If I Were To Say 'Hell's Angels'

You Would No Doubt Immediately Picture -

A load of scruffy oiks wearing grubby denims festooned with Iron Crosses, Satan and embroidered 'I Love Mom' patches.  All driving Harleys, to the heightened blood pressure of Col whom in

     ANYWAY that's not what I'm referring to here.  O noes.  You see, way back almost one hundred years ago - hmmm that makes the last century seem reallllly distant* - there was a film called 'Hell's Angels' made from 1928 to 1930 by Howard Hughes, who really, really pulled out all the stops to make it realistic.  Art!

     Wowser, it's available for free, but is also two hours long.  Four people died during the filming, and Hughes himself was badly injured doing one of the aerial stunts.  Reading the screen synopsis reveals a bleak ending.  Incidentally the breakout film for Jean Harlow, whom was featured prominently on the film posters - Art!

Calling Mr. Freud, do you have a moment?

     ANYWAY the film depicts 'The Gasbag Strikes At Night!' as an intruding zeppelin raider lowers an 'observation car' below the belly of the beast, in order to for it to descend below the cloud layer and direct bombs accurately.  Art!

     Unluckily for the Teutons, the dashing chaps of the Royal Flying Corps have been scrambled and they spot the gasbag in the distance, overhead.  This is bad for the zeppelin, as it's subject to wind and needs to get away before being intercepted.  Art!

     As I mentioned yesteryon, a zeppelin had to descend to relatively low level in order to bomb accurately, and this one has been caught with it's pants down.  The Kapitan realises this and - Art!

     No, the Teutons don't talk with a thick British accent, they speak in Teuton.  Despite flogging the engines, the gasbag ain't making enough speed.  You have probably joined the dots by now, but allow me to confirm your suspicions as to why I included the observation car first thing.  Art!

     As it would take seven minutes to haul the car back up, one pair of bolt-cutters later - Art!

Karl's Kar Kaput

     It's quite dubious as to whether this was ever done in real life, but it makes an excellent depiction of how utterly Hunnish the beastly Teuton bounders were.

     Incidentally, there was never a lack of volunteers for 'Spahgondel' duty, as it was the one place for a zeppelin crew where they could smoke without risk of punishment or explosion.

     Now, we move back to 'Charley's War', where our protagonist, Charley - not very bright but brave and loyal - is home on leave after getting a Blighty wound.  He lives near the Silvertown ammunition factory, and guess what?  Art!

WASH OUT YOUR FILTHY MINDS!

     Sorry for the blurry illo; I wanted to put up Joe's depiction of a Teuton naval officer acting as a zeppelin commander, and the brace of zeps being walked out of a hangar, for they did not cope very well with bad weather on the ground.  Nor attacks by the Royal Naval Air Service.  Art!

     The gasbag in this instance is attacking towards the end of 1916, when the defenders of Perfidious Albion had organised their anti-aircraft defences instead of relying on impromptu make-do.  The Royal Naval officer here is telephoning contact details to various anti-aircraft gun detachments at different locations around London.  Art!

     

     Allow me to add in Pat's dialogue: "Achtung!  We are under attack!  Release ballast!" and in the next panel "We must gain more height!  Cut the observation car loose!"
"But the observer is still inside, Herr Kapitan!"
"The safety of my ship must come first!  Cut the cable!  That is an order!"

     The observer, of course - obviously! - can hear this conversation via the telephone his car is equipped with.  So as he falls from 20,000 feet he knows exactly what happened.

     I checked Pat's notes for these panels and not once does he mention 'Hell's Angels'.  Tut tut, Pat, tut tut!

     Moving seamlessly from fiction to real life, the 'L59' zeppelin was sent from Yambol in Bulgaria on an epic mission to Africa in late 1917.  Art!

     General Paul Von Lettow-Vorbeck, bane of the British and Allies in Teuton East Africa, who fought a sideshow of a sideshow and was able to outwit far larger Allied forces by being mobile and stealing native food.  The idea was for L59 to make a one-way journey to East Africa, carrying 15 tons of medicine, gold, ammunition and food supplies.  It would deliberately ditch on landing, being recycled for the troops PVLV led, using it's fabric, steel and rubber.

