If I Were To Mention 'Discovery'

You Might Think I Meant That 'Starry Trex' Spin-Off

'Spin-off' in the way an ultracentrifuge spins off, and destroys the laboratory it's based in, which, if Art will put down his bowl of anthracite and milk - 

     Yeah, a centrifuge is not to be messed with, considering they can be spinning at 30,000 revolutions per minute.

     BUT you'd be wrong! as I've never seen an episode of 'Discovery' and have no reason to remedy this deficiency.  I'm still working my way through Season One of 'Smallville' and then have Season onward of 'Lost' to catch up with, so that's me spoken for.

      ANYWAY what I wanted to address is the South Canadian legal description of 'Discovery', which we here in the Allotment Of Eden know as 'Disclosure'.  Art!

Also known as 'Attack of the Giant Hands'

     

     The rules for Discovery came in after 1938, so you won't find them in the film above, which is 1932 vintage.

     What are they?  O I thought you'd never ask!  It's a set of procedures before trial that seek to attain and maintain transparency, where each party exchanges information and evidence, preventing 'trial-by-ambush' where one side suddenly reveals hitherto unknown evidence, and fostering settlements before a case comes to trial.  Art!

     You can see Vinny scheming and plotting to get hold of the opposing counsel's information - which is all completely uncalled for as discovery would grant him this information anyway.  Doesn't Marisa Tomei look delicious?  I MEAN an excellent technical witness?
     ANYWAY why am I going on about South Canadian legal procedures?

     Funny you should ask.  Art!

     This is Donnie Dorko's suit against the BBC, alleging defamation because they spliced together two film clips that were actually 50 minutes apart, which he alleges amounts to defamation.  The whole clip amounts to 12 seconds.

     In reality Donnie never expected the case to proceed to trial, as what he wanted was $10 million or so from the Beeb for him to drop the case and make it go away.

     This has not happened.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  The BBC has retained counsel and is now pursuing several avenues, including the surrender of financial records.  The Beeb alleges that DJ Tango earned more than $1 billion over the course of 2025, so he has not lost money due to their broadcast, and they intend to prove that in court.  Art!

Conrad unsure if this is the 'Paint Licker' or the 'Coke Sniffer'

     Mister Smug here runs the 'Donald Trump Revocable Trust', because Daddy cannot be trusted with anything complicated.  There are over 400 businesses that fall under this umbrella and THE BEEB WANTS ACCESS TO THEM ALL.  Which Judge Lett has granted them, arguing that BOOH's 'brands, properties and businesses have been impugned, with subsequent reputational and economic damage'.  So all those records need to be viewed by the BBC's attorneys, an action The Nodfather will inevitably jib at, because he wants as little scrutiny as possible.  Discoveryuncomfortable, hmmm?  Art!

     Meet Mike.  Michael Popok, South Canadian attorney, and whom went into the case on 'Meidas Touch' on Youtube in some detail.

     Firstly, he said that the entire case may yet be given the heave-ho, as the clip Don Snoreleone is having fits about was never shown in South Canada; secondly, he rather cruelly dismisses the program it was from, 'Panorama', as having little presence or viewership on streaming services.  Art!

    Thus having little influence.  So Pumpkinhead cannot possibly have suffered the loss of $10 billion as a result.  To quote Mike: "They apologised, which is a very British thing to do," and may have encouraged King Piggy to press further, mistaking humility for weakness.

     Going back to the BBC; Mike describes them as 'coming out swinging', meaning the boxing term not lifestyle choice.  In order to prove that what they said is the truth, and thus cannot be defamatory, they have subpoenaed almost 100 individuals of the Trump Crime Family and their Consiglieres.  The list includes his current wife Ivanka, Jared Kushner - some sort of orbiting parasite, I believe - Steve Bannon (whom makes Boris Johnson look well-groomed), Michael Flynn, Stephen Miller and The Paint Licker.  Art!

     You may remember Sydney Powell, one half of the comedy duo Powell and Giuliani, both of whom have been subpoenaed, despite Fat Caligula claiming that Powell never worked for him.  O and Roger Stone as well, the criminal pardoned by BOOH.  A right rogue's gallery!  Art?

     Chuck Tobin, one of the BBC's attorneys, who is seeking to get Pimpkinhead to make a deposition.  This is one of the pre-trial discovery measures where witness statements are taken under oath, which Trump and his attorneys will storm the gates of reality to prevent happening, as once again, scrutiny.  Art!

