The Vituperative Vicissitudes Of Vehicles

Veer With Me On This, Vulnavia

For those of you who haven't been paying attention, Vulnavia is the proto-audience and sounding-board whom we bounce ideas off, and have done so for several years; all the way back to 2014, in fact.

BOOJUM!: Astronomy. BOOJUM! Style

     So, no, we didn't simply create her out of whole cloth in order to alliterate.  Art!

     We pay her in 5 cc phials of the Elixir Of Life, as recommended by her previous employer, Doctor Fybez (sp?), whom forwarded her excellent references.

     Dougal is our occasionally present idiot, when he can fit us in on his busy schedule working the satellite towns of Babylon Lite.  

     ANYWAY I did think of titling the blog "Willow Weeping", because we're going to start off with more references to TREE LAW! which always goes down well with Your Humble Scribe.  People tend to take trees for granted, you see, which is their first mistake.  Art!

I'm telling you nothing

     The tree in question was a weeping willow, not a pine, I just couldn't resist using that old sci-fi novel title.  The following details are culled from a Youtube Reddit post about love, death and redemption, without the redemption, yet with added schadenfreude.  Art!

     The willow comes into the tale early on as background, because it was within it's canopy that Vengeful Poster and her Boorish Boyfriend made with the locking of lips when they started out.  Said willow was handily located near their apartment, until VP broke things off with BB, whom it is fair to say did not handle rejection well.  Art!

     Well aware of VP's romantic attachment to the tree, he maliciously informed her via text FOOL LEAVING EVIDENTIARY TRAIL that he'd felled 'their' tree, har har har.  I added in the laughter as it seemed appropriately crass.

     VP immediately forwards this confession to the landlord, whom is predictably extremely unimpressed at having a mature willow chopped down, since they cost thousands to replace.  

     Thus, two weekends later, VP is able to witness BB out on the lawns with various power and hand tools, and one of these - Art!

     A tree-stump remover.  BB spent all day digging up the old tree stump, getting rid of the roots and planting a new willow sapling.  All of which he paid for himself, as otherwise it was fine and crime time.

     Yes, it did take him all day, and a hot, sweaty effortful day it was, too, because if you want to understand how large a tree's root system is, look at how large are the array of branches it possesses.  Art!

     That's the root system for a willow tree.  Incidentally, one of the lesser-known but salient facts about willow trees is that their roots will automatically make for any nearby water sources, such as underground aquifers, or water or sewer pipes.  Builders beware.

     Displaying a staggering level of unawareness, BB turned up at VP's door, filthy and sweaty, asking if they could use their shower?

     EFF NO! was the short, loud response, followed by another short loud response as the front door was slammed.

     Here is the vehicle bit.  You see, BB had driven to the apartment in his Dodge Ram pickup truck, which he treated with far more care and affection that VP, and which he needed to transport the tiller, tools and sapling.  Art!

'Twas showroom pristine

     So he tried to protect the seating from his soiled clothing and skin by putting  newspapers down upon the fabric.  Then he discovered that the newsprint rubbed off on the fabric, and was wroth.  Which means he swore loud and long.  VP, seeing and hearing all this from her apartment, and probably with a bucket of popcorn in hand, merely smiled a malicious smile of triumph.

     Well, that's our Intro out of the way, and it has put forward both trees and vehicles, which we shall come back to.

Vehicles And Vatniks

Here Conrad is going to show more of vehicles and trees, although first I need to educate you about tank transporters.  Art!

     This here is a British version, transporting - you may be ahead of me here - a tank.  Why do this when the tank is perfectly capable of travelling under it's own power?  O I thought you'd never ask!

1)  Mileage.  Tanks are notorious petrol-hogs that measure consumptions in gallons per mile, the consequence of being a dirty great lump of metal.  Moving by an Antar HETS means lower fuel consumption.

2)  Wear and tear.  Tanks need an awful lot of tender loving mechanical affection to keep running, so the less strain placed on the engine, power train, suspension, wheels and tracks the better.

3)  Road surfaces.  Having a regiment of 70-ton tanks driving over the tarmac does it no good at all, much to the dismay of Mr Joe Public in his family saloon.

