Nets And Booms

No!  This Is Not What You Were Expecting
For the 'net' in question does not refer to teh Interwebz, and the 'booms' are not the resonating of explosions - though we will get to that.
     No, what I mean today is the 'torpedo net' and it's supporting 'net boom' - this being a boom in the sense of an armature or jointed protrusion.  Let us cattle-prod Art awake and have him illustrate the point.  Art?


     There you go.  The USSS Parvenu* at anchor, with it's torpedo net deployed, kept at an appropriate distance by the booms.  You see?  You see how carefully all this is crafted and how it butts together?**
     The idea of torpedo nets, which ought to be obvious so I'm not sure why I'm labouring the point except that some chump will assume they're there to help torpedoes strike ships, is to intercept an approaching torpedo and prevent it from hitting the hapless and helpless vessel it was aimed at.  Art?

Art!  A pox on you and your hideous cave-dwelling ancestors!

     I think we can whistle up a torpedo net illustration.  Art?  And bear in mind this Tazer is working off a fusion reactor -

A gathering of grommets

     Nowhere do I find exactly what happens to a torpedo after it encounters a wall of steel grommets like this.  The whole net will yield under the impact of the motorised missile, without giving way much over all.  Does the torpedo explode on contact?  Or is it just held in place until it runs out of fuel?  If this happens will it's warhead detonate by default as a safety measure?  Is there a delay between fuel exhaustion and self-destruction?  

A torpedo.  Just so we're clear.

     Torpedo nets were placed in position to prevent ships being sunk by submarines, which still left the problem of attacks by torpedo-carrying aircraft, who could easily overfly the miles of netting deployed to baffle submersible boats, which leads to an interesting story we shan't go into tonight.
     Time to tempt the motley inside the industrial tumble-drier that contains a bag of rotting fruit and shattered housebricks, and turn it on!


Conrad: Sharp-witted At Times
If I can get the magnification up -

Nearly ...

     Not a bad snap, if I may blow my own trumpet.***  Because the sticker is too small to see, I shall detail it here:  "THIS VEHICLE IS TRACKED".
     You can tell where this is going already, can't you?  For an obsessive punner who is unhealthily interested in tanks, it's not a stretch.
     "NO IT'S NOT! THIS VEHICLE IS TRACKED!" - Art?

Quiver in fear at the mighty Bob Semple!
(Yes it was a real thing)

     I spotted the van driving past a few seconds before and was thus poised, POISED I TELL YOU, ready to take the snap.  Just a shame that it's a little too far off to read.

The Stuff Of Nightmares
What On Earth?  Once again I am left wondering quite what goes on beneath the surface of my mind. Let us first of all detail the behaviour of the 24 bus in the wild.  On Tuesday, as I stood in the kitchen preparing for Life's Great Adventure (a.k.a. catching a First Bus into Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell) at 7:08 it went whizzing down Tandle Hill.  On checking the relevant timetable (see Art-appended picture below) -

The only work of fiction longer than the First Bus timetable library

     - it should have been there at 7:10.  This morning it hadn't turned up by 7:15, so I caught the 409, ready to head into Oldham and the 83 service into G-o-t-I.
     "There's the 24 behind us!" commented one eagle-eyed old dear, so there was a hasty debark at the next bus stop, to catch the 24 - which was only 10 minutes late.  Practically on time for First.
     Anyway!  Last night I had a rather unpleasant dream, where the 24 bus driver heading for Rochdale ignored me  and my stop, despite furious bell ringing.

Perhaps.  Perhaps not.

     I'm afraid the dream-Conrad was a lot less reticent than the real thing, since he broke out into curses and swearing, which I would never do.  Not only that, our bafoon of a bus driver was doing at least 60 m.p.h. and putting us all at risk.
     When he finally stopped, it was pitch black and we were stuck in the middle of a field, whereupon he jumped out of the cab and ran away, leaving a bus full of very, very angry passengers.

Exactly like this.

     I hope none of this is prescient or clairvoyant in any way.  We shall see.
Almost Finally -
Because this will all make sense when it gets posted on Facebook (I hope), allow me to introduce a breed of soldier you've probably not heard of before.  Art?


     This is a Moroccan Goum, Second Unpleasantness vintage, wearing his traditional Berber robes, rather reluctantly carrying a rifle and caressing the weapon he loved above all else, a Great Big Knife.  You did not take liberties with these chaps, because they were interested in three things: mayhem, plunder and bloodshed.  This might be only two but I wanted to be certain.

Pretty Definitely Finally -
Say hello to Stan Getz, who was a tenor saxophonist of some note and commercial success, principally with "The Girl From Ipanema".  Art?

Stan, standing.

     And once again this ought to make sense, or what passes for it round here - after all, how many people do you know who leap into frenzied action when they see a sticker on a van that could be the source of bad punnery? - once the whole lot gets posted on Facebook and Twitter.  That is, as long as I remember what I was going to post, because this isn't going to get added to social media for at least another 4 hours.  Maybe longer - if that dream was foretelling the future after all ...



*  I made this up.  It could be any South Canadian ship. 
**  If you believe this, I have a small piece of land to sell you ...
***   I certainly may.  Once again, whose blog is it?