I See V

There You Go - Conrad Not Trying To Be Clever
If I was then the blog title would be "I.C.V." and I'd mislead you with a farrago of nonsense about the "Interception Counter Vehicle" that was carried on the Minuteman nuclear missile's bus, enabling it to defeat anti-ballistic interceptor missiles -
     Not a whit of it is true.  Well, not to my knowledge.  NORAD, SAC and Pine Forks Missile Base are not commenting, so if I did get ICV right by accident, expect never to see BOOJUM! again.

Er - this looks kinda ICV-ish.

     If I - hopefully! - haven't lost you, then allow me to explain further.  Yesterday the blog's theme was "V", and I mentioned the Thomas Pynchon novel "V", which includes scenes set in Valetta, the Maltese capital.   Dogsitting this afternoon, I read the biography of Jean Parisot de La Valette, leader of the Knights of Saint John on Malta during the great Turkish siege of 1565.  The capital, Valetta, is named after him.
     What have I just read about on the BBC website?  More on Malta and Valetta, where HR The Queen* lived whilst she was just Princess Elizabeth.  HRH is currently visiting there, hence this interest.
     So much coincidence!  Mind you, I did mention that reality-bending bandit Thomas Pynchon yesterday, so I ought not to be too surprised. Phil?  Any comments?

"If it's not Tom, it's the aliens.  Between 'em reality is getting a right shoeing."

NANOWRIMO
Alas, I am going to have to give up on putting forward "The Annals of Urquelomplangia" for this year's contest.  It still stands at only 5,000 words.  Instead (heh heh!) I shall have to file off the index numbers of a previously-composed work and submit that instead.

Conrad, looking evil.  Or it might be indigestion.

     I know, I know, just call me eeeevil.

Doctor Who: "Heaven Sent"
Conrad likes to go into each episode knowing nothing at all about it, as this means he is not prejudiced or partisan and can judge each show on it's own merits.  This can lead to frothing at the mouth when an expected two-parter turns out to finish at a single episode, or the cliff-hanger is not resolved and there's actually another episode to come.  I'm sure I speak for you all.

Peter digs a hole to hide in if this is a two-parter and Conrad goes off on one

     So, I did not realise that last night's show would be pretty much a solo performance by Peter Capaldi.  You had a shuffling bathrobe with claws, and a supporting cast of flies, and Miss Smug Gums herself, Clara Oswald, put in a cameo.  Otherwise it was all Peter.
     I have to say I liked it a lot more than last week's extended death scene nicked from Harry Potter, but this week's did go on rather.  An awful lot of set up.
     Now, here be SPOILERS!

Also pictures as there's a lot of empty space otherwise.
Any Yorick jokes to hand?

SPOILERS, NO KIDDING!

NO! It's not the world's biggest Nutribullet.

STILL WITH US? STILL SPOILING!



The Doctor goes through a trial and tribulation for forty minutes, ending up with the realisation that he's been stuck in the Castle of Splendid Isolation for - 7,000 years.  He finds a block of solid <cough cough wasn't paying attention> that's four times harder than diamond, tries to punch his way through it and gets fatally roasted by the bathrobe.  This repeats on a fast loop, with his quoted time at the Castle increasing each time - 12,000 years; 600 thousand years; 1200 thousand years; 2 million years; 20 million years; 1 billion years; 12 billion years.
     Finally the <Sprong**?> breaks beneath his pounding fists and he breaks through into - Gallifrey.
     Don't mean to carp, Doctor, but there was a spade lying around you could have used instead of your fist that might have cut a few billion years off your incarceration.

The better to batter

What's In A Name?
Whilst perusing the television channels, what did I espy but: "Russell Hobbs Pans Blockbuster".  Very cheeky of Russell I say.  I was always fond of it myself, as it concerned words and being clever.

Blockbuster.  Just so we're clear.

Whilst We're On The Subject -
Me being clever, if it wasn't clear enough.  What film is this?

Go on, ask me -

     SLACK MASS!
     I know, I know, I amuse myself sometimes.

First Bus
Truly performing to type, one bus came early so I missed it, and the next was late, so I got wet.
     I like to think of First Bus as a vast monolithic entity, rather like the black slab in "2001: A Space Odyssey".  No, I don't mean that they happen to be a super-intelligent hypercomputer, I mean they have the intellect of a black slab***.

The Black Monolith - if designed by First Bus

* Stand up and salute you idle shower!
** Sprong the wonder material I invented.  Lightweight, durable, rust-proof and available in either black or white.  Caution!  May cause voles to explode.
*** A black mass, perhaps?

V

Not Being Too Cryptic, Am I?
Since we appear to be working our way through the alphabet backwards on themes, and have now reached the letter "V", here we are.

Conrad, happy at reaching "V".
Or is it sad?  Kinda hard to tell TBH

     Just for your information, "alphabet" comes from the combination of the Greek "alpha" and "beta", the first two letters of that alphabet.  V can also serve as the Roman number 5.  Although nobody now living knows how the Romans really pronounced the letter V, the Latin swines!  I remember one member of our excavation team at GMAU explaining that the Roman Legion "Valeria Victrix" might really be pronounced "Waleria Wictrix", which is far less imposing and hardly likely to strike fear into the rebel tribes of Lusitania*.


