You Can Lead A Horse To Water

Indeed You Can

Quite why you would want to spend your free time getting Dobbin drinkwards is another matter, because if there's a water-trough there and he's thirsty, he'll drink. 

 Or does this aphorism apply to standing water sources in the countryside?  Because again, if Dobbin knows there's a pond at the bottom of Ten Acre Field*, he'll trot down and quench his thirst.  What he'd not be very keen on is if some interfering Hom. Sap. comes along, gets hold of his bridle and drags him over to either trough or pond.

Horse for "I've already HAD a drink."

     This is probably over-thinking the adage, which is pretty much how we operate around here.  If Conrad can take a perfectly innocent, simple and straightforward everyday object/person/saying, and turn it into an entanglement of illogic, then his day is complete.
     For Lo! we are back on the Official History of the Gallipoli campaign, which you must have missed, since I've been keeping it on the back burner.  It is arguable that things had gone irreversibly toes-up back in February of 1915, long before any landings took place, when the Royal Navy began to bombard selected spots on the Gallipoli peninsula.  It doesn't take a genius to see that Perfidious Albion might be considering a landing there.

British tourists come ashore

     Before anything had been planned, the Military Secretary to the British government sent them a prescient and detailed letter outlining a series of Very Important Questions, which I think we shall try to paraphrase, or this Intro will be two blog posts in length:

"1)  How many troops to be used?

2)  What supply arrangements are there for boats and tugs?

3)  What of pontoons and landing piers?

4)  How will water and provisions be supplied?

5)  How will hospitals be arranged - on land, at sea, or both?

Both, actually

6)  Will this be a surprise landing or is trench warfare expected?

7)  What siege guns are available?  How much ammunition will they have?  How will both be landed?

8)  Can naval gunfire properly support an attack and deal with hostile enemy batteries?

Global warming not an issue in 1915

9)  What are the logistical arrangements for ammunition supply generally?

10)  How are supplies to be transported overland when there are very few roads?"

To which was added the telling coda "Unless details such as these ... are fully thought out before the landings take place, it is conceivable that a serious disaster may occur." (emphasis mine).

     Guess what?  These questions were completely ignored for the most part until the fleet was assembled at Mudros.  When they were (very briefly) raised at an earlier meeting of the War Cabinet, Lord Kitchener growled that the men on the spot should do the planning, and because the politicians were scared of K of K (to be honest, everyone was scared of K of K) that was the end of the matter.  Ooops.

One of the consequences

     I think we can see where this is going.  I have just reached that point in the narrative where the landings are about to take place - finally! - after 162 pages.  
     Motley, please eat this two-pound bag of salt and we'll see if that allows you to be led to those puddles over there.

Cool and quenching, hmmmm?

Talking Of Naming Names -

Conrad, as a small youth, used to enjoy watching a television program back when there were only three channels, broadcast on Friday evening, called "The Virginian".  It was a western, running from 1962 until 1971, notching up 249 episodes, so somebody out there liked it.  Art!

The Viginian at back port

     Unlike Baby Yoda, or The King of a Hundred Knights (see yesteryon's blog), we never got to learn what The Virginian's name was.  Not ever.  Conrad remembers a newspaper letter remarking on this, waiting for another character to call him Jim or Steve or Eustace or Flapdoodle-Dandy-Sugar; it never happened.  This is because the series was loosely based on a book published in 1902 titled "The Virginian" where the character's name is never revealed, either.

     James Drury, the actor playing TV, was also in "The Adventures of Briscoe County Junior".  Just so you know.

I Hope You Appreciate This

Your Humble Scribe has just spent a good 10 minutes trawling the internet and IMDB's Trivia page for "The Blues Brothers" in order to put to bed a rumour that concerns John Landis and Donald Sutherland.  The rumour was that Don had appeared in a string of films that John had directed.  Art!

     "National Lampoon" and "Animal House" were two films he definitely appeared in, yet folks float a rumour that he was briefly seen on a billboard in "The Blues Brothers".

     "Is this true, Conrad, O thou touchstone of truth, veracity and Imperial measurements?" I hear you call.  Pausing only to salute your recognition that Pounds, inches and shillings are all the world needs to solve it's problems, I can answer definitively - kind of.  Art?

