What's Wordsworth?

NO! I Do Not Mean The Poet
Was he a poet?  One of those rather soggy chaps who hied around the Lake District, bleating about flowers and butterflies and transient peripatetic weather phenomena?  Or an author?  Ink-stained thumb and forefinger from dipping his quill pen into an inkpot?
     Well I'm not talking about him, so it doesn't particularly matter, does it?
     What I do mean is, what are words worth, when one has a picture or painting or photograph?  Take, for example, this vision of the heavens at 7:10 a.m. this morning:

     The camera on my phone doesn't really do it justice, as this particular rainbow was one that could feel justifiably proud of itself.  It was a big rainbow, arcing from horizon to horizon.  The force majeur of Nature at work, you might say, feeling that even if you were getting as soggy as the Lakeland poets, there was a bit of buttery brightness about the world of a morning.
     Then you have The Metro.  In their case a picture is worth 75 words.  Let me illustrate the point:

Pun-ishment

     The article consists of describing what you, the reader, can already see: damage to a car.  They don't know anything else, who the driver was, if they were injured, if there was a passenger

DOG BUNS!  Just realised I've not made a pot of tea tonight - My god my standards are slipping this presages the collapse of Western culture as Rome before the barbarians at the gate -

 - or any other facts, and the picture is a bit rubbish too, but!  or in the case of The Metro, of course! it takes up half a page.  Which is all that matters to them.  Less Wordsworth than Nerds-worth.

"Steel Tempest"
This is a fillum I caught a little of on the "Movies for Men" channel, and a couple of the names in the first credit sequence seemed familiar.  "Cromwell Productions", and "Director: Bob Carruthers".  
     The film itself is mostly in colour, with black and white contemporary inserts from 1944 thrown in, alongside modern stuff rendered in black and white - not a bad mix, it wasn't easy to tell the two apart.  Filmed from the German perspective during the Battle of the Bulge, the uniforms and equipment and vehicles all looked spot on replicas, there were Hanomag half-tracks and Marders and a Sherman tank to boot.

The Coal-scuttle Helmet
Not a big hit with the ladies

     Then the other shoe dropped - Cromwell Productions used to do military documentaries about the Second Unpleasantness, with re-enactors and military kit and vehicles.  Every so often you'd get Bob Carruthers holding forth with exposition and wireframe graphics and military jargon.  These programmes appeared on The History Channel when it was still around.
     Now, "Steel Tempest" dates from 2000, so Conrad wonders if it was a film-length advertising piece from Cromwell, in order to persuade THC to book a series from them?

Bob Carruthers: Invisible football expert as well

A Short Photo-Essay
How to radically gut your pumpkin.

Pristine

     The unsullied pumpkin, all unaware of what fate lies in store for it*.

"Let the instruments of torture be shown"

     Yes, that is a timber saw.  It takes the top off in seconds flat, and is far more efficient than a knife.

Decapitated*

      One quick saw and Hay Pesto!

Scoured clean -

     The seeds are all taken out with the ice cream scoop

Then scooped

     And the flesh is gouged out with that same ice cream scoop

Grate!

     After food-processing the sh1t out of it, we then get about a kilo of grated flesh all ready for the Halloween Pumpkin Cake.

Plum And His Slang
This P G Wodehouse chap wrote across the years and then some!  I'm currently reading "Picadilly Jim", which was published in 1918, and that's after finishing "Stiff Upper Lip Jeeves", which was published in 1963.  
     The slang, of course, takes a bit of work.  I don't wonder that some bright spark ought to come up with a Plum glossary, so that all us of the 21st century are able to understand the argot of the bright young things of a century ago.
     For example, "V-shaped" has come into my ken again.  From context one can tell that it means "things of ill omen", but does it crop up on a Google search?  No it does not!  Nor is there any entry in "Brewer's".  It might be in my "Dictionary of Phrase and Fable" but that's buried under a ton of other books, so no recourse to that today.

Hmmm.  Can't see the ladies weeping over this, exactly

     "Beasel" is another word I've looked up before.  It actually means "a shy and diffident young lady", except that Plum is applying it to the madcap plotter and borderline anarchist Stiffy Byng, so it must be ironic.

Odd, that.  I'd have called him an Owl.

     Then there is Bertie's heartfelt plea about being given a "Stoup of Malvoisie", which had Conrad baffled.  Here "Stoup" refers to a bowl or receptacle, and "Malvoisie", as you can guess with Mister Wooster, is wine.

Bertie's fond imagining

Well, we're well over the word limit, because I sat and worked-up stuff in Cafe Costa this morning, and this is after only 40 minutes.  I still have that cake to make, you see, and all I've done so far is the pumpkin.

More anon!


* Heh-heh!

U.G.L.I.

If I Were To Say To You -
 - ah but you know Conrad so well already.  When I quote the blog title, I do not refer to the Ugli Fruit, which to be fair is not all that hideous, certainly not when compared to the inside of a Passion Fruit, or the outside of a Dragon Fruit.

