The Giant Flying Mallets Are Back!

Excuse My Nickname For The Lancaster Bomber

We have been here before, because Your Humble Scribe is nothing if not an aficionado of things that go BANG, and one of the largest non-nuclear BANGS of the entire Second Unpleasantness came about because inventor Barnes Wallis was also into sudden loud noises.  Art!

No, they are not very very small people.  It's a very very big bomb.

     Grand Slam was the operational name for a monstrous ten-ton bomb that BW had designed, a bomb so big that it didn't need to hit anywhere near the target.  The design meant that it burrowed into the very earth, fifty or sixty feet deep, before the fuses worked and it detonated.  This created a huge underground cavern which is called a 'camouflet', although Conrad and his audience are doubtless thinking of 'quaquaveral' as an alternative.  Everything above ground promptly collapsed into the camouflet.  Art!

As popularised by futurologist Gerry Anderson in "Pit Of Peril"*

     Now let us introduce the Target For Today, the Bielefeld railway viaduct.  This particular structure had been bombed relentlessly for years, to absolutely no effect, because if you're bombing from 30,000 feet up a railway viaduct looks like a length of thread laid atop a length of twine.  Art!

Flaunting it's undamaged status.

     According to "The Northern Historian", whose Youtube channel I am reciting this from, three and a half thousand TONS of bombs had been dropped in the vicinity without a single direct hit.

     Enter 617  Squadron and Grand Slam.

     617 had won immortality as "The Dambusters" with their ghoulish motto "Apres moi la deluge", and you could count on them to drop a bomb down a chimney from 40,000 feet up.  In March of 1945 they turned up over Bielefeld en masse, fourteen of them dropping the 'mere' five-ton Tallboys alongside a single Grand Slam.  The whole thing was filmed by a specially-equipped Mosquito.  Art!

     That above is taken from about two miles up and shows Tallboys detonating near the wretched viaduct in what you might call 'close but no cigar'.  Don't forget these are five-ton bombs going off.  Art!

     This is a tricky one to illustrate.  The Grand Slam has been dropped, and the carrier Lancaster promptly rockets upwards now that it's gotten rid of a ten-ton payload.  The GS heads south, spinning thanks to it's specially-designed fins, and it reaches near-supersonic speeds of 750 m.p.h. before impact.  It has an eleven-second fuse.  Art!

     Compare with the image above.  And, don't forget, this is from two miles up.  End result: Bielefeld Viaduct 0 Grand Slam 1.  Art!

Oooopsie!

     I would recommend "The Northern Historian" and his Youtube channel, with the proviso that people not hailing from This Sceptred Isle may find his accent a tad difficult to follow.  He's a Geordie, you see, and their dialect can be a little - ah - obscure.

     O the viaduct?  The Teutons gave up on it, thus severing a crucial rail network link.  In fact engineers went for a completely different post-war design, probably because it was quicker and cheaper than filling in giant subterranean caverns.  Art!

     As Conrad has posited before, it is wise to let sleeping bears and dogs alone, and also Perfidious Albion, lest you get prodded back a whole lot harder than you prodded in the first place.

     Motley!  Let us go and attempt to harvest the Devil's Spitting Cabbage from The Zone!  Hazmat suits are de rigeur, weapons are optional.

Conrad Is ANGRY!  O SO ANGRY! O SO VERY ANGRY!

For one thing, the off-season of the ballfoot game seems to be shrinking with every year.  If it carries on like this it will re-start before it finishes and we'll have to call in that chap with a big blue police box to sort things out.

     Secondly, modern bank notes are extremely hard to unravel when they've been rolled up in a bundle for five years.  Did nobody think of this when they were introduced?

     Thirdly, yes, the Codeword compilers are pushing the boundaries of acceptable use, to the extent that a criminal complaint to the ICC in the Hague would be quite plausible.  What's that?  You want examples? O just wait!

"DIAZEPAM": ARE YOU DOG BUNS KIDDING ME!?  What, are we expected to be drug addicts familiar with the abuse of modern pharmaceuticals?  Although, you know, that "-Az-" portion bespeaks of nitrogen molecules - NO!  You're not going to get away with that.  Conrad is ANGRY! at this obscure resolution.  