     Meet Magistrate Judge E. Letts.  It should be obvious to you that she is a woman, and also black, both of which are going to bring the Orange Land Whale to the brink of a rage-induced stroke.  Why have we circled back to her?  O I thought you'd never ask!

     Because Trump's attorney, from the law firm Sleaze, Cheeze and Wheeze, has now hastily dropped the 'economic damages' part of the suit, seeing how hard the BBC are punching, claiming that the case has 'evolved' and they are only after reputational damages; a claim that cut exactly no ice with Letts, who refused to separate either aspect.

     Conrad is pretty sure this case will fizzle out before it gets to court, as the Saggy Senile Sepia Sackbut won't allow himself to be depositioned nor have his business secrets exposed.  Art!

How he sees himself             How he really is

     Lay in more popcorn.

Getting Rid Of More Old Bookmarks And Favourites

Art!

     Hmmm low editorial standards here, methinks.  No, NASA did not once consider nuking the Moon on purpose.  The organisation did not come into existence until mid-1958.  Who was around long before NASA?

     That would be the South Canadian Air Force, who thought detonating a nuke on the Moon would pick up their nation's morale, which had been a bit dented by the Sinisters and their Sputniks.  Saner, cooler heads prevailed and the A-119 project was later shelved.

     Demonstrating folie a deux, the Sinisters also had a 1958 speculative 'Nuke the Moon' project dubbed E-4, which was also allowed to lapse.  Art!

     The scientists involved were not sanguine about guaranteeing the launch would be successful, meaning there was a non-zero chance of a live hydrogen warhead falling back to Sinister territory.

More Of Mister McKie

And his pie in the sky.  Or, rather, gigantic spaceship.  Art!

     This has the feel of a book cover to it, and reminds me of 'Childhood's End'.  I've had a thorough scope of the cityscape here and cannot find any hidden elements or Easter eggs, only a small notation to lower port of '8N'.  I do note that the skyscraper to starboard is extremely narrow for it's height, which must surely bring up critical construction issues associated with it's architecture?

     Or - is that just me?

     A bit of digging seems to bring up this image with several others as illustrations for a book - Art!

     From 1976, about human colonies in space being established 'Within your lifetime'.  Ah the optimism of fifty years ago -

I Did Mention This, Briefly

So the algorithm may have picked up on 'orca', which makes a pleasant change from oscilloscopes.  Previously it was a metaphor about naval blockades and how Perfidious Albion manages challenges to her hegemony.  Art!

     I didn't watch the clip or take stills from it but - you may be ahead of me here - having five tons of anything hit a mere boat is not going to end well for the boat.  Art!

     Teenage vandal orca biting off a boat's rudder.  

     Hom. Sap. don't hunt orcas so why they're being so destructive is rather a mystery.  Ichthyologists say youngsters falling into bad company.  Quite possible true.

     Don't forget - 'orcas' not to be confused with 'orcs'.  The latter are just as destructive but are land-mobile.

Happy Birthday, Stan!

I Refer, Of Course - Obviously!

To Stanley Euphrosyne Kubrick, who would have been 98 today if he hadn't shimmied off this mortal coil in 1999.  Actually I lied about his middle name, he didn't have one.  Rather than put up an illo of his most famous films, here's a behind the scenes still from 'Barry Lyndon'.  Art!

You can tell it's from behind the scenes because the actor in the forefront is smoking a cigarette, which were unknown in the eighteenth century.

     ANYWAY time to post the links for today's blog.

2025

BOOJUM!: The Big Bang Burner Barn

2024

BOOJUM!: Leave It!

2023

BOOJUM!: A Hard Day's Plight

2022

BOOJUM!: Obscured By Clouds Or Overcome By Fumes

2021

BOOJUM!: Those Fiendish Danes - They Play Word Games!

2020

BOOJUM!: Seeing Things Differently

2019

BOOJUM!: Look! A Book!

2018

BOOJUM!: I Am Going To Cheat Here -

2017

BOOJUM!: Conrad: Can Pass For Human

2016

BOOJUM!: 24

2015

BOOJUM!: Peaches, Pigs And Paramilitaries

2014

BOOJUM!: Only 20 Hits To Go

2013

BOOJUM!: Comics and Cake. Actually Trade Paper Back and cake.

If I Were To Say 'Port'

You'd Probably Roll Your Eyes At Me Being Willfully Obscure

Which is fair enough.  Art!

     The most expensive bottle of port ever sold, an 1863 decanter of Niepoort, which set the buyer back £100,000.  So, about £5,000 per schooner.  I put this up as an physical example, since I also use 'Port' in preference to 'Left', and if we can cattle-prod Art into work -

     None of that 'Front', 'Back', 'Left' and 'Right' nonsense about ships here.