     If you examine those credits closely at lower starboard you can see Don's name there.  His name only - his likeness never appeared.  Given the rather B-movie vibe of "See You Next Wednesday" this undoubtedly a good thing.

Finally - 

I was going to go on about "Operation Ariel" at one point in today's blog (actually done the night before but you get my drift), and then thought that we'd had enough of military operations for one day.  How about "Auto-da-fe"? instead?

     This was a formal indictment of alleged heretics under the Spanish, Portuguese and Mexican Inquisitions, the term itself coming from the Portuguese for "Act of Faith".  Trials were held in secret, with the accused never knowing who had given testimony against them, and at the end of the whole horrid affair all parties would be marched off to a place of burning.  Some were acquitted, others had their sentence confirmed but suspended, and others would be given the human rotisserie treatment - because the church was forbidden to spill blood.

     It's also the title of a much more interesting story about sentient cars being killed for sport in the arena, by moto-matadors, written by that master of prose Roger Zelazny.  Infinitely more preferable!

     And with that, Vulnavia, we are definitely done.

*  I don't know and don't care what this is in metric.  Acres is what it is here.

Sir Thomas Malory Did It First

A.K.A. Baby Yoda Gets A Name

Don't sneer at me for being behind the curve here, it's not an easy balancing act, keeping your head in both the fifteenth century and the twenty-fifth (or whenever "The Mandalorian" is set).

     This does, however, give me the opportunity to bait the odd click or two by including a screenshot of the small green critter in question.  Art!

     For those who may have been in a submersible marine research station at the bottom of the Marianas Trench for the past three years, this little scamp is self-willed, inquisitive, perpetually hungry and fond of food to big to comfortably fit in his mouth.

     Now that your appetites are whetted, let us abruptly change tack and revert to "Le Mort D'Arthur", because this does make sense*.  You see, ever since Book One we have had to deal with a character Sir Tom called "The King With A Hundred Knights", a rather clumsy nomenclature that definitely doesn't trip lightly off the tongue.  I don't know, perhaps it was smoother in French.  Only towards the end of Book Ten do we learn that this cove has a name: "Sir Berrant Le Apres".  Well done, Tom, couldn't you have dropped that in a tad earlier?

     No pictures of Sir Berrant that I can find, so you'll have to make to with a Questing Beast.  Looks a little "Yellow Submarine" to me, frankly**. 

     "What does - O," I hear you comment.  "We see."
     Yes, here we are half-way through the second series of "The Mandalorian" and only now do we find that "Baby Yoda" is actually "Grogu" (long "O").  Conrad feels this is quite appropriate, since he/she/it/whatever appears to be passing fond of anything vaguely edible it can fit in it's gob, such as grog.  Art!  More clickbait!

BAD GROGU!  NAUGHTY GROGU!

     Since the little beggar is telekinetic, it's a safe bet that Mando has terrible trouble keeping the lids on all the jars in his spaceship.  Although that kind of ability would be pretty damn useful in getting my jars of Polish pickles open, since they vacuum-seal them so securely you have to slam a -

     Sorry, got a little off-track there.  What's that?  What's 'grog'?  O I thought you'd never ask!  Art!

     It was a ration of rum, diluted with water, which was served to seamen in the Royal Navy from 1740 to 1970, and which made the Senior Service unbeatable (or made it think so).  Diluted in this manner, it would spoil rapidly, especially in tropical climes, so the rascally tars couldn't hoard it to get pie-eyed on a couple of pints of rum (which was 95% proof and thus able to serve as fuel in an emergency).
     Hmmmm.  Okay, Mando, you do NOT let Grogu anywhere near grog.  Not only would that make you culpable in loco parentis, having a kid able to throw around multi-ton monsters under the influence - nope.  We don't want that.

I feel I'm being judged here

     It's a bit hard to tell if Mando's annoyed or not, isn't it?  One supposes that if you're still alive, he's not too bothered.
     Motley!  Do you want to hear the delicate squeaking of some Whistling Birds?

Breaking Down

Not the sort where your car's axles fall off and you hurl over the bridge parapet to fall 50 yards into the Squalee River, nor yet where you suddenly realise that QAnon are a load of credulous bampots.

     No.  Remember Conrad banging on about Lego constructions that make up 'Great Ball Contraptions"?  You better had, for we now have a few shots of the modules that collectively make these Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson assemblages.  Art!