     Alas for the romantics out there, it had to abort the mission when the Allies over-ran the flat savannah that the L59 needed to land upon, as zeppelins were ill-suited to fly amongst mountains, let alone land in them.  Art!

     Despite all that I think we might be able to squeeze another Intro from the zeppelin stable.  At least you now know why I attribute Mopey Dick The Orange Land Whale with a zeppelin ego - huge but fragile.


Let's Be Jolly With A Famine Folly

This is the second such on the Conolly's Castletown House estate, and whereas the entrance folly to their estate looks like an over-elaborate entrance, because it is, this one is - well, see for yourself.  Art!

     It has the nickname of 'The Wonderful Barn', and is distinguished by being a combination of stone amusement ride and storehouse, for reasons that escape everyone associated with it.  Built in 1743 in the aftermath of the first great famine, that the indigent poor could earn a few groats to get gruel with.  

Krim Krim Kerflee

You can rely on Peter The Average to act as a reverse-barometer of whatever's going on, off, down or pear-shaped in Mordorvia, because he completely ignores it.  That's when you know it's bad.  As proof that it's even worse than realised, only believe that a disaster is taking place when Peskov officially denies it.  Art!

     You may have trouble resolving those figures, so allow me to put up a close-up for it.  Art!

     That's how many trucks and tankers were destroyed across the occupied territories and Ruffia ON MONDAY ALONE, about 50% higher than average.  The orcs are now trying to escort trucks and tankers with armed vehicles, which seems to have only increased the number of losses.  Art!

     The euphemism for this is 'A target-rich environment', as there are three tankers and two military trucks in this convoy, making it much, much more apparent to roving Ukrainian drones.  Art!

    Ooops.  Someone's going to be volunteering for a storm unit any minute now.

      How fraught the situation is now has percolated into the collective crania of the orcs in Krim, who are experiencing buyer's regret.  Art!

     Of course Putinpot is silent.  By staying silent and hidden in his underground bunker, he tries to avoid being associated with bad news.  Unfortunately for him - Art!

 
     The Kozaky hit the Kerch thermal power plant on Tuesday, meaning half of Krim is now without power.  You can add another absence to your list of travails, madame.  By now there are over 1,000 cars in a colossal queue waiting to cross the Kerch Bridge and get the Dog Buns out of Krim.  There is no queue to get in.

I DO NOT CARE

Let me get that in first.  Art!

     If South Canadians interview any Glaswegian fans they will need to provide a translation service.  Sassenachs here in This Sceptred Isle find it from hard to impossible to comprehend a Gorbals twang, let alone the slang.

     Are Iceland in there this year?  Or - was that the Europa And The Pirate Twins ballfoot event?  Answers in the Comments, please.

You're Welcome

BOOJUM! working to kill clickbait one excrescence at a time.  Art!

     "The Green Mile".  How hard was that, DE?

Finally - 

Early finish! as I get to use up my TOIL at the end of the day - surely yet another indication that upper management has changed.

*  Because it is.

The Gasbag Strikes By Night!

I Know What You're Thinking

But no, this Intro is not about Donold Judas Trump blathering away on Truth Social in the small hours, for five hours past midnight, meaning he needs a restful nap during his subsequent meetings in the Oval Office.  For we are, instead, focussing on the zeppelin as a weapon of war during the First Unpleasantness.  Art!

     This is the Wright brothers flying their 'Flyer' - nil points for creativity, chaps - at Kitty Hawk in 1903.  However - cropping up early today - this was a heavier than air vehicle and we make the distinction because lighter than air craft had been flying for several years already.  Art!

Luft-Zeppelin 1 with puny humans for scale

     These rigid airships were made bouyant by hydrogen cells in their hull, meaning they needed an awful lot of hydrogen, meaning zeppelins were great big things.  The 'M' class, with with the Teutons entered the war, was 852 PROUD IMPERIAL FEET long, could carry 9 tons of payload and manage 50 miles per hour, being driven by three engines.  Art!

 
     Using zeppelins as a military resource was a novel experience, and the Teuton Army found out the hard way that operating at low altitude, which was the only way to bomb accurately, meant being very vulnerable to ground fire.  The Navy, operating it's own fleet of zeps, tended to use them for reconnaissance over the North Sea and Baltic, rather than delivering ordnance.  They kept a sharp eye out for the Royal Navy, seeing what they were up to and where, as well as tracking any British mine-laying activities.  Art!