This many is probably a bad thing

"GARBLING": This reminds me of Garbochock, a Swedish new wave group from the early Eighties, whom I don't think I've recalled since then.  "Can Can Flikor" was one of their catchy little tunes if I remember correctly.  And if you can't make any sense of that, consider yourself to have been garbled.

See - proof I am not raving.  Not yet.

"POXY": NOT PRESENT IN MY COLLINS CONCISE!  Supposedly derived from "Pox", which refers to the disfiguration of a surface (usually skin) by pits after a healing process.  AND FAR TOO MUCH A VULGARISM TO BE IN A CODEWORD!

     <takes five minutes to calm the raging torrents of vim>

"Redemption Ark" By Alastair Reynolds

You can't accuse Ol' Al of thinking small.  There's a lot of Space Opera about this novel, with spaceships four kilometres long, and evil enemies who devour planets for breakfast, and what Conrad like was mention of rail guns.  We have prototypes of this weapon today.  Art!

     This behemoth accelerates steel slugs thanks to electro-magnetic rails, whizzing them off into the wild blue yonder, where they impact the bad guys and cause severe headaches and a bad hair day.

     Ol' Al's SO version are a thousand kilometres long (!) rather than a thousand centimetres, and bring their truck-sized warhead up to 70% of light-speed.  They do have to manage this via the propulsive effort of thermonuclear warhead detonation, mind, so - a bit radioactive and messy.  Art!

A baby version

Finally -

We have actually hit the Compositional Ton so Your Modest Artisan needs to get cracking on reducing the Codeword/Cryptic backlog, and in reading some more of his Book Mountain.  The thing is, it's payday tomorrow, so one is tempted - O is one ever so tempted! - to get online at Turner Donovan and order £500-worth of books <wallet squeaks in anguish>.  I think we shall see.

     Don't forget, President Bierce needs your vote!

*  I think.  My meds might be wearing off, though.

Rocket Cathedral

No!  Not The Be Bop Deluxe Song

Even if it is an arresting image.  Their opus is entitled "Rocket Cathedrals" thank you very much, and as I recall it's one of the only songs on "Axe Victim" with keyboards (probably played by Bill Nelson).  You can bet the lyrics were written by Bill, a Yorkshireman with a waspish wit.  How does it go?  "In a rocket cathedral pointed at the sky" and I shall, capricious as ever, use the cover picture from a completely different album, ha!  Art?

     Whilst we're off on this tangent, BBD kept ahead of trends and weathered the change from classic progressive rock into New Wave; this became a bit of an issue for Bill, since a lot of his audiences wanted his older Flashy Guitar Hero stuff, rather than the more ensemble work from "Drastic Plastic" onwards with more emphasis on electronics and keyboards.  One imagines Pete Townsend experienced similar tr

     ANYWAY once again we have gone down a completely different rabbit hole and in fact it looks rather like a mole's burrow.  What we are meant to be referring to are GIGANTIC SPACE ROCKETS FROM SOUTH CANADA!

     Conrad, given that he is interested in space vehicles and space travel, is quite cross that he missed this news from 06/08/2021.  Art!

     Photographs courtesy of SpaceX.  Here you see the Super Heavy booster sitting on a launch pad, and the Starship vehicle being lofted by probably the world's tallest crane, and the two finally being mated NO SNIGGERING AT THE BACK! for a test fitting to make sure they can integrate properly.  I apologise that I cannot find any pictures that truly show how enormous this thing is compared to puny humans, but be advised that it is 400 feet high.  When finally launched later this year (fingers crossed!) it will be able to loft 100 tons of payload into orbit.  Art!

     To Conrad's eyes the Starship component of this assembly has a distinct element of "Dan Dare" to it, which is no bad thing.  The overarching idea, as with SpaceX's Falcon rockets, is to make both parts of the system re-cyclable, in order to cut down long-term costs.  The thing that makes me wonder how I ever missed such a news article is because this is the largest rocket ever assembled, taller, more massive and with twice the thrust of the admittedly enormous Saturn V.  Art!