     That Apollo is the conduit down which the balls roll, to emerge at the bottom, and sorry that they never pulled the camera back far enough to show the whole thing, which stands about eight feet high.  And it's only one small part of the whole construction.

     Here the split-feed of balls coming from the rocket merge together and onwards to a set of three circular disks, that pick each ball up, move it to the disk above and then -

     - down the other side again.  Then -

     - they get jiggered up a set of alternating steps.  Okay, that's four of the 'modules' that get linked together to create the whole enormous array.  Conrad is pretty sure they build all the modules first, then transport them to the display venue and the hard work consists of linking everything up, making sure it works, making sure it works in synchrony with the other modules and then setting the balls rolling.  It would just take too long to assemble from scratch at the venue.  Days, probably.

     Go on, go on - "some people have entirely too much time on their hands.***"

I Like This Theory!

You know Conrad, if it's possible to put a dark and sinister interpretation on something bright and positive, then that's his day made.  You wouldn't believe how hilarious it is to recite "Little Bo Peep" in the manner of an understated  hissing psychopath (the school won't invite me back, though).

     ANYWAY I was perusing a Youtube Reddit channel that asked "What Fan Theory Makes Most Sense To You?" and they came up with a corker.  Art!

Scooby and the gang!

     "Scooby Doo takes place in a world devastated by a global economic catastrophe".
     Before you scoff, they did add in that these kids just swan about the land with no gainful employment, parents, educational responsibilities or source of income.  Obviously they barter their services for food and fuel.

     Next compelling argument: everywhere they travel is dilapidated, abandoned or run-down.  Of course they stay away from big cities, which in this scenario would be rat-infested, gang-riddled, septic sewers of disease and violence.

Here there are just septic sewers.  I rest my case.

     Lastly, they make the point that people who, pre-Crash, would have been well-off middle-class doctors and scientists, go out of their way to cheat and steal and hoodwink them for the sake of a few dollars.

     Colour me convinced.

"The entire Police Department was present."

*  In my head, which is where it matters most.

**  'Questing Beat'?

***  Said without a wisp of irony

Why We Should Fear Mel Brooks

No!  I Don't Mean That, When The Lights Are Off -

 - he removes his human skin, spreads his leathery wings and takes off into the dark to dine on human flesh, blood and an occasional glass of Tokay*.  Besides, if he did that, his wife would surely notice?  Unless, she, too -

     

 - of human victims"?

     Whoops.  Yes, got a little distracted there.  What I really mean, of course - obviously! - is his prescient film "The Producers", which Conrad has seen, because it's a film about a musical, rather than a musical itself**.  Art!

Gene and Zero

     Since you may have been living up a pole in the middle of the Gobi Desert for the past 54 years, I shall render a synopsis of the plot: Max and his accountant plot to scam investors in their musical, by creating the worst possible musical, thus guaranteeing that it will fail, so they can keep all the money.  Conrad wouldn't find it difficult to see any musical as the worst possible, though I have to concede that "Springtime For Hitler" is an outstanding concept.  Art!

Possibly also a tad lacking in taste ...

     The twist in the tail is that the musical is so bad that people mistake it for a satire.  It becomes a success.

     And thus we come to that televisual combination of dumpster fire*** and trainwreck: "Batwoman", Season Two.  It will have been broadcast last night, which is a bit too soon for the viewing figures to be in yet.  Conrad confidently predicts they will be even lower than last week's, which stood at 660,000.  Or, if statistics is your thing, one person in every five hundred across South Canada bothered to watch it.   Art!

That whine you can hear is Bob Kane spinning in his coffin

     Ooopsie, I told a fib, I have found a site that lists yesterdays viewers and yes they lost another 17,000 viewers.  At this rate they'll be down to 250,000 by the time the season ends.

     Now, this relates to Mel Brooks because a significant number of those viewers you see above are actually reviewers like The Critical Drinker.  These people suffer so that we don't have to - a round of applause for all these people who have to get blackout drunk to manage a whole 44 minutes of these episodes.  The risk, of course - obviously! - is that word will get around of a television program so bad it's hilarious, and more people will watch it, generating more word of mouth.

     Go Google "Florence Foster Jenkins" or "The Room" if you doubt my wisdom.
     Only my The Mars Volta keeps me sane.

     

You What?

