AVRE

No!  It Is Not A Mis-spelling
For am I not Conrad, that ferocious fiend of the <thinks> er - keyboard, who makes words sit up and dance?  That's a yes for any of you unsure of the answer.
     No, I have not mis-spelt "AVRO", the British aviation company long since subsumed into British Aerospace, who seem to have a patent on everything above the Earth's surface.  A V Roe formed the company in 1910, not far from where your humble scribe earns his pennies at The Electric Goldfish Bowl.  They were notable for producing what Conrad has rather tastelessly called Giant Flying Mallets - the Lancaster bomber, long an unwanted staple in the skies across Nazi Germany, and the Vulcan bomber, that howling banshee of the Cold War that only ever bombed in anger once*.
     No, the A.V.R.E. I talk of is a modified Churchill tank, from tank to Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineers.  No, this has nothing to do with the above paragraph, because that's how we roll here.  Well, when I say "roll" I mean ""Oscillate wildly with spasmodic leaps in the air plus a hint of foam on the lips".

An AVRE about to give someone the worst bad-hair day ever

     Here an aside.  You might, or might not if you live in heathenish and benighted climes other than the Allotment of Eden**, be aware that lots of bits of the British Army have the prefix "Royal": Royal Artillery, Royal Marines, Royal Regiment of Scotland.  However, one NEVER refers to it as the "Royal" British Army.  Chaps have been cashiered for doing this. 
     Back to AVRE.  I shall leave out the full stops as they bore me.  Take them away!
     As the Lancaster was described as a Giant Flying Mallet, so the AVRE was a ground-bound Giant Mallet On Tracks.  Rather than the normal high-velocity gun, it was armed with a Petard mortar, firing a low-velocity round as big as a waste-paper basket, intended to be used against fortifications.  

I think their looks count as "awed contemplation"

If the stunned occupants of said bunker or pillbox didn't give up right then, a second modified Churchill would go into action.  The Churchill Crocodile, which mounted a giant flamethrower in the hull.  The bunker would have a gaping hole where that Petard hit, and I shall let your imagination fill in the gory details.
     "Gosh, what a horrid bloodthirsty old targe he is," I can hear you say.  
     You have a point.  I chose AVRE because the previous "BARV" was a big hit.

Talking Of Big Hits
Eric Morecambe.  There was a chap with funny bones.  He could - and did - walk on stage and just stand there, and make people laugh.  His son, however, said that he always remained very humble about success, always imagining that one day They would arrive and say "Okay, the joke's over, back to normality".

Eric.  Bless him.  I feel a smirk coming on.

     Whilst I blish*** to include myself in a paragraph that follows the great man's name, I do know how he feels. Yesterday the blog hit 548 posts, small beer for some bloggers I know, but about ten times what BOOJUM! is used to.
     'Where are they all coming from?' I asked myself.  Don't worry, that counts as normal round here.  A surprisingly large number hail from South Canada, and a fair few are Ruffians.  My own countrymen from the Allotment also take an interest; my work colleagues out of curiosity as to what I'm chuntering on about now -
     For some reason an obscure post from May has proven to be amazingly popular, for no good explanation that your humble scribe can discover.  Here's the link:

http://comsatangel2002.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/its-rose.html

     I wish you joy of it!
More Of Big Hits
As you may have noticed, your humble scribe likes to run with a theme.  This time we revisit "Thunderball", that James Bond classic from the Sixties^^.
     Blame that Nick Hughes and his review of the film.  Here's the link:

http://rhubba.com/thunderblog/

     Having read the review, I really had no choice but to buy that copy in the charity shop, did I?  Okay, now to skip erratically to a completely different subject.
     You know in those hokey old black and white films from the Fifties about the mad scientist who eventually gets killed by his swarm of killer weaselnanas?  The grizzled cop at the end turns to the priest, and says  "There are some things man was not meant to know."
     Quite.

The "Disco Volante", unexploded

     In the same way, there are some things that assistant special effects directors ought not to get their hot sweaty little hands on.  Like experimental rocket fuel.
     Here an aside.  Rocket and missile fuels, the kinds that send ballistic missiles into orbit, are spectacularly dangerous and unstable when in liquid form.  "Devil's venom" was a Russian nickname for one particular fuel.  "Unsymmetric dimethylhydrazine and dinitrogen tetroxide" is another and I swear the keyboard quivered when I typed those words.  These things are simply itching to explode the instant a single photon, let alone a grain of dust, falls upon them.
     Enter stage left South Canadian Colonel Russhon, who acted as a kind of "fixer" for the Bond films.  Need permission to get into the grounds of Fort Knox?  He's your man.  Need a small fleet of frigates, corvettes and Coast Guard cutters?  See the Colonel.
     Want to get hold of experimental rocket fuel to help blow up a boat?  Yep, see the Colonel.  John Stears was responsible for loading up the "Disco Volante" with explosives and rocket fuel, which arrived so late they didn't have time to test it.  Art?

The Disco, exploded

     The explosion turned the boat into sawdust.  It also blew out windows in Nassau.  Which was thirty miles away.

And I'm typing this bit in to get us over the 1,000 words mark.  Yay!
*  Black Buck.  Go Google it.
**  It's the Allotment today because it's dry.
*** Like a blush but with more Star Trek to it^.
^  James Blish

^^  1965.  I checked.