     Remember, too, that all this SpaceX stuff is being achieved via private enterprise thanks to Elon Musk (Jeff Bezos and his sulky throwing toys out of pram lawsuits permitting).  Somewhere the ghost of Robert Heinlein is looking down and laughing.

     We cannot deploy the motley in any meaningful manner to test ballistics or acceleration or how insanely fast a rocket sled can go, because it's on bed-rest at the moment.  Fell off the skateboard whilst trying to - er - emulate an emu.  Not only that, it broke the heel on one of it's stiletto shoes.  Don't worry, I gave it a real rocket.

Contra Mortui Viventes!

We've not revisited how a Roman legion would face off against a zombie horde for a while, so permit me to indulge in my flight of fantasy again.  We've dealt with the individual troops and weapons a legion could bring to the fray, and had one of their heavier missile weapons analysed versus the living dead.  What we've not done is look at defensive works.  

     You see, if a legion expected to be attacked in situ, they would erect NO SNIGGERING AT THE BACK THERE! assorted defensive works, which, if Art will put down his plate -

     This is over-egging the pudding, rather, since it displays all the defences Caesar created for his siege of Alesia.  A legion, in creating it's own defences would only have one or two of these variations.  Let us look at them from starboard inwards.  First you have iron spikes knocked into a log, itself hammered into the ground.  Any zombie that trod on this would rip it's foot apart when trying to get free, meaning it would fall over.  And it's witless compatriots would then fall over it, creating a huge mound of immobile writhing undead.

Spice Girl fans

     Then the zeds have to contend with an array of sharpened sticks, also embedded into the earth, nice and solidly.  Once again they would impale themselves, and their compatriots would then walk over them en masse and crush them to a fetid pulp.  

     All this is gaining time for the garrison, who would have been alerted and massing for a counter-attack, whilst the zeds are confused and delayed.  If our hypothetical legion has any experience in combatting zombies then they may well have strung lines between these obstacles, from which hang cans of stones, which will act as an early-warning system.  Zombies not big on caution, you see.

"ZATOICHI": Yet another word that popped up into my mind earlier today, for not good reason.  At first I thought it was one of those words that cropped up in Cyberpunk which might have been recalled to life <Robert Silverberg reference for you there> because I'm reading the immensely long "Redemption Ark" sci-fi novel.  I know, I know, They like to call it "speculative fiction" and Conrad will continue to use his phrase because it annoys Them.  Art!

O what hilarious post-modern irony!

     Hmmmm.  It would seem that it's actually a long-running Japanese film and television franchise, about a blind swordsman.  There were something like a total of seventeen films and one hundred television episodes. and the whole subject is so sprawling and has so many whiskers that I can't be bothered to chase it all up.  I have pizza to eat, after all!  Art!

     Hmmmm.  Conrad wonders if "Mythbusters" ever tested the feasibility of a sightless swordsman?

Finally -

Conrad has about seven newspapers with cryptic crosswords and codewords in each to tackle, so I had better get moving and reduce the number.  However, I also have an even bigger Book Mountain to tackle than usual, given that I bought another six today (don't tell Wonder Wifey!), although none will remain in The Mansion long-term, because once Your Humble Scribe has read a murder mystery, there it no use retaining it.  Retentive memory, you see.  Why, it's many, many decades since I read "Too Many Magicians", an absolutely delightful locked-room mystery set in an alternative universe where magic is an everyday utility - and yet I still recall the solution.  Art!

My old edition.
Staying small for obvious reasons

     Well, Vulnavia, I think we've covered all the bases we need to cover.  All we need to do now is call a scrap metal merchant to collect the remains of those steam locomotives the motley saw off with The Mansion's PIAT.

Toodle pip!

We Dabble In Politics

Tangentially, I Might Add

The reason is that I've acquired a copy of "Fire And Fury" by Michael Wolff, as it had pride of place on the shelves of the British Heart Foundation charity shop in Babylon Lite this morning.  Conrad was also pleased to see the giant jigsaw crossword puzzle which he completed a few weeks ago on the shelves as well - Art!

