Meanwhile, In Tcherbevan ...

As With Friday, So With Sunday
I think I've already bored you with the details of my spectacles falling apart on Friday morning - turning them into bisectacles - and how this really didn't begin the day well.
     Well, this weekend my friend Richard has been running a large-scale wargame set in the fictional Black Sea republic of Andreivia, and your scribe was one of the players, commanding the Andreivian Armenians.  Time of arrival today was to be around 10:00, so I blithely set my alarm for 8:30 - giving me enough time to get abluted, check the blog and post a pester, get a bite to eat and arrive in Sheffield.*

The splendid "Royal Hotel" pub.  Where men are men and dinner portions are huge!
We walked from the gaming venue to here for dinner.

     You can already guess what happened, can't you?  Due to an early wake-up and a poor night's sleep on Friday, I went to bed early on Saturday, woke up with the alarm at what I presumed was 8:30, turned on the PC and, with a sense of mild horror, saw that the time was actually 9:36.
     Fortunately this is Sunday morning we're talking about and there was very little traffic about, although the dreadful weather did slow me down.  I contrived to arrive at Dungworth at 10:45, made my excuses and then got on with demolishing downtown Thcerbevan's Turkish Quarter ...

Tcherbevan: the Before picture

    I didn't get back home until 4:30, hence no earlier posts today.  But don't you worry, I've now got material for two more posts sitting stewing in the cranium.

Back To Friday
If you have been faithfully and frankly following the blog, then you will know that Conrad was off to watch what young folk call a "gig" on Friday night, and yes, I was officially the oldest person there.
     However, doors didn't open until 9:00 and the musical shemozzle wouldn't kick off until at least 9:30, so what was feckless old man Conrad to do in the meantime?
     Go to the cinema!  And see "Chappie", as I'd thought to check start and finish times and it would end at 9-ish, allowing a quick guzzle afterwards.
     So - Chappie.  What did Conrad think?
     I liked it.  Remember "Short Circuit?"  Imagine "Short Circuit" with guns, drugs, blood, swearing and - actually forget "Short Circuit".  Imagine "Robocop"** crossed with "Pinocchio" and there you have it.  The ending is a bit fairytale but then - I refer you to the Pinocchio subtext.  

"Number 22 is alive! And very sweary!"

     A few points.  It's not clear why Ninja's gang are in deep trouble with Hippo; we see a mess of stuff in the back of their van but this isn't explained - certainly not why Hippo thinks he's entitled to R20 million.
     There are references to "Zef" all over the place.  Given that this is also the name of Sophie's*** cat, I think there is a common root here.
     The derelict factory that the Ninja gang live in is - well, it's not really covert in any sense of the word.  There are acres of graffiti and artwork all over the walls, there aren't any doors, they casually assay and cut their drugs out in the open - it's no surprise that Hippo knows where they live.  Love the pink and white automatic weapons, tho'.
     I believe that the scout robot's "ears" are actually modelled on the ones from "Appleseed" - they are similar - and they enable a surprising amount of emotion to be displayed.  Alex Murphy would kill for a pair of those, you know.


An Aside On Trailers
I missed all the adverts (Hoorah!) but unfortunately may have missed a trailer or two (Booh!).  Here are my thoughts on what I did see.  I know you didn't ask for my opinions, but once again - whose blog is it?
     Mad Max: Fury Road
     There appeared to be a lot of cars zooming around the desert amidst explosions and tornadoes, and Tom Hardy is Max.  
     That's it.  I do believe reading about the shooting of this film years and years ago, so the question must be - why is it so late in arriving on-screen?  That's usually bad news for any film production.

There's the plot, right there.

     Fast and Furious 7
     Or, "Car Porn #7"

If YOU PEOPLE keep watching this stuff, they'll keep making it!