     Art!

     There is also a position for a soldier bearing arms, as in the above, where the Guardsman has his pig-sticker resting at 'port' on his - er - port shoulder.

     All of that is by way of preamble - Conrad is unsure if he's ever done a postamble or not - to the meat of the matter, which concerned a Comment on a Youtube Reddit compilation titled 'Biggest Fails Ever Recorded', which is composed of - you may be ahead of me here - the biggest eff-ups ever witnessed.  As an example, one of the shorter tales was about a poster's grandfather, who worked for a tent company.  His team went to take down a huge tent that had been rented by a circus, only to find an elephant left inside.  Art!

"Yes?"

     The Commenter in question was careful not to give either a date or a location, making any confirmatory digging pretty difficult.  It was in This Sceptred Isle, if that helps at all.

     ANYWAY he stated that this occurred many years ago, at a major city port, where a father employed there had gotten his son a position working dockside for the port authority.  Art!

     There are 121 different ports in the UK, of which 51 are large, city ports, so there was no quick or easy way to identify this one; I shall come back to this.  Art!

     InexperienceD Inspection Onsite Technician, hereafter IDIOT, was responsible for testing fire extinguishers at the port's fire department laboratory, which were primarily the CO₂ version, full of carbon dioxide under pressure.  Meaning that when their release valve was actioned, they emitted an enormous volume of sublimating CO₂.  Art!

     IDIOT couldn't get one extinguisher to function as the valve was jammed.  He lost his temper and walloped it against the nearest hard object, which had the undesired effect of breaking the whole valve off.  Oooops.

     With no valve, the extinguisher instantly vented it's entire contents into the lab building, which made Conrad a bit antsy about CO₂ poisoning.  There is no mention of this in the Comment, so the concentration must have been at below lethal levels, and they had the windows open.  Judging from the speed with which my bottle of ginger beer emptied itself when propelled by carbon dioxide, the venting took only seconds.  Art!

     Our Narrator states that the port control tower was located directly opposite the laboratory building, which is no longer the case but might well have been thirty years ago.  Conrad is making a guesstimate that the port we are talking about here is Swansea, since the Narrator mentions an associated 'bay', which means either Swansea or Cardiff.  IDIOT exited the lab to try and signal that it was only a minor accident, nothing to see here, move along, by waving.  Ooops.

     The control tower staff see, not a minor accident, but a building engulfed in fumes, with a desperate employee signalling DANGER WILL ROBINSON!

     They activate the Port Alarm.

     Narrator clarifies that this is the master alarm for the whole port, and is a siren exactly similar to those used for air raids, which has only ever been tested in drills and never for a real emergency.  Conrad dug a little on this and yes, ports do have a siren alarm system to notify of emergencies.  Unfortunately for this story, I couldn't find any examples of it being used at Swansea port.  Art!

     The Port of Swansea no longer handles tankers, as the port of Milford Haven displaced this function in 1998.  However, 'many years ago' they did, so the two tankers offloading flammable cargoes drop their lines and reverse, as fast as possible, into the bay.  The local city fire brigade is summoned automatically by the port alarm, and 5,000 employees are evacuated.  This is where I did more digging and excluded Cardiff from being the port in question, as their days of having five thousand employees were at the beginning of the twentieth century.

     The Narrator ends rather weakly with IDIOT heading home - more like slinking home - and his father commenting on how odd a time it was for an emergency drill at the port, wasn't it?  We are then told this was decades ago, so potentially from 1976 to 1996?

     Net cost of having a snit was apparently £6,000,000 for a whole day's port operations being shut down.  And people still recognise IDIOT as 'the man who shut the port down'.  Infamy is a wonderful thing.  Art!

£6 million per refill

More McKie Maunderings

Art!

     Hmmmm.  To judge by the speech bubble and lettering, this is from a magazine, possibly 'Heavy Metal'.  Allow me to dig a little.  

     Aha!  Art?

     Vindicated.

     Allow me to add a bit more detail.

It is a scarce poster and has been out of print for 36 years.
Extremely nice gloss, brilliant colors, and definition.
Highly collectible.
Suitable for framing.
Heavy Metal is an animated film from 1981 and was produced by Ivan Reitman.
This is the famous scene in the movie of the Smiling Alien Spaceship that sucked up Gloria and Anrak.

     Now we all know more than we did 5 minutes ago.

