Eating For Charity

A Dirty Job But Someone's Got To Do It

Today we had a McMillan's Cancer Coffee Morning, with an assortment of food brought in to be dined upon, although things didn't really get going until 12 o'clock, so a Lunch-cum-Afternoon-Graze would be closer to the truth.  Tactically positioned, Conrad was next to one of the worktops where food was put out.

     "What food, Conrad?" I hear you ask.  "And what did you make?"

     Here is a panorama of the provisions:

The pink slips denote "Home made hummus" and "home made bread batons" - made by this author
Conrad is to the left of picture

Anna's cupcake tower and Becca's very nice strawberry tarts

      Notice those balloons.  There were eight, and they needed disposing of.  Back in our old office Claire would never let Conrad burst them BUT SHE ISN'T THERE ANY MORE! so they were all burst by knifestab.  High point of the day.

"Dracula Untold"
So sayeth the bus poster that went scooting by earlier this morning.  Hmmmm.  Conrad remains to be convinced.  The poster has a chap wearing a big cape standing on a big bit of granite, all black and moody.
     How much, one has to wonder, of Dracula has not yet been told?  I mean, the real thing was a nobleman of the fifteenth century, giving us six hundred years for him to be told about.  I suppose you can blame two people for Dracula:  Bram Stoker, who invented him, and Christopher Lee, for playing him as a handsome ladykiller.  No, Bela Lugosi doesn't count because his name is an anagram of Is Glueable, referring to his prosthetic teeth being fixed-on with gum arabic*.

Close enough

"The Maze Runner"
Another bus poster.  Judging from the featured faces on the poster, this one is intended for the young adult demographic, as those fresh faces are all young adults.  The colour palette is bright and verdant, meaning - "adventure and romance**". No doubt the success of "The Hunger Games" has brought about this infliction.
     What is it about?  Forsooth, Conrad cares not a jot wot it is abot***!  Kids running in a maze, I would hazard; nothing to do with life on a run-down housing estate in Wythenshawe with gangs and drugs.
     Oh - MTV staff? Your film reviewer needs to be taken outside and bloodily  bludgeoned blithely by baseball bats.  Why?  What did they put as a review?
     "A-Maze-ing".
     Baseball bats braced by bloody big barbs, thanks.

Kites, Bats, they both fly, right?

The War The Infantry Knew
This book is actually in journal format, with an entry for each day of the years that the 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers were on the Western Front.  Today, on the 26th September 2014, I am reading about the 26th September 1917, with the battalion being at Tower Hamlets in the Ypres Salient.  This was a ghastly place, described unforgettably in "A Passionate Prodigality", and the 2RWF suffer casualties in an advance over a muddy moonscape and then from ceaseless shelling.  They do not, as the myth-makers and ill-informed would have you, spend endless time in the front-lines, although they do march continually from Flemish village to French village rather than being left alone in a single one.

BOOJUM! being serious for once.

Choctaw
Alas what it is to be old and deaf and daft.
     No!  I mean you.  Conrad is perfectly - well, perhaps not quite perfect - okay, a little imperfect - okay he's a raddled old wreck with deficient hearing and attention.
     "Choctaw,' said Dave "Yorkie Refugee" Kerry, way over to my right.
     By the various vicissitudes and vagaries of memory and attention, this word instantly brought Conrad to full wakefulness, and he called over:  "It's a helicopter."

The ugly but chock-full (ouch!) of character H35 Choctaw

     Dave, Roxy^ and Rebecca (who were conversing before my interruption) all looked somewhat bemused, Dave actually having to stifle a grin.  Possibly the first time I can write that and sincerely say I saw it happen. 
     'Oh, no,' beamed Roxy.  'I was talking about "Cut Off".  You know, when you stick your hand out of the car window - and it gets cut off!  Not "Choc taw"' "
     A nice young lady, Roxy, though I do worry what goes on in her head at times^^.



Evening Refreshment
I give you a glass of nice cold Guiness - actually I don't, I'll fight you for my glass of Guiness! - what I mean is, here is a glass of Guiness, which Conrad is damn well going to enjoy.  After a hectic week, a nice sit down and a rest from answering phones is pleasant indeed.

I'm surprised there's that much left

     As Wonder Wifey is off at a jolly tonight I am also dogsitting Edna, who has recently been informing me - in Dog - that she does not appreciate being less than fawned over extensively.  Thank you, Edna.  

"Edna, disgusted. No sitting on Conrad's lap, tug-of-war games with soggy toys, cossetting or pampering? GRRR!"