"V" (And Also "Vineland") By Thomas Pynchon
Anyone with any literary pretensions has to read TP: I'm afraid it's the law in America and heavily legally-implied in the rest of the world.  V the novel is structured in a V, and ends in Valetta (Maltese capital), and is about - well, it jumps around in time and place, but concerns the search for the mysterious character V, who may - or may not - exist.

I have no idea what this is about.
But it looks interesting

     It's a blast, trust me.
     Vineland is a lot easier to read, yet tricky to summarise.  About California, really, and the Regan years, and the People's Republic of Rock and Roll, and Thanatoids**.

V
Not to be confused with the above novel, although that's exactly what Conrad did back in the mid-Eighties.  You can guess how bitter his disappointment was.
     It's about aliens who come apparently in peace, but who are really EVIL INVADERS, because nobody in the V-universe has ever read any science fiction stories nor apparently does Doctor Who or Star Trek exist in that reality, or they'd be a lot more sceptical.

Twenty years of Doctor Who meant Conrad = Not Surprised

     It also rather laid it's Nazi-allegory status on with a trowel, or more accurately a garden spade, which was only compensated by Michael Ironside and things exploding plentifully.
     There was a remake, which Conrad will pretend never happened***.

"V For Vendetta" By Alan Moore
As a comic book snob I refer, of course, to the comic book, not the film, which I haven't seen and which Alan has (obviously!) castigated.

Don't be deceived by his cheerful grin
This fella's steeped in darkest sin!
And gin.  Mustn't forget about the gin.

     It's set in a future Britain where a fascist if not outright Nazi government is in force, and concerns the attempts of V, a masked anarchistic terrorist, to overthrow said government.  He is accompanied in his endeavours by Evie, so he's not being too ambitious - no solo attempt, as that would just leave him too outnumbered.
     The film's mask has taken on life of it's own and become a bit of a meme in it's own right.

V3 Vergeltungswaffe ("Vengeance Weapon")
This is an example of how Nazi Germany could get things staggeringly wrong.  The idea was to have a super-long gun barrel that fired a fairly small shell.  Arranged in sequence up the length of the barrel were secondary chambers that contained more explosive charges, the idea being that they would be detonated as the shell passed them, giving it enormous velocity when it finally exited the barrel.

The hand-cranked proto-prototype

     Things did not go well with the project.  The prototype blew up after firing a few rounds.  The guns sited at Mimoyeques in France, supposedly to fire on London, were bombed to bits before they began firing.  The two guns that went into operation in December 1944 to shell Luxembourg managed, in the space of 3 months, to kill 10 people.  Which, Conrad can guesstimate, is far fewer than were killed in traffic accidents.

Vulnavia
I throw this lady's name into the mix on occasion, as if I were directing my hilariously witty and pithy remarks^ to an unseen observer - along the lines of "Yes, Victoria, There Is A Santa Claus".  See what I mean, Vanessa?
     She's not a real person, but a character from that hilarious black comedy "Doctor Phibes".  

Vulnavia, demonstrating the lost art of Gramophone-Wrestling
(I think)

Vim
This is two things:  a concept and a cleaning product.
     The concept: performing an action with "vim" is to go at it, and then some.  About the only thing that Conrad performs with vim is reading, drinking tea and mashing flies into smears with a flyswatter.  Hopefully you get the idea.
     The cleaning product: I am unsure if this still exists, and I'm not going out of my way to drive down to Royton at this time of night in disgusting weather to trawl the shelves of the Co-Op to find out.  Okay?

Vim.  Can be applied with vim.

The Victor
Ah, the siren song of that comic from Conrad's youth!  This was a weekly comic, the front page being in four-colours, that normally featured British Tommies getting the better of the Bally Hun or the Beastly Nips  - you could get away with language like that in the Sixties.  Sometimes they had cowboys, just to cleanse the jaded palate of their teenage readers.

He flew with Braddock.  Who knew!

     It featured "Braddock", a British bomber pilot who was an antagonistic, anti-authority wizard in the air.  He had no respect at all for authority, as mentioned, and would gladly sling an oily rag into the face of superior caught smoking near a refuelling aircraft.  Then there was "Morgyn The Mighty", who was i) Big and ii) Strong.  Not much nuanced character development there.  Another interesting strip was "Alf Tupper The Tough Of The Track", a blue-collar hero at a time when this was unusual.  Alf was a gifted athletic runner who paid the bills running a welding business.  Stout fellah!

Venus
NO! Not the planet.  Hopefully Conrad is a little more creative than that.  Venus the female pilot and crewmember from "Fireball XL-5", although Conrad always felt she was more on the M side.

Hot stuff in her day, and obviously modelled after Diana Dors

Vickers Vimy
Two V's for the price of one!
     This was a British bomber of the First Unpleasantness, and a whopping big bird it was too.

|To give a sense of scale

That's us at well over ONE THOUSAND WORDS.  So I shall shut up for tonight.


* Modern-day Portugal, which is Arabic for "Orange", the fruit.  Just so you know.
** Derived from "Thanatos", you know.  Which is the Greek for "Death", as opposed to Eros.  Just so you know.
*** It's my blog so they're my rules.
^  They ARE so!