!

     In fact it threw her off a mountainside when she tried to run from it, gave her a mauling and kept her head underwater in a stream at the bottom of the canyon.  This has led to an overturning of the 2016 moratorium in Romania on the killing of bears, as there are now 8,000 of them wandering the Carpathians.

     Below that item - Art!

     A certain Doctor Khalil opened a sanctuary for ex-dancing bears in 1998, when using them for entertainment was banned.

     We in the West cannot criticise, or point accusingly as - well, let me bring on the evidence.  Art!

     I think the RSPCA should be told.

Finally -

I occasionally mention "AfricanStalingrad" on the blog, as he posts on Twitter about the war in Tunisia in late 1942 and up to the end of the campaign in 1943.  He posted a picture of his mancave and it makes mine look sparse and uncluttered.  He's recently been reading a work about Allied logistics in the Second Unpleasantness, and bemoaned the fact that there are so few books dealing with military logistics.

     Well, I'm afraid I've probably induced another book purchase by him - Art!

     Right up his street.  Not read it myself, mind.

How To Be Famous And Secret

Sounds Like An Oxymoron, Doesn't It?

Today we are dealing with WILD COINCIDENCE, secrecy, the Iranian Embassy Siege, Philip Marlowe and Raymond Chandler, just not necessarily in that order.

     Yes, we are talking about the Special Air Service, which was created in North Africa during the Second Unpleasantness, disbanded at the end of that conflict and then brought back full time in 1952.  Art!

     It's an important plot point in "The Long Goodbye".  Marlowe, who has an eye for detail, notices Eileen Wade wearing a pendant, which he is curious about and checks up on.

     Eileen's story is that it was given to her by a lover when she was living in England in 1940, a lover who was later killed at Andalsnes, during the Norwegian campaign of 1940.

     Okay, this kind of detail may be easy enough to find in the days of teh interwebz, but not when Ol' Ray was writing TLG in 1953.  Art!

     Now, Ol' Ray gets a few facts wrong about the winged dagger.  Eileen claimed it was a present in 1940 from a soldier with the Artists Rifles; Marlowe said it didn't exist before 1947.  Both are wrong; it was created in 1941.  Marlowe has also done his background checking, because the Artists Rifles were never present in Norway.

     The Commandoes, however - O I've not used that word for simply twenty-four hours! - were allegedly carrying out a raid there in 1942, which is when this supposed lover went missing.  Phil, a very thorough chap, informs Eileen and her husband's publisher Spencer, that the Artists Rifles were converted, in his words, to a "Special Air Service Organisation'.  Art!

Notice Artists Rifles shoulder badge and winged dagger cap badge

     Ol' Ray's interest in England and Britain as a whole came as rather a surprise to me earlier this week; he grew up in This Sceptred Isle for several years and was partly educated here.  He liked visiting and thought that Britons were a bit of a cut above South Canadians, thanks to not being as shallow and greedy.

     He has a point.
     Now, we take an abrupt detour and travel back in time to October of 1944, which is when Edition 191 of "The War Illustrated" was published.  Art!

     One of the later articles is this feature on - this is where the wild coincidence part of the title comes into play - the Special Air Service.  This organisation had been created in North Africa in late 1941 as the brainchild of Lt. David Stirling (upper port) and Lt. Jock Lewis.  Unit members had to be parachutists, experts with small arms, able to muster unarmed combat, and be able to march up to 100 miles.  You can see members of a patrol to upper starboard, where the blurb claims they are walking over a hundred miles to rejoin their lines.  How fortunate that a photographer was there to capture the moment!

      At bottom port you can see what made them so dangerous for such a small unit: a desert-modified jeep (note condenser can mounted on the radiator) carrying a ton (possibly literally) of supplies, and mounting four machine guns.  The one being pointed looks like an air-cooled Browning M2, found on an aircraft, which they probably stole.  This beast would throw 800 rounds per minute and stop anything not mounting a lot of armour.  The other three weapons are Vickers 'K' Guns, again normally used on aircraft but being given out to other services when made obsolete.  Each of them fired at a rate of 1,000 r.p.m. so this mobile arsenal could do an awful lot of damage in a very short time.  Art!

August 1944

     The SAS only came off the censored list after the liberation of Paris, and had been kept out of the limelight for two and a half years.  One suspects the Axis in North Africa knew there were wild desert pirates out there committed to mischief.

     The Regular 22nd SAS were reconstituted in 1952 and operated for nearly 30 years with a level of anonymity simply unachievable nowadays.  Art!

Because this

     Yes, the Iranian Embassy Siege.  The SAS went in and solved the problem of hostage rescue by rescuing the hostages - you are probably ahead of me there - and killing the bad guys.  Thing is, they did it in front of the world's television cameras.  So they are now both famous and secret.

     O and that naughty French SAS trooper in the middle of the page is passing around cigarettes to Tunisian troops.  Tut tut.