Art!

     Ruffian tank on a Ruffian tank transporter.  Note the absence of tracks on the tank, implying that it's a battlefield casualty that has been recovered.  Note also that there aren't any chains or cables securing the tank in place, because what happens next?  Art!

     The TT reverses WITHOUT RAISING THE ACCESS RAMPS.  These, when raised, form a physical barrier that prevent vehicles from, O I dunno rolling off the back thanks to inertia.  Because whoever drove that tank up onto the TT left it in neutral, the maroon.  Art!

You'll have noticed the tree

     No chains or cables, no brakes, no raised ramps and presumably no driver, either, as the trackless tank rolls right off the back of the TT.  Thirty tons of metal with no driver  careering across the road; just another Tuesday in Modern-day Mordor.  Art!

     The tree comes off substantially worse, being knocked completely flat when the tank's wayward progress is interrupted.  The orc filming this then pans back to the TT.  Art!

     That's my attempt at a moulage shot.  Not bad.  I wonder what the OC in charge of these Karno's Army rejects had to say about this failure?

Vehicles And Volts

Or should that be 'dolts'?  As you may be aware, neo-Nazi bampot Elong Tusk has invested heavily in his Tesla car, which runs off electrickery and which are ruinously expensive.  Art!

     This is a Model 3, which will set you back at least £43,000 and up to £58,000 in proper money.  "Iamundertow" on Twitter informed that his neighbour, a big Ketamine Kid fan, bought one of these on an instalment plan.  Let us be charitable and assume he paid only (!) £43K.

     Surprise!  He couldn't keep up with the payments and is now looking to sell his Model 3, except that it instantly depreciated to £21K whilst he still owes the balance of nearly  £40K on it.

     Ooops.  Iamundertow, very uncharitably, is laughing, pointing and consuming popcorn, the cad.  Also, tee hee.

Frogs In Bogs

Yes, Conrad is using poetic licence here, as we've got pictures of the conventional Matilda II tank as it comes a cropper in New Guinea, during the Second Unpleasantness in the Pacific whilst in service with the Ockers.  Art!

     No tank transporters here.  This one is a bit awkward, so let me interpret it for you.  This Matilda was driving alongside the creek, and the driver strayed too close to the edge, which crumbled under the weight of a dirty great lump of metal.  Consequently 'Cairns' slid sideways into the stream, canted too far over to either reverse out or push on forward.  They're going to need another Matilda to hitch a cable to the rear and tow it back out, probably also slewing it around to get it perpendicular to the creek to get maximum traction.  The only good thing in compensation is that this is comfortably distant from the Japs, as nobody is crouching under fire or worried about enemy shelling.  I bet the driver gets a right rocketing, however.

The End Times Are Upon Us

I will forgive you if you think this is about Mopey Dick, the Great Orange Whale, or Kaptain Ketamine, the toxic Tesla toad.  No!  This concerns much graver matters.  Art!

     Honestly, you give them the vote and next thing they're running the country, being all touchy-feely and empathithtic (sp?).  Thank the lord aloft we don't have the equivalent of Bloaty McBloatface here in This Sceptred Isle.  Art!

Makes trailer trash look classy

Finally -

Don't dare put the bottle bin out this afternoon as it's surpassingly windy.

It's Got To Beef Perfect

Ha!  This Intro Is One With A Core I've Been Saving For Ages

It just needed a bit of a framework to hang it upon, which came into sudden focus earlier this evening as I was grilling aubergine to put on a sandwich.  You can't leave eggplant too long in the fridge or they go brown and soggy.

     ANYWAY today's title is a not-very-subtle reference to that irritating hit by Fairground Attraction, "It's Got To Be Perfect", from thirty-five years ago.  Art!

     Alright, I admit this is nothing to do with either the song or group, and is in fact the AI Art Generator's vision of my short story "Attack Of The Killer Potatoes", where a Hungarian biotechnology lab is mistakenly gi

     ANYWAY AGAIN back to that song title, and the word we want to emphasise here is 'Perfect'.  Which, inevitably, has a Latin root <hack spit>, that being 'Perfectus'.  Art!