Not, it has to be said, a very flattering photo

     From the author's use (after an extremely quick skim) of words like "gobsmacked" and "nutters", Your Humble Scribe suspects he may hail from This Sceptred Isle -

     ANYWAY, the blurb extract on the dust-jacket's reverse caught my attention, so allow me to add it in here: "Almost everybody in the Trump campaign thought of themselves as clear-eyed and realistic.  The unspoken agreement among them: not only would Donald Trump not be president, he should probably not be." Ouch!  If your own staff are thinking that ...

     The whole election campaign was seen by Trump himself as a priceless, prime-time, enormous publicity stunt that would boost his brand and allow him to create a television network.  And, asserts Wolff: "What's more, he was already laying down his public response to losing the election: It was stolen!"

Mike muses

     Bear in mind this book was published in 2018, long before -

     So Conrad can argue he's only delicately skirting the outskirts of politics.  We may come back to this, tiptoeing as daintily as an emu on a skateboard*.

     

CAUTION! Not to be confused with this

    Motley, we're going to gaffer-tape your arms behind your back, put you in stiletto heels and send you downhill on a skateboard.  Just to model an emu.  We like to be thorough.

Speaking Of Thorough ...

Apologies for going off at a tangent, but this is BOOJUM! and you can't really expect anything less.  Okay, remember that scene in "Suicide Squad" where Peacemaker is about to end Ratcatcher?  Art?

     Of course it has less gravitas than it ought to since he uses the erroneous South Canadian pronunciation.

     HOWEVER, Peacemaker, how thorough are you, really?   Art!

     SPOILERS AHEAD!

     STILL SPOILERS AHEAD!

     LAST WARNING ABOUT SPOILERS!

     Peacemaker gets into a fatal tussle with Flag, over a hard drive the latter removed from a bank of computers.  This hard drive is apparently crucially and critically important since it triggers the above brawl -

     Except just what are Flag's qualifications about computer technology?  Because we see him grasp a pair of handles on a piece of computer hardware and attempt to drag it open, unsuccessfully.  Then he pops that hard drive out.  So there's only a single hard drive for a bank of computers that spans a whole wall?  No secondary or back-up or daily download or a cache on a remote server?

     Colour Conrad un-convinced.  Art!

Some of you ain't coming back

BOOJUM! Reviews Films

And possibly television programs, too.  Don't forget our rules of engagement: we go solely by the title alone, unless we can also refer to a poster; we generalise hugely; we may ignore the first two rules if we feel like it**.  And we feel free to just make things up out of sheer creative malice.  Let the review rotisserie begin -

"SNAKE EYES": Sorry, herpetologists, the title is a misnomer as the bus poster features what looks like a chap in Asian dress, and because the colour palette is all dark and moody, one presumes the film is, too.  You tend not to get light and frothy comedies advertising themselves in shades of grey.  O I see he bears a couple of swords.  Martial art kung-fu fistery and choppery one presumes.  Art!

<Conrad yawned hugely>

"BLACK WIDOW": Let me guess, a sequel to "Black Panther" where his bereaved wifey takes up the uniform to carry on his legacy or somesuch, because she's such a strong independent character.  Or something.  Art!

     Yep, I called it absolutely spot on.  Not sure who the lady in white photobombing it in the background is.

"SHANG CHI": Your Humble Scribe could only see the title for this, as it was on a bus over fifty yards away, so any delicate nuances of design and marketing were completely lost.  Asian, obviously.  Chinese?  Made about China? In which case expect all possible criticisms of The Populous Dictatorship to be excised, so that it won't get banned.  Made in China?  In which case expect it to extol the sheer wonder of China from every pore.  Art!

     Cheap Tolkein knock-off, obviously.  Trying to egg the pudding, frankly.  From Marvel, hmmm, well Conrad has never heard of this chap and I doubt anyone else seeing it will have, either, so you've got an uphill struggle.

     I think that's enough incise film reviewing for one day.  If you want a proper film review, I recommend Mark Kermode.  Art!

Mark.  Looking rather shifty.

     Big fan of The Comsat Angels, as I never tire of reminding you.

That Bomb At The World's Fair 1940

You recall that yesterday we mentioned that "The Daily Beast" was pushing a conspiracy theory that the bomb in question (which killed two New York detectives) had actually been planted by the British themselves, in order to help drag South Canada into what had been solely a European engagement.  There are a few problems with this theory, as I shall expound about.

