Privirea Aspra A Duminicii

Which, Of Course - Obviously! - Is Romanian

For "Sunday's Sternward Glance", because it gets rather boring saying it in English all the time.  Art!

     There's Romania.  Surrounded by the Slavic-speaking nations of Bulgaria (not named here but to the south), Serbia, Ukraine (un-named but to the north), Serbia and Moldova, and the Magyar-speakers of Hungary.  Yet Romanians speak what is obviously a Romance language, similar in appearance to Italian.  How did that come about?  Art!

Wider Europa circa 600AD

     It's a holdover from the Latin used in this region when it was part of the Roman Empire, which is why it has a 77% commonality with Italian.  

     Pretty obviously this could be a whole blog on it's own, which it's not supposed to be, as it's the short Intro to a retrospective post.  Better get them links posted.  Or, 'Mai bine puneti-le link-uri postate', if you will.

2023

BOOJUM!: The Fantastic Iconoclastic (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2022

BOOJUM!: Interview With A Vampire (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2021

BOOJUM!: A Rosin By Any Other Name (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2020

BOOJUM!: Nice Weather For DUKWs (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2019

BOOJUM!: Ray Bradbury! (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2018

BOOJUM!: A Word About Cross (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2017

BOOJUM!: The View From The Rabbithole (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2016

BOOJUM!: Rain Pain. AGAIN! (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2015

BOOJUM!: Mashed Potato. For BREAKFAST? (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2014

BOOJUM!: Practicing - To Take Over The World! (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2013

BOOJUM!: China - is it The Right Stuff? (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

Still Boiling

Let's Hope The Humourless Koobecaf Mods Don't Read This

ANYWAY - which is unusual, starting with what usually crops up as a break in my train of thought later in the Intro - there I was, walking Edna and experiencing a little 'Thinking Time', because there are a lot fewer distractions on Tandle Hill Avenue than in my Sekrit Layr.  

     "How can I work in more contemporary argot from "The Long Goodbye"?" I pondered.  Only in thought-conversation to myself, it doesn't do to get passers-by spooked by having a talk with oneself.  A lesson learned years ago on the bus.  Art!

The opposite of standing still

     Yes, that's a B-52 on take-off, because it's a lot more dramatic than a 409 bus.  Their nickname is "BUFF" which is an acronym of "Big Ugly Fat Fella" and t

     ANYWAY (and an ANYWAY in the right place) my thoughts ran along the lines of "Still Being Hard Boiled" and then, of course - obviously! - I got to wondering exactly what a 'Still' is.  Let us consult my very best friend, the Collins Concise Dictionary.  "An apparatus for carrying out distillation, used especially in the manufacture of spirits."  From the Old French 'Stiller' meaning 'To drip' which in turn came from the Latin <hack spit> 'Stillare' from 'Stilla', meaning 'Drip'.  Art!

     This is known in the trade as a 'Pot still' and you may wonder why, as it's pretty obviously made of copper, not china.

     It's the shape.  This can affect the taste of whatever it's distilling; in the picture above that would be whisky.

     How does it work?  I'm going to be concise here, because there are undoubtedly whole libraries on the distillation of whisky, never mind brandy and other spirits, and this is just the tangential part of the Intro.  Art!

     A low-alcohol content base is added to the still, where it is heated sufficiently that the alcohol boils off.  This is moved via tubing into condensing chambers where the spirits, now high in alcohol content, can be collected as a liquid.

     Sounds simple, right?  WRONG!  There are potentially toxic distillates generated at the beginning and end of the process, ethanol and methanol, which can cause blindness or death.  This is one reason law enforcement agencies look upon illegal stills with considerable disfavour, quite apart from the tax factor.

     Now that we know how the spirits that Philip Marlowe consumes far too much of are made, let us carry on with my clinical dissection of the contemporary argot employed by Raymond Chandler.

PHILO VANCE: I wrote this down so presume Ol' Phil was thinking along the lines of his fictional competition, which is pretty meta- for 1953.  Art!