Conrad, as we all know, is a terrible person who derives considerable glee from the sufferings of others, most especially if said sufferings were brought upon that person by virtue of their own stupidity.

     Hence his goggling at the description on a Youtube Reddit of a workplace where one manager ate his way through either six ten-packs or ten six-packs of what were termed "White Castle Sliders".  Your Humble Scribe had never heard of these before, so a resort to Google was undertaken.  Art!

Ah, ten six-packs it is

     It's not obvious from that picture, so let me inform you that these are made from steamed beef and are considerably smaller than a conventional burger in a bun.  Art!

30.  So half of what Matey got through.

     Despite them being small, getting through 60 is an impressive achievement.  According to the poster, the last pack were consumed whilst answering an urgent call of nature, in an atmosphere I leave it to your imagination to conjure up.

Toffee And Coffee

Did you ever wonder why these two words resemble each other?  Of course not, that's my job!

"Coffee", according to my Collins Concise, derives from the Italian "Caffe".  This, in turn, derives from the Turkish "Kahve", which is a rather mangled version of the Arabic "Qahwah".  Art!

This will wind you up like a watchspring

     Pretty definitive.  I am afraid "Toffee" is rather harder to pin down.  It is a nineteenth century variant of "Taffy", which appeared about two hundred years ago, and there the etymological trail goes cold.  Back in the days when he could eat sugary stuff without risking a diabetic coma, Conrad used to occasionally make toffee <sighs thoughtfully and throws darts at the motley>.

"Excuse Me, Sir, But Your Lance Is In My Liver"

For Lo! we are back to "Le Mort D'Arthur" again, where Conrad has just started Book Eleven, at Page 520, so only 280 pages left to go!  If you have a low boredom threshold then you might want to miss the Dog Buns interminable jousting event that is held at Lonzep toward the end of Book Ten.  It goes on for (I think, my attention was waning) for seven days, and consists of long descriptions of how "Sir Art E Choke brast his spear against Sir Susurrus, and smote him to the ground, and then Sir Bokebag smote him with a spear that he fell over his horse's croup and then both lightly voided their horses, and Sir Tenty went sore at him for two hours, until Sir Vole De Mort cried mercy -".  You get the idea.

No comments about horns, thank you

     As you can see from the re-enactors above, once a knight was fully tinned-up, the only way to identify him was by his banner, tabard and shield.  This leads to a bit of a mix-up by Sir Palomides, who takes on another knight at a well.  They go at it hammer and tongs until he demands to know whom the other knight is.  "Sir Safere" is the reply.

     Ooops.  Sir Palomides' brother, in other words.  Really, this sort of thing goes on a lot, and should have led to the invention of the business card a few centuries early.  Art!

Finally -

I think I've played "Deloused In The Comatorium" to death, so time for "Frances The Mute".  Or we'll pick it up tomorrow; don't want to scare the neighbours with bonkers mathcore prog-metal, do we!

     No we don't.  Really, we don't.  Plus it's getting late.

*  Even the very worst of us deserve some of the best.

** Yeah, yeah, special pleading.  Be quiet or I'll nuke you.

***  No English comparison available, unless you pay me

The Rake's Progress

I Was Just Inspired

 - which means I now have to subsequently do some digging about said inspiration, as these things that arrive out of my mind's left side need a bit of support.

     Okay, you may be aware of a series of prints by Hogarth, dating from the eighteenth century, which are titled "The Rake's Progress".  Art!

     Conrad is not going to put up all eight, as that would create a blog at least 7,000 words long, what with pointing out the details in Ol' Hoggy's creation.  The idea is that Tom Rakewell inherits his miserly father's fortune, and then sets about blowing it all on gambling, whores and crack cocaine high living.  He burns through the whole lot and ends up in a lunatic asylum; quite a downer and probably not what you were expecting, hmmmm?
     Of course, having introduced this, we promptly skip away from it, since it's not what the blog's about.  Then there is the 1945 film of the same name, starring Rex Harrison, which Conrad has actually seen.  Only once, a long time ago, but it still counts.  Art!

     In this film we see Rex Harrison's character, Vivian, behave like a completely unprincipled bowel-movement for most of the running time, trusting to his charm, good looks and family money to get him out of trouble (debt, philandering, pregnant women, angry puppies).  He finally finds redemption in making a doomed last stand, holding off the Teuton hordes single-handedly as his company escapes, all the time whilst quaffing champagne (if I remember correctly).  

