4 Million Bullets

And 40,000 Hits!
No!  I'm not talking about the hit ratio of bullets fired to effective impacts - though I could go on about that for a couple of hours if you'd - no? - okay.
     No, I am talking about the number of visitors to BOOJUM!  The blog you're currently reading, in case you were wondering.  Hopefully you didn't arrive here execting a treatise or two on 'Alice In Wonderland' or a scholarly analysis of Charles Dodgson*, because you're not going to get it.
     What you get instead is a gloasting post about having 40,000 visitors to the site.  Not bad when our initial traffic per day amounted to 10, if we were lucky.  Fortunately our winning recipe of scrivel, zombies, atom bombs, tanks, astronomy and logic rendered into a pretzel has borne fruit.  Or vegetables.  We're not fussy.

Conrad wearing his happy face.
Yes, really.

     "Yes, but those bullets?" I hear you query.  "Where did they all go?"
     That's not really the issue, it's where they were going from.  Anyway, let us proceed.

Forgotten Weapons
This is one of Conrad's subscribed Youtube feeds and one of his guilty pleasures.  After all, the prospects of your humble scribe ever getting his hot sweaty-palmed hands upon any kind of weapon that fires bullets is remote.  Their Youtube link:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrfKGpvbEQXcbe68dzXgJuA


     "Non-existent," the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester would add.  Yes, for any South Canadian chums who might be wrinkling their noses at this peculiar Britishism, you have to go right to the top of the police management ladder to get approval if you want to purchase a firearm in the Pond of Eden.  Even the most perfunctory of internet searches by the police would probably alarm them enough to forbid Conrad access to anything beyond a blunt spoon.
     Back on track.  Conrad was watching Ian of FW going over "Heavy machine guns of the Great War".  Art?

Ian: don't let the flowing hippy locks fool you, the guy is a dyed-in-the-wool killer

     That whopping big piece of kit in front of him is a Vickers machine gun.  The British Army, who know what they like and stick with it forever, were using these guns for over 60 years.  They were big, expensively-machined, robust weapons designed to keep firing continuously; all you had to do was pour gun-oil over the breech and keep the water jacket topped up.
     Now, when they gave these up in 1968 for the Jimpy  - another long story there - according to Ian's anecdote, they tested a Vickers gun by firing it non-stop for seven days.  It didn't jam or malfunction at all and was still good to go at the end of this period.
     This is where the ammunition count comes in.  A Vickers could sustain a rate of fire of 450 rounds per minute, which equals 27,000 rounds an hour (or 108 boxes of ammo).  That's nearly 650,000 rounds per day and well over 4 million over seven.

"Keep cranking them out!  The Vickers needs feeding!"

Jaffa Cakes And Atom Bombs
Only joking!  No atom bombs.  The Jaffa Cakes are Polish, however, which is almost as good.  Art?  Rivet us with photographic evidence.

     These are cherry-flavoured, and at that price Conrad got four packets.  No idea why they were going cheap, in which case we shall mutter "Brexit" and retire.

Ricin
I mentioned this yesterday and today you're going to get the full feature.  Ricin, you see, is an extremely toxic protein derived from the castor bean.  Yes, the very one that you get castor oil from.  

The beans of Bad

     In reality it's exceedingly hard to poison yourself with these beans as they are very robust indeed and you'd need to chew your jaw into immobility in order to ingest a lethal dose.
     I know you're worrying about castor oil; don't.  It gets roasted at high temperature to denature the proteins present, so it's quite safe.  Horrid, but safe.
     Ricin's method of operation is to attack the body's cellular structure by binding into it's  proteins.  This, in effect, causes you to fall apart slowly and painfully.

Beautiful and DEADLY!

     The potential of ricin as a means of rendering your fellow man highly dead indeed  caused both the South Canadians and the Sinisters to experiment on it as a war-winning wonder weapon, as you might expect.  They came up with a powdered pure extract that requires about this much ..... in terms of mass to finish you off.
     Now, if you think ricin is bad ...


*  Better known as Lewis Carroll