     Philo, the creation of one S. S. Van Dine, was a stylish New York playboy, with an intellectual bent, who solved crimes, presumably to keep himself from getting bored.  He sounds like a South Canadian version of Lord Peter Wimsey.  His erudition involves knowledge of chess, which leads to -

STEINITZ VERSUS FRENCH DEFENCE; RUY LOPEZ: Marlowe's three hobbies by the time of TLG appear to be drinking, watching television and playing chess, the latter two also usually involving drinking.  'Steinitz' rings distant bells as being a famous chess-player.  Art!

Splendid beard, dude

     Minimal digging required; yes, Ol' Steinie was an extremely able and influential professional chess-player, ruling supreme for 30 years.

     Ruy?  He hails from the sixteenth century and was the first modern chess analyst and theoretician.  His name is given to an opening gambit.

TERTIAN AGUE: A term used by Phil's mate Terry, which again is not a term I've ever heard used before.  Since Terry seems to have knocked about in This Sceptred Isle and picked up several English mannerisms, he may have come across the term here.  It was used in reference to what we'd call 'Malaria', which used to be endemic in Perfidious Albion.  Terry was referring to the nature of the disease, the symptoms of which can vanish abruptly and then re-appear.  Art!

Killed by a 'Tertian Ague'

FRANK MERRIWELL: A name I'd never encountered before, mostly because I wasn't alive in the years up to 1930.  Another meta-reference, Frank is the very standard of clean-living manliness and decency, being an outstanding sportsman in many fields, as well as being teetotal and abhoring tobacco.  He was the fictional creation of Burt L. Standish and appeared in hundreds of dime novels.  Art!

" - Delilah!"

     Let me inform you that I'm about half-way through TLG and Ol' Phil, who never met an alcoholic drink he didn't like, has found the missing author.  That can't be IT, because there's still half a novel to go.  So, who did murder Mrs Lennox?  These things have a way of connecting up, so we shall see, we shall see.

     Also, I suspect Phil only watches television because it gives him another source to violently dislike.

This Is Most Annoying

I was singing the artistic praises of Bernie Wrightson, who is no longer with us, and came across a splendid collection of his various artworks on the "Print" website.  They have an opening screed and then a long collection of images, WHICH THEY DON'T IDENTIFY.  Some are self-explanatory, being comic book covers or Intro art or are identifiable as being from "Frankenstein", but some are bafflingly hard to identify.  Art!

     Not even a date.  Hang on, let me reverse-image search this one - HAH!

Bernie Wrightson - Badtime Stories - "The Last Hunters" Page 2 (Graphic Masters, 1972). One of Bernie Wrightson's best early stories, it was the lead story in Bernie's first big solo effort, Badtime Stories. This was easily the best story in that desirable and hard-to-find book that was written, penciled and inked by the master. The original artwork, was created in ink-wash on Craftint board and has an approximate image of 12" x 17." Bernie added his signature on the bottom margin, and the story is dated 1971.

     Okay, old dog's still got a few tricks in him.

SHARKS ARE OUR FRIENDS!

I will keep ploughing this lonely furrow.  Sharks are the hoover of the seas, and we repay them by killing them by the million, especially the Chinese and their Dog Bins! demand for Shark Fin Soup.  Seriously.  Go look it up.  Art!

     Truth be told, sharks do NOT like the taste of Hom. Sap.  Marine scientists have noted that they will spit out any bits of human they had a go at, and will very likely never attack a human again.  The trouble is, mind you, that a shark's bite radius is so large that what the shark deems 'an investigative nibble' means 'several pounds of missing me-meat' for the unfortunate victim, and quite possibly death.

      Which is still rare.  On average two people die per week, globally, in shark attacks.  On average, 10 people die every year in the Grand Canyon National Park, so there.

DOG BUNS!

Edge just updated my browser, WITHOUT ASKING, meaning I've lost all my tabs that I had open, and it's not offering a 'Restore' option either.  Fortunately for the laptop it had saved Blogger, or I'd be applying the Windowsill treatment.  This is where you shut the laptop, grasp it firmly in both hands and apply it with as much force as you can muster to a solid (preferably stone) windowsill.  The South Canadians have other options.  Art!