     You will, of course - obviously! - recognise Peter Perfect and the Turbo Terrific from "Wacky Races", which is one of the few vehicles there present that actually looked as if it could race competitively at Brands Hatch.  Conrad is unsure why you'd wear jodhpurs in a car.  Doubtless there are fan theories.

     Back to the concept of 'Perfect'.  Whilst casting around for a bit of structure to erect for this Intro, Your Humble Scribe recalled a short story by Bob Shaw that was relevant.  Art!

Ol' Bob

     Serendipity again, as Bob used to be a structural engineer.  He was a native of Northern Island, noted for his dry, sardonic wit, and for sci-fi stories that were always firmly based in reality - that engineering background no doubt.  Conrad met him briefly once, at a book-signing in Odyssey 7, where he signed my paperback of "Ship Of Strangers" and informed that 'Orbitsville' was going to be published in a new edition.  Art

My edition long gone, alas

     If you're wondering about that cover illo, what you're seeing here is the survey ship 'Sarafand', which has sent out six manned exploration vehicles on a supposedly barren alien planet.  Trouble is, seven vehicles have now returned .....
     ANYWAY AGAIN the short story I was thinking of is "A Full Member Of The Club", which YES WE'LL GET TO THE 'BEEF' PART SHORTLY BE PATIENT concerns artefacts that are so perfect they are almost other-worldly, and which are marked unobtrusively with a 'P' on their corpus.

A Full Member of the Club - Shaw Bob :: Режим чтения

     That's a link to a free version of the story, should you wish to peruse.  Ol' Bob has fun with perfect cigars that are the best smoke ever, perfect television screens that do not sport scanning lines even close up (this was 1978, long before LCD monitors) and, especially, coffee that tastes as perfect as it smells.  Art!

     Now, onto the meat of the matter, if you'll forgive the pun.  You see, over on Quora the question was asked: Why do hamburgers at restaurants taste better than the hamburgers I make at home?

     You can substitute beef for ham here to get today's title.  

     The question was answered by a Quoran whom had worked in a South Canadian burger bar before the days of MacDonalds, namely "Swift Arrow", where he grilled up to 460 burgers per hour (7 every minute) for a total overall of 5,600 per week.  Art!

Soz, no 'Swift Arrow' to be found

     The beef patties were cooked on a five-foot square flat-top grill, which had been in use for 16 years by the time our Quoran quoth, meaning four million six hundred and fifty-nine thousand, two hundred burgers had been cooked on the grill.  As he explained, each burger added to the flavour of all the subsequent ones, so for your home-cooked burgers you need a special dedicated decade-old grill used for them and nothing else.
     Cleaning the flat-top was done very carefully so that liquid never reached the cooking surface, because that would have removed the flavour patina.  Art!

     The kitchen grunts went at it with paint scrapers to remove physical grunge, then wiped with a DRY cloth, then covered it in coarse salt, wiped that off and then ground it clean with pumice stones as shown above.  The owner was a stickler for cleanliness and if he wasn't satisfied with how the grill looked at close of business, why the lowest grunt on the staff ladder had to clean it again.

     That's how you get a perfect beefburger.  Possibly a little too contrived for your kitchen.

     Great, now I can delete that article I copied out months and months ago.

"The War Illustrated Edition 205" 29th April 1945"

We're back with what might be called the fag-end of the war in Europe, as the Rhine is crossed and Teuton resistance begins to get spotty and unpredictable.  Art!

     The small bloke wearing a fleece is in fact Monty, more formally known as Field-Marshal Montgomery, here addressing British paratroopers of the 6th Airborne Division, who had successfully formed an airhead on the east bank of the Rhine earlier in March.  Here they are acting as ground troops, because as I said, resistance was crumbling and you didn't want to reserve a whole division for an airborne drop that might never happen.  Art!

     This picture shows the aftermath of the airborne landings of March 24th.  I'm afraid the text is too blurred to resolve, so allow me to enlighten you that it gloatingly boasts that the Allied glider train for this attack was 500 miles long.  Here there are portraits of two Britons responsible for planning, gliders in a field and dropped paratroopers forming up to march on their target.

