Rated PG Tips

Ha!
I'm pretty certain I can keep this punning up indefinitely, or at least until the heat-death of the universe.  Whether you lot can keep up is another question.  Oh, and for those of you unlucky enough to live in the blighted, benighted lands that lie beyond The Allotment (for I have heard that such places exist!), allow me to illustrate what PG Tips are.  Art?

Voila

     They form part of the background to our culture, which means nobody know why they have that peculiar name.  I suppose "Tips" because that's the part of the tea plant that gets picked.  "Pelham Grenville"? after Sir Wodehouse?
     Alright, moving swiftly along, we now come to - the Comments.  As you know by now, these are only sparsely added to over time.  Quite what the chap ranting on in Vietnamese was going on about is a mystery, but the latest one isn't even in the Roman alphabet.  Arabic?  Punjabi?  Novipazarian?  It looks to be fairly succinct.  I can't copy it so a screenshot will have to suffice.

Suggestions on a postcard, please

    
Atomic Rockets
Oh dearie me, just when management at the Dark Tower are expecting us to start tackling the new database, I stumbled across the above site.  Briefly described, it is a long hard look at the physics of real space travel and combat, eschewing any of the "pew pew pew" silliness of Star Warstrek and similar ilk.
     There is an awful lot of it!  Unfortunately - or perhaps not, if you are one of the more senior minions in the Dark Tower - it is monitored by our IT folks, limiting access to lunchtime.
     Herein the link:

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/

     Of course, once you have logged on at lunchtime, they can't tell what you're looking at from that point onwards*.
     Be warned, there's a fair amount of actual physics involved in the various essays, so if you prefer your sci-fi to simply be flashy things flying around going "bang" in the depths of space, it may not be for you.

BOOJUM! Reviews Films
We haven't done this for a while, so allow me to recap on our editorial policy:
     1) We go off the title alone
     2)  That's it.
     If you want a proper, impartial, nuanced, carefully judged review - WRONG BLOG!  Go talk to that Mark Kermode chap.  Meanwhile, back at the ranch -
'Kingsman: The Golden Circle': Do they know something I don't?  As far as your humble scribe can recall, QE2 is still sitting on the throne.  She might be a bit long in the tooth but she's not dead yet.  Plus, a circle sounds a bit dull.  Couldn't they make it a "Death Circle"?  Or - "Deadly Circle"?  Even a "Slightly Peeved And A Bit Liverish Circle"?

Or - a Golden Army!

"Goodbye Christopher Robin": Wow.  Probably the world's shortest film, eh?  No dialogue, just a shot of someone waving.  I bet they still charge you full cost for it, though, the chiselling weasels.
'Victoria And Abdul':  Dear me no!  NO!  I anticipate this being what Conrad sniffily dismisses as a 'Big Skirt Film", made for women or soppy men trying to get in touch with their inner female.  Bah!  Go very far away very quickly!

If It's Wednesday, Those Teeth In My Behind -
 - must belong to the Coincidence Hydra.  After Ambrosia and The Thing, we now have St. Vincent.  Conrad knew nothing about her, or them, or even it, before Saturday just gone, when he heard their/it's/her latest hot platter being played at Fopp.  The track conformed to The Rule - if it's Very Good then Conrad buys the record.  So I did.
     Enter the Beeb.  What do they have as an item on their homepage?  An item on St. Vincent.  Art?

     It really does make me uneasy when this - DON'T SNEAK UP ON ME LIKE THAT**!

Luffing Cranes
No!  This is not a concealed swear; as you should surely know by now, "Dog Buns!" is the official epithet of exasperation here on the blog.  No, Luffing Cranes are a real thing.  Art?

Rather birdlike, non?

     The idea is that the hook, and whatever is being carried thereupon, remains at the same level, whilst the jib moves up and down to move said hook backwards or forwards.  So, the cargo is moved horizontally not vertically.  You can see cranes of this variety at the dockside.  I'm looking out of the window right now at an array of cranes across the skyline of Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell, but none of the swines are the kind I want, the luffers***.




*  Heh.
**  I'm an old man.  Heart attack a genuine risk.
***  Do you see what I did there?

The Ming

Thank You, John Carpenter
Once again we honour the world's most daring documentary-maker.  By now it should be obvious - neither McReady nor Childs were infected at the end of the most terrifying documentary ever made; because if either of them was, John could never have made it back to civilisation*.
     Which has nothing to do with - LITHIUM BATTERY DESIGN!
     Which we're not going into.  Ha!  Did you really think we'd examine something so deadly dull, when we could be discussing THERMONUCLEAR WEAPON DESIGN!
     Which, once again, we're not going into.  I have to consider that those nosey parkers over at UNIT might be eavesdropping electronically, not to mention those equally annoying pikers at SPECTRUM, and MI5.
     Let us instead acknowledge NORWEGIAN SPECIAL FORCES!  As you ought to know by now, Conrad is fond of praising the Marinenjaegerkommandoen, who keep our North Sea oil rigs safe.  I am not the only one who's a fan; this chap over on Youtube also bigs them up. 

