Were I To Say 'Camp'

You Ought Not To Be Thinking

"O Conrad is going to compliment Alan Carr".  Quite the opposite.  Carr Trouble is going to be one of the first into the uranium mines when I take over, alongside Russell Brand and Elong Tusk if he's still around.  

     ANYWAY I want to deliver Part Two of the Car Trouble saga, with No Chrysler 4 Me and his idiot older brother, Chad Wannabe.  Allow me to recarpitulate.  Ha!  Do you see wh O you do.  Art!

     We learned that CW absolutely could not stand to be upstaged by his younger brother and had HAD HAD to outdo him.  Hence the long, sorry saga of a worn-out Dodge Ram - see above - and then a decrepit camper van.  Hence today's title.

     Who gets to help renovate and refurbish the camper?  Why none other than NC4M, who had not yet learned to say 'No'.  He detailed the work required: half the rusted rotten floor needed replacing; rotten wood in the walls needed replacing; the roof needed resealing; a vent had to be put in and a lot of black mould bleached out.  Art!

     When engine troubles - which NC4M had warned long and loud about at the time of purchase - rendered the Ram immobile, CW thought it the world's best idea ever to tell - not ask - NC4M to give him his Toyota Tundra, so that he wouldn't have to drive the Ford minivan his ex had gifted him out of pity.  He viewed it as a 'chick car' and felt humiliated driving it, the poor man-baby.

     This idea got short shrift.  CW retorted that he might just steal the Toyota anyway, which is not the brightest idea in the world; warning the person you're going to steal from that you're going to steal from.  Art!

Toyota Tundra  = MAN TRUCK!

     His brother retorted that he had security cameras focussed on his truck and the cops would be called instanter if it went missing.  CW stormed out of the house in a rage and kicked his Ford's tyre so hard he fell on his behind, having to crawl into it. 
     CW went complaining to Mom and Dad; normally in these stories they side with the bottomhole offspring but in this case they told him to kick rocks and he wasn't getting any MAN TRUCK money out of them.

     We then get into the gritty details of engines.  CW wanted to do an 'LS Swap' with his Ram.  Translated into English, this means replacing the original engine with a GM LS Series V8 engine.  Art!

Truly an engine fit for a MAN TRUCK

     NC4M then indulged in a debate about the LS being a 'Small Block V8' versus the Ram's 5.7 Magnum engine being 'Big Block'.  

"A big block engine is a large, heavy-duty V8 internal combustion engine with wide cylinder spacing and high displacement, built to produce massive low-end torque"

     So now we know.  So, too, did CW, whom also knew of a LSV8 in a junkyard that he could swap into his Ram.  The whole package consisted of the engine, a transmission and a cooling system, altogether (with labour* costs) totalling $3,000, which was $2,995 more than broke-bottom CW had to his name.  Art!

     That's the transmission again, looking once more like the engine bell of the 'Rocinante'.  I shall gloss over the long saga of CW trying to raise money, except that NC4M pulled out a sheaf of signed receipts for when he'd lent money that was verrrry grudgingly paid back.  In fact there was a total of $400 still outstanding.
     To cut a long story - we are 13 minutes into the story here - short, it took CW so long to raise the cash that the LS V8 was sold before he could acquire it.

      Of course - obviously! - he blamed NC4M for everything, but finally accepted that the Ram was toast and sold it for $1,500.  Being the man-baby he was, he then spent his days sulking, pouting and crying in his camper van.  

      His next brilliant plan was to -

      Convert his Ford minivan into a truck.  A MAN TRUCK!

      I need to do more annotation about the latest part of this saga, because there's another 13 minutes to go.  Before Part 2.

Duxford Redux

SIT BACK DOWN!  Do not fear, I shall not be going overboard with another 1,500 words and 35 photographs, this is an Item not the whole blog or even an Intro.  Art!

     Another recap, the Tornado we ended with yesteryon.  The viewing platform enabled one to see into the cockpit, which is shown below.  

     Very cramped.  Also, full of electro-mechanical gadgetry, whereas nowadays it's all digital.  Your Humble Scribe would not be able to fit in there, either as regards height or girth.  Art!