Conrad Courts Controversy

I did float this on Facebook last night with the words "A 1,031 page biography?  O go on then", but coyly refrained from identifying said work.  Well, here it is.  Art!

     No!  It's "Heinrich Himmler" by Peter Longenrich, not the other way round.  It was a speculative spot purchase in Waterstones years ago, as there was damage to the cover so it was only £8, instead of £24.  It has been sitting on my shelves unread ever since then, so I chose it to go out and peruse in the sun after finishing work yesteryon.  Art!

     That's the end of the actual work itself, then the Endnotes, then the Bibliography, then the Index.  Art!

     This is no hastily-written exploitative screed, it took Longenrich 10 years amongst working on other books.  

     I did cheat a bit and look into the text about 500 pages in, where the Second Unpleasantness had broken out, and discovered that, up to that point in time, Himmler's glory years had been 1935 and 1936, and he'd blotted his copybook with Herr Schickelgruber over his obsession with mysticism.  Interesting!

Point And Laugh, Maliciously

It's always amusing to indulge in schadenfreude at the expense of Modern-day Mordor.  No, this isn't about anything military - wellllll apart from F-16s have now started to arrive in Ukraine, which must make the VDV quite nervous - rather a bit of an economic gloat.  Art!

     This is the interest rate in Perfidious Albion.  Hmmmm a cut to 5%.  Remind me again, what's the interest rate in Soviet Union 2.0?

     Ah, schadenfreude, the delicious zero-calorie form of fun you can enjoy between meals.

"Lobster Quadrille"

Ah, what a source of content Steve and Oscar are! (Memory and Subconscious respectively).  Only this morning, as I was pottering about getting bits ready for work, the phrase 'Lobster Quadrille' popped up in my head.

     As most of you ought to know by now, Conrad thinks with his stomach, and his first thought was that this was a culinary dish.

     Not so!  Art?

     It's a song from "Alices Adventures in Wonderland", as performed by the Mock Turtle, and is alternatively known as "The Mock Turtle's Song", which almost sounds like the name of a band .....

     I'm going to boost the word count here by putting up the first verse.

"Will you walk a little faster?" said a whiting to a snail,

"There's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my tail.

See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance!

They are waiting on the shingle—will you come and join the dance?

     Yes, 50 brownie points if you noticed that it parodies "The Spider and the Fly", which doesn't sound like a band name at all.  Unless they hail from Mars.

     Thank you Steve and Oscar!

Here's One I Preserved Earlier

As you should surely know by now, when I take over August 17th will be Global The Comsat Angels day, when all radio stations worldwide will have to have a playlist of their songs and nothing else.  

     Yes I am a bit of a fan.  Art!

     A lot of afficionados feel this is their best overall album - 'All killer no filler' as the phrase goes, and it warms my fusion-powered pumping unit to see it back and available.  Do your descendants a favour and purchase a copy.  Or ten.

 

Finally -

August being a Dry month, I'm going to be drinking a lot of tea, and only have 2 packets of loose-leaf Darjeeling left, so a trip to Sainsbos tomorrow looks on the cards.

Have You Tried- Part The Second

I Do Apologise!

Yesterday I went all about the houses in setting the scene for an AI that was able to lie, with an example of this being done both maliciously and innocently.

     Well, there's a far better-known example of the malicious AI at work, in a film I've referenced lots of times on the blog: "2001 A Space Odyssey".  Art!

More like 60 years ago now

     Yes, I am talking about the HAL 9000 supercomputer, which will suit for an example of a hostile AI and Have You Tried Turning It Off And On Again.  HAL, you see, goes potty during the mission to Jupiter and decides to off the human crew.  To do this he fakes a predicted breakdown in a component module, thus luring an astronaut outside the 'Discovery'.  Art!

Inscrutably evil

     HAL then remotely operates one of the 'pods' and uses it as a murder weapon, severing said astronaut's air supply.  So much for the Three Laws Of Robotics, hmmm?

     This - can you call it 'behaviour'? - doesn't come out of nowhere.  HAL, you see, had lipread Bowman and Poole discussing shutting 'him' down, which might be considered the AI equivalent of killing him.  At any rate, HAL was not at all happy with this decision, because it would have been the first 'disconnection' of a HAL 9000 anywhere.  There's no knowing how HAL would have reacted when re-connected, and he didn't feel like finding out.

     What a shame there was no Big Red Off Button.  Art!

     This electronic zoo is the New York Stock Exchange, what has been described as the world's biggest casino.  As you might reasonably expect, they have a Disaster Recovery Plan, in case Manhattan is flooded out, destroyed by meteorites or invaded by aliens.  Art!