1)  The idea that Winston Churchill, the PM, would sanction an act like this is vanishingly remote.  'Let's get the Yanks on our side!  Go and kill some of them!' is not a viable game plan.  You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

2)  It's possible that the bomb was planted by the British, so they could throw their hands up in horror at the subsequent explosion and blame Un-Named Forces Who Were German.  In which case why not lock the room it was in, or hide it in a cupboard?  Very sloppy, chaps.  And the intent would have been to merely blow shizzle up, not kill South Canadian police; the unhappy reality would mean never ever owning up to the plot in the first place.

The British Pav.

3)  William Stephenson, British spymaster, has also been put in the cross-hairs as being responsible, because he was willing to kill for Perfidious Albion - so alleges TDB.  That's simply reaching; he killed for his King and country in the First Unpleasantness because he was a fighter pilot.  Note also that he was sent to New York on June 21st 1940, and would have taken time to arrive even if crossing the Atlantic by air.  Thus he would have had less than two weeks to get into his role as one of the most senior people in British Intelligence across the globe, and certainly the most important in the Americas, before said bomb went off.  So they allege he barely had time to take his shoes off before planning to bomb things?

4)  Perhaps the most important quibble of all: absolutely no evidence that Perfidious Albion had anything to do with it.  Nothing came up at the time, nor post-war, nor even after all those involved were long dead. No forensic evidence, no deathbed confessions and no lack of other suspects, either.  Bad TDB!  Naughty TDB!  No biscuit for you!

Finally -

Oooops, we've run on a bit!  And long surpassed the Compositional Ton.  Time to wave a cheery goodbye.

*  Yes, I mixed metaphors.  Sue me.

**  So I'm fickle.  Sue me.

I Should Apologise -

But I Won't

Because I have to keep my Horrid Meter at over 50%, don't you know.  I have apologised, occasionally, but this isn't going to be one of those occasions.

     To what misdirection, mistake or misapprehension do I refer?  Why, none other than leaving you with a mysterious photograph of an unidentified man in an article that had nothing to do with him (par for the course round here, mind).  Art!

  This, ladies and otherwise, is Alan "Fluff" Freeman, an Ocker who came to Perfidious Albion and became a notable and pioneering disk jockey.  His nickname was thanks to a fluffy sweater he was fond of wearing.  Now, his effusive and relentlessly positive style was mocked by some and parodies by others, including a version by Harry Enfield, entitled "Dave Nice", which, if Art will get off his carbon-smutted rear end -

     In fact Enfield had quite a bit of regard for Fluff, considering him one of the rarer type of DJs who liked music, not the sound of their own voice, and Sir John Peel also respected his DJ skillz (that is what the young folk say nowadays, isn't it?).  Also -

Erk.

     Yes, that's Harry spoofing Fluff whilst standing next to him.  Props to Fluff for not being remotely precious here.

     ANYWAY his catchphrase was "Not 'alf!" and I know this because he had a radio show on Saturday afternoons in the Seventies that was unmissable if you were into rock music, particularly progressive rock. It stood head and shoulders above all the tawdry daytime tat the BBC put out, at least in the opinion of Conrad, prog rock nerd.

Prog rock exemplar!

     So, there you have an explanation, at least, if nowhere near an apology.

     

Er - quite.  Just not the man Alan

     The motley?  Out stalking and hunting steam locomotives with a PIAT, since you asked.

Annotation About Revelation

Conrad is currently working his way through "Redemption Ark" by Alastair Reynolds, the geeky Welsh astronomer-cum-author, and if we wield the cattle-prod in a convincing manner, Art -

     This is a sequel of sorts to "Revelation Space", and a couple of mentions makes me wonder if I've read the prequel.  There is mention in RA of the post-death version of a human being re-created on the surface of neutron star's surface, which definitely rings a bell, and there can't be many novels where this happens.  There was also, in RS, a horribly punning reference to a set of lyrics from a song by Yes (more prog rock!), all about purple wolfhounds <sighs heavily> I suppose Conrad has no choice but to acquire a copy and re-read it, hmmm?  Art!

