Short wave.

The Short Wave mystery is book 24 or book 52 of the original Hardy boys canon depending on your region.

It involves audacious thefts and stuffed animals and an eventual showdown in Canada, with the ring leader.  It also deviates harshly depending on the version you got.  The original actually explains the outcome much better than the rewrite does.  Essentially giving the Hardys a reason to go to Canada rather than the boys going after the crook in the last chapter.  Also as the boys never graduate in the rewrites, they have to find ways to be excused from school. Rather than work for their dad, Fenton in the original.

There are some main cross over points common to both stories, though. A mansion, an auction, a "deerly" departed deer, that Chet Morton stuffs and mounts and is then stiffed out of $10 by a crook, and a raid on an electrical factory complete with a code over the wireless.

There's a nice parallel with gaming culture in the original text, with Aunt Gertrude moaning about short wave vs regular radio, and that the boys are spending too much time up in their room on their short wave sets.  Essentially pulling an all nighter, but 1940's style instead of gaming to the early hours.

Another thing not commented on in the rewrite,and this maybe exclusive to the UK version, is the sheer amount of typos in the text. I think they gave the proof reader, a day off, as they are quite extensive.

This includes, at the most nit picky, stray quote marks attributed to non quotable text and spaces before full stops, to really major stuff, including Chet Morton being called chest at one point, and Jimmy Gordon's mum being misgendered at one point (himself rather than herself.) The original PDF text I had also misses out two pages from the end of chapter 21. Glad that I bought the original as I've added the missing text, whilst reformatting.

A few things in the original are gladly gone. Joe doesn't kill a lynx in the rewrite, nor does Jimmy's dad beat the living bejesus out of him either. Uncle Elly is very much dead in the rewrite rather than just a dead beat, but apart from that the original text is very much the one you want.

Edit both are done now so download here and here.

Tube

Woke up midweek with the oddest dream, that they actually implemented tube travel in South London.  Then spent the next 30 or so minutes awake going through what it would mean and what stations would be represented. I came to the conclusion thatan off shoot from North Greenwich on the Jubilee line that went on to serve Bluewater shopping mall, via Plumstead and Bexleyheath, would be the best bet.

For those that don't know, the tube only really serves London, north of the river Thames. There are great links to the east and west along with inroads into Middlesex and Essex. But there is only token support for South London with the Northern Line terminating at Morden going someway to redress the balance.

I know we have the DLR now but consider this. When I was small our nearest tube was Elephant And Castle, a long bus trip away, and no New Cross station, does not count. 

While doing research for this, I found one of my holy grail's, an actual inverted map that shows the extent of the lines if they were represented from a south London point of view.

There are links to Leatherhead and Chessington, World of Adventures in the south, and Tonbridge Wells and East Grinstead in the extreme south east.  Dartford seems to have sprouted an airport, as it correlates to where Heathrow is in its inverse form.  Croydon is mainly part of the Jubilee line now so its goodbye trams and hello tube.

Most of south London proper, seems to be the same with only Camberwell gaining a tube stop and a few stops for Peckham and Walworth.

The not DLR now terminates at Kingston in the west rather than at Woolwich Arsenal, and what ever the white line serves Kew and its Gardens, much in the same way the district line does now.

As a final note, at secondary school in design and communication, one of the projects was coming up with a tube line that served south east London...  The more that changes, eh.

Printer

We now have a "new" Printer.  Took a chance on a Canon that was chucked out at work, to replace an old canon that has been my mainstay for years.  Had to remove some snails from the main cavity but apart from that its pretty good.

Its a MG 2950 part of the Pixma range as was my old printer (an MP220), though this is at least supported in Windows 10 now. For some reason simple scan doesn't recognise my old printer (we scan everything in linux) now, it prints but doesn't scan and running stuff from command line is just so 90's I can't be bothered to check whatever workaround there may be.

There is an official installer from Canon and the ink doesn't cost an arm and a leg like my old one did. Black ink was £15 from Wilko's so not so bad and it'll last ages as I rarely print stuff.

Scanner will see the most use though. Top tip, ignore Canons bundle ware apart from the drivers and get NAPS2 to do your bulk scanning with.  You can use Paint or GIMP as well but this is the Windows equivalent of simple scan and pretty good it is too.

Edit it looks like scan problems is a known bug with emma buntons 19.1.

Double edit and its fixed with an update. Tried out my trusty canon and its now scanning.

Missing Chums Redux

I have a brand new book for you to read and enjoy. This is the Hardy Boys the Mystery of the Missing Chums. The original version of this story differs quite a lot from the UK and indeed the American reprint that made its way to the bookshelves when I was small. 

