SIIVET!

Which Is, Of Course - Obviously! - The Finnish For 'Wings'

Because we're back on a slideshow from IWM Duxford, the home to hundreds of planes and other large vehicles.  If I had to tramp around the enormous site for seven hours and take photographs then you are most certainly get the benefit of my actions.  Art!

     This is the rear port side of the Victor, seen in the background in an earlier blog.  Can't have you seeing the whole thing, you'd get too excited.  Your Humble Scribe is unsure if this is the bomber or tanker variant; I suspect the bomber as I think the tankers just had a single monochrome paint scheme.  What you see in the foreground is a Thunderbird, with transparent panels so you can see all the goodies inside.  This is a stripped-down version.  Art!

     It's a big beast when fully assembled, intended to destroy Sinister bombers up to 30 PROUD IMPERIAL MILES slant range.  It also featured briefly in an episode of 'Doctor Who', where The Master described it as being nuclear-powered with a nerve-gas warhead.  Rather egging the pudding, one feels.  Art!

     A study in opposites.  What you see in the foreground is a Northrop MQM reconnaissance drone, made in the Fifties to supply eyes in the sky for the South Canadian army.  It was their first unmanned drone, seventy years ago, and would not recognise it's own grandchildren of today.

     The big white missile in the background is the 'Blue Steel', a British nuclear stand-off missile, built to be carried and launched by the 'V' bomber fleet.  It toted the 'Red Snow' fusion warhead of 1.1 megatons yield, meaning more like Red Vapour than snowflakes.  Art!

     You can tell these things are ordnance, BUT there were no explanatory plaques, so all I can tell you is that the one nearest the camera is a bomb, 200 PROUD IMPERIAL POUNDS at a guess.  No idea why the others aren't streamlined or have tail units.  Art!

     A torpedo!  Shiny and black.  Behind and above it is one of the only surviving TSR2s. a name that makes plane geeks weep in anguish.  It was an extremely advanced supersonic strike and reconnaissance jet, but it was also a money-pit of black hole proportions and was scrapped before entering service.  Conrad also believes that Lord Mountbatten The Mountebank had something to do with the cancellation, because it threatened the Royal Navy's carrier budget.  Art!

     More nameless ordnance.  The missile nearest the camera has the look of an anti-ship item (it's not a Harpoon as I checked), and Conrad has a sneaking suspicion that the hefty green guy in the background is a nuclear bomb.  I seem to remember seeing a similar item at IWM Salford.  Art!

     Three young chaps in suits.  Very suspicious.  Art!

     More nameless ordnance.  That yellow one strikes me as being First Unpleasantness dateline.  Aha!  A modicum of digging reveals that it's the British 1,650 pound bomb.  Art!

Puny human for scale

     This whopper was constructed to be carried by the enormous Handley Page bomber, which craft is sadly absent from Duxford.  I think the bomb with the orange nose might be an aerial mine, which was dropped by parachute and hung nose-down.  But don't quote me on that.  Art!

     I can't find any photos of aerial mines in colour, nor did Googling provide any more clues, so my hunch must remain just that.  Art!

     An helichopter!  This is the Westland Wessex, one of the ugliest aircraft to ever wobble into the skies.  That's as much as I know about it and go Google if you want more.  Art!

     Here is the only surviving Concorde in the world, and it looks fast standing still.  I have cheated here and used teh Interwebz for a photo as I may have taken one myself but not in sequence and I don't fancy trawling through 200 photographs to track it down. As you may have guessed from the stairs, you can take a stroll through the interior, which is a museum in it's own right.  I'm not going to inflict that on you today, it will drop tomorrow or maybe later.  I bet you can hardly wait.

 

Let's Be Literary

Allow me to buff up my reputation as a shallow pseud <the horrid truth courtesy Mister Hand> whom has a keen WHAT? That traitorous appendage!  No, I mean another entry from that list of books dealing with the classical world.  Art!

18. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903)

by Jane Harrison

     That human-animal hybrid on the cover looks rather like the winged bulls of Assyria, about as far from ancient Greece as one can get.

     The blurb explains that Jane's magnum opus, well over a century old, is very readable and witty, but that's not enough to tempt me <wallet sighs in relief> and also it's over 700 pages long.  Conrad is still ploughing through Volume 5 of 'The Expanse'.


Whilst On The Subject Of Books -

Nothing as high-brow as Jane's work, just a nod to the list of sci-fi novels that are similar to 'Greybeard' in being post-apocalyptic.  Art!

IGNORE THE FILM!  IGNORE THE FILM! which is only slightly based on the book.  Hell Tanner, the protagonist, for starters, is a Hell's Angel, not a clean-cut Air Force officer.  The mission is to cross Damnation Alley and get plague serum to Boston.  I forget why they can't use aircraft; Roger wanted his characters to sweat a bit.  The mission also starts out with three 'cars', since the author believed in redundancy.  Hawkwind also do a pretty rocking version of it on 'Quark Strangeness And Charm', condensed as it's not a triple concept album.

     I think that the DNA of Rog's story is also clearly visible in the '2000 AD' Judge Dredd serial 'The Cursed Earth', where atmosphere conditions don't permit cross-continental flight, so Old Stony Face has to transport plague vaccine overland.  Art!

The Clock Is Ticking, Donold

I am typing this on October 1st, meaning there are now 34 days until the South Canadian mid-term elections and, as predicted, Cankles Von Yamteats is not bothering to go 'on the stump' and campaign in contested districts.  Mostly because he is as welcome as plutonium soap in a jacuzzi and candidates want to boost local issues, not 'They Stole My Election' for the 1,423rd time.

     People with special circumstances are already sending in postal ballots, which process King Piggy was unable to stop.  Cynics - or realists - are now pondering if he's going to fake an emergency and use that to 'postpone' the elections, which will then never happen.  I doubt it.  Even Don Snoreleone understands the South Canadians won't take that sitting down as they aren't supine sheep.  Unlike another electorate I can think of.  Art!

Awww.  Doesn't he look sad?

FLIGHT OF THE PAGBEAST!

      That bottom one is proof Fat Caligula's hair is a sentient symbiotic organism and has taken on it's winter plumage.

Back To Brucie

Mister Pennington, the man who wields a paintbrush not a pen.  We have skipped over some of his paintings, especially the earlier "Dune" variant covers.  We are now some 5 minutes 37 seconds into a 7 minute slideshow.  Art!

     Verrrry symbolic, Bruce.  I believe the sinister horned chap is modelled very closely on Brucie himself.  Nice to see the coral architecture back.  Not sure if that's a comet, meteor or asteroid about to cause grief in the background.  the city to starboard looks as if it's already been hit.  Art!

     I like this one - very evocative.  It has a look of the Oriental to it, nicht wahr?  I wonder if it was a book cover - not quite a Title Gap at the top but close to it.  Allow me to dig a little.  Nope, not coming up with anything.

AND WITH THAT WE ARE DONE!

Jack The Giant-Killer

No! We Are Not Talking About The Film

Which I have seen, but many decades ago.  There was something about a magic mirror and stop-motion animation?  Art!

     They're calling it a 'Pendragon' but I don't see any evidence of a Parker Platinum fountain model.  I believe there was also a remake, which died the death at the box office and tanked the director's career afterwards.  Art!

     Ah yes, the director in question was Bryan Singer and it starred Nicholas Hoult, not Ben Cross, because the film above is one of the Asylum mockbusters and I cannot be bothered to correct what is, after all, merely an intro to the Intro.

     For Lo! we are going to be looking rather closer than other pundits have at the sonorous-sounding 'OPERATION VIVALDI', the ongoing Ukrainian counter-offensive in the direction of Lyman.  If you're not a fan of granular current military analysis you might want to sit this one out.  Art!