     

     The South Canadians did NOT approve of his behaviour and thus changed the title, because hanky-panky outside of marriage in 1945 was a big no-no.

     ANYWAY that's still not what the blog's about today.  If you have been following us with any regularity then you know Conrad follows the Youtube channel for 'post10', whom is a South Canadian dedicated to unblocking drains and culverts in his locale.  No, he doesn't get paid.  Yes, his Youtube channel has advertising and you can send him money if so taken, yet he does what he does out of sheer public mindedness.  Art!

Not all heroes wear capes

     Very unusually, Post (not going to use his real name) was stopped by the police before he got to clearing clogs, as he was carrying a rake and they wanted to know what his intent was.  A quick Google would have confirmed the truth.  Once free to rake, he goes at five huge culverts that have been blocked over time by twigs, branches, tree trunks, leaves and silt.

     You can judge how much crud has built up here by scaling the culvert pipes against Post himself in the one above.  Does this matter? I hear you ask.  Well, yes, because if the water's not going through the culvert, it will back up and cause flooding.

Water beginning to run freely

     Compare water levels here.  Cleared channel to starboard, blocked channel to port.

     

     This is rather risky, as Post is standing directly in the in-flow which has dramatically increased due to his removal of the clogs, so there is a possibility of his being forced off his feet.  This didn't happen in real life, but indicates the kind of risk he undergoes in his civic volunteering.  Not to mention armies of spiders.

     Motley, you look a bit under-entertained.  Feel like exploring a culvert under the motorway by torchlight?

Bitten By The Coincidence Hydra - AGAIN

Your Humble Scribe must have especially tender and tasty buttocks, as the Dog Buns! beast above has fastened all fifty-five fangs in there, ferociously.  This takes a bit of preamble, so bear with me.  NO!  Not the creature, the phrase.

     BOOJUM! has, of late, been prating on about foxes, which naturally led to wolves, and "Wolfie" Smith of "Citizen Smith", whose catchphrase was "Freedom for Tooting!"

     Our trans-Atlantic cousins may be surprise to know that "Tooting" means more than merely blowing your horn.  It is also home to Tooting Bec Underground station, which urbane Youtuber Jago Hazzard covered in one of his informative videos.  Art!

     Jago explained about the Underground's designs, which were created by architect Charles Holden.  They seem so commonplace nowadays that it takes rather a leap of the imagination to understand that they were designed.  Of course their awesomness is wasted on the southron jessies that use them daily.  Jago pointed out that the ticket offices for Tooting Bec are all deep underground, so the station above ground is merely a kind of cover for the escalators that reach those subterranean depths.  Art!

     As we already know, the odd name comes because the Norman monastery at Bec owned land in the area, for whatever convoluted reason.

Talking About Going Underground

I was going to post about Nemesis and Torquemada and 2000AD, and then thought to check and yes, I've already done an item on them.  April last year.  Art!

O well

A Holocaust Hobbit-Hole

Hobbits, as we are well aware, live underground.  That's Point One.  Point Two is that, in the event of the Third Unpleasantness ever kicking off, This Sceptred Isle would be the unwilling recipient of a whole mess of Sinister "Buckets Of Instant Sunshine".  To avoid being rendered into a vapour, a whole array of underground installations were - er - installed, across This Sceptred Isle, the better to carry out their functions.  In the case of the Royal Observer Corps, said function was to monitor for nuclear detonations, yield, location, airburst or groundburst, wind direction and strength and report into a central network that would plot these events nationally.  Fun job.  Art!

     Here we see the ROC St Agnes site, which is a small wired enclosure, an entrance shaft and a pokey little room at the bottom. I'd not call it a "bunker" myself, to be honest, because that's frankly a little grandiose.  Nor would I be interested in paying £25,000 for it, which is the asking price.

Finally -

I have spared you any great insight into "The Mandalorian" as I've still not finished watching Season Two, but now that we are 12 episodes in to both seasons, you may need to get a bit of prep in for Conrad's yarking and barking.  There's a lot that could be done in analysing this show, as Jon Favreau has nods and winks to the original film trilogy and any number of spaghetti westerns, and Clint Eastwood, and sci-fi tropes -

"Don't play with your food."

     See you on the other side!