     Herr Schickelgruber must have been enraged by this event.  After all, it was the Teutons who demonstrated how effective airborne warfare could be in 1940 and 1941, a fact now proven in reverse.  Tee hee!

My Spidey-Sense Is Tingling

Ha!  You'll see what I'm bloviating about in a minute.  Art!

   Do you see wh - O you do.

   This - and don't snigger at the back - is SIMP 0136, a peculiar object that has been dubbed a 'singleton' in the past.  More formally, it's a "free-floating planetary mass object" because it travels through space without being part of a solar system, a kind of galactic orphan.  Whilst it is approximately the same size as Jupiter, it has over ten times the mass, implying that it's certainly not a gas giant.  It also turns extremely quickly, with a single SIMP 'day' being only 2 hours 12 minutes long, which is quite a dizzying rate and - more strained analogies with spiders - makes it an outstanding spinner.  

     One suspicion is that it might be a 'brown dwarf', which is a species of planet that never got quite big enough to turn stellar thanks to fusion processes, except it's much too bright to be a dowdy brownie.  There are various models and proposals as to why the atmosphere of Ol' 0136 varies dramatically in brightness, yet nothing definitive.  No, Dougal, that does not automatically mean aliens <heavy sigh>.  Art!

As never featured in 'Snow White'

Erk!

I was just doing a quick search to find an image and - Art!

     I'm not sure how on earth that juxtaposition occurred.  Let us move swiftly on!

Snowy White And Dirty Slush

Yes, the days are counting down to 21st March 2025, when Disney release 'SNow White' to the eagerly awaiting public.  Or not.  Going by the statistics in the official trailer on Youtube, nobody wants to see a film that nobody asked for., nobody likes and nobody but the critics will attend for  One of the more trenchant observations was "I'm rooting for the poison apple!".  You may not be aware, but Zegler, the unappealing SW character who looks like a Lord Farquad clone, and Gadot, who plays the much nicer Wicked Witch, do not get on.  At all.  Art!

     Yes, they both presented a whatever at the Oscars, and the palpable seething actinic hatred between them was almost visible.  Art!

     Neither dared turn their back on the other.
     Bring on the wheelie-bins of popcorn!  Another tee hee moment.

Sammakko!

Which Is Finnish For 'Frog'

Nor is it similar to the same word in Estonian, which is 'Konn', just so we're clear.  Today's Intro is centred around that single word, because I originally had an idea about it and then things kind of branched out, as they tend to do in my mind when it settles like a flock of ravens into an orchard.

     Now, were I to harp on about deadly frogs, you'd be perfectly entitled to consider the sinister tree-frogs of Central and South America, which exude poison from their skin and thus render themselves inedible.  Art!

     Manchester's Victoria University used to have a small vivarium with these frogs as part of the ensemble.

     Entitled yet WRONG! for we don't accept the first thing that comes into our head as the body of an Intro, or it would be a very short Intro.

     You might consider the frogs deadly by virtue of association with things deadly in their own right.  Art!

     Once again you have to be of Conrad's vintage to remember 'Frog' model kits, as they are long gone now.  They made both conventional plastic (injection-moulded) kits and rubber-banded kits that actually flew.  They were around for 40 years and specialised in producing unusual kits that nobody else (such as Airfix or Tamiya) did, like the 'Westland Wallace', which I'd never heard of before today and I bet it's new to you, too.  Art!

The terror of the skies.  Perhaps.

     In a rather bizarre twist of fate, Frog - an acronym whose origin I cannot define for certain - went into receivership in the mid-Seventies, and guess who bought up all the non-Axis aircraft moulds?  The Sinister Union, who retailed them under the trade name 'Novo'.

     Perhaps more a dead Frog than a deadly one.  Art!

     Here you see one of the patented British pig-sticking pointy objects that severely discomfited whichever enemy they were opposing at the time: to wit, a bayonet*.  This is the 1907 Sword-pattern eighteen-incher, which will have been whetted to a sharp edge, so the problem is how do you keep it ready for action without inflicting serious injury upon yourself?  You use the upper device, known as a 'bayonet frog', a sort of miniature fabric scabbard that the blade remains within until fixed.