     The trailer began with cars being parachuted from the back of a cargo plane.
     Why?  It's in the script.^  Yes, yes, it would be far easier and simpler to merely drive them along a road, except the studio needs to go One Louder than the previous film.  In "Car Porn 8" expect them to re-entry from orbit after deploying from the Space Shuttle.
     Then they pursue a big black coach, there's a gun battle, the coach crashes.
     Why?  IITS.  It would have been logical to put a large, solid object in the path of the coach in order to stop it, so they don't do that.^^ 
     Then - JASON STATHAM!
     He's the baddy.  He has to be, he's an English actor and it's an American film.
     Insidious 3
     To summarise: knocking on a wall will bring all the demons in Hell pouring into your bedroom, because you miss Mummy.
     Or something like that.  I think after "Insidious" was such a big hit, there was a little bit of pressure to produce another hit, and - inevitably - quality has suffered.

Darth Sidious.  Close enough.

"Mason and Dixon"
Panic not, gentle reader.  Conrad is now over half-way through this tome, with about 300 pages left to go, so it will continue to haunt your existence for only another couple of weeks.
     Two things emerge from my recent reading - 1)  Mr Pynchon likes to use unusual, uncommon, obsolete or (sometimes) completely made-up words.  This is particularly rife in "M & D" because the language used is a pastiche of 18th century English.
     2)  There are occasional breaks with reality within the text, that lead you to think you've turned over two pages accidentally.  "Against The Day" had this in spades; "M&D" rather less so, but it's still there.
     So, to detail:
1)  "Soubrette" - a stock female character in French theatre, who can either be conceited or coy.

I Googled "Soubrette" and this young lady is wearing the most of all the results

     "Dromond" - a large medieval warship.

Lomond.  Close enough.

     "Stamp Tax" - this might be more familiar to South Canadian readers.  The British Parliament tried to force the American colonies to purchase paper products from Britain that had an embossed stamp to prove their authenticity.  This provoked an enormous backlash from the colonists and, all in all, was not a very good idea.



2)  At one point in the narrative, Mason and Dixon enter a run-down rustic cabin in the woods.  As they penetrate the interior, they appear to be in Lepton Castle, an enormous structure with a huge population of staff, guests and hosts.  No, it didn't make sense to me, either, and I went back to check.
     
Time to post and inform the world that Conrad is still around.






* No, not a destination chosen at random.  The venue for the game was in Sheffield.
** The original.  Let us not speak of the remake.
*** Not that Sophie, this Sophie.
^ I'm recycling this term from my days at the Agony Booth.
^^ This is a precis of at least a dozen different plot holes that occur in this single sequence.

Apologies For The Delay -

I Was Battling Russian Paratroopers/Aliens/Tax Inspectors*
Actually yesterday and today have been one of the rare occasions that Conrad's social and creative lives clash.  Clash the first was the launch party of Claw The Thin Ice's new album "Exercise", performed at the Star and Garter in Manchester last night.  This meant Conrad staying in Manchester instead of going home - hence no blog on Friday evening.
     I hope this grim absence didn't derail people's lives too much.

Conrad's loyal fan is a bit grim and despair-y

     Clash the second was my commitment to play at "Crisis Point", a large-scale wargame arranged by Richard Crawley at Dungworth, running both Saturday and Sunday, from early morning onwards into late afternoon.  So I am not long home.
     Enough preambulatory wibble!  Let the motley begin!

Claw The Thin Ice
The "Doors Open" was 9:00 but as Conrad intended to be fashionably late, I didn't get there until nearly 10:00, which was good, as the first of the two acts didn't start performing until 10:34.  They were "Bearclaw Beware", described as a  mathcore** band.
     Good lord they were loud!  Or maybe I'm just old.
     No, they were loud.  Its a small venue and I have large ears.
     The bass player was positively acrobatic, throwing himself across the (small) stage in a blur of limbs and guitar neck, definitely upstaging the guitarist.  And the music?  Well, it did have melodic bits, but it also had a lot of thrash, different time signatures, that sort of stuff.