     This is one of the better maps I've seen of what's going on in The Lyman Direction, as people keep calling it.  You see, back in May 2022, the orcs managed to occupy Lyman.  They had to abandon it five months later during the Kozaky counteroffensive, and have been trying to get it back into their sweaty mitts ever since.  Over the past 4 years they had created a salient north of Lyman, which they hoped to lever into a pincer that would have come at the city from the rear.  This has come with enormous expenditure of blood and treasure as they grimly ground forwards, heedless of loss.

     "Where is this Jack you -

     SILENCE!  NO CAVILLING!  I WILL GET TO MY POINT IN GOOD TIME!

     A couple of months ago the Ukrainians began Operation Vivaldi, which their commander, exhibiting Slavic satirical sense, forecast would take place in 4 parts - after the composer's 'Four Seasons' meisterwerk.  Seriously, check it out, it's a fantastic piece of eighteenth-century baroque composition.

     ANYWAY we abruptly change tracks to mention 'Preston Stewart', the South Canadian ex-101 Airborne officer, whom on his Youtube channel was interviewing another interesting character: Art!

     Before you is Sergeant John 'Jackie' Roberts, South Canadian army veteran whom moved to Ukraine to combat the orcs - today's title 'Giants' - five years ago, and who has a long history of working both front and rear lines.  Now you know where our title comes from.  John agreed to an interview with Prez, and what follows is their discussion.

     OPSEC:  'Operational Security' or keeping what needs to be kept secret, secret.  The Kozaky found out the hard way in 2023 that informing the South Canadians of what they were going to do was a splendid way of having Jake Sullivan, the Biden presidency Sec Def, immediately leak all that info to the Kremlin in search of an Off Path, a De-escalation or Let's Not Humiliate Putinpot Route.  Or so the conspiranoid loonwaffles would have us believe. Art!

     Excuse me if my bitter political hatreds come to the fore <mashes voodoo doll of Sullivan with a hammer>.  Art!

Third Army Corps in Ukrainian

     Jack pointed out that one consequence of the Global West providing aid to Ukraine is that the latter required information about what was going on, or had been going on, or was going to be carried out, to further obtain more support.  Which, if you're not sure, is the opposite of Operational Security.  Oooh-er Matron! 

     Salty Jack also lambasted the GW for not believing the current rate of loss of orcs versus Kozaky in his area: 20 to 1.  We shall come back to that.

     ANYWAY AGAIN Prez asked Jack about why an Ukrainian attack in the Lyman region as of now and when?  Art!

     Well, there are 2 reasons.  One is that 50,000 Ukrainians live in the 'Fortress Belt' and Prez Zed does not want to see any of these people being sent elsewhere into Ukraine as internal refugees.  The other is that Bunker Dwarf Excuse Me Putinpot maintains that he is going to occupy this region and the Fortress Belt is stopping him from managing this.  Art!

     One practical example Jack cited was the defence of Izyum, a major road and rail logistics hub, which you can see on the map above.  The Kozaky liberated it from orc control, which means the orcs are desperate to get their vile greedy sweaty talons back on it again.  Tough.  Jack explained that the Ukrainians are centering their defence on Borova.  Art!

    Keeping the maggot-folk of Mordorvia at distance at Borova means they cannot mass fires against Izyum, or over 45 kilometres away in barrier terms.  The terrain around Borova is not ideal for defence, but it is a lot better than having Grads and tube artillery killing people in Izyum.

     Prez then mentioned the orcs use of Ruffian drones to carry out long-range strikes inside Ukraine, much as the 'Human Murder Safari*' <long redacted description> orcs do so in Kherson.  Art!

     Jack's rather clinical response was to describe 'Cost Per Shot', meaning how much it costs to carry out a particular drone mission, since these having gradually increasing costs with elevated mission profile.  

    CAUTION RATHER DARK FOLLOWS     

    CAUTION RATHER DARK FOLLOWS

     To kill a Ukrainian civilian walking their dog in Kherson - which has absolutely happened but which I will not illustrate since apparently Conrad has scruples - you would need a drone with a 75 kilometre optic spool.  This costs a lot and has to be balanced against the payoff: Do you want to see a dog-walker being <redacted, redacted and once again redacted> or practical military effects?  