     Perhaps more a thread frog than a deadly one.

     Then there is the expression 'A frog in the throat', which comes from one of those medieval fears about body horror.  In this one, people were convinced that drinking water contaminated with frogspawn, which is a disgusting enough concept all on it's own, meant the eggs would hatch inside one and the hacking cough occasionally heard meant the live, full-grown frogs were trying to escape.  Art!

     Conrad unsure if he's coughing it out or dining on it.  Whichever, he doesn't look very happy about it, poor bloke.  

     Assuming he's ingesting it, more a fed frog than a deadly frog.

     ANYWAY we are now entering onto the real subject of this Intro, which indeed a deadly Frog.  Art!

Balikpapan, Borneo, July 1945

     Yes, it's our old pal the Matilda tank again, in an Australian version called, for unknown reasons, the 'Frog', which sported dirty great flamethrower in place of the main gun.  Just to make sure it could cope with dug-in infantry, bunkers, the jungle and caves, there were 80 gallons of fuel in the turret.  In the first picture above they seem to be carrying out training or practice, as the two standing soldiers aren't wearing helmets or carrying weapons, and look far too chirpy to be at risk of sudden death or discombobulation.

     The lower picture more closely resembles business as usual, with the skulking soldier in the background hanging back and wearing a helmet and pack.  You can see that the burst of flame has just stopped and there is a gap between the muzzle of the flamethrower and the blazing fuel it just spat in a spate of spite.  The target is a Japanese bunker and we shall move on hastily -  Art!

     These two shots illustrate the 90-yard range of a Frog, which put it well beyond the range of anything Japanese infantry carried, and their anti-tank guns might as well have fired jellied eel at a Matilda for all the good they would do.

     Most definitely the deadliest of frogs.  The F.R.O.G. is a tale for another BOOJUM!

Another Of Michael's Tipa

Michael "The" Mann, obviously - of course! the director, producer and author.  His second tip, in the vlog I captured from "Outstanding Screenplays", and this one is very prescient.  Art!

0

     If you haven't seen "Thief" yet, then put it on your 'To Watch' list.  It was The Mann's film debut, based on a biographical work by a professional cat burglar, and he kept things realistic on set by keeping ex-criminals as advisers and chatting with them about their life and lifestyle.  "Get into a sub-culture and really understand it" as the man himself said.  Why so?  Because doing so allows characters to be developed who have depth and realism, rather than being a walking stereotype.  Art!

    It's a striking poster, no doubt, yet Conrad isn't convinced it has much to do with the content of the film itself.  Persuade me in the Comments.

     No "TWI" today, we've had quite enough of matters martial.  Instead, here's a picture of lovely fluffy lambs gambolling in the pasture.  Art!

Perhaps 'gambolling' is reaching a bit

Our Journey With Bernie

Is getting progressively harder over time as we get closer to the end of the current run of FPG trading cards, which is the 1993 "Masters of the Macabre".  We hit this problem about Card #70 and the ones I was trying to capture in pictures, #82 "Guardian of the Well of Souls"and #83 "Defender of the Keep" are entirely absent on teh Interwebz.  

     So - Art!

Something generic

     If this problem persists I may just jump to the next FPG collection, which is the 'Frankenstein Subset', and see if that is better represented with the lower-numbered cards.  O the travails of a blog-content creator.

Mopey Dick The Great Orange Whale

I have found a reliable way of predicting what Donold Judas Trump will do in any given situation: imagine what a spiteful, petty seven-year old would do, multiply their physical age by eleven and reduce their IQ by half and Hey Pesto! you get his response.  You can't call what he does by the P-word, it's all bitter revenge or whatever the last adviser he spoke to informed about.  Art!

A visage untroubled by the bother of intellect

     Fox News, who blow hot and cold on DJ Tango, put up a clip yesteryon of his bloviating about something or other, with a stock price widget showing the market dropping by the second as he spoke.  Art!

How it started

How it's going, 15 seconds later

     That worm in his brain has a lot to answer for!  And this is from Fox, which means they might be getting nervous about what Pumpkinhead is going to do to the South Canadian economy.  One suspects Putinpot is laughing and rubbing his hands with glee at what's going down.  He doesn't realllllly have room for amusement given that he's already done to his economy what Pimpkinhead is doing to his.

