Chocolate Cheesecake Muffins!

Hmmm - But No
     No, the Official Swear of BOOJUM! is still "Dog Buns!"
     Pronounced with emphasis, "Dog Buns!" lets anyone within earshot understand that you're not happy about dropping your teaspoon to the bottom of the cup, or realising that you've locked yourself out of the car, or that your experimental batch of botulinus toxin has died off - again.  But it isn't swearing, because there may be children reading this.
     Naughty children!  Bad children!  It will give you nightmares!
     "Chocolate cheesecake muffins!" are what Conrad baked last night.  Viz:

    How did they go down with the ganterpies at work?  There was only one left when Conrad left, so they were fairly popular.

Today's Dress-Down Had A Theme
     People could wear sporting shirts or tee-shirts, or football club shirts, donating £1 to Anna for her charity.
     Conrad possesses no sporty wear.  But he wanted to make an impact.
     Suddenly, his head lit up like a lightbulb; he was having An Idea.
     "I shall go to work, not as a Football Fan, but - as a Football Manager," he decided.  "So I shall wear a suit, with a tie, and a hat".
     Of course the problem with this is that Conrad knows 0% about football.  However, he has a mind that absorbs passing detail and can ad-lib fairly convinciningly.
     Thus:

"You're supposed to be marking that striker!  He's got room to move - CLOSE HIM DOWN!"

     Occasionally he would spout some platitude he'd heard other people say, managing to sound realistic whilst not knowing what he actually meant.  Drilling crosses, anyone?  The hat had to come off when answering the phones - the phone rig wouldn't allow it to balance properly.
     Let us leave Football Manager Conrad with the last words (as if he knows what he's talking about!)

"Yeah, we did lose seven-nil, but it was really against the flow of play."

What's Going On?
     The mysterious and massive white structural components of the new tram station under construction at Victoria Station are getting put together - the thing nears completion.

Like a 1990's wire-frame graphic

     Except for that bit in the upper right, where a piece is missing, and has been missing for days now.  What's going on?  Is there supposed to be a gap there?  Is the part missing?  Broken?  En route from the foundry over in Taiwan?   What what what?  Conrad needs to know!

That's Quite Enough Of That!
     The that in question being a film title that is appearing on posters across Manchester:

"Yes, but "Nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine Ways To Die In The West" was too long" 

     Really!  A willing suspension of disbelief?  Conrad doesn't think so - this is taking liberties with poetic licence sufficient to drive it completely off a cliff.  A Million ways to die - No!  Firstly, and foremostly, and forthwith, you can reduce that figure of 1,000,000 down to 2, if you want to be crude about it - i) bullets and ii) disease.  You can possibly add iii) being tied to a railway track, but that's pushing it.  No, Indians don't count; if they use rifles then that's bullets, and if they use arrows well they're a projectile weapon as well.  Spears or tomahawks would come under diseases - er, chronic steel poisoning.

What's That? Okay, Just A Moth
     Conrad does not like flies.  A popular spectators sport at the Mansions in summer is to watch a grey-haired man leap madly about the kitchen, flailing his arms, occasionally pausing to stamp on the floor and sneer in a hideous rictus denoting triumph <Mister Hand explains this is Conrad pursuing a fly, swatting it to the floor, crushing it to a smear then gloating about it>.
     So - what's this?

Not the cord or the cake - the black blob at dead centre.

     Only a moth.  Moths are okay, Conrad is quite able to tolerate them.  A butterfly would be rather distracting, but a moth - they're okay.

Sophie And Her Haunted Hands Of Horror
      - no, only joking, she doesn't have Hands of Horror.
     No, she has Feet of Horror!      - no, she doesn't have Feet of Horror.  Well, she might, but they're always covered up so you can't tell - actually I might be on to something here <Mister Hand intervenes to point out that Sophie is a lovely lady who doesn't deserve this slander, and can Conrad get on with the article?>
     Er yes, the assortment of cakes.  Feast your eyes, gentle reader:

From L to R: vanilla cupcakes; gingerbread cupcakes; strawberry & cream cake-pops (all Sophies);Dog Buns! (Conrad's)

     Conrad can chuck a cake or a muffin together no problem; Sophie, on the other hand, can make hers look good.  This is why we must hire an assassin gaze on in envy before the assassin strikes realising that we can never prevent the assassin hope to <NO MORE ASSASSINS! - Mister Hand> do as well, and certainly not better.

Chin chin!  Tomorrow - Audubon's sketches of the Hounds of Tindalos

Fluffy Bunnies And Frilly Butterflies

After Yesterday's Somewhat Sombre Post -
     - and nobody bothering to read it, Conrad has decided to be more of a happy chappy, with the careful use of lovely cuddly bunnies, the better to pull viewers in.
     Take a look at these chaps:

Ah yes.  Well, they may be killers - but they are still bunnies!

