Greek Bail Out

Eeh By Gum, Arne Saknussum
Actually this has nothing to do with Iceland, Jules Verne or the centre of the earth.

The first and bestest.  But till nothing to do with the Intro

     No, I refer you to the practice on the island of Corfu of - cricket.
     Yes, you read that correctly.  The Corfiotes were under the wicked heel of the perfidious British empire in the 19th Century, and hated it so much - they took up the English national sport (football hadn't been invented then).
     So -

The pitch in Corfu Town

     If you squint hard, you can just see the bails have been knocked off, so that batsman's out.
     What?  What?  Did you think it meant something else?

Preparation
Am I overdoing it? Possibly but a lot of prep time saves time later as evinced here.

     This was written an age ago, possibly September last year, and amounts to about 2 words to outline the blog.
     Whereas now -

     I'm not going to bother counting it.  A lot of words.  And the finished thing will have a lot more!
     Evolve or die, as they say.

Deepspace Horizons
As opposed to Deepwater ones, which are far less well-regarded.
     Well, thanks to this gallant little space-probe, we now know bags more about Pluto than we did even a few months ago.  Clyde Tombaugh would probably be rather staggered at the amount of data that came in whilst in close proximity.

Sez it all, really

     Now, what else for New Horizons?  If it keeps going it'll hit the Kuiper Belt, which is kind of builder's rubble left over from the creation of the Solar System, herein the link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt

     - and if the probe keeps going beyond that, there's the Oort Cloud, a shell of icy objects that extend (theoretically) halfway to the next nearest star.

There you go!

     Although I don't expect any of you reading this to hear back from NH when it arrives there.  It's a relatively slow probe, and that's a very distant cloud.

"A Field Artillery Group In Battle" By Colonel Weber
This was delivered with impressive speed by Naval & Military Press and I have been reading it with considerable interest.  It is a stern corrective to the "Donkeys" school of thought, as the tactical and technical aspects of commanding the 2nd Royal Field Artillery Brigade are considerable and complex - how do you deploy batteries in a salient?  Is enfilade fire effective?  Where ought the wagon lines to be?  How rapidly can the Divisional Ammunition Column replenish the minimum 200 rounds per gun?  Where is the local infantry battalion headquarters? Is there a "bury"?  What arrangements have been made for Liaison, Intelligence and Forward Observation?  Etcetera.  

Does what it says on the cover

     That's the content.  There is also the style, as this book is composed of collated articles written almost one hundred years ago - in other words, me reading Colonel Weber is rather like him reading an account written by a British artillery officer fighting in the Peninsular War.  Of 1812.  Col. Weber's style is very droll, understated and in the third person, a bit like your humble scribe.  Conrad is also grateful that the author doesn't lard his text with untranslated French, Latin or - Lord aloft - Greek, to show how clever he is and that he had a public school education.

Superheroes With Their Pants Down
And once again we return to the Fantastic Four, this time to focus on Ben Grimm - oh!  what an appropriate surname! - because he's better known as The Thing.

NO!  Dammit, Art, back in the septic sump -

That's better!
Baffoon.

     
Be warned beforehand, jokey references to "Rock music", "Blackpool Rock" or "Ayers Rock" do not go down well with Ben, and a finger-flick from him will put you in traction.
     What, then, does Ben have to fret and fear about everyday life?  I thought you'd never ask!
     1) Furniture.  Not only is puny human furniture likely to collapse under Ben's weight, anything that doesn't is likely to be very badly scuffed.  Plainly The Thing needs to carry around his very own vanadium-steel collapsible stool.
     2)  Cups and mugs.  These would need to be very large, minus a handle.  In fact, these would need to be - a bucket.  A chintzy one with flowers on.
    3) Cutlery.  Once again puny human ironmongery is grossly out of scale.  Ben would be better off with a garden fork and a cavalry sabre.
     4)  Baths.  Not possible.  He needs a swimming pool - with stone steps, not a fragile steel ladder.
     5)  No contact sports!  For fear of manslaughter.  Nor pole-vaulting - ruinous to both pole and ground.  In fact the only other sporting types he'd be able to play with would be the Hulk, Thor and Superman.

Not me!

"Gravity's Rainbow" By Thomas Pynchon
I'll keep this short, that cake's a-baking and I don't want it to burn.  What does Tom have for us today?
     "Sus. per Coll." which is a peculiar translation I've not encountered before.  It's an abbreviation of "Suspendatur per collum", which means "Let him (or her) be hanged by the neck", which is fair enough in context - witch trials.
     "Desiatina".  Nothing to do with flowers, it's a Russian unit of measurement in terms of land area.  And there was me thinking I was clever knowing about poods and versts ...

Close enough.