Talking Of Whales -

As one thing tends to lead to a whole rabbit warren of other entities in Conrad's mind, I suddenly remembered about "Moby Gleep", a bizarre and rather disconcerting painting from the Seventies.  Art!

     That's Moby Gleep attacking the 'Peckwad', and there's a whole lot of other puns riffing on "Moby Dick" associated with this oil painting.  It dates from 1978, and I don't think I've ever thought about it since then, which is either excellent recall of a very distant memory, or a symptom of too much gin and old age.  A whole lot more entertaining that the novel it spoofs, which I gave up on before reaching page 100.

Finally -

Better close the window, we have a Team meeting at 13:00 and there's always too much traffic on Rochdale Road to allow it to impinge on our convo.

     Also, been complimented by a caller and told I should definitely do voice-over work.  Rather a recurrent theme, that.

*  We shall gloss over that the name comes from the French "Bayonne"

The Effect Of Flying Butter

I Know What You're Thinking

"It won't have any effect until it lands, surely?"

     Ten out of ten for observation, nil for appreciating that, as is the rule with BOOJUM! we are not talking about the stuff you spread on toast of a morning.  You see, I am talking about what my 'Collins' describes as "Any diurnal insect with a slender body having clubbed antennae and typically rest with the wings (frequently brightly-coloured) closed over the back."  Art!

     The thinking is that the name comes from butterflies that were bright yellow, as above, which reminded our distant ancestors of butter, as bananas hadn't yet been invented.

     Talking of butter, Conrad is reminded of a Youtube Reddit I came across recently, where the Reticent Poster's male partner kept disappearing into the bathroom for an hour with a pack of butter.  Butter Perv eventually cracked and told her what he was up to, which turned out to be so sordid that she didn't dare put it down.  Naturally there was no shortage of risqué suggestions, none of which are going to be repeated here.  Art!

At £2 a pack he ought to have gone for margarine

     ANYWAY to get back to the title, what we're talking about today is 'The Butterfly Effect', which comes from chaos theory.  Briefly put, it states that small initial changes in a system can, over time, cause disproportionately large changes in that system at a later date.  Popularised as a butterfly flapping it's wings in Peru can cause a hurricane in the Philippines.  Not that hurricanes need much excuse to hit the Philippines.  Art!

     ANYWAY AGAIN moving on from meteorology, I am relating a Butterfly Effect tale from Reddit via Youtube, where the most inconsequential beginnings end up having disproportionately awful consequences, since these tales rarely have a happy ending.  Art!

     The Cheapskate Narrator explained they were trying to get a $10 discount on an assault course package, by having 5 people take part.  Doughy Middle-Aged Hispanic Guy was eventually verbally bludgeoned into taking part, which was a mistake as he fell and tore his cruciate ligament after the 5th mile.  Slipped on a greasy substance derived from dairy milk, perhaps?  Art!

  As CN told it, DMAHG was thus unable to work thanks to his injury and was forced to stay at home all the time, as presumable cruciate ligament problems take ages to heal and involve not moving about very much, said Doctor Conrad.  He then got into furious arguments with his wife whom he had previously been able to avoid thanks to being in the office, which escalated to the point that he got divorced and separated.  His adult children didn't want anything to do with him after he moved out, so he had to rent a property.  Hmmmm a bit telling that his own kinder didn't want anything to do with Dear Old Dad, methinks.

     Bad enough, right?  Art!

     Yeah, because DMAHG rented a flat from a mutual friend of CN's.  The Mutual Friend was a strapping 30-year old white bloke who was soon to be married.  Then he discovered that DMAHG had used his (MF's) photograph on Tinder to try and hook up with single women.  Rather a desperate strategy because if he got a hot date, they would instantly see a dumpy little 5' 2" Hispanic in his fifties was kind of completely different from MF.  MF found out and was not amused, especially as it was his wife who found the fake profile on Tinder, which must have led to an interesting conversation.  Nor would DMAHG respond to phone calls, because he immediately realised he'd been busted and thought - well, his thought processes don't seem to have been engaged substantially, if at all.