Small Earthquake In Chilé

I offer this as proof of the embarrassed state of the Ruffian Navy.  One third of their Black Sea Fleet is now decorating the bottom of the Black Sea, their other warships have abandoned Sevastopol and they're not safe even in the Sea Of Azov.

     So, what do you do when so thoroughly discredited?  Art!

     "Warships" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.  One ship is a patrol boat, so borderline 'war', one is a training ship and the third is a tanker to fuel the other two.  These must be modern ships because there's no sea-going tug in case of breakdowns. 

     Do you want to see a bunch of real warships?  Art!

     This is a South Canadian carrier strike group.  I count seventeen major warships and four minor, and you can't see the submarine component.  The South Canadians have six of these constellations.

Finally -

Since it looked to be like a hot day, I've already walked Edna this morning, before temperatures got too high, and SURPRISE! there were no other dogs about.

From The Doctor To The Food Of The Dogs

NO!  Not That Doctor, This Doctor - 

Theodore Geisel.  I admit I'm cheating here, I omitted his middle name, which would have given the game away immediately, as he wrote under the pen-name 'Doctor Seuss'.  He was a pretty bright character who went to Oxford University, intending to graduate in Philosophy, until his then-girlfriend persuaded him to go into art as a career.  Art!

We'll get back to this, honest

     Rather than starving in a garrett, Seuss went on to become one of the best-known and most successful authors of children's books, ever, selling 600 million of them.  Small Conrad even had a couple of them; I wasn't wild about the storylines but the bonkers artwork with wild landscapes was a winner.

     And so to the work illustrated above.  It's been at least fifty-five years since I last read it, so the details are a bit hazy for which I hope you'll forgive me.  You don't have to, I'm horrid like that.  Art!

     This is the nameless hero, whom hails from the Valley of Vung.  Until the day in question, their life had been free from troubles, until they tripped over a rock.  Then the aggressive and hostile wildlife started attacking.  I've had days like that.  

     ANYWAY a chap on a passing uniwheel camel-cart suggest Our Hero tag along to the city of Solla Sollew, where they have no troubles at all.  He immediately qualifies this with ' - or very few', which causes Conrad to cynically cock an eyebrow, since who is judging trouble-rates and how?  Art!

     

     Of course - obviously! - OH has to endure frightful hazards and tribulations en route to Solla Sollew, because even in children's books you have to have a sense of dramatic tension and struggle against the odds.  Eventually, after a very long journey, OH reaches Solla Sollew.  Art!

Ducks, geese or swans?  Only you can tell!

     There is, inevitably as sunset, a fly in the ointment.  You see, in an epic design fail, there is only one door into  the city of Solla Sollew -

     HOLD IT RIGHT THERE!  What about fire and emergency access regulations?  How can you evacuate the populace in case of an event such as earthquake or hurricane?  The Health & Safety Executive want a word with whoever signed off on this city's design!

     - which is locked.  Not only is it locked - Art!

     This piker has taken up residence in the lock and won't permit any entry.

     Let us now abruptly change tack and focus instead on Facebook, because everyone likes a laugh at their expense.

     You see, in October 2021, FB had an IT problem that took Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp offline.  The reason was fabulously boring; all you need to know is that it cut off FB from teh Interwebz.  Art!

     To fix the problem, the FB IT trouble-shooters needed access to the relevant servers, which were housed in FB HQ.  This is situated in Menlo, California, South Canada.  Art!

Not shy

     Here is where we come across the "I Had Trouble Getting To Solla Sollew" issue, because FB ran all it's systems and utilities on the FB internal software architecture.  Thus, the IT technicians couldn't get access to the building because their ID cards didn't work, thanks to FB not working.

     Essentially, their key was broken off in the lock.

     There's no resolution in the story that I picked this up from, but one can expect the doors to have been jemmied or otherwise jacked open to allow access, with such physical action required all the way to the server room, and NO use of the lifts either, just in case.  One would imagine either a separate emergency access portal being built that did not require FB to recognise ID cards, or an emergency system over-ride that allowed doors to be opened if presented with a special limited-issue ID card.  Art!

     There is an industry phrase for being this confident about using your own products and software: "Eating your own dogfood".  Conrad, knowing that dogs will eat anything that fits into their gaping maws, including the contents of the cat's litter tray, is not overly impressed.  Art!