     
*  If you don't know what this is - GO AND READ THIS WEEK'S BLOGS!
**  I can't remember the film, but one character remarks to another about "adventure and romance" and is sternly chided, being told there is no such thing, only "trouble and desire".
***  Yes, I know it's mis-spelt, but it rhymes this way.  Whose blog is it?
^ It takes a great deal of effort to avoid adding a compliment of the vulpine variety.
^^  She is perfectly entitled to be worried abot what goes on in Conrad's head.

Of Greek And Bezique

At Last!
I can put in another word that rhymes with "Greek".  Mind you, tonight's Hellenic repertoire is considerably less than yesterdays, being in fact restricted to a foodstuff.  Hummus. You remember the bread-batons of last night?  Conrad rashly also ventured to make hummus to go with them.  Thank you to Ms. Pavlou for providing a recipe.  Actually I lied, that surname is Greek, so we have two items from the eastern-most peninsula in the Mediterranean.

Hummus.

"Saw-edged rales"
This phrase has always stuck in my mind, being from that incomparable science-fiction "Earthman, Come Home", by the unfortunate James Blish.  Er - unfortunate in that he's dead.  He described a character, running for their life (and that of the flying Okie city of New York*) as breathing "as though through saw-edged rales".
     Rales, it turns out, are part of the interior of the human lung, which makes sense in context, as Blish was qualified in biology.
     There you have it.  

Rales.  Ha!  I bet you expected "Rails", didn't you?

Chine
Aha, this term crops up in one of the Pastel City novels by M. John Harrison, one of our home-grown greats in the science-fiction field.  It is a geological feature from it's context, although there is no clear description of "Iron Chine".  That useful arbiter of information, Wiki, describes a chine as a narrow, steep-sided river valley usually running through sandstone terrain.  They occur frequently on the Isle of Wight, and are also mentioned in 

A Chinese chine

The War The Infantry Knew
 - where the author, Captain Dunn, mentions the word but doesn't describe it, merely contrasting the Flemish countryside to that of the English south coast as he goes for a jolly behind the lines on leave.  He also mentions the Crecy campaign again, and several towns that the English army of 1346** passed through, and you get a sense that the English were rather like a visiting football firm, arriving only occasionally but being exceptionally unpleasant when they did.
     O bitter irony, he also mentions the small port of Saint Valery.  This is another site of historical interest because here the 51st Highland Division was overwhelmed by the Wehrmacht in in 1940.
     For those with better olofactory gifts than Conrad, Dr. Dunn also mentions the first cases of poison gas cases affected by another unlovely German chemical invention, mustard gas, which he describes as smelling like "nasturtiums".  As a corrosive it tended to invalid rather than kill.  My mother-in-law's father-in-law had been affected by mustard gas when lying injured; being heavier than air it tended to lie on the ground and if one couldn't get one's head above it ...
     From the beastliness of man to that of nature.  Dunn describes how appallingly bad the weather in August was, creating mud that impacted front-line operations dramatically for the worse.

Mud and rock.  Double whammy.  No, hang on -

Bezique
I almost forgot.  What is this word?  It's a French card game for two players, using a double pack of cards.  It features melds, brisques and trick-taking, all of which sound unutterably dull to Conrad and, frankly, the game is only here because it rhymes with "Greek".

Bez.  Eek!

"Got Ham"
I saw this on a bus poster yesterday, and wondered a little about it.  The tagline is "Before there was Bat man, there was Got Ham".  Conrad is not well-versed in the affairs of cricket, but he's pretty sure that before you start talking about batting, you sort out who's going to field and where (yes, Silly Mid Off) and the order of batting, and the umpires tie coats around their middles.  Where the cured pig meat comes in is anyone's guess, unless they mean the actors, which again is a mystery as who is going to watch bad thespians***?

Posh Hamm.  Close enough.

For Better Or Worse - Lawyers We Curse
No, this is not Conrad being mulish and dealing with current affairs.  Alexandre Dumas^ wrote of lawyers in 1844, that Napoleon should form a corps of them, and send them in where the shot and shell flew thickest.  What did I see on a bus poster today?  Why, an imprecation "For better.  FOR WORSE. See a professional.  See a solicitor" there was small print that I couldn't read as the bus drove off, doubtless about how they would suck the blood, marrow and soul out of the opposite party and all for the bargain price of your firstborn child, a wheelbarrow full of banknotes and all your gold.  Not silver, as silver is known to repel evil.  You will never see a lawyer wearing silver; they say it is, but we know it's really white gold ...

Sadly this lawyer was too greedy to resist those 30 pieces of silver ...

*  Yes, thanks to the Dillon-Wagoner polarity generator, the "spindizzy", cities can fly.
**  The year AD, not just-past-quarter-to-two
*** The Persians.  Remember yesterday's blog about the Battle of Thermopylae and the 300 Spartans?  Well there were a lot of Thespians there, too.  Alhough maybe they were bad-ass Thespians.
^ Pronounced "Dyoo-mah", not "Dumb-ass".  Just so you know.