     We will assume common humanity and move on.

     Don't worry, Jack, we will be back.  I bet you can hardly wait.

Bring On The Gentle Shoes

Or the not-so-gentle ones.  King Piggy, whom seems to be rotting apart as he stands before us, is once again the subject of medical speculation as he falls apart in public.  Art!

LEGS!  LEGS!   LEGS!

     Bear in mind that Cankles Von Yamteats also wears elevators in his shoes, and is just an hideous person, and you'll have an understanding of where he stands today.  I have more horrid photographs to bring in of His Sepia Awfulencess:  Art!

The sepia skin!  The neck vajayjay!  The hideous smirk! The eye-bags!

     He looks about 102, or twenty years  on from where we are today.  Is Droopy trying to smirk whilst stroking out?  100 to 1 says he doesn't make it to 2027.

From The Hideous To The Sublime

We've not had anything related to RAF Duxford for a couple of days but you don't get off that easy.  Art!

     Trucks.  The ugly, unglamourous side of warfare, yet so, so essential to running a modern army.  Conrad is pretty sure these chaps graced the London IWM and got moved to Duxford as part of the Large Object Move, as there is more than enough space at Duxford to put them on display, rather than having to rotate them as exhibits.  Art!

     This is a Bedford 15 CWT truck, or a ton and a half truck in proper speech, and 'TAF' stands for 'Tactical Air Force' unless I miss my guess.  This unit would have been based in Europe, either in This Sceptred Isle, Italy or France, given the camouflage scheme.

Read The Room, Dimya

Art!

     ' - to bits' if you want the rest of the headline.  If even a yellow rag like the 'Daily Star' (imagine 'The Sun' but with more boobs) is lambasting you, then you really are in trouble.  One notices that The War now consumes 40% of the Mordorvian budget and that, post-election, taxes on everything have jumped, as have food prices.  Conrad confidently predicts the orcs will whine, grumble and do nothing.

Finally -

I need this to get to Count.  Thank you, that is all.

*  Believe me, this is the one of the most awful things you will read about today

There's Nothing Greater -

Than The Silverpit Crater!

Relax, I am being poetic.  Pretty obviously loose-leaf Darjeeling tea, the comic art of Matt Howarth and slightly-overripe persimmons are all far, far better than an obscure geographical feature.  Which I had not heard of until tonight; that's how obscure it is.  Art!

A melange of Matt

  

     Lest ye be unaware, the Silverpit Crater is a submarine feature off the coast of Yorkshire, marking the spot an asteroid 150 metres across, or 3.3 million kilograms mass, hit waaaay back 45 million years ago.  Art!

     I shall refrain from coarse ribaldry about Yorkshire, merely to point out that this prehistoric impact created a wall of water 300 feet high that would have scoured the coast and for miles inland.  Bath night for the Yorkies 
     A.k.a. a 'Tsunami'.  Which is the Japanese for 'Port' and 'Wave'.

     For Lo!  Your Humble Scribe has been doing a bit of background reading on the subject of tsunamis, propelled by reading about the description of same in 'Nemesis Games', and a glance o'er a few other websites.  

     Tsunamis are not common, which is a good thing as they are tremendously destructive when they do happen, principally to coastlines - but not exclusively.  The larger ones can affect terrain miles into an interior, either by direct flooding or by travelling upriver.

     I am certain you are thirsting to know how they happen.  Art!

Gobsmackingly horrifying

      Normally, there is a movement of terrain on an enormous scale that agitates the body of water around it, typically an earthquake, but also due to landslides into or along a shore, or volcanic activity, and only verrrry occasionally as an asteroid or comet impact - certainly none of the latter have occurred in human history.  Art!

     Thus the Silverpit Crater is evidence of an exceedingly rare event.