     So -  he got evicted.

     All over a $10 discount.  A personal hurricane from the lightest of butterfly wingflaps.

O Delicious Schadenfreude!

As you may be aware, Elong Tusk (a.k.a. Kaptain Ketamine) has been thrusting his long and unwanted oar into the politics of South Canada, twisting it about and generally playing with the rowlocks.  He can get away with his aberrant behaviour in South Canada, because they see charmless as harmless.

     Less so in Europe and Scandinavia.

     Where is the Tesla being trialled on this side of The Pond?  Why, Norway.  Art!

     The NAFO and Norks on Twitter have been keeping track of Tesla's sales performance in Norway, which has been - underwhelming.  Down 30% in January.  Down 70% in February.  Across Europe?  Art!

Sicur

@Sicur5Sicur

·

Mar 2

59% in Germany, 63% France, Denmark about 40%. 45% total in Europe

     In the space of two months.  Wow, for the person running Tesla, Elong Tusk is doing a bang-up job for <looks up an EV competitor> Audi and BMW.  Art!

Sadly, I cannot Taze the AI Art Generator

     What makes things even worse for The Musk Rat is that his other businesses are all founded and based on Tesla stock, so if this tanks, as it is currently doing in hard fashion, he's rather rotary-metal-helical-fixing-deviced.

     Conrad is only sad there's no popcorn left in The Mansion.

OOOOH!

Just noticed this as a by-line on the news feed, and of course - obviously! - I had to share it.  Art!

     We occasionally refer back to this story but it bears repeating.  You see, the BBC's premier dramamentary series was recorded and stored on great big cans of film, which took up lots and lots of room.  Come 1970, when it had been running for seven years, the suits in charge at Auntie Beeb decided to destroy the old film stock of "Doctor Who" in order to make room for newer film cans.  Thus many of the old black and white serials with William Hartnell (above) and Patrick Troughton were either missing completely or had gaps in them.  Over the decades many supposedly 'missing completely and totally never to return' episodes turned up.

     There are still 97 episodes absent that are, by now, unlikely to ever be discovered in anyone's attic or basement, so the Beeb has instead created animations of these episodes, which are then paired with the soundtracks, which all exist.  Not a brilliant solution but any port in a hurricane.  Art!

From "The Web Of Fear"

     The animators are now looking to the Beeb to permit them to go into serial production of the missing episodes with animations galore.  We shall have to go ponder on this anon.

More Matilda

If we're being formal, the "A12 Infantry Tank Matilda II", which inherited the name from it's diminutive predecessor, the Matilda I.  Art!

     Supposedly, the Matilda A11 got it's name thanks to it's resemblance to a cartoon duck of the time.  Your Humble Scribe has gone scouring teh Interwebz for a picture of this duck but alas, there are none.  It's all Dog Buns! Disney ducks from their stunningly unfunny animations.

     ANYWAY AGAIN I have a photo or two to share about the field trials being conducted in New Guinea in late 1944, where the Sherman and Churchill were being put through their paces to see if they were up to the task.  Art!

Photos and captions courtesy Dennis Burns

    Here one of the trial Churchills has gotten bogged-down, which is surprising as the Churchill was capable of great things in rough terrain - at least in Europe and North Africa.  Being that it totalled 40 tons, or at least 12 more than the Matilda, getting bogged-down would be a regular occurrence.  Art!

     This Sherman here has also bogged, and is getting an ignominous tow from a Churchill.  Shermans were a lot less massive than the Churchill but still at least 2 tons heavier than the Matilda.  The Sherman also stood 1' 3" taller than the squat Matilda II, meaning it stood out a lot more, was harder to hide and easier to spot.  The Matilda also ran on much lower gearing than the Sherman, meaning it was able to advance sloooooowly without stalling, just what you want when venturing into dense jungle that can conceal the enemy.

Conrad Agrees

I see the Snake Pass is back in the news again for all the right reasons.  Art!

     Because otherwise I am discommoded when travelling to Richard's domicile at Dungworth.  See to it, mayors.  Ta very much.  Or you will bitterly regret it when I take over.  O yes indeed.