     A mere coincidence, I am sure.  Perhaps if we look for "bunny" instead of "bunnies"?

Oh my!  Not - er, not what BOOJUM! intended

     Whoops!  Hang on, let's try again -

Oh no!  It's the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog!  RUN AWAY!

     Okay, Conrad admits defeat about fluffy bunnies.  Let us move on.

"Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead"

     Thus spake Chris, team leader and very occasional feature in these columns, this morning.

     Conrad's computer-like mind* raced to a decision - after all, Margaret Thatcher is a long time gone.

     "Chris!" I criticised.  "That's a horrible thing to say about Maya Angelou!"

     Ah.  Well, now, how was Conrad to know?  We are sailing dangerously close to current affair-commentary here, but apparently a man called "Michael Glazer" had died overnight.

     Hmmm, mused Conrad, bad news indeed if you wanted your windows fixing -

     "No, you baffoon!" chortled Chris.  "He owned Manchester United.  The football club," he added, seeing a look of blank incomprehension facing him.

     "Ah!" I countered.  "George Best - he plays for them.  Can't fool me!"

     Not sure why Chris did a facepalm and walked off.

Golf Club.  Close enough

World's Most Expensive Taxi

     If you were to travel by black cab for six hours, you'd expect to rack up a bill of several hundred pounds, correct?

     Wrong! Try a bill of several million pounds instead.

     Admittedly the taxi is a Soyuz capsule, and it sits atop this missile:

"No eating in the back.  And if you're sick, you pay for it."

     It's taking a crew of three up to the International Space Station for a six month holiday in near space, before it brings them back down.

     Probably not on a Saturday night, though ...

SPACEPLANE!

     I just like the sound of that word.  Let me try it again: SPACEPLANE!

     Yeah.  Very Gerry Anderson, except it might actually get to be real in the near future as a cheaper alternative to the Ariane rocket system, for delivering telecom satellites.  Let's have a quick look at SPACEPLANE! thanks to Auntie Beeb:

NNNNNNYYYYEEEEOOOOWWWWWWWWWWW!

     Big things going really, really fast.  What's not to like?

Frilly Butterflies

Swarm attack - RUN AWAY!

     Yeah, don't let their fragility fool you.  Remember that classic documentary series from the late Sixties, "The Invaders"?  Intrepid investigator David Vincent and his camera team sought out alien skullduggery across America, including one where these evil interlopers were seeking to overthrow the very boundaries of Mother Nature, by breeding carnivorous butterflies.

     That's right, killer carnivorous butterflies.  Yeech!  Makes one's skin crawl.  

     Not only that, in the genre-defining novel "Schismatrix", Bruce Sterling has a protagonist killed early on by what?  That's right - killer butterflies**.

*  That is, it crashes, needs rebooting often and is rapidly becoming obsolete

**  They might have been moths.  It's been a long time.

Life, Death, Taxes And RDX

I Believe It Was Benjamin Franklin
     -who perceptively observed that the only two constants in life are death and taxes (the RDX of the title can be safely filed under "Death" - more on this later).
     Road tax.  In order to get a new tax disk, Conrad had to get the mobile murderwagen certified as MOT compliant, which it certainly wasn't.  Oh no.  Last year's MOT inspection cost £1.20 for a new rear-number plate light bulb.  This year's MOT inspection also cost £1.20 for a new bulb - and another £298.80 for the other stuff.
     Based on this ratio of increase, Conrad can confidently predict that next year's tax disk will only be acquired after spending £75,000 on the car.

 -  and for 2016

Murder!
     "Hangman's Holiday" - more well-aged entertainment from Dorothy L. Sayers, one of whose characters spouts on about "sulphate of Thanatol" as an essential compound in a chemical cocktail.  Which will cause you to die if you have a hot bath.
     A completely fictitious substance, and do you know why?  Look at the root of the word: "Thanata-"  Conrad has been around a bit and seen a few things, and he knows that there is a Greek deity (or should it be diety*?) called "Thanatos", who is the god of death.  Non-violent death, I grant you, but death nonetheless.