     ANYWAY what happens to a tsunami might be undetectable at sea, thanks to the volume of water above the event, BUT as the wave gets closer to shore the water becomes shallower, the wave slows and increases in height.  It has an incredible amount of kinetic energy behind it, which is why it can flood miles inland and cause immense damage where it lands.  Art!

     If the trough of the tsunami hits first, water will recede from shorelines, which is an alarm bell to anyone paying attention to get to high ground RIGHT NOW.  There's a Youtube short from a South Canadian television show about first responders that does a good job of displaying this, which I'm not even going to bother trying to find, as that would be impossible.

     80% of tsunamis are generated by earthquakes, meaning that the Pacific 'Ring of Fire' and it's associated tectonic activity, is prime territory for tsunamis.  Art!

     This is the NOAA - National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, a South Canadian NGO - map of historical tsunamis.  The closer and darker the cluster, the greater the number of tsunamis, so Indonesia and Japan win the un-coveted prize of being most at risk.  If you are as aged as Conrad, you remember the ghastly 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean which basically destroyed coastal communities in the region.  This occurred whilst I was at Connexions, and I recall taxiing about a pair of Sri Lankan lady teachers who were in the UK to network about it.  English not great, but very polite and petite.

     ANYWAY AGAIN as an illustration of just how deadly this event was - Art!

     The 'After' and 'Before' pictures of Banda Aceh in Indonesia, where the community was swept clean of habitation bar the mosque, which seems to have been made of stronger stuff than the houses around it.  The death toll was around 200,000, which had slipped my mind apart from being general background This Was Awful.  These were people who had absolutely no idea what was about to happen to them, and whom had done nothing to merit their fate.

     If we abruptly turn tail and refer back to 'Nemesis Games', the sinister dual-entity author James Corey is rather coy about what the mass of the impacting Rocks From Space is, except from the details about what the strikes look like and the effect they have close to Ground Zero.  Millions of tons?  Billions of tons?  Trillions of tons?  Art!

     OF COURSE they egg the pudding - I'm not going to explain this idiom as I've done so several times already and you ought to be up to speed on it - and have at least 7 strikes on Ol' Terra.  If I recall correctly, the bombardiers are interrupted in mid-bombard and nuked into a thin vapour.

     There you go!  Today's lesson about meteorology and hydrology, and you're welcome.

O Good Lord NO NO NO

Conrad has a few saved pictures that he fully intends to come back to in order to create an Intro or two.  Here is one I saved from a couple of days ago.  Art!

O my do I remember

     The blurb reads, since I don't expect you to use a magnifying glass "The adventures of a cheery schoolboy who has a navy, army and air force of his very own - wonderful scale models operated by a radio wrist-controlled gadget!"

     Excuse me, but is it wise to give a ten-year old the ability to storm the local council offices and declare martial law?  Or, you know, destroy the school if he dislikes his homework assignment?  Who, exactly, gave him executive authority over a military force not past of HRH The King's armed forces?  And, why is there a trio of Panther thanks 30 years obsolete in the foreground?

     Let us hope the submarines are simply hunter-killers and not SLAMBAM nuclear missile boats.

     Or - am I overthinking this a tad?

I Don't Want To Turn Us Into The 'Donold Judas Trump' Kicking Site

But I have to take my chances while the oleaginous sweat-stain is still alive, as I'm pretty certain he's not going to make it into 2027.  Bring on another ghastly photograph of him!  Art?

     To port is what he looks like absent makeup, hairdressing, lighting and a hernia truss.  To starboard is what he likes to imagine he looks like, sweaty, swollen and sepia-tinged as he is.  Art!

     He looks as if someone punched him in the face and delivered two black eyes.   Or purple eyes.  Perhaps his eyes look like Wildberries?  What a delightful contrast between eyes, skin and ears.  Purple, orange and pink, three colours of the rainbow.  

     36 days until the mid-terms, Donnie me boy.  Hearken to the clock.

Talking Of The Apocalypse

In case we're unclear, I have been bloviating about post-apocalyptic novels similar to 'Greybeard' by Brian Aldiss and a looooong list of books that came up in the search engine.  I've been pontificating about those I've read already, because you might need my guide to literature.  Art!