     Meet the English Electric Lightning.  It's basically two whacking big engines with a cockpit strapped on, able to easily hit Mach 2.  Note the missile slung under the wing, because the Lightning's job was to intercept Soviet bombers in short order and turn them into aluminium filings.  I've seen one in low-level flight over Freckleton Marshes, then it angled upwards and turned on the afterburners and it was gone from sight in about three seconds.  Note the unusual wing shape, and how thin they are.  So thin that external fuel tanks were mounted on top of them, since there was no internal wing space for fuel storage.

A Blast From The Past

From my initial year at Sainsbo's in fact, which was <shudders in horror> eight years ago now.  How time accelerates to a significant fraction of c.  Art!

     My old boss's boss, Gary, and an absolute delight to work for.  He had a side gig in doing voice-overs, so moving into radio seems perfectly logical.  You know all those terrible stories of South Canadian manglement I often post?  The opposite of Gary.  The senior management above him begged him to stay on an extra year so they could look for someone able to fill his shoes.  Well done, sir!

Egging The Pudding

By which I mean that 'How To Not Die' website and their 'What Zombie Movies Get Wrong About Survival' and the last iteration of same: Neglecting Minor Medical Injuries.  Art!

     They blithely state 'An untreated wound becomes infected within 24 - 48 hours'.  NOT ALL THE TIME!  HTND automatically assumes that 100% of all wounds are infected all in the worst way.  How did we children of the Sixties manage to survive?  They go on about tetanus, UTIs, and bloviate about how blisters can kill you deader than dead.  Drama queens.  Then they state that all antibiotics will have run out within 12 months, BUT don't mention anything about naturally-occurring substitutes.  Also, Conrad did the maths on this: drugs for half the South Canadian population of 150 million in stock for a year, means that 15 million survivors now have 10 years-worth of drugs.  Art!

     There are also millions of these.  Lifesavers!

Back To Brucie

Bruce Pennington, that is, and another screenshot of his artwork, cribbed from 'Sci-Fi Artwork's Youtube channel.  Art!

     Reallllly sinister.  Conrad is unsure exactly where those hooks are dangling from but they give the impression that you're in somewhere rather close Hades-like.  The red palette Ol' Brucie uses doesn't make it look inviting, either.  Nor does his depiction of a volcano, which is a bit of a go-to for artists wanting to depict Hell.  Plus the bones.  And the river of blood.  

     Is it for a book or magazine cover?  Let me dig.

     Nope.  Nothing comes up in searching.  Perhaps Ol' Brucie was simply feeling a bit liverish that day.

Finally -

We have avoided mentioning Mordorvia so far, and that's the only time it will crop up, so it's time to do a bit of gentle shoeing.  Art!

     Ooooh dear, poor old Donold, he looks as if he's lost the will to live.

*  NOTE CORRECT SPELLING

Wings And Things

I Can Only Hope You're DESPERATE To Learn About Airpower

Because that's what this blog is going to be about, along with various tanks and other kit.  For Lo! we are on about the Imperial War Museum at RAF Duxford, and the contents thereof.  They had a fair few armoured vehicles as well, that were moved there from the London museum as 'overflow'.  The whole site is vast, meaning we did a lot of walking.  Fortunately the weather was brilliant, just like high summer.  Art!

Proof!

      Just a note about the photos: the exterior ones were taken with my digital camera, the interior ones on my phone camera, as the daylight was so bright I couldn't see the phone display.  Great problem to have!  Art?

     The map shows how massive the site is.  Weary-footed were we at end of day, also grateful for Mister Sun.  Art!

     A peek into the Conservation Hall, with a Hanomag halftrack mounting an AA gun on the back.  

     Sal wondered why those planes had their wings folded up, so Dad explained that they would have been serving on an aircraft carrier, where space is at a premium, so the wings were hinged to fold upwards.  Cue short discussion about having them fold up mid-flight.  Art!

     The Polaris SLBM (Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile) that I displayed yesteryon.  Sal, absently, wondered how it would be re-used after launching.  I explained that it only gets to be used once, and makes a very loud noise that nobody nearby will get to hear.  Art!