    Give yourself fifty brownie points if you thought this was going to be mentioned in a riff on the title.

     I'm sure some of you are curious, so here's the resolution OH came to.  Art!

Traffic Graphic

Conrad has, for the past couple of months, been doing a lot of posting on Twitter, usually snarky, pithy or sly puns on other people's Tweets.  This has coincided with a very significant uptick in traffic on my blog, which is quite understandable; people read or Follow and end up clicking on the daily links I post.

     However - second use today - I am beginning to wonder.  Art!

     Is the flattering yet deceptive Blogger traffic algorithm getting silly again?  It's not at the zenith or nadir of what it was earlier this year, with 23,000 people hitting the blog.  

     Perhaps - perhaps this middle-aged curmudgeon with his own argot and jaundiced weltanschaung is actually that popular?
     

     Nah.

A Blast From The Past

Conrad was recently binning a load of old work A4 papers that I'd got daily traffic stats on, alongside various notes of surgery addresses, home post codes and other guff that will never see the light of day.  Data Protection, you see.

     I also found 'Bernie Wrightson' scribbled on a page.  This is what I do when working and an idea for blog content hits the brain; write it down on my work notebook.

     We've featured one or two of Bernie's artworks in the past.  He is a master of inked detail, as I shall shortly prove.  Art!

     I can't find any attribution to this picture, although given the size and detail, is may be from his "Frankenstein" graphic novel, because this level of detail is impossible for a comic to sustain given time and publishing demands.  If you take 14 days to complete a single panel - there's the exit door.  Art!

     Be advised we will be returning to Ol' Bernie.

Someone Is Having A Bad Hair Day

We have mentioned Elvira Nabuillina in the past.  She is the head of the Ruffian Central Bank, and to give the lady credit, she tried to resign on day one of the Special Idiotic Operation.  Having your life or family threatened by The Little Tsar got her back on track; this only gets you so far.  Art!

     No, she doesn't look happy.  Under her aegis, the Ruffian interest rate was raised on Friday to 18% in order to try and get inflation under control.  She also stated that there is no more excess labour or production capacity left in the system any longer.  

     The FSB recently murdered an 82-year old woman, who was an economist, for no obvious reason except, perhaps, to demonstrate to Elvira what her future looks like.  O I beg your pardon - she 'fell out of a window'.

Is This A Plot Hole?

Hopefully this isn't giving too much of the plot away.  Yes, it concerns "The Long Goodbye".  Philip Marlowe, through A Convenient Literary Convention, had gotten hold of the names and addresses of three doctors whose last name begins with "V".

     He goes and has a chat with each of them, seeing if they might be treating a patient he's been hired to look for.  Art!

     Hmmmm.  What about doctor-patient confidentiality?  If they were in possession of said patient, they'd deny it.  If they didn't have him on the premises they'd still deny it.  None of the three have so far mentioned doctor-patient confidentiality, which is an issue Conrad deals with on a daily basis.

Finally -

Weather, thou treacherous jade!  Conrad walked into Lesser Sodom this afternoon, wearing a coat because it had started spitting when I set out.  The spitting continued for a short while, then absented itself, leaving me sweating under a coat so much I would have been drier not wearing it.  NOW - now the skies are clearing and there is blue and sunshine.

     Bah!

Timed Travel

Greetings, Pilgrims!

First of all, I did think it was taking rather longer than it ought to in order to attain the Word Count Total of 1,200 words at minimum.  This was the total when I was adding in an excerpt from my fan-fiction of about 200 words on top of the initial aim of 1,000 words.  Everybody loved the excerpt because nobody complained about it, which is how I'm interpreting things.  So the revised total sans excerpt should have been 1,000 words, not 1,200.

     Well, nobody complained about it.  Art!

     

     I think I've seen this and was favourably impressed.  Elliot Gould is a lot closer to Philip Marlowe than some who took the role (barring Bogart, I won't have a bad word said about him).

     O what is happening! I hear you witter.  Leading into the Intro without a tangential blather first?  Art!