The bass player unusually static

     Now, I'm not going to post about CTTI because I intend to get Ian's permission about posting a couple of photographs.*** So make do with this:

Promotional poster

Back At The Britannia -
Conrad, knowing that CTTI wouldn't be going on until late (11:30 as it turned out), had conspired to get a room at the Brittania Hotel to stay overnight, rather than have to catch the night bus back to Oldham Bus Station and then taxi on from there.  The room price also included breakfast, which added to the lustre.
     Allow me to impress you with the room:

     Er - I grant you the first one is a bit Room In The Rough, but you get the full feeling of Conrad at home, don't you?
     Now, what is the disadvantage of having a third floor room in an hotel at the very centre of City Centre Manchester - on a Friday night?
     Yes!  The drunken revellers creating an embarrassing hoo-hah until the small hours of the morning, not to mention a drunken couple lurching around the corridors at 4 a.m.
     "Gorblay", repeated the man, countless times.  It may have been the female partner's name, or he may have been making words up at random.
     No I was not dreaming!

Friday Did Not Begin Well
No it Dog Buns well didn't!  I may have alluded to this in the rather hasty mock-up post that I did at lunchtime on Friday.
     I picked up my glasses from the bathroom cabinet, walked into the Upstairs Lair, and one of the arms fell off my spectacles.
     Could I find the missing screw that caused this minor calamity?  No I could not.  A frantic search unearthed a slightly ratty older pair of specs that, wonder of wonders, actually functioned almost properly -

The stop-gap pair and Conrad's cross stare

Cross or happy?  It's hard to tell.  Oh - the old specs, before they came to 'arm

     This is not the only way in which -

 - excuse me, it's unpleasantly silent in here, I'm going to headphone'n'Grooveshark -

Much better!  What was I holding forth - oh yes -
  
      - in which Friday packed a sting in the tale.  Conrad was busy copying a post from 2014 into a new one when he rashly "Deleted" a picture via the keyboard.  The proper procedure is to use "Remove" from the picture Options menu.  Otherwise the cursor retains the format of the picture removed, and overlays it on the post wherever the cursor is moved.  This means that your whole post ends up like a moonscape of fonts, captions and overlaid formats.
     The only way to definitely remove this formatting error is - if you're lucky - to save, quit out, then go back in again.
     Which didn't work this time.  Conrad had to re-do the whole post after spending 20 minutes on the old one, which took another 10 minutes.^

Conrad, expressing his annoyance.

Don't Say I Don't Do Anything For You, Ganterpies^^
As Conrad was on leave on Thursday, he took the opportunity to make not one, but two cakes.
     Is this news?  Yes it Dog Buns well is!  Do you know how long it takes to make a cake?  Not just make it, but nurse it through the baking process - checking on whether it's done or not, turning it to bake evenly in the oven, tenting it with foil to prevent the exterior burning as the interior bakes, because oh so often the time given is more a guess than anything accurate.
     Hence the gluten-free Spiced Date and Walnut Loaf:

     It looks a bit flat, but for anyone with coeliac disease, it won't bloat your stomach into a mini-zeppelin, with quite as much gas.
     Then it was down to the gluten-free Chocolate Brownies:

     Conrad, canny as a Nobel Prize winning scientist pretty clever baker, multiplied the ingredients by 1.5, meaning that there were plenty of brownies for the ganterpies at work, yet - YET! - Wonder Wifey also had plenty.
     He also used 1/4 of the raising agents used in the previous Brownie Debacle, where the batter became sentient and crawled out of the tin.

Meanwhile, In Yorkshire -
Conrad has, of course, imbibed all the Lanky biases against the Tykes because they are, after all, entirely true and firmly based in fact.
     Except perhaps the weather.  Whilst - I'm going to quote one of my favourite bands here, The Comsat Angels:^^^ "The rain hung in sheets from the sky" in Lancashire, over in Yorkshire we had bright sunny weather at Dungworth.  Even this:

Words un-necessary!

* As usual, all or none of these may be correct.
**  That is, extremely proficient musically at the expense of soppy love songs.
*** Bearclaw Beware, however ...
^  You see?  You see the trouble I take!  That's 30 minutes of a 45 minute lunch-break.
^^ This is not a compliment.  That is all you need to know.
^^^ Who come from YORKSHIRE!  The Horror!