     These ships came into service in 1915 and were a lot more capable than the pre-war 'M' class, being sent on various bombing missions over This Sceptred Isle.  As with their descendants of 1940, their accuracy was abysmal, thanks to the height they had to operate at, and 'Bombing only military targets' as ordered by the Kaiser turned into apparently indiscriminate attacks on civilians in the south-east and London.  Art!

     One of the more effective raids took place in October 1915, killing 71 people and injuring 128, before zep operations stopped for the arrival of winter's bad weather and full moons.  Zeppelins, you see, were so large they suffered from the effects of high winds, and were plainly visible in moonlight on cloudless nights.  In military or strategic terms the raids inflicted minimal damage; what they did inflict was a sense of horrified outrage amongst the British population, who were even less enchanted with Teuton 'Kultur' than they were already, and they had been pretty thoroughly disenchanted in the first place.  The Teuton populace lapped it up - this seems to resonate in a strangely familiar fashion today, if only I could put my finger on it - and felt it only fair that 'Gott strafe England'.  Art!

     

     The Teutons made a very determined effort through 1916 to hit British morale, dropping 125 tons of bombs, killing 293 people, injuring 691 and causing £2.5 million in damage.

     However - twice in one Intro! - the sheer scale of the Teuton aerial assault forced the Army, the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service to create proper defences, with dedicated anti-aircraft guns, searchlights and night-fighter scout planes.  By October 1916 the flyboys were acquiring the new incendiary and explosive ammunition from Brock, Pomeroy and Buckingham.  Unlike the normal solid rounds fired by machine guns mounted on aircraft, these ones didn't merely make small holes and release limited quantities of gas.  No, they worked on the zeppelin's greatest weakness: their use of verrrry explosive hydrogen gas.  Art!

     We have here a Camel outfitted for night flying and hunting zeppelins.  Normally it mounted two Vickers guns firing, synchronised, through the propeller blades, but in this instance it was firing Pomeroy explosive ammunition and the risk of blowing a propellor blade to itty-bitty pieces was not negligible.  So it is using twin Lewis guns fitted to the top wing.

      There wasn't a whole lot the zeppelins could do about this; they couldn't armour their hide or they'd never get off the ground*, and non-flammable helium was regarded as a passing rare laboratory element with no industrial production of same.  Unlike today.  Plus, a zeppelin was a massive target it was difficult to miss, and night fighters armed with machine guns were a whole lot more effective than ones trying to drop bombs or a 'Ranken explosive dart' upon it.  Art!

     Well, I could go on a lot more about the zeppelin, and doubtless will do, just not today.  I bet you can hardly wait.

A Further Famine Folly

Although 'Tales From The Bottle' rather cheekily included this one in his vlog about famine follies in Ireland, it's not in Ireland.  Rather, it's on the island of Uist in the Hebrides, constructed in 1830 under the auspices of Dr. Alex Mcleod, who paid for it's construction in order to give the poor and indigent something to do and get paid for.  Art!

     It's a two-storey tower, long derelict, situated on a small eyot and Conrad wonders how they got quarried stone there; is it passable by foot at low tide?  It looks as remote and lonely a structure as it's possible to get.  Art!

If I Were To Say 'Gyros'

You might well think that Conrad was thinking with his stomach again, yarking on about Greek food -

     Sadly no.  Art!

Gyros

     What we're really talking about it one of the critical core components of the orc's Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile, 'Oreshnik'.  Putinpot likes to talk up this chimera as if it was the last word in technical proficiency, when in fact it's targeting system is based around a gyroscope design 50 years old.  Art!

     We've covered this before, when the Ukrainians got their hands on the wreckage of an Oreshnik, and lo! they found components from the Sixties being used.  The Gu-503 went out of production last year, alongside with the calibration equipment that ought to be testing it, but which doesn't exist any more.  So, the orcs can instal a Gu-503 into an Oreshnik, BUT CANNOT TEST IT.  Art!

     

AI but it seemed fitting

     This explains why the most recent use of 'Hazel Tree' blew $30 million to destroy three garages outside Kyiv, and why another fell in orc-occupied Donetsk; their gyros are failing to direct them with any accuracy and they're missing by tens of kilometres.  Remember that when Charlie Chipmunk Cheeks blathers on about how they deliberately hit Donetsk to see what would happen, because it was 'easier to observe there'.  Putinnochio.

