Charlie The Starkist Tuna

Apologies To Non-South Canadian Readers
There I was, pondering mournfully on what to call today's blog - for the muse does not always strike according to wishful thinking - and I happened to flip back to my notes made whilst reading "Inherent Vice", by that provoker of coincidence, Thomas Pynchon.
     After re-reading the paragraph above I would like to scotch a few misapprehensions some folks have about BOOJUM!  We do not pretend to be intellectual, and those of you who have witnessed Conrad's childlike glee in things that go BANG! are pretty much armoured against that particular mistake.  Art?

Mythbusters: blowing shizzle up for 12 years.
AND GETTING PAID FOR IT!

Nor does his like of cheesy black and white sci-fi fillums of the Fifties portend any great mental acuity*.  When I say "notes made" I refer to particular mentions TP has written into his novel, pop culture or personages that might be part of the South Canadian media landscape, yet which are unknown to your humble scribe.  Nothing so grand as recurring themes, conceits, tropes or symbols: go see the Thomas Pynchon Wiki if you want enlightenment there.
     Back to Charlie.  Art?

The piscine proponent

     So.  TP set his novel in circa 1970, and this image comes from the internet today, which is proof that an anthropomorphic fish has staying power.  Denis, one of Doc's friends in the novel, well-hammered thanks to drugs, contemplates a tin of Starkist Tuna with unabated horror, explaining that here's a happy tuna, happily promoting a tin of tuna, a tin of tuna for humans to eat (happily), which seems all kinds of wrong to him.
     "Hiya humans!  Come get a tin of my delicious relatives and friends and family and eat it right up!" is how you could summarise it, and indeed it seems odd put like that.
     O well.  Time to move on.

"FAN SONG"
I know what you're thinking, just because I'm clever (and the telepathy machine is still a Work In Progress):  "Conrad!  This sound like <gasp> a musical, that form of entertainment that you loathe more than parsnips - how can this be?"
     It's not a musical - The Great Satan - nor yet a song from a musical - The Intermediate Satan - but a Russian military radar system, the NATO codeword for it being "Fan Song"**, used in the operation and guidance of long-range anti-aircraft missile systems.  Art?

The SNR 75M3: a cold, emotionless name, frankly

     Here is one in it's natural habitat, all ready to baby a SA2 missile to target.

Mythbusters Nearly Missed
I may not have mentioned this for a long time, but Conrad is a big fan of Mythbusters.  Blowing things up - with planning and engineering and for Science!  Mostly for the blowing things up, though.
     This particular anecdote is a rather soggier one:  how easy or difficult is it to get out of a car underwater?  That is, when it is sinking.  Although done in 45 feet of water the car was buoyed to float at 10 feet with an arrangement of drums.  Art?

Out of shot: four rescue divers

     It wasn't simply a case of driving off the barge: the team were testing the tendency of a car to turn turtle in the water.  Adam Savage sat in the driver's seat, with an emergency air tank, a paramedic diver behind him with another tank of air, and three more divers immediately outside the car.  Once driven off the barge and turned turtle, Adam allowed the car to fill with water, surely a worrying and very damp experience -

An earlier test in a nice safe swimming pool

     Once the water had filled the interior, he opened his eyes -
     - and was immediately blinded.
     The car had belonged to a heavy smoker and all the residual nicotine came out into solution in the water.  There was Adam, unable to see, whilst the car flipped over again, then flipped over again - it being a lot less stable on it's roof than on it's wheels.
     To end the suspense, he got out 3 seconds before the safety divers were ready to shatter the windows and drag him out.
     He described this, unsurprisingly, as the scariest thing he'd ever done on the series.  No argument from your humble scribe!


SpaceX Success
OR
If Elon Musk Didn't Exist, It Would Be Necessary To Invent Him
(and probably by Robert Heinlein).  Elon is the chap behind SpaceX's intent to create a re-usable orbital rocket.  This is the expensive mechanical part of any launch, and currently ends up usually doing a dive into the ocean.  SpaceX are trying - and in fact have managed successful return landings on solid ground - to retrieve these vehicles for refurbishment and re-use.  Art?

Read that caption

     Landing a rocket on an ocean platform means not having to worry about missing the target, I suppose, but it's not making the landing any easier, as the ocean - you may already know this - is never still.  Well done SpaceX and Elon***!



*  He likes low-brow stuff <translation from Pseud to English courtesy Mister Hand>
** Yes it sounds camp, don't blame me for nancy NATO nomenclature
*** Which is one of those names that sounds like an anagram