This might happen today, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow

     Thus they have back-up servers located in Chicago, eight hundred miles away and thus presumably unlikely to be attacked by those very same aliens.  Unless they multi-task, for I have never encountered an alien invasion where Chicago got smitten before the Big Apple d

     ANYWAY the back-up servers had to be physically turned ON and, at a particular time of day, turned OFF.  By a squishy fallible member of Hom. Sap.  Art!

Spot the weak link

     I can see you shaking your head and tutting, because you're ahead of me here.  Yes, an employee forgot to turn the back-ups OFF, which meant the computers physically located in New York didn't operate as if the new day's trading had begun.  No, they went on continuing trading as if the previous day was still extant.  This goosed a lot of the opening stock actions, causing values to plunge and ascend wildly until the whole lot had to be terminated and all deals cancelled.  

     Conrad has not seen a dollar total for this grossly deficient flub, just that it affected 250 firms, who will all be out for blood and money.

     What a shame there was no Big Red Off Button.

If Only There Was A Big Orange Off Button

I'm afraid that the numbers news is not good for Donald Judas Trump.  Actually that's a lie, I'm quite gleeful about the numbers news.  Yes, this concerns his "Truth Social" social media platform, but instead of plummeting stock values, we're talking about an equally severe plummet in terms of traffic.  Art!

     Data is out for June 2024, and O! my goodness, what a difference a year makes.  TS was always a minnow amongst Liopleurodons; it hit the exceedingly modest total of 3.4 million visitors in June 2023.  Facebook in the same period had about THREE BILLION visitors, just to give you a sense of scale.

     For June 2024 the traffic at TS is down again, to 2 million, a drop of 38% overall in a year.  This is the third straight monthly fall in traffic.

     Is there a reason for this?

     Well, yes, it's the echo-chamber effect.  A platform like Facebook has an immense array of opinions and viewpoints, which sparks debate and enquiry.  TS has a bunch of right-wing cultists who all cling to the party line.  No debate, no difference of opinion, no reason to attend.

     No problem!

Apologies For All The Boiling

It must be a little uncomfortable in this heat.  Still, I have more South Canadian vernacular to elucidate so you're not getting away soft-boiled.  O noes.

TWO WAYS FROM THE JACK: You what?   It took a bit of digging on Google to decipher this one.  It means 'To be alright and in fine fettle'.  Don't ask me where it comes from, possibly to do with gambling?  Art!

BRITISH ARMY SERVICE BADGE:  This is where things begin to get even more twisted than usual in a Chandler novel, because the chap wearing said badge was none other than the very South Canadian Terry Lennox, who was going by the name Paul Marston at the time.  Very odd, hmmm?  Art!

     We are definitely coming back to this one, Dog Buns yes!

CORN-BEEF JOINT: In the sense of an eatery, not a joint of corned beef.  I tried looking this up in various combinations and came away with nothing.  Allow me to copy in the line in question:

I went over to a corn-beef joint on Flower. It suited my mood. A rude sign over the entrance said: "Men Only. Dogs and Women Not Admitted." The service inside was equally polished. The waiter who tossed your food at you needed a shave and deducted his tip without being invited. The food was simple but very good and they had a brown Swedish beer which could hit as hard as a martini.

     O boy, you couldn't get away with that nowadays.  I take it this is a very basic catering establishment, without any airs or graces, but unlike a greasy spoon diner, the food is very good.  Art!

MAGOOZLUM: This is rubbish.  No, not this item - the word itself apparently means 'trash' in South Canadian, or 'rubbish' amongst the rest of us.  Origins uncertain.

     There was a lesson in drug slang and identification which I shall save for another day.

I Say Goodbye To "The Long Goodbye"

Yes, finally finished it.  I swear I remember the bit about Captain Gregorius, whom Marlowe described as being the kind of senior police officer going out of fashion yet still around in not-insubstantial numbers.  He lurked in Bay City, and liked to beat up prisoners for fun and to pass the time.  Towards the end of the novel we get informed that, several months later, he's on 'retirement leave', with a nod and a wink meaning he's being retired, like it or not.  Art!

Beast of the same stripe

     I definitely remember the twist-in-the-tail ending but definitely haven't read the whole novel, so may have heard a radio version of it.  I won't spoil it for you by giving away the details.  Not today, anyway.

What's That Deep Purple Song Again?

No, not Dog Buns! "Smoke On The Water".  Enough of that, away with you.  O yes, I recall now - "Hush".  Art!

     Why did I bring this up?  Well, it's more widely known than "Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte", and I wanted to make a point about Pumpkinhead not having a good day.  Art!

     So he will, in fact, have to hush his flapping pie-hole until September, when he gets sentenced over the 34 FELONY COUNTS.  The poor baby is so upset about not being able to traduce, defame and slander the justice system and the people within it.  Another few points on the blood-pressure scale towards an hideous medical emergency, methinks.

Finally -

Get ready for "The War Illustrated Edition 191" rocking up to a blog near you very soon!