     Not only have I read it, I saw the adaptation put on at the 'Royal Exchange' as a play, which was pretty darn impressive.  ARGA WARGA!

     You might find it hard going, as it is written in a debased argot of English, but it repays study.  It's set in the post-apocalyptic wastelands of the English south-east, where a central plot driver is the discovery of -

      GUNPOWDER!

     What can possibly go wrong*?

     Quite a lot, actually, and not only open flames.  Static electricity will also set off black powder.

Finally -

Watched the reboot of 'Resident Evil' at the weekend and even though I have not played a single second of the game, it is 100% better than the original Mila Jojo films.  Which, I am embarrassed to say, I have seen for years after the original.  What can I say. Conrad and zombie films.

*  An enormous amount which we will not tackle here

Gone For A Burton

We Are Digging Into British Idiom Here

More specifically, the times of the Second Unpleasantness, where, for many years, the only way of delivering justice upon the Nazi hordes was via air-delivered ordnance.  Art!

     Take your oil-swilling hump and serve it against a glasshouse!  On the way there please ensure your Sidcot is free from castor-oil lubricant t

     ANYWAY - er - please forget any nonsense from the Second Unpleasantness about terror, destruction and havoc delivered from the skies, because in this Intro we have more than enough in all three dimensions.  

     Or don't, as I've not explained it.  'Gone for a burton' was an euphemism from the Brylcreem Boys during the Second Unpleasantness, referring to someone no longer present thanks to being dead.  It being impolite to call them 'dead'.  In the First Unpleasantness Biggles would have used the euphemism 'Gone west', as in Batson, who had 'Gone west' owing our hero forty francs.  1917 francs, mind you, so at least £237 in today's currency.  Art!

     ANYWAY AGAIN to get back to the meat of the matter, Your Humble Scribe is now over half-way through 'Nemesis Games', Number Five in 'The Expanse' series of novels, and the narrative cycles through all the different characters.  The most interesting one is of the 'Rocinante's engineer, Amos.  Amos Burton.  Hence today's title.

     Amos had an extremely horrid upbringing in Baltimore, which he rarely refers to and does not care to reminisce about.  He generally stays away from Earth and only returns in this volume to find out how and why his old foster-mom died.  Natural causes, it transpires, otherwise a whole lot of people would have suddenly died.  Art!

Amos and friend

     Whilst still on Earth, Amos elects to visit Clarissa Mao, whom is being held in an underground prison in North Carolina, for multiple crimes including murder, and whom had been a temporary shipmate aboard the Rocinante.  That subsumes at least 500 pages of plot and character development.  You can thank me later.

     SPOILER! SPOILER! SPOILER!SPOILER! SPOILER! SPOILER! SPOILER! SPOILER!

     It's at this point that things get interesting,  since a radical OPA Belter faction has decided to rock the Earth's ashes, by hitting it with rocks.  The OPA is a scion of the asteroid belt, hence the name.  These rocks are not the variety you can kick aside; they mass millions of tons and are travelling at very high speed.  Art!

     This chap is the first to see the initial impact, which was thought to be a cosmic accident.  He's around for about five seconds before the blast wave hits him and he vanishes.  I have gone back and forth in the novel to see if the authors - for they are a joint team writing under a common pseudonym - mention exactly where the first Space Rock hits, but cannot find any details.  All they say is 'North Africa', which is a pretty large piece of real estate, and 'Morocco', which only slightly reduces the geographical spread.  

     Aha!  Teh Interwebz reveal that the impact was at Laghouat.  Ta WWW.  Art!

     Nor is it in Morocco.  Algeria, pilgrims, Algeria.  We are told that Rabat, which is in Morocco, was 500 kilometres west of Ground Zero.  Also that the strike registered as 8.75 on the Richter scale.  The one they use to measure earthquakes.  To get a grasp on that, that's the equivalent of 30,000 Hiroshima nukes.  These are BIG rocks.