     Well done FB mods, it's only taken you 13 years to discover BOOJUM!s modus operandi.  I did appeal against their decision and nobody's gotten back to me yet.  Gosh!  Isn't life full of little surprises.

     ANYWAY what do I mean by 'Timed Travel'?  Simply that TLG, which I am now reading, has definitively moved on from the pre-war novels preceding it, since it came out in 1953 and reflects that.  For one thing, Ol' Phil watches boxing on a television set.  For another, a minor character relates a military anecdote about their time at the front line in lots of snow, so that was either Italy or the Ardennes.  Whichever, the Second Unpleasantness has been and gone.  No mention of the Korean Unpleasantness so far.  Art!

     This is Santa Monica in 1940.  Why does that matter?  Because Raymond Chandler didn't want to rock the boat too much when describing this famously corrupt area, where everyone was on the take.  So, he dubbed it 'Bay City' instead.  As an example, in "Farewell, My Lovely" the gangster Burnette buys the mayor for $30,000.  Not to run Bay City, simply to ensure his water taxi service that runs to the floating casinos beyond the three-mile limit are not troubled by police or anyone else.

     Let us continue with the deconstruction of the temple.

ROLLS-ROYCE SILVER WRAITH: Yes, a car.  Being RR, it will have been large and very expensive.  Art!

     That's a 1952 iteration, yours today for only £64,000.  They seem to hold their market value, don't they?  Phil makes the acquaintance of Terry when the latter is unable to get in or out of his ex's RRSW.  Alcohol was involved.

JOWETT JUPITER: I had never heard of this vehicle before, so author and audience alike are going to be making a discovery.  Art!

     The epitome of a sporty little number, hmmm?  The blurb under the picture for this one is:

     There were only 900 of these made, which is why they're rare.  I shan't go into detail as cars are Not My Thing, merely to note that the car used a sports-spec engine with a commercial chassis, and it could get up to 86 m.p.h.  and that, like the RRSW, it hailed from This Sceptred Isle.

SPUMONI: From the context, this is food, though I wouldn't hurry to eat something pronounced 'Spew-'in the first syllable.  Once again I have no idea what it is in real life, so let us explore.  Art!

     From the accompanying blurb, this is an Italian-American ice cream dessert.  Go on then, taunt me with what I cannot have.  Unless there's a sugar-free recipe?  Hmmm I feel a recipe trawl coming on.

JUDAS WINDOW: I hadn't heard of this particular item, either.  Doing a quick Google brought up - O irony of ironies! - what they called a famous 'locked room mystery' by John Dickson Carr.  Art!

That's his pseudonym

     A bit of a red herring.  Doing a bit more digging, and resisting the urge to read about TJW, I discovered that a 'Judas Window' is a very small window let into a larger door, for the purpose of looking into (or less frequently out of) a room.  Art!

     It often comes with a movable cover to restrict access.  So now we know.

     Thinking on, Conrad realises he's read or heard an account of a fake death in Mexico.  Mexico, you see, is where Terry, Phil's absconding mate, ends up dead.  Or does he?  I may find out in the next 200 pages.

If You Are Feeling Generous

Or even if not, and you merely feel guilty at having lots of money in the bank making lots more money in the bank, let me acquaint you with a fund-raiser promoted by the Twitter user "Seveer of the 95th Rifles".

http://Buymeacoffee.com/atlasglobalaid

https://atlasglobalaid.org Please comment when you donate with 'car' or 'vehicle'

     Sevvy is looking to purchase a car for medevac work in Ukraine.  Art!

     Don't ask me what kind it is, I already told you cars are Not My Thing.  A 4x4 that can off-road?

     Because I am feeling generous, a donation will keep you out of the organ banks when I take over.  The uranium mines, however, are still an option.

A Little Inter-Service Rivalry

Twitter is proving to be a source of content generation today.  I came across this Tweet and made a copy so I could post it on the blog.  Art!

     The implication being that the Army, Navy and Marines are all far too gung-ho and physical, whilst the Brylcreem Boys are a lot more civilised.

     This made me recollect the amusing anecdote from our South Canadian cousins about the difference between their armed forces.  To wit:

U S Army - The Army would secure a building by locking all doors, put bars on the windows, and establish one entrance with a guard post and armed guards and carefully check the IDs of all personnel who try to enter.