Not Sure If Anyone Will Get This One

Art!

"The Trump-001 cannot fathom complex machines.  Guns and umbrellas have chemicals in them.  Moving parts.  It doesn't understand that way, but it can form stolid sentences.'

     There's other evidence of Rupar's assertion being correct, when Mopey Dick the Orange Land Whale abandons an umbrella as he gets in the door to Air Force One (the one that's not a bribe).  Art!

     Either he's genuinely too stupid, clumsy or unfit to close the umbrella and just leaves it for a minion to recover.  O his poor bruised hands!

Oooh!  Oooh!  They Made This Item JUST For Me!

There I was, checking the news feed to see if there was anything whimsical or odd I could exploit, and Your Humble Scribe came across this.  Art!

36 minutes long!

     I don't have time to go through and do a critical analysis tonight as I've still not had my tea - this tropical heat rather quashes one's appetite - but rest assured I'm going to Bookmark it and peruse closely, then get back to you.  I bet you can hardly wait.

Finally -

Going out with a Biercism.

"Dice,n: small polka-dotted cubes of ivory, constructed like a lawyer to lie on any side, but commonly on the wrong one."

* Lead zeppelin, anyone?

Four Poster

Yes, We Are Back On The Subject Of 'Four' Again

And am I not posting about it?  Hence the title.  Commiserations to all of those who expected to see the bed version.  There's a fatal model in the 'Jonathan Creek' episode 'The Grinning Man', console yourself with that.  Art!

Things that go creek in the night?

     ANYWAY I was pondering upon where to start, and it came to me in a dull flash of muted muse: begin with bands!  Art?

  
     Paul McCartney of The Beatles, a.k.a. the Fab Four, performing for the camera on Salisbury Plain, escorted by Centurion tanks, a whimsical notion if ever there was one.  Yes yes yes, there's only one of them visible.  Use your imagination, bafunes.  Next!

     The Four Tops, out of Detroit, one of the most successful South Canadian vocal groups evah.  Cuts no ice with Conrad, they don't have guitars or organ riffs.  Art!

     This is the first studio album from Gang Of Four, 'Entertainment', dateline 1979.  They were dubbed 'Post-punk' and delivered 'funk-punk' and 'art-punk', whatever hideous farragos they might be.  Not a band Conrad has nor had any appreciation for.  Named after the clique in The Populous Dictatorship who took control of the political levers of power after Mao died, and even before he died - which is a whole other ballgame.  We may come back to that, it's a lot more interesting that a band who changed members more often I change my tee shirts.  Art!

Not the band.  Just so we're clear.

     Having gone off at a tangent - how utterly unlike us! - let us get back into entertainment NO NOT THE G.O.F. ALBUM but rather films via comics.  Art!

THE FANTASTIC FOUR: One of Marvel's tent-pole properties since Stan Lee and Jack Kirby dreamt them up in 1961.  They have been so profitable - ahem - sorry I mean so artistically relevant and timely that writers are not allowed to muck around with plots too much, or (gasp!) kill any of them off.  Marvel has tried to convert their property into a cinematic version several times, with limited success, and look to be going for a forth attempt.  We shall see.  Art!

     The 2017 flop.  Just to prove that not everything Marvel turns out is either good or profitable.

     THE FOURTH DOCTOR: Spanning media in the opposite direction, here we have an iconic television trope that has also translated into comics.  Known fondly as the 'Tom Baker era', it was teased by adverts where The Doctor was holding forth on a dandelion that had been crushed, nay pulverised, and what deductions he drew from that.  Art!

     " - according to my estimation of the resistance to pressure of vegetable fibre, it was stepped on by something weighing a quarter of a ton." Art!

     

      Conrad has to be careful or the rest of this Intro will be nothing but Fourth Doctor.  Another of his quotes comes to mind: "It may be irrational of me, but human beings are quite my favourite species!"  Art!

     Present company excepted, Harry being the idiot who pressed what wasn't supposed to be pressed.  As when he tried to remove an explosive harness from The Doctor by giving it a hefty pull, deciding that Cyberman technology was unable to cope with aggressive tugging.