Conrad Cavils At The 'Daily Sluggard'

I hope you appreciate me taking the time out of my busy day to save you from the Curse Of Clickbait, unless it's my clickbait, in which case it's perfectly fine.  ANYWAY AGAIN Art!

     It's a bit iniquitous to select Mike as the 'star' because the film is 'A Bridge Too Far' - and you're welcome - with a list of other stars as long as my arm, and it's a long arm.  James Caan, Sean Connery, Robert Redford, Gene Hackman, Anthony Hopkins, Dirk Bogarde, Curt Jurgens, Laurence Olivier and more.  Made in the days of practical effects with nary a CGI shot to be scene.  And, as I keep saying, the best ever depiction of a Royal Artillery creeping barrage.

Whilst On That Subject

Gosh, what came up in my news feed that was completely unexpected?  Art!

     That's Ian 'Gun Jesus' McCollum, the chap behind the 'Forgotten Weapons' Youtube channel that has branched out somewhat from it's original premise.  

     Conrad suspects that this is actually a French weapon that the South Canadians adopted, as they had little in the way of manufacturing capacity to make artillery pieces.  Though they might manage a minnow like this.  Let me dig a bit further.  Art!

     I was half right.  It's a Bethlehem Steel 37 mm cannon, ordered by the French government for use in trench warfare, to the number of 200.  Of which the French only got 15, as the South Canadian army seized the rest when they joined in the fracas in early 1917.  

     Ian's commentary is consistently disturbed and interrupted by the sound of gunfire as other people fire their guns off to port and starboard.

     I have seen a similar French gun that they manufactured themselves, where the wheels could be removed to lower the profile, in which case it was hauled by at least four sweating poilus.

Proof Of Concept

I've just finished consuming my second batch of ginger beer, and did a little nosying on teh Interwebz to see if anyone had an idea of how strong it might be.  Art!

     From what they say, from at least 5% and up to 9% proof, which means no more until September.  Although I have found a recipe for ginger beer in my '1,000 Recipe Cookbook' that makes about six pints of it.  No word on strength.

The Ambiguous Apocalypse

I'm Sure You're Wondering How That Can Be

"How can global thermonuclear war be even the slightest bit ambiguous, being as it is the death knell of most of Hom. Sap?" I hear you quibble.

     Well, there's the rub.  'Most of' is not the same as 'All'.  Imagine you're sitting in your study, working out how to afford the next term's extra-mural fees for the children's boarding-school, how much repanelling the wine cellar is costing and how much inheritance tax Daddy will be paying when he expires and SUDDENLY! all the oiks, plebs, neds, chavs, hoi polloi and working-class riff raff are vapourised.  But your comfortable middle-class lifestyle continues.

     Say what?

     Art!

     I've no idea what concept the cover is portraying.  Can't deny it's compelling.

     ANYWAY this is Bri's look at the history of science fiction, and it needs an update since it was written in 1973.  In it he takes aim at John Wyndham and critiques him for creating what he called 'Cosy catastrophes' in 'The Day Of The Triffids' and 'The Kraken Wakes'.  In these works, he alleges, the grubby masses are all killed off so that Bill Masen or Mike Watson can enjoy a life free from class warfare.  Art!

     One wonders if Ol' Bri actually read either work.  In TDOTT 99% of the world's population is blinded, and the remaining 1% have to do battle with lethal plants that exhibit a hive-mind behaviour.  In TKW only 16% of the world's population survives, in an environment ravaged by ecological disaster, where guerilla warfare to steal other's food occurs even in This Sceptred Isle.  Things like flush toilets, motor cars and tinned baked beans are all notable by their absence, and that's only at the Fifties level of technology prevalent when they were written.  Art!

     Another of Ol' Bri's targets, 'The Death Of Grass'.  This one concerns the death of all species of grass, including food crops such as wheat, and the ensuing global famine.  To cut down the number of 'useless mouths' the UK government nukes all major cities, killing tens of millions of - sorry, what's that?  No, it doesn't sound especially cosy.  Nor does the incipient infant new order, based on murder, robbery and violent seizure.  But what do I know!  Perhaps that kind of stuff was meat and drink to Ol' Bri.  Art!

     You know who else was critical of the Cosy Catastrophe?  P D James, that's who.  She found the concept of being permanently and totally blind and being pursued by inimical, relentless lethal plants to be - oooh, what's that word?  O yes.  Scary.