From Russia With Lyubit

 - By Way Of Sparta
Don't worry, it'll all make sense in the end.  Or as much sense as you are liable to find in BOOJUM!
     Posting late tonight as traffic was a conspiracy to delay Conrad, then I threw together some dough to make breadsticks, which are even now in the oven.  And I do mean "threw together", it will be amusing and entertaining to see what emerges from Gas Mark 6 at twenty minutes.

These!  Bread batons.  You could club a person with these.

Nyemetski
Which the Russian for "German", translating as "The dumb ones".  Not that our Teutonic cousins are especially shy, voiceless or quiet - witness "Das Neibelung" and in fact anything by Wagner - but when our Slavic brethren encountered German-speaking Germans it came as a bit of a shock.  The Slavic languages are mutually intelligible, so a Pole or a Czech or a Serb or a Bulgarian could make themselves understood to a Russian.  But not a German.  Hence Nyemetski.

Richard Wagner.  Inspiring Prince since 1860

So, I hear you asking, where does this lead to Sparta?

Barbarians At The Gates
The Greeks dubbed non-Greeks "barbarians", because they didn't speak Greek, and Conrad recalls reading that barbarians were so dubbed because their speech sounded like "bar-bar-bar" to the refined and intellectual Greek ear.

Greek rear.  Close enough.

Sparta And Speaking
Sparta - you've heard of the city-state, right? - was tellingly described as a "dull, cruel city" because it's motivation was WARFARE.  None of that pansying about with art or culture, with Sparta it was MY TANK IS FIGHT* except with swords and spears instead of tanks.  It was the chief city of the region of Laconia.  Still with me?  Good.  Now, the Spartans were not known for being big on rhetoric, in the sense of formal speaking - after all, why talk to someone when you can MY TANK IS FIGHT them instead?  When a Spartan diplomatic mission went to request food aid from another polity, they simply brought along an empty sack, dangled it in front of the other city's dignitaries and said "needs grain".  They were, of course, roundly condemned by their fellow Spartans for being wildly loquacious** since all they needed to have done was dangle the sack and say "Empty".
     Thus, "Laconic" - that is, to be brief and to the point.  Imagine The Man With No Name in the Dollar westerns; like him.

He sounds Spartan - his name has "KIL" in it.

Laconic:"Molon Labe"
Classical Greek for "Come and take".  This was the response of Leonidas to the demands of the Persian heralds at Thermopylae, who told the Greeks to give up their weapons.  As you may recall, things did not end well for the Spartans, but in the process of being completely wiped out they did give the Persian host quite a hot time of it.  Allegedly Leonidas's words to his men at breakfast were "Dine well, lads, for tonight we sup in Hell", although Conrad wonders who heard this and lived to tell the tale.  As a pre-battle motivational speech it is pretty wordy for a Spartan, as compared to MY TANK IS FIGHT, but is a laconic model if you compare it to Henry V in Shakespeare, banging on about death and breaches***.

"Come and take - if you think you're hard enough"

Coca-Cola Life - Mileage In This Product Yet!
Conrad doubts the mighty multinational is reeling yet at the variegated vindictive venom put out by BOOJUM!, yet hopes remain high.
     "Lower Calorie" declared the bus poster that wafted past Conrad this morning, extolling the virtues of the liquid in question.  My mind, trained in the art of forensic rhetoric by rigourous study of the Greek classics, immediately swung into action.
     "Lower - as compared to what!" came the instant mental rejoinder.  After all, there is no other metric given to base this comparison on.  Lower calorie than a mound of sugar as big as a bus?  Lower calorie than the sugar intake of the entire UK?  Lower calorie than -<Mister Hand intervenes to hurry things on before midnight>

"Granite!  Less fattening than lava!"

The Great British Bake Off
Tricky bready stuff tonight, folks.  The quarter-finals, with only 5 contestants left of the original 13.  First challenge - freeform sweet bread, no tins or pans allowed.  Richard did well with a Swedish couronne^. Then came the technical, with a horribly difficult Croatian bread-cake that had a walnut, cocoa and butter filling, that only Chetna did well with - because her Signature bake had been a variant of this.  The name sounded like "Povitza" which obviously - obviously! - any Slav listener would immediately recognise.
     Lastly came the showstopper, 18 each of two different kinds of doughnut.  Not just proving, then, but the temperature and duration of the frying had to be just right.
     Now, I shan't put who got sent home here, but it is below in the asterisked remarks^^.

"MY TANK IS FIGHT!
Also, any Povitza going?"

* A bad translation of a Russian phrase
** Chatty
*** Not to be confused with "breeches", as although breeches can have breaches, breaches can't have breeches.
^ I say it was a couronne.  So it is.
^^ Martha :(