     Nor to I mean "Underbarrel Grenade Launcher, Infantry", which is a handy attachment occasionally seen on the SA80, enabling the British soldier to make his opponent's life miserable even if they are under cover or behind a hill.

     NO!  I refer to an acronym of my own creation: Uniform Grey Layer Infinite.
     A picture will explain this rather better:

Proper ugly

     I am describing the skies above Manchester today.  Unbroken and grim from horizon to horizon, weeping copiously.  Imagine a foul unclean marshallow of one million tons deadweight. A blight on the sight and a drug on the market.  Looking to the hills - and you can't, as UGLI concentrates the damp so effectively beneath it's suffocating folds that the hills look ill.

"Clutterbuck"
On a whim, as with so much else, I wrote down this surname and then wondered where it came from.  Fearfully bad news for the Little Englanders and any UKIP members who may have strayed onto the premises, as it seems to be an Anglicized version of a Dutch name, from the Sixteenth Century.  "Cloerterbooke" was the original, from folks who came to England after being picked upon most grievously on the Continent.
     As to what Cloerterbooke means, your guess is as good as mine.

Clutterbook.
Pretty damn awesome in Conrad's opinion!

Z Nation
I think they redeemed themselves rather with this one, and once again no Citizen Z*.  Whilst on a boating trip, our heroes bump into those tellers of tall tales, Sketchy and Skeezy, although "sleazy" would apply to them both.  Forcibly detoured thanks to a river-wide zombie jam, 10K ends up with the two twisters, whilst the others venture on without him.

Not one of their better moments

     Things take a turn for the surreal when the trio come across an abandoned dentist's van, which they promptly purloin and drive along to Burr Town, named after Mister Burr.
     "My family came across on The Mayflower," he informs Sketchy.  "Before things all went to hell."
     "Ah, the Apocalypse," agrees Sketchy.

As you may have suspected, the truck had little to do with teeth.

     "Hell no!  The War of Northern Aggression!" hotly retorts Burr.  I should explain that this is the euphemism that some Southern South Canadians refer to their Civil War by.
     Well, it made me laugh.  The laughter dies on the lips of our trio when it turns out that the van belongs to the Zeros and El Scorpion, who promptly puts our heroes on trial.
     Sentenced to hang, they are rescued in the nick of time by a lady with a sackful of guns - who had earlier been making with the goo-goo eyes at 10K.
     Chaos!  Confusion!  The old shooting-the-hangman's-rope trick!

Well, two out of three's not bad

     Now, the economy of Burr Town had been established upon the exploitation of zombie labour, which - as you must surely realise - only requires minimum wage and a zero hours contract**.  That anarchic lady with the bag of bang-sticks then sets the zombies loose and - chaos!  confusion!  everyone in Burr Town too drunk to remember that they have guns!

Sketchy and Skeezy get a "Butch & Sundance" moment.
I hope they come back, I like these sleazebags.

First Bus, Roadworks And Conrad's Ire
Once again the staff and drivers of First Bus can consider themselves lucky that automatic weapons are not common issue in this country, nor are flamethrowers, microtonne-warhead rocket launchers and phased plama rifles in the forty watt range.
     "What!" I can hear you cry.  "What has shocked you out of your customary sweetness and light veneer of pleasantry dark sullen moroseness?"

Conrad, sweet, pleasant or morose.  One face fits all.

     Roadworks, dear reader, roadworks.  Manchester City Council's Road Obstruction Planners have decided to close off both northward lanes of the A57 at Moston.  This means a mile-long diversion on a single road that adds at least fifteen minutes to the journey - twenty-five last night.  So when the 24 reached Royton, that's where it ended.  No!  Silly passengers. Foolish passengers!  Woefully wishful passengers!  So what if it says "Rochdale" on the sign, adapt or die!
     The roadworks are going to be there all week, and Conrad confidently expects First Bus to be late all week, as they are at least consistent in that way.
     Besides, fifteen minutes late?  That's practically on-time for First.

First Bus: thinking outside the box.  Way, way waaaaay outside the box!

<right, off to get another cup of tea>

This Isn't An Ugli Fruit Either
Although nobody could accuse the humble pumpkin of being especially attractive, certainly not before carving chunks out of it.

     Conrad intends to cut the top off with a saw, then use an ice cream scoop to get out the seeds, and then to HACK AND SLASH until I've got enough flesh out of it for my Halloween Pumpkin Cake recipe, although I might make it into cupcakes instead.

Egad!  A Bit Of Book Clutter
NANOWRIMO has caused Conrad to dig out various written bits of plot and character that have accumulated over the years, thus -

This is just the hand-written stuff

     The impetus of having to come up with a novel novel idea might impel me to actually type these up and put them into order***.  I have until Sunday, when the competition begins, so we shall see.  When I did it five years ago I only came across the competition four days into November, so the odds were stacked agin me - but your not-so-humble scribe prevailed^.



* I notice these omissions.  
** They never mention "Shaun of the Dead" but I reckon it must have inspired Burr.
*** "Might".  The odds are stacked against it.
^ Hoorah!