     The second strike is also not precisely defined, merely as being ' - in the middle of the Atlantic ocean'.  This strike is even more deadly than the first, since the subsequent tsunamis affect every coastline along the North and South Atlantic, creating disasters from Greenland to Brazil.  Art!

     From 'Deep Impact' but it illustrates the point well.  We are also told that Dakar, on the African coast, is hit by the shockwave an hour after initial impact.  Art!

     We then get to the third impact, as if the first two weren't enough.  This one hits near Bethlehem in North Carolina, the same state that Clarissa is ensconced in, and where she and Amos are deep underground.  About thirty stories deep, if I recall correctly.  Thus, they survive the impact but are trapped, as the lifts don't work and the stairs have collapsed.  Bottom!

     Amos' other crewmates from the Rocinante are all off-world, watching this apocalypse unfold with horror, which allows the authors to impart that the death toll is at two hundred and fifty million within a couple of hours, shortly to become billions.

     Grim stuff but my word! is it entertaining.

More Grim Reaper Statistics

Here's an interesting statistical comparison.  Art!

     Ruffian medical care is as up to date and modern as it was in the Crimean War of 1857.  This means that the normal ratio of dead to wounded in modern warfare of 1:3 is, in Mordorvia, closer to 1:1.  So, approximately 750,000 dead and 750,000 injured.  Art!

     18 dead and 624 injured is a ratio of 1:34, which is again an illustration of modern South Canadian military healthcare as compared to that of the orcs.  Grim, yes, and also illuminating.

More Gentle Shoeing

It has to be gentle as Droopy is pretty much dead on his swollen meat-balloon feet at present.  Allow me to introduce the latest of our mocking photos of the Big Orange Oaf Himself.  Art!

The Swollen Sweaty Senile Sepia Saggy Sackbutt himself

     Now you know why one of my nicknames for Donold is 'DJ Tango', which might be obscure to non-British folk.  Art!

     The can might be beaded with moisture if it is straight from the fridge.  The Farting Fraudster is beaded with sweat because merely moving his massive carcass is an effort.  Art!

     Here is a still from a sequence taken after he descended the steps of Air Force One, where he's visibly struggling to breathe, to the vast delight of many cruel people on Twitter (including me).  Art!

     Which brings me to an interesting vlog by Chris Cillizza, pictured above.  He brought up a promise that SSSSSS made months ago, that he was going to visit all 35 critical districts in the runup to the mid-term elections.  That means one per day.  Has he started yet?  

     No <gasps of shock and horror>.  Instead he's going to cheat at golf, or to meetings with governors in safe Republican seats, or football matches.  He is definitely not 'on the stump' as the phrase goes, campaigning for Republican candidates.  One reason, as Chris pointed out, is that candidates in tight races don't want to be associated with him in any way whatsoever, as he is massively unpopular.  The second is that he is a morbidly obese 80-year old with bad circulation, who is now unable to get down a flight of stairs without difficulty.  Doing a campaign appearance over the month of October would finish him off.

   Hmmmm.  GET OUT THERE AND CAMPAIGN, DONOLD!

More From That List Of Books 'Like Greybeard'

I bet you thought I'd forgotten about it, didn't you?  You lucky people, here we are again looking at post-apocalyptic sci-fi novels.  Art!

     'Or, How We Got Along After The Bomb'.  Conrad has definitely read it, but I cannot remember anything from the novel, except to say that the blurb definitely mirrors 'Deus Irae', which I have also read and can remember.  A combination of old age and gin, I think.  Hang on -

"Dr. Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick is set in a post-apocalyptic world following a nuclear disaster caused by scientist Bruno Bluthgeld. As society attempts to rebuild, the story follows several quirky characters, including the telekinetic Hoppy Harrington and Bonny Keller, who navigates this strange new reality. The plot weaves through their lives, exploring themes of redemption and the human condition amidst chaos"

     You can see the parallels I'm seeing, can't you?