Alastair looking suitably smug

"Terry Talks Movies"

Indeed he does, and do you know what?  So do we.  Except we don't publicise the fact on Youtube.  Ol' Tel recently put up a list of 16 films that he'd been watching, in addition to his usual diet of genre fodder, and Conrad can comment on three of them, because I've seen them.  First up was "How I Became A Superhero" which I may have covered briefly already since I watched it only a few weeks ago, and am not going to explain accordingly.  Art!

French.  Still, not bad for all that.

     Secondly we have "The Quiet Earth" which is a film made by the Polite Australians.  A post-apocalyptic thriller, the plot centres on the literal handful of survivors who don't instantly vanish from the planet when an incredibly dangerous experiment in power generation goes badly awry.  Art!

     And the third film is "The Train" which is a terribly dull title for a film that's not dull at all.  It's a version of reality, wherein a French train full of stolen French art is going to be whisked off to Germany by the wicked Teutons, and the efforts of the Resistance to prevent same.  Art!

Burt of Lancaster being very stern

     Burt does his own stunts, which include jumping from the outside of a moving train, and the scenes where trains are wrecked - for real - are frighteningly effective.  Art!

What happens next will shock you*!

     I would recommend you check out his Youtube channel, as he does incisive reviews of films without being a pseud about them.  As if he would, he's an Ocker, I think there are state and federal laws against being a pseud down there.

     Enough with the reminiscing!  Let us boldly move onward and upward**!

That Bomb Explosion On 04/07/1940 Redux

If you recall, there had been a bomb planted in the British Pavilion of the World's Fair, which had been taken outside and which was being examined when it detonated, instantly killing two New York detectives who were trying to investigate what they were dealing with.

     Grim enough.  Despite the NY police leaning heavily on every possible plausible subject, the bomber was never caught, which has doubtless led to endless conspiracy theories.  One that "The Daily Beast" looked at four years ago was that the British themselves were the culprits.  Ah, Perfidious Albion, just look at how perfidious they are!

     This seems to be based on the British not rolling over and allowing all their security staff to be interviewed immediately they were asked: "permission was not freely granted".  Yes, which would foster suspicion of an inside job straight away, wouldn't it?  Conrad has no idea if this reticence was compared against other pavilions belonging to other countries.  

     Then there is William Stephenson ...

The inspiration for this chap, apparently

     We shall come back to this, O yes indeedy Ally Sheedy!

     

     I just heard an enormous explosion outside, and the chandeliers are swaying slightly - I think the motley scored a direct hit with the PIAT!

Finally -

Conrad is unsure why his notebook has an entry from yesterday about "Angry Ruffians" yet there it is.  Of course, your average Ruffian has a lot to be angry about, probably most of all that the rest of the world doesn't love them enough, and secondly that Tsar Putin seems determined to turn the clock back to 1975, and thirdly that it's not so easy to fly to This Sceptred Isle and do a P. G. Wodehouse scenic tour.

     I dunno.  Perhaps it'll come to me later on after a brandy or two.

Ruffian brandy.  It is a thing.

     Right, I'd better go call a scrap metal merchant and see if they collect.  Later!

*  Or not.  One of the two.

**  Not outward.  I am quite large enough already.

An Unholy Amalgam

Ah, Yes, "Amalgam"

Back in the day this word used to refer to the metallic combination as used by dentists, that being mercury and silver.  Conrad is somewhat worried that orthodontic surgery would be carried out by using two heavy metals not known for their benificent action upon human physiology.

Norin Radd being totally bad

     Hmmm not sure I'd trust him with a drill and scalpel.  Today we use this word more in the sense of "alloy" than anything else.

     ANYWAY none of that has to do with our current Intro.  Cast your minds back (if you have minds in the first place) to 2013, when BOOJUM! erupted onto the internet, declaring that we would boldly and nobly deal with issues of tanks, atom bombs, zombies and astronomy.  I think there were some cuddly critters that we lied about at the time, too except I cannot be bothered to do the digging required to confirm this. 

BOOJUM! circa 2013

     Let us now explore astronomical object LP 40-365, which Conrad only picked up because "The Daily Beast" broadcast about it in the most tabloid of terms: 

     You cannot deny that this combines both zombies and astronomy.  Whether it is true or not - hmmmmm that remains to be seen.