     The RE8, the other end of the air technology spectrum.  Made of a wooden frame covered with fabric, strung with wires under tension, and with a bracing open cockpit and observers position.  It looked quite shoddy, which you might expect of an artefact over 100 years old.  The aircraft was an observation plane, intended to do spotting for artillery batteries far in the rear, vital but deadly dull work.  The observer also had a machine gun, Hun deterrence for the use of.  Art!

The RE8s tail, a thing of beauty in it's own right

        There's a War Department Army Service Corps truck in the middle ground, and in front of it - Art! 

     This is a mobile mechanics' workshop trailer of the ASC, intended to be towed around behind the front lines in France and Flanders to wherever 'twas needed.  It definitely doesn't have wings, so it may be one of the large objects moved from London.  Art!

     Here we meet another First Unpleasantness biplane, the BE2.  This was another reconnaissance plane, doing spotting and photography, plus a little bombing to add a nice frisson, tootling along at a maximum speed of <gasp!> 70 PROUD IMPERIAL MILES PER HOUR.  It took almost half an hour to reach 10,000 feet.   We'll come back to that benchmark metric.  Art!

See Harrier

     The Sea Harrier, the Flying Fiend of the Falklands.  Much smaller than Col expected, because it's indeed a dainty little lady.  Apparently if engaged in a dogfight other pilots found it hard to identify if it was coming or going.  The Harrier pilots had a horrid trick up their sleeve call 'Vector In Flight' or 'Viffing', if an Argentinian plane got on their tail, they would rotate their jet through 90º to the downward position.  This caused the Harrier to leap upwards, meaning the following aircraft to lose any kind of lock they had, and to move into where the Harrier had been.  Meanwhile the Harrier resumed normal flight - now being behind the enemy plane.  Art!

     A couple of shots of the Short (!) Sunderland flying boat, which gobsmacked Col in terms of sheer size and bemused Jul, who had never encountered such an avian species as this one.  Having it sit in the water to take off and land meant no protrusions on the underside, and it has a nice clean streamlined hull.  The large gap in the fuselage under the wing was where bomb or depth charges would be cranked outside to be dropped.  Art!

     The Sunderland from the front, with puny humans for scale.  Art!

      What on earth is this?  No plaque or blurb about it, so Conrad took a photo, guessing it was a Leigh Light.  Art!

     Surprise surprise, it was a Leigh Light.  Not sure how it was attached to the Sunderland, but the general arrangement was that it hung under one wing.  The aircraft mounting it would then dispel black night o'er the ocean an acre at a time, revealing any surfaced U-boats.  The U-boat crews loathed the LL as it was so effective, yah book sucks Herr Schickelgruber.

     The Shorty you see before you was also used by the M8s as a nightclub and bar post-war.  Good luck fitting more than a dozen guests in there at any one time.  Art!

     An assemblage of ordnance, irritatingly not labelled or plaqued.  I can tell that one at the rear is an anti-tank missile, cannot remember the name.  No idea what the whopper at the front is, but I think your best bet is to not be around when it goes off.  The drum magazines on the anti-aircraft machine gun mounting threw me and I thought they were Vickers 'K' guns; but no, they're Bren guns sporting the 100-round drum magazine rather than their normal curved 30-round jobs.  Two guns firing at once would put about 1,000 fast metal pieces in the air per minute.  Art!

     The tail guns of the Sunderland poking into shot.  What we're mostly looking at here is one of the British 'V' bomber force, the Vulcan.  We'll get to the Victor and the Valiant later on.  All 3 were intended to deliver Buckets Of Instant Sunshine to Moscow if the Cold War went pear-shaped.  The Vulcan, handily, has a gaggle of puny humans standing around to demonstrate how massive it is.  As seen in 'Thunderball'.  There is one still flying at air shows, which has to be careful flying over car parks as it's so loud it sets all the alarms off.  Art!

     Once more no wings.  Here we have a Daimler armoured car of the Desert Rats, discernible as such by the jerboa emblem on the bumper.  Sal thought the other was a vulture and she may well be right.  The driver's hatch is raised because they're not expecting trouble; if they were anticipating a hot time ahead the armoured flap would lowered and the driver has then to squint through a gap only slightly bigger than a postage stamp.  The function of an armoured car was to carry out what cavalry used to do in times of old:  screen their own forces and find out what the opposition is doing.  Conrad is fairly certain this vehicle was on  display in London.  Art!