     I bring her up because her own novel above about a gradually depopulating Earth was turned into an excellent film, one which she herself approved of - a rare event in the entertainment world.  There is no grand overarching event that ends Hom. Sap. as things seem set to end according to 'The Waste Land', that is 'not with a bang but a whimper', just inexplicable mass sterility dooming humanity to extinction.  In the film even This Sceptred Isle, top dog amongst the nations, is exhibiting a steady degradation.

     EXCEPT in both novel and film, a new-born child, the first for 26 years, ends things on a hopeful note.  Art!

     It's a great cover picture, by Keith Roberts if I dug around successfully, very striking with only a tenuous connection with the novel itself, dated 1964.

     What's it about?  O I thought you'd never ask!

     A gradually declining human population, as mass sterility causes no new children to be born after mucking about in space with nuclear weapons realigns the Van Allen belts.  Hmmmmm sounds familiar.  The 'Accident' occurs in 1983 but most of the novel is set long after this event - hmmmmm sounds familar - in 2029.  By that time large organisations have gone the way of the dinosaur and England has collapsed into a bucolic, isolated pre-industrial society.

     EXCEPT, at the very end of the novel - well, if it happened at the beginning there wouldn't be much of a story, would there? - it's discovered that some children have been born in the past few years, ending things on a hopeful note.  Art!

     O and Ol' Bri tries to make things less cozy by introducing an overwhelming army of stoats.  One would expect a Malthusian feedback cycle to take care of a vermin volcano like this, but what do I know?

     Well, that's all for this Intro before I go off on other 'depopulated world' sci-fi novels, such as 'Earth Abides' (George R. Stewart 1949) which is one of the better entries and a story for another day.

The Turkey Genes Emerge!

Yes, another not so gentle shoeing for the Big Orange Oaf Himself, and another terrible picture I got from Twitter last night.  Art!

     Not a good look for the ugly sepia biffer, with his neck wattles prominently on display, and his barely-open eyes that seem swollen nearly shut thanks to - bloated bloatiness?  Take my medical judgement as you will.  Also, note his Hair Helmet seems to be about to secede as a separate organism.  His skin is exuding used engine oil.  Take my engineering judgement as you will.

     I've got a much longer item on BOOH to work up, which will grace these pages at a later date.  I bet you can hardly wait.

     

More Of Mister McKie's Skies

All aboard the Angus bus, one image analysis coming up.  Art!

     Hmmmm I misjudged the title here, there's no sky to be seen here, in what looks like a computer and human-controlled industrial facility.  Art!

     No idea what they're doing there, apart from pressing buttons and flicking switches.  The whole gigantic installation doesn't seem to be making anything, so I suggest it's doing something; something uncanny and unknowable. 

     Once again I don't think this has appeared as a book or magazine cover, or we might have more to go on.  O well.

Thinking Outside The Box

One consequence of looking up WW1 hex and counter wargames on teh Interwebz, as well as Youtube, is that the algorithm has been throwing up suggestions that are, for once, reasonable and credible.  No more portable saw mills or log counting software; we will not mention oscilloscopes yet.  So - Art!

     Just to confirm that subtitle obscured by the timer: "The Thirty Years War 1618 - 1648".  Whilst This Sceptred Isle was enduring their very own Civil War, the continent of Europe was undergoing the paroxysm of the Thirty Years War, which was an horribly complicated conflict that drew in every nation extant.  The title means 'Whose Realm?" in Latin, and is linked to the religious aspect of the conflict.  Thanks to 'Ardwulf's Lair' for shelling out the moolah for this and displaying the parts.  Art!

     
     Here's one of the two maps, showing the Early Modern states, done on a hex display (hooray!).  Art!

     The 24-page Rulebook, concentrating on 'Pillage And Sack' rules here.  Conrad thinks 'Sack' is more intrusive and intensive than 'Pillage' but what do I know?  Art!

     One of the four countersheets, meaning over 700 of the little rascals.  The orange counters are the 'Imperial' forces, and the blue the 'Protestant' ones, depicting matchlock troops, pikemen and cavalry.  No counters for artillery on this sheet.  Art!

     They do exist and here's proof.

     It's a very nicely-presented game, and costs <wait one -> $70.00.  Which I am perfectly capable of resisting, even if I remember this for the back burner.  Art!

You Jx549#+#8*3 What?

No, I'm not using random figures to obscure swears, that's what Dog Buns! is for.  This is another bizarre entry generated by the news item algorithm that really needs to be seen to be believed.  Art!

     What on Earth, the moon, Mercury and Venus are they describing here?  It's a server with about 46 redundant characters to it.  To think I used to cajole Arthur Clarke for daring to use 'C' as his middle initial.