     They are much too modest to boast about deeds done, but they got a Presidential Unit Citation for their work in Afghanistan.  You don't find those in packets of breakfast cereal, matey.  Bad guys take note.

Given recent events, you might want to skip this one -
Insane Weapons
If anyone has a lock on designing and using Insane Weapons, it's the South Canadians.  Over there, everyone has a gun, if not four or five.  It's in the Constitution, or something.  At least, that's what it seems like to us on the saner side of the Atlantic.
     Not satisfied with being able to own automatic weapons, some rapscallion over there decided that you can't kill someone dead enough by only shooting them ten times in the space of a second.  No!  That simply won't do - so they gimmicked up a makeshift Gatling gun, by welding six automatic rifles together.  Art?

     This thing fires ridiculously fast - basically, the faster you crank it, the faster it fires.  If the notion took you, you could always connect it to an electric motor, in which case you are approaching the Death Ray Of Lead model, as seen with the Minigun**.

Conrad:  He's So Bad
And I should know.  I am Conrad, incidentally, for those who have only just arrived.  Small wars undertaken, minor kingdoms toppled and pocket dictatorships overthrown, all at reasonable rates (no working on Sundays).
     Back on track.  THERMON - er, no, we're avoiding that one today, aren't we?
     Words!  There you go, nice safe topic.  As has probably become clear by now, your humble hack does not think the way Hom. Sap. does.  This gives him an advantage when it comes to hand-to-hand combat doing the Cryptic Crossword, and an insight that has to be shared to be appreciated.  Art?

     Where you would see something quite different, Conrad sees "SCA OIL", and wants nothing to do with the horrid stuff.  My human camouflage skin is quite oily enough on its own, thank you very much.

Dammit, it's hard to keep off the subject of Foofoodillies.  Quiet Tom, during our meal at Sweet Mandarin, was commenting on Really Bad Ideas About Weapons, and mentioned the "Davy Crockett".  This was a <sighs> never mind.  Moving on -

Planet Earth: Still Going
Conrad recently came across an item on the Beeb website about a chap called David Meade, who is unlucky enough to share his name with that of another chap who can politely be called a "Swivel-eyed conspiranoid loonwaffle".  David Mk.2 is pushing the idea that a rogue planet called Nibiru is going to wham into the big blue ball of rock we inhabit, utterly destroying us.  This is bad; my subscription to 'Empire' will lapse.
     David Mk.2 confidently made a prediction that the world would end on 23rd September.
     Surprise!  It didn't.  You would have noticed, right?

Planet Eart - it was good whilst it lasted

     Not satisfied at still being alive, David Mk.2 promptly backtracked and started qualifying his statement.  Conrad confidently predicts that matey will continue to blather on about how the world is ending, is due to end or has already ended (though I think we would have noticed). This is nothing new, idiots and charlatans have been predicting the end of the - sorry, that ought to be capitalised - The End Of The World*** for at least the past thousand years.  None of them got it right.  We're still here.
     Right?

Bitten By The Coincidence Hydra - Yet Again
Dammit all to heck, my nethers must taste extra-specially wonderful.  Yesterday we had that stuff about "Ambrosia" and today I open up my copy of 'Empire' and what do I find?  A many page spread about "The Thing" and another article about Things in cinema generally.  If the Universe is trying to tell me something, couldn't it at least use social media?

Davy Crockett
Dog Buns, I am going to go on about this.  UNIT are busy with the Ortons (or so I heard) and Spectrum are fussing about the ISS so -
     Would you trust these men with a ten-ton bomb?
     The Davy Crockett was one of the smallest tactical nuclear weapons ever deployed, with a yield of between 0.01 and 0.02 kilotons - which is 10 to 20 tons to you and I.  They were issued in the thousands, and were intended to be the world's biggest anti-tank round, targeting the Sinister armoured hordes hunkered down in East Teutonland.  Cross the border and say Hello! to a bucket of 'instant sunshine', as RAF artificers have been known to call them.  

Did he eat the meat?

They were crewed by a team of 3, and due to their small size, there were no Permissive Action Links or failsafes; if you build it, they will - no, sorry, that was "Field of Dreams", wasn't it?  If you fired it, the Davy Crockett went off.  Boom.  No messing.  However, it wasn't terribly accurate, and the M28 model only had a range of just over a mile, so - Caution!  May Kill The User!

Davy, in his coonskin cap.  No - hang on -

* Unless he - no, let's not go there.
**  The most inappropriate name ever.
***  Cue sinister oboe music