     The Panavia Multi-Role Combat Aircraft, better known as the Tornado.  Conrad remembers having an Airfix kit of it in the early Seventies, before it actually came into service, and here it is gathering dust in a hanger as an exhibit since being retired in 2019.  Possibly most renowned for involvement in 'Operation Telic' where they used Storm Shadows for the first time.  

     Or - was that model kit a Jaguar?  Curse you old age and gin!

     I think that's enough of RAF Duxford for one day.  More to come in future - LOTS more!  I bet you can hardly wait.

I Am Back!

To A Chorus Of 'Were You Away?' Or 'So What' From The Audience

Both of them, the pikers.

     I need to explain that I'm typing this Intro up on Monday evening, after having arrived home from the Imperial War Museum site at RAF Duxford, where I and others have been making a group visit.  The site is HUGE and one needs to walk between the gigantic aircraft hangers to get around, a chore rendered considerably less painful thanks to being in bright sunny warm weather.  

     As with the visit to BOVINGTON TANK MUSEUM last year, I am going to be padding out the blog with a handful of the 198 photographs I took.  There would be more but both camera and phone battery were getting low by 17:00, or seven hours after we entered.  Art!

     The mighty Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead, or up to three of them*, which kept Brezhnev and the Ruffians in check and being as polite as Ruffians can be.  With Sal and Col for scale.

     ANYWAY as we do on BOOJUM! I would like to return to spifflicating the Ruffians again, this time the descendants of those who were kept polite courtesy of a few 200 kiloton Instant Sunshine Bombs.  Art!

     One rather suspects that 50% of the Ruffian audience are the FSB, eavesdropping on how the global West sees them, and the others are Ruffians who loathe Putinpot with all their being and want him gone.  Have patience.

     ANYWAY AGAIN I would like to lead with 'Preston Stewart', the vlogger whom has his own Youtube channel called - you may be ahead of me here - 'Preston Stewart'.  Prez lead on his channel with the frankly bonkers news that Barad-Duh was burning, and on the eve of Putinpot's sham 'elections', too, which is the cherry on top of the icing on the cake.  To mix baking metaphors.  Art!

     What you see here is Prez's Serious Face, his actual visage on live film is rather more animated and less constipated, and he has a great accent.  His vlog concerned a huge Ukrainian strike on Barad-Duh on the first day of the 'election'.  Art!

     This is how you keep Ruffians polite.  For your information, the Kozaky usually send as many as 400 drones into the entirety of Mordorvia, so this is about x4 times the normal number concentrated on one particular region.

     Art!

     That's the opening scene for 'Blade Runner', which Your Humble Scribe watched at the cinema yes I am that old and - Art!

     The Moscow Oil Refinery is on fire.  On the day the Duma 'elections' take place.  Not a juxtaposition of words Charlie Chipmunk Cheeks ever expected nor wanted to hear.  The Ukrainian attack was documented by 'Clement Molin', the wunderkinder French chap who uses OSINT - 'Open Source Intelligence' which is available to all - to create charts and graphs and maps that - if he stops posting in the near future, means either the CIA or MI6 have recruited him - illustrate the ongoing war.  Art!

     That looks expensive.  Art!

     The Ruffian milblogger 'Rybar', one of the orc's semi-official pro-Putin  posters, explained in detail what had happened.  The Kozaky had launched waves of drones towards Moscow, many of them inert versions carrying NO explosive payload, but ALL of which had to be intercepted, as you cannot tell which drone is carrying 50 kilos of high explosive.  This process uses up the available interceptor missiles and at $1 million per interceptor versus $50,000 for a drone, the Ruffians are eating the credit imbalance.  Then the waves of real drones went in, and the orcs admit at least 11 hit targets, which may be correct or just orc coping.  Those that hit the Moscow refinery had gotten through 140 anti-aircraft systems arranged in 5 concentric circles around Barad-Duh, meaning that the Kozaky can still hit targets in the best-defended city in the world, should they care to.  Art!

