:: What you say is quite true. :-) However, as I interpreted
:: the original message, the task to do is a one-off operation
:: to create the text string from existing varchar data and
:: plug it into the blob field.

Yes, that's exactly what I need to do.

:: values (1, 'George Dubbya Bush', ' will not be remembered as
:: a statesman',

That's not harsh enough. My database is International (Unicode) and thus
doesn't require data to be toned down. :)