     ANYWAY Art!

That scarf looks sentient

FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL: Good lord aloft, it's horrifying to realise this film is 36 years old!  I've only seen it the once, which was quite enough for me, and remember it as Hugh Grant's break-out role.  He personified the somewhat bumbling, self-deprecating Englishman who had a heart of gold and whom drew the ladies like moths to a flame.  Down, Vulnavia, down!  Art?

     In fact the role was a bit of a mixed blessing: yes, it got him other, similar roles in other rom-coms, yet tended to get him typecast.  Only in recent years has he been able to display his acting chops by playing villains.  Art!

     'Box Office Mojo' informs that the budget was $4.5 million, and it made $245 million at the box office, meaning a profit of at least $100 million, and one can only applaud screenwriter Richard Curtis for not bowing to the money men and penning a sequel.  Art!

     A Gerry Anderson puppetry series you may not have heard of.  It features sheriff Tex Tucker, the authority figure in the town of - you may be ahead of me here - Four Feather Falls.  Tex was gifted four magical feathers for saving the son of an Indian chief.  Two of them enable him to rotate and shoot his guns without so much as touching them, a jolly useful skillset to have in the lawless Eighteen-Eighties in South Canada.  One feather enabled his dog to talk, and the other allowed his horse to talk.  Probably boosted their intellect, too, as otherwise their conversation would be all 'More hay!' 'More beef!' 'Less riding!' 'More walkies!'

     

Hmmmmmmmm

It's a well known fact that Conrad likes ginger.  Ginger snaps, crystallised ginger, ginger beer, ginger ale, ginger and lemongrass cordial, the list goes on.  So, a couple of days ago I idly Googled for ginger beer recipes, of which there are loads.  Art!

     The recipe I glossed over included sugar, honey and yeast, as well as plenty of water.  Central to the idea is that you ferment the sugary solution after adding a syrup of boiled ginger and honey, leaving it to stand for a couple of days.

     Only this afternoon, several days later, did I realised that 'fermenting' means 'creating alcohol' so even if I did make it, I'd not be able to consume it for a couple of months.  Not only that, the proof of the end product can vary from 4%, or about the same as a pub pint, to 11%, which is almost as strong as wine.

     Gotta admit, I am tempted.

BOOJUM! And The Unending Battle Against Clickbait

This time, less to do with a film or television series and more a retail location.  Once again the 'Daily Express' conspires to have you click on their baiting article in order to complete the headline.  Art!

     

     If you Google for the item, you get the information that it's the Riverside Retail Park site going toes-up, which has only been open for a year, implying that their profits have been non-existent and whomever signed off on the deal needs to have a long, intense chat with HR.  Ooops.

Two Bad, So Sad

The horrorshow that is life in occupied Krim gets worse by the day.  Ukraine blew up a couple of the highly ineffective Pantsir SAM vehicles ON THE KERCH BRIDGE ITSELF a couple of nights ago, then found a small tank farm that had accumulated fuel brought in by ferry and destroyed that, too.  The foolishly loquacious Ruffian milblogger 'Fighterbomber' had been gloating about a lot of fuel suddenly arriving, for which information the Kozaky are very grateful.  Art!

     Those are two of the small ferries the orcs are - sorry, were - using to transport supplies from the Ruffian coastline into Kerch.  Krim authorities are now advising drivers to revert back to the M-14 highway, after having made a will.  Art!

     Each yellow dot is a confirmed geolocated Ruffian transport vehicle destroyed with video evidence to back it up.  What you see here is about a tenth of the overall total Ukrainian claims to have malleted.  So now the orc tourists in Krim have no fuel, no water, rolling power cuts and the likelihood of being forcibly conscripted as 'volunteers'.  So much win!

Someone Has Been Watching Too Much 'Dawn Of The Dead'

 - and thinking that it's a documentary, thanks to them being but lightly endowed with intellect.  Art!

     He's going to order that he be pumped full of them when he drops dead at the Resolute Desk.  Really, I cannot see that he'd perform any worse as a zombie than he does at the moment, although camera crews and photographers would need colour lenses to turn his green skin into a vibrant popping orange.  

Finally -

THIS is why I always ran past the Lego shop in the Arndale Centre when I had to work there on a daily basis.  Art!

     Too much temptation!