U S Navy - The Navy would secure a building by swabbing all decks, turn off all coffee pots, turn off all lights, lock all office doors, and lock all entrances as they leave the building.

U S Marines - The Marines would secure a building by assaulting it with a combined arms team, breaking into all interior rooms, shooting all resistance, and planting demolition charges as they evacuate in an orderly manner. They would then level the building to prevent further enemy use.

U S Air Force - The Air Force would secure a building by having the Base Contracting Officer negotiate a three-year lease with a option to purchase.

     It seems the fly-boys are regarded in exactly the same manner on both sides of The Pond.

Talking Of Fly-Boys -

Again thanks to Twitter, and whoever put up this short video clip of a monster aircraft coming in to land.  Art!

     There's nothing to scale it against, thanks to it being in the sky, except possibly that other plane in the background, but this thing is not nicknamed "Roc" for nothing.  Art!

     With puny humans for scale.  It's 238 feet long, has a wingspan of 385 feet and comes in at 225 tons.  The idea was to use it to air-launch space vehicles as a non-expendable platform, which it never got to manage.  BUT in an alternate universe, a craft like this would have been ideal to help construct "Arcology One", nicht wahr?

Finally -

Apparently the Olympics have begun in Paris.   Your Humble Scribe, who is as uninterested in sport as he is in fashion or ballfoot, only became vaguely aware that this even was happening a couple of weeks ago.

     Rest assured, we will ignore it as comprehensively as possible.

     O I take it that the Yuro Ballfoot event is now over?  Answers in the Comments please.

Leave It!

As We All Know, Conrad Is The Sole Of Discretion

Because we all know he tries to avoid putting his foot in it, as a size 11 makes quite the imprint.

     So, when I discussed work conditions or recounted hilarious stories from the Co-Op or Sainsbo's, I never mentioned their names on BOOJUM! or posted pictures that would have identified the location, unless you worked there.  Art!

The Electric Goldfish Bowl

     Thus I am not going to identify my current employer, who are a global player with a significant presence in South Canada, under a different identity.  See where trying to track that down gets you.

     Now, onto the subject of today's title: leave.  Also known as holiday, or, across The Pond, vacation.  Which we here in This Sceptred Isle get a lot more of than they do, HAR HAR.  See?  One of the benefits of being part of the Commonwealth.

    ANYWAY Because I am Conrad and curious about etymology, I looked up 'Leave' and discovered that it hails from <drum roll, cymbal crash> Old English and 'Leaf' which in turn derives from 'Alyfan', meaning 'To permit'.  Art!    

     Leave is a bit of a dull subject, so I thought I'd spice it up with a picture of the Valkyrie XB-70, which is one of those planes that look fast whilst standing still.  Sinister defence planners probably wet themselves in fear just looking at it, wh

     ANYWAY AGAIN, under Serco we used a system known as "Teleopti" to work out leave, in terms of entitlement and amount taken.  Art!

     It had a handy Aggregate function for our team, where you could see who was due in at what time, and when a person wasn't on Teleopti any longer, you knew they'd been fired.  None of that 'let go' euphemism here!

     Shifting to the here and now, currently we wage-slaves have to use a 'Work Force Management' system to view our schedules, whilst using different software to request leave, and Planning (for which read 'HR') use a third system to track leave.

     Or not.  For Conrad, entitled to 20 days leave*, had taken 7 and wanted another 5 off in August.  Leaving a residuum of 8.  Right?

     WRONG!  Planning thought I only had 3 days leave left.  Art!

     Surprise surprise, guess who also has problems with leave systems tracking correctly?  Perhaps this has been resolved by now, the article I'm taking this info from is three years old, but perhaps not because resolving it would cost $$$.

     The "New York Times" did a bit of a dig about this and found that Amazon's leave systems were a hotchpotch of different databases acquired at different times from different vendors, none of which were compatible with each other.  This is what happens in businesses that simply evolve rather than plan ahead.  There were instances of staff being fired whilst on leave because the systems thought they had been 'let go'; other staff on maternity leave had their formally-agreed pay cut thanks to be on unauthorised absence; one employee, poor beggar, had to sell his wedding ring when his disability payments simply stopped.  They probably thought he was dead.  Art!