     That looks expensive.  

     Prez read out the thoughts of 'Fighter-Bomber', the Ruffian ex-military pilot whom warned that Ukraine would be sending in waves of 1,000 or even up to 4,000 drones, to saturate the orc defences.  This might sound like a paranoid fantasy, but it's not beyond reason; if the Kozaky can produce 400 drones per day and save 100 towards a major incursion each night, this kind of - <ahem> - 'experience' may not be so novel for the orcs in future.

     Bunker Grandad may not be aware of these details as of today, or yesteryon, but even he can see what the results are with his Mark One Human Eyeball if he dips out of the Kremlin at any time.  Art!

     I bet 'Moscow Being Bombed' was not on his 2026 bingo card. 

     Stay polite, Dimya, we here in Perfidious Albion still have 4 'Vanguard' class 'Boomer' nuclear missile subs, one of which is always on patrol and which could deliver 40 Instant Sunshine Bombs on your scrofulitic empire.  One wonders if the Ruffian air defences around Barad-Duh could intercept any of them.  O and that's not counting our M8s, whom have their own Boomer nuclear deterrent.  Art!

     It takes rare precision and skill to unite two nations whom have been at each other's throats for 400 years and have them both hate and unite against you.  But the highest levels of political will in Mordorvia have managed it.  Well done Charlie Chipmunk Cheeks!

More Ungentle Shoeing

Yes, we are back to the Mercilessly Mocking Manchild Moobster, or the bloated sweaty swollen carcass that calls himself Donold Judas Trump.  Sorry if you're a fan of his BUT you ought not to be anywhere near BOOJUM! if you revere the Big Orange Oaf Himself.  Art!

     Showing off his triple chin, and sweaty epidermis, and bloated eyes.  He looks 92 years old, and a bad 92 at that.  Imagine, if you will, Donold trying to cycle 50 yards as per Joe Biden: he would drop dead over the handlebars before 45 yards.  I think this is BOOH trying to push his presence on the ballot, which, since it doesn't and cannot exist, is more 'Pretend The World Is As I Want It To Be'.  You could write a library about him at this pont.  Art!

     Which came first, the Donold or the Salt Vampire or the Donold, or the - ?  Only you can tell!

Cankles Von Yamteats

I have had to contract this Canadistuckistan's Twitter post since their nickname for the treble orange toast-rack is even worse than the original.  Art!

     Conrad unsure if there is any other stupid we can concrete how stupid Cankles Von Yamteats truly is: a basic metric in how much volume of your brain is made out of mashed potatoes?  Maris Piper 1.0 and so on.

     Enough of the Swollen Sweaty Saggy Senile Sepia Sackbutt, let us move on!

Further To The Above

Whilst travelling back to Lesser Sodom, Sal and Tom whom are collectively known as 'The Kids' despite being over 30, were communing together on their Devil's Digital Devices, and became aware that there was a Road Traffic Accident just ahead of us on the motorway.

     Cue a diversion into an 'American Diner' for an early dinner, just short of the tailback forming as a result of an enormous army vehicle colliding with a car.  Art!

     Picture the above BUT WITH SUNSHINE.

     Your Humble Scribe got a 'Blue Berry Gum' shake that meant no other sugar for the next ten days.  Art!

     Yes, so thick the spoon stood upright within it.

     ANYWAY AGAIN once finished, The Kids used their unholy Devil's Digital Technology, known to the rest of you as mobile phones, to work around the back roads to circumvent the traffic backlog and avoid said queue.  Which was pretty impressive to this old dog, I can tell you.

     Still not had any more sugar since, though.

      

STOP WITH THE WALLET-EMPTYING!

Whilst at Duxford, I did avoid purchasing an edition of 'Sand And Steel' that was signed by the author, since I already have a non-signed edition.  I am not saying that I didn't purchase any books, merely that wh

     ANYWAY ANYWAY moving swiftly on, here's said author pimping another book - Art!

     NO NO NO NO!  I am so very NOT buying this book ever ever ever.  Not at least for twelve months and there's a cheap paperback second-hand copy on Abebooks.

     Enough wibble and time for bed.  

*  I think this was the 'Chevaline' modification but don't quote me.