BOOJUM! is Back

 

What do you mean, was I gone?

     Took a night off from posting meandering meditations on the Muse, baking and tanks.  Now I'm back, ready to kick bottom. 

     Turpitude
     I'm willing to bet you've only ever heard this word as part of a phrase - "Gross Moral Turpitude" and even then not very often.  It sounds like a submarine weapons system, or the Classical Greek definition of musical composition, or a kind of resin you get out of the Norwegian Pine.
     Well it's not!  It means being disgustingly depraved.  Disgustingly!  When spoken you must put emphasis on the first "T", making a spitting pronunciation.  Only then will your audience know the true evil of - turpitude.

Gross Moral Turpintude

Mangonel
     If anyone has read this blog from Day1 they might remember that I decided to use Trebuchet as the font.  I then provided illustrations of what a Trebuchet was; a mediaeval siege engine.  Say hello to the Mangonel, a less sophisticated and earlier siege engine.  The Romans knew it as the "Onager", their name for a wild ass, because their engine kicked like one.

Kick ass.  Literally.

You winched the arm back, placed a large rock in the sling, then released the ratchet.  Whammo-blammo, your enemy gets a great big rock between the eyes.
     Why am I telling you this?  Because you need a rounded education, dear reader.  Tomorrow we will tackle spigot mortars.  Make a note in your diary, there will be a quiz. 

Affleck as Batman
     A couple of my female colleagues were tut-tutting over the news of Ben playing Batman in the forthcoming Batman & Superman film.  May I point out:
1)  It isn't due until 2015.  That's plenty of time for this film to fall into Development Hell.
2)  Cost.  This is going to be a big budget summer tentpole blockbuster that will probably demand a budget going north of $250,000,000.  Which means it may never come together.
3)  Ben is actually a sh1t-hot director, witness "The Town" and "Argo".  He can act, too, but will probably need a director able to extract a good performance.  This is quite problematic.
4)  Look, this is going to be Superman and Batman, two cash cows for the movie business.  It's probably doomed to be made!

Conrad as Scriptwriter
     What I would love to see, as an animated 3D or live-action, is the original "Bad Company" from 2000AD way way waaay back in the  80's.

This is Bad Company before they got hardcore.

You can see Joe Scummer, Dogface, Wallbanger, Mad Tommy Churchill, Kano, Thrax, etc. - all before the real human interest joined up.  I say "joined up" when it really should be "enlisted at gunpoint".  They are fighting on the jungle world of Ararat, in a hostile environment, against the sadistic, merciless alien Krool.  Hell, if "Pocahontas In Outer Space", a.k.a. "Avatar" can get made, why not Bad Company?

So - Tanks?
     As you may have noticed, I avoid depictions of the over-familiar Tiger, Sherman, Panther, Abrams or T55 here.  Here we see the Italian light tank "CV33"

Sadly, that big gun in the background is NOTHING to do with the CV33

More correctly, this is a tankette - kind of tank-lite, if you will.  This is the more deadly model armed with a flamethrower - that big pipe on the left-hand side, towing a trailer full of fuel.
     It wasn't very heavily armoured.  By anecdote, if you put a Lee Enfield rifle up against the armour and pulled the trigger, hey presto, you put a hole in the armour and whoever was inside. I have actually seen this vehicle up close at Bovington Tank Museum and there is simply NO WAY anyone of my size (6 feet 1 inch) could get inside.  Anyone smaller would still have a bloody hard job fitting in behind the machine gun mounting. 
     Imagine driving this mobile metal midden - crushed as you are into a space no bigger than a laundry basket - in the temperatures of Egypt at the height of summer, with dust being thrown up all around and a limited water supply.  Then add flies.  Then add British tanks and armoured cars and anti-tank guns that can turn you into a work of modern art in half a second.  Suddenly the Italian tankies don't seem so cowardly, eh?

Awwww
  Since we've had a lot of internecine content, here is something a bit cuter to end.
 

Mother and daughter aardvarks.  Why aardvarks?  because you need a rounded education, dear reader.

Pip pip!