     The resolution?  Rather than bring in a new, holistic, universally applicable leave database, they went for a cheap interim work-around, namely to employ 67 full-time staff to do nothing but input leave data.  The rumour goes that this work is both boring and stressful, a winning combination! that results in them not merely taking leave but leaving altogether.
     Hmmm, it makes Your Humble Scribe O! so proud to be treading in the footsteps of mighty Amazon.  O no wait a minute no it doesn't.

The Proof Of The Pudding

Is it in the eating?  I beg to differ, because if your pudding was called the "Snot And Gravel Dumpling" I don't think you'd bother consuming it.  I remember this topic coming up in "Anne Of Green Gables" where Anne contested the Barf Of Avon's assertion that "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet", pithily declaring that it wouldn't if it had been christened the "Lesser Stinkwort".  She gets my vote, that gel.  Stick it to the Barb!

     ANYWAY I digress, as I often do.  Art!

     Colour me unsurprised that it hadn't been purchased until it was down to 10% of the original price.  Conrad likes cauliflower, in moderation.  I just don't think pushing it in Coronation flavour is going to get anywhere.

Slumpy Trumpy

Yes, we mentioned him yesterday, and we're going to mention him today.  More specifically, the stock market value of his 'Trump Management & Technology Group'.  Art!

     The price shot up after his ear scratch, if you'll forgive the pun, and it only appears so on the 15th because there's no trading over weekends.  Thanks to speculators thinking nothing can stop his shuffling into the White House.  Thus Somnolent Joe withdraws at the weekend and on Monday 22nd July the stock value plummets.  Speculators now desperately trying to dump stock before it becomes worthless. It'll be interesting to see how rapidly it dwindles and to what level.

     Bring on the popcorn!

"The War Illustrated Edition 190"

Out of sheer good taste I've not been doubling-up with any of Roy Cross' martial artwork, because yes Vulnavia you jolly well can have too much of a good thing.  Art!

     Here we have one of the lesser-known military units of Perfidious Albion: the Royal Air Force Regiment.  These are soldiers in the service of the Brylcreem Boys, whose principal task, now as then, was the protection of British airfields, airplanes and airmen.  This makes sense as why skim off men from the Army then the blue jobs can do it instead?  The photo at upper port shows them at their debut in North Africa, where they captured the Teuton airfields at Daba and Fuka NO SNIGGERING AT THE BACK and took a couple of hundred prisoners, who were probably very upset that it was airmen who'd done the doing.

     At starboard you can see the extremely unlovely environs of the Imphal Valley in Burma, with RAF Regt. officers have a nosey and having the lie of the land pointed out to them.

     At bottom one of the old reliable picture tropes: How Many Men Are Hiding Here?  Ten of 'em is the answer, all Regt members.

Here's A Question

One thing that the 'Deadpool' films have is a hefty dose of cynicism, mixed in with a lot of snoot-cocking at Political Correctness, which is why people like them.  Art!

     I very much doubt it, as they've been making terrible turkeys recently, losing possibly $1.5 billion (okay, that was the whole of Disney) over 2023 thanks to thoroughly bad films that nobody asked for nor went to see.  A single film isn't going to turn that financial sink-hole into a money mountain.

     I'm having a look at the Comments and poor old Marvel (and Disney).  People don't seem to like them very much and a consensus seems to be that they should have stopped at "Avengers: Endgame", which was a colossal critical and commercial success.  Instead we have the going-to-the-well-too-often symptoms showing up (Cont. Page 94)

Finally -

It's really not the weather for porridge of a morning, so today I improvised a bowl of muesli.  Oats, sliced almonds, currants and chopped dates, and it went down rather well, apart from there being about twice as much as there needed to be.  I may try this again tomorrow, and see if those frozen blueberries are still around.

     Just to let you know that we've hit over 1,200 words without having a big chunk of fan-fiction in the mix.  In fact - shouldn't I have only been aiming for 1,000 words?  Ooops.

*  HAR HAR