     Being all scientific and shizzle, it would seem that LP (which we will use in the interests of brevity) is the result of two other, considerably more massive, stars colliding.  Instead of the anticipated mutual annihilation what we got was a giant fragment of the originals being ejected into space at Silly Speeds.  Art!

The launch-pad

     LP is unusual because of it's chemical composition.  Normal stars are composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, the two lightest elements, but LP has no hydrogen or helium, and instead consists entirely of metallic elements such as iron and nickel.  This may well be thanks to it being the child of a supernova.  Which has also boosted it's velocity to hitherto-unheard of lengths, at about, oooh, let us say two million miles per hour.

      "These are very weird stars" said an astronomer, and - you know what?  He's right.  Nor is LP the only one of it's kind, since there are another 4 stars of a similar composition that have been detected.  The Universe; not only is it stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can possibly imagine.  Weird scenes inside the gold mine?  Weirder ones outside the galaxy!

Jim!  Put some clothes on!

     Motley, shall we see if you can outpace this stellar remnant by boosting you on a rocket sled?  

Another Blast From A Very Distant Past

Conrad is reading the biography of Nigel Kneale, which is entitled "Into The Unknown" and jolly interesting it is, too.  Kneale, lest you be unaware, spent his formative years on the Isle Of Man, a kind of free-floating polyp in the Irish Sea that has traditionally been ignored by all and sundry, thus allowing it to develop it's very own culture and mythology.  Echoes of same are found throughout Kneale's works; the theme of ancient mythology affecting stolid twentieth century folks finds it's apotheosis in "Quatermass And The Pit" which is one of the creepiest sci-fi television programs ever made, despite being over sixty years old.  Art!

     The text also mentions a couple of Manx mythical monsters, one being the Boggane, which brought up absolutely 0% results from Google, the other being the Phynnodderee, which brought up the above, and you can make all the jokes you like about spirits.  That's the trouble, you see: Manx has it's own dialect if not language, so translating causes problems.

     Hmmmmmm yes, one doubts that the monsters of antiquity were quite so comely and connubial*. 

     We shall be coming back to this topic in future OH YES INDEED because Mister Kneale was an influential chap.  Not half.

Our Complicated Cousins

Those one across The Pond, you know: South Canadians.  As Conrad has pointed out before, we here in Perfidious Albion - and probably our far-flung Dominions too, with the exception of the British Americans - hug the fond illusion that we know their society inside and out because we happen to speak a version of the same mother tongue (except ours is the better).  Not so.  Not so at all.  I have explained this in depth with the Bureau of Reclamations, yet backing up a little in the federal hierarchy brings us to the over-arching federal administration of -

     The Department of the Interior.  This seems to be a kind of administrative dustbin, where any agency they can't decide about gets lodged.  It covers several million square miles of South Canadian federal territory, and includes: the National Parks Service (nothing to do with cars and lots); the Fish and Wildlife Service; the Bureau of Indian Affairs (?); the Bureau of Land Management; the U.S Geological Survey and the Office of Insular Affairs.

The office in question

     That, I'm afraid, only scratches the surface.  Rest assured, watching "All In The Family" or "Archie Bunker" does not equip you to adequately understand this nation in depth.  Tsar Putin is now kicking himself at this point.  Sorry, Dimya, watching every episode of "Friends" does not an expert make!

Finally -

If you have a memory beyond that of a goldfish then you recall that Conrad has been whanging on about dirty tricks afoot at the South Canadian World's Fair of 1940, where a time-bomb left in the British Pavilion was discovered and (rather ham-fistedly) dealt with by the local police, leading to the death of two detectives involved.  There are rather a lot of loose ends associated with this case, one of which has to be, what was the protocol at the time for dealing with time-bombs?  Ignore the fact that there was a finite amount of time elapsed before the infernal device went off, rendering all around it most stonily dead?  Not that this eventuality had prevented the Bomb Squad from carrying the bomb past a host of spectators at the event -

"Paging Mister Freud - paging Mister Freud"

*  Yes it's a proper word.  No, I'm not going to define it for you.