Caber toss, Thanatos, easily confused

Murderers!
     In that same story several famous murderers are mentioned, none of whom were familiar to Conrad, probably because they were all pretty old.  For instance -
     Gesche Gottfried
     Who poisoned whole swathes of her family and relatives with "Mouse Butter".  Not as
harmless as it seems - it consisted of arsenic flakes in animal fat, and she fed her victims batches of the stuff, until one relative, either more suspicious or paranoid than the rest, noticed the arsenic and she was turned in to the police.
     End result; decapitation <insert tasteless joke here>
     Herbert Armstrong
     A comparative lightweight, Herb only managed to kill his wife and make a professional rival violently sick.  The professional rival's father, the town chemist, certified that Herb had bought lots and lots of arsenic from him.  His wife's corpse turned out to have lots and lots of arsenic in it; not only that, the arsenic helped preserve the corpse for samples to be taken from.
     Kind of shot yourself in the foot, there, didn't you, Herb.
     End result: Neck-stretchy time
     William Palmer
     Palmer was a doctor and a serial poisoner.  You'd better get out of his way if he sets eyes on you!  He started off as he meant to go on: badly.  He was caught stealing and sacked.  Then he was caught running an illegal abortion clinic and sacked.
     Then he qualified as a doctor. Obviously medical standards for doctors in Victorian England were a little more elastic than today.  He also drank to excess and gambled excessively - establishing a tradition for medical students everywhere - but only really found his true vocation in 1842, which was killing people with poison.
     The total he murdered is a bit hazy but start at ten and go upwards.
     End result:  A bit of a fall, luckily arrested by the rope someone had thoughtfully put round his neck.

"There's been a murder ..." intoned Inspector Morse, putting on his - no, wait, that's not right ...

Conceal, Create, Confuse
     No! not the process whereby BOOJUM gets put together.  The title of a book, I'll have you know.  Why so important?  because it explains what a "Quaker Cannon" is.
     A Quaker Cannon is a decoy gun, crudely made but sufficient to deceive the enemy at a distance.

Quacker Cannon.  Close enough

     "So what?" I can hear you saying.  Also "Damn that Jeyes Household Cleaning Fluid is pretty strong stuff".
     No, no, you see, there was a short story by Cyril Kornbluth I read ages ago, titled "Quaker Cannon" and it assumed the reader knew what the title meant.
     Conrad does now!  Happy Conrad!

I Speak No Greek
     Cannot read it, either, so I was glad to see the return of the redoubtable Anna Pavlou** to the workplace, since she can read Greek.
     Why was this necessary? O I thought you'd never ask!  Because Ms Sayers had Lord Peter Wimsey declaim in Greek, and didn't bother to translate it.
     Anna struggled with it, too - she got the sense of the thing but it is apparently Classical Greek rather than the form spoken by Hellenes today.  Still, ever resourceful, she took a screenshot and will have it translated by her sister who does speak Classical Greek.
     Captain Corelli's Mandolin
     A wonderful novel, Conrad thoroughly enjoyed it, especially since it blew up a few stereotypes about snivelling cavilling Italian soldiers.  Anyway, Berniere's novel has English officers turning up to help the Greek resistance, speaking Classical Greek and thus barely able to make themselves understood by the locals; their language sounds as if taken from Shakespeare.

A Mandolin.  

     The Guns Of Navarone
     A wonderful novel, Conrad thoroughly enjoyed it, especially since it blew up things.  Anyway, early on in the book our gallant British, Kiwi and Greek commando team encounter a German patrol boat, and one of the British officers replies to the German captain in - Classical Greek.
     O noes!
     Will they be given away?
     Tune in next week - SPOILER AHOY!




     No, they don't get given away because the German captain has been taught Classical Greek as well and he doesn't notice a thing.

"Talk, Englischer Schweinhund, talk! Or it will go very badly - ooh, I say, Ernst, you must tell me who your barber is."

RDX

This stands for "Research Department Explosive".  Yes, dear reader, Conrad is once again looking at Dangerous Chemicals!

     The usage of "RDX" as a title is certainly more convenient than it's formal name, which is Cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine.  Bit of a mouthful, no?  It is one of the most powerful explosives, but is also highly stable, which in explosives is just what you want.  It can be readily mixed with other explosives or mediators, creating a whole family of things that go BANG - but which only go BANG when you want them to go BANG.

It's in Greece and being blown up with RDX.  Now do you see the theme here?

     Why is this important?  Because unstable explosives are - how can I put this - EXTREMELY BLOODY DANGEROUS!  Ah, yes, that's how to put it.  Take nitro-glycerine.  Nitro-glycerine is one of the most powerful explosives, but it has the temperament of a psychotic supermodel on a diet of tequila slammers after being locked up in a dog-hutch with a porcupine for company.  None of that rancour for RDX.  You can pound a block of RDX with a hammer and it will laugh at you (not literally), you can even set fire to it if the feeling takes you - certainly you can borrow my matches, no need to return them, that's me over in Derbyshire.  Anecdotally you can even shoot it, although Conrad at this point thinks you are pushing Fate to the edge of the step.

*  Do you see what I did there?  Death?  "Die" Dei - O you do.

**  There is still time to avoid the awful consequences of not sponsoring Anna and her sister.  Go to Justgiving and look for Dogs Trust, or, trust me, there'll be trouble.