Building B Locks

NO!  We Are Not Going On About Lego - Yet
Nor Minibrix nor Bayko, and Meccano is too two-dimensional to consider as any form of "Block".  No, this evening I happened to wonder if there was anything out there that had the title of a "B Lock" and, rather to my surprise, there is.  Art?

                                                                    B Locks

     These are, apparently, a type of puzzle where you have to work out how to unlock the padlock, which, at £95 each, Conrad thinks he can easily resist, all the more so as a normal padlock from B & Q costs about £5.  SO, there you have today's title.
     Whilst on about price, I would like to return to the Seabreacher semi-submersible sea demon, which you really need to see perform in a video rather than the stills I've posted here.  Is it possible?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E41kFAL0UUo

     There you go.  As I glibly speculated earlier today, don't be surprised if the Marinenjaegerkommandoen* end up with a couple of these puppies for rapid response in the North Sea.

Shark shark!

     And the price - yes, well, they are not going to be cheap.  £40,000 for the most basic model and styling, going up to £60,000 for a special custom build.  You cannot deny that they look cool as anything and go like absolute stink <pauses to dry his hot sweaty palms>.  How come we've not seen these on some ghastly South Canadian television series about lifeguards on the Californian coast?
     There we go, this evening's Intro.  Motley!  Fetch me a golf club and some walnuts, for I feel snackish.

Okay, Now Lego
You see?  You see what happens if you have a little patience?  Okay.  As you know, we here at BOOJUM! have found a fruitful topic in Lego builds, both the gigantic bespoke ones that require tens of thousands of bricks, weeks of time and endless patience, and the slightly less ambitious kits that are available commercially.  So we come to the Ghostbusters HQ building.  Art?

Thus

     It doesn't look too difficult or tricky from this perspective, which is where they get you, since it has over 4,000 pieces.  I can hear you gasp in surprise from here; what you can't tell from this shot is that there's a whole lot of interior to build.  Art?

Now do you see?

     Realisation dawns, eh?  One thing that seems to be missing is Ecto-1.  I suppose it would be difficult to create it accurately in this scale, though I wonder if anyone else has built it?  <Googles> ah yes, there is a kit, which costs another £60.  We may come back to this.

Navigating The Mental Mindscape
If you are a regular here then you know Conrad suffers from the spontaneous appearance of words and phrases in his mind that appear to come from nowhere, without any real explanation.  Okay, "Thrasybulus" may be due to reading about ancient Greek history, which I do on occasion**; so where on earth did the name "Waunchope" pop up from?  I Googled it and there appears to be an electrical engineering company in the south of the Pond of Eden, whom I have absolutely no connection with.  And that's it.
     I can only suppose it's a character in a novel I've read, who has come back to haunt me like a bad smell, which would be difficult as I've got practically no sense of smell.
     If you, too, are haunted by Waunchope, please let me know in the Comments and we can be strong together.

The Waunchopes, perhaps?

Less Doo-Ron And More DesRon
This touches on an article from the podcast "We Have Ways Of Making You Talk", where Jim Holland was chatting to a South Canadian military historian John McManus, about the latter's recent work on the 1st Division, a.k.a. The Big Red One, on Omaha Beach, during D-Day.  An event you may have heard of.

The Big Red One goes in

     As you may be aware, things ashore were very sticky for a while at Omaha, thanks to the inevitable chaos of war and the South Canadians not having any of the 79th Armoured division's "Funnies" with them.  When things were looking especially bleak, the South Canadian's navy got itself involved, specifically DESRON 18 - "Destoyer Squadron 18".  These were half a dozen destroyers that got very, very close into the beaches, as close as 1,000 yards, which is Practically Point Blank for naval warships, and which proceeded to pound the living daylights out of the Teuton defenders.  Art?

USS Harding

     Each of these destroyers mounted 4 x 5 inch guns, equally as big if not bigger than the Teuton defender's, and capable of firing with both extreme accuracy and rapidity, not to mention anti-aircraft guns and cannon, and the trusty Browning .50 calibre, which is a whole lot of firepower to contend with if you're the enemy.  They tend to get rather overlooked in accounts of D Day, being taken for granted, included by Conrad, who is definitely a landlubber by specialism.  There's a whole book in there somewhere, which <that threat you love to hate> we may come back to.

Finally -
Proof that Conrad is, indeed, not human.  I watched a short film on the BBC's I-player this evening about Films That Scared Their Child Audience, and there are some very appropriate entries there, including "Watership Down", "The Witches" and "Labyrinth".  The producer's intent was to include films where the Target Demographic <hack spit Hollywoodism> aimed at children, and then included scenes utterly unfit for them to see.  Art?

Nothing a wig and some foundation won't solve ...

     Conrad rather feels that they shot themselves in the foot, however, by starting the whole thing off with The Childcatcher from "Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang".  Art?

Hmmmmmm.

     He may be a creepy old perv, but - terrifying?  Really?  Conrad saw this film as a much smaller version of his present-day self and - doesn't remember a thing about matey.  Whereas others of his generation wet themselves and go white and shakey if you so much as mention his name.
     Peculiar***!




*  The Norwegian naval Special Forces, of course.
**  Attempt to be Intellectual noted <the horrid truth courtesy Mister Hand!>
***  Yes, but who is peculiar? <the horrid truth courtesy Mister Hand!>