Here the boys have a bunch of hardened crims to deal with on the ominous Blacksnake Island. Of course Biff and Chet are still captured but this time the story, is much more believable.  There is some genuine peril here, unlike the reprint which seems to hang around Shanty town too much and seems to involve the coast guard far too much. 

The premise is that Chet, and Biff are off on a trip up the coast and the two boys can't come as they have to look after their mum. Fenton Hardy is off on the trail of a crook, called Baldy Turk, in Chicago. So the boys are stuck at home.

As I noted before, Aunt Gertrude shows up, and is a total beast in this. She's a surprise guest, and treats the two lads as if they were still little kids. She has a cat called Lavinia. She settles in and runs the house as if it was her own, this includes steaming open Fenton Hardy's personal mail.  Will not spoil this for you any more, but with both versions up you can read the two side by side and see what commonalities they both have.

Next ones will be the Shortwave mystery. So will have to get my finger out and transcribe this.

Moomin Valley

Happy Easter one and all. We're currently watching this on Sky One over the Easter weekend and its proving to be quite the best version of it. Beats the scary Polish Moomins, that we had as a kid and is on a par with the mid 90's anime that BBC1 used to show when I was in sixth form.

For me its voices Matt Berry from House of Fools as Moominpapa, the bloke from Kingsman as Moomin and the Swedish guy who voices Snuffkin is spot on. In fact this is how I imagined Snuffkin to be, rather Scandinavian and aloof, but at the same time with a deep love of nature.

Little My is of course a massive pain in the arse and while I can't remember her from the books, it must be based on some kind of reality.

It's not just the Hardy Boys books that I read in school.  Can remember these from primary school as well as reading Hugh Lofting's Dr Doolittle's books too.  In fact I would genuinely love a cartoon based on these books as well. Maybe in the style of Dr Snuggles or Willy Fogg. Maybe an anime. Anything to take away the pain of either the films. I was not a fan.

Anyway the book scan is currently on hold as simple scan is being a little cunt at the moment.

Emperors birthday. Missing Chums.

Was going to hold off until the original version, was done, but here is the Mystery of the Missing Friends aka Missing Chums UK edition, from the original Hardy boys series for you to read.

There isn't that much different from the U.S.A version to be honest. Some of the spellings have been changed to have the U's put back in them, such as "harbour" and "colour". The bad guy drinks Fizzle Lemonade now instead of Soda and a few other bits such as kerosene and commercial have been changed to paraffin and advertisement. More strange is that Chet Morton's line at the beginning where he says that they will be the death of him has been changed.  I wonder if it was policy at Armada to remove all references to death then.

Finally you get the previous and next story changed as we had a different line up here.  Your previous tale was the Tower Treasure and The Viking Junk Mystery follows this. 

Also a note on "Chums". Nobody really called each other chums here except for the term bum chum from the picking game each, peach, pear plum, choose your best bum chum. A girls version of Ip dip.

Incidentally Bum Chum is one of the many names for homosexuals and is hilarious when used for products such as these. They're easy on your baby's bum apparently, I guess they don't know what we know.

Also have turned up a factsheet from a dead old Channel 4 show called plants for free. I doubt anything exists of this now, but for some reason we have a photocopied version  of it done by an old neighbour. I'll get this scanned and added to Archive. org over easter so what out for that.

Some greenhouse news

A rather patriotic Poselgeri.

Finally been down to the greenhouse for the first watering of the year.  Have noticed that some of the Mammilarias have set fruit, thanks to the hot weather last year.  Mostly its the usual suspects such as Prolifera, and Hahniana thanks to the sheer amount we have grown from past seed.  But I also noticed that we have some fruit on Cochemiea Poselgeri as well.

Not quite sure why they are in Mammilaria in the first place as they tend to be huge trailing things, a guy I knew had one up to 6 foot tall, with some impressive scaffolding to keep it upright, as in nature it trails.  Most Mamms are small and spreading with a few that get huge (a foot or more in height, or 30cm for metric ponces.)  Maybe genetics will sort them out, and maybe not.

Any way I took a bunch of photos of it with its fruits on display and then removed them for safe sowing.  They kinda look like sweet corn kernels, which is much more rounder than what I've seen on display that regular Mammilarias do.  I'll update this with the photos when they finally come off my phone and will do a comparison shot between Prolifera and Hahniana's fruits as well as some seed shots too.

Edit: Photos.

Cochimeia Fruit