BARV

Yes, More Of "The British Are Coming"
In tanks.  Not only did Perfidious Albion* invent the armoured fighting vehicle, they also composed some very odd variants of the basic model.

The Weasel
Okay it's South Canadian but it still looks odd

     "B.A.R.V." is an acronym, yet not for "British Army Rowing Van" as you might have guessed although your guess is closer to the truth than you might imagine.

Another weasel

     Alright, what, besides drinking tea and eating chips, are the British known for?
     Yes, that's right, amphibious invasions!
     A large part of invading or liberating - Conrad will not make value judgements here - involves landing craft and tanks either coming ashore under their own power, or being landed from those landing craft**.  Tanks being woefully unreliable, and heavy, breakdowns frequently occured.  Landing craft, once beached, tend not to be able to reverse (can driving a boat backwards be called "reverse"?).
     Enter the "Beach Armoured Recovery Vehicle".  Art?

Rather odd in appearance, I grant you

     This is a big armoured box on the hull of a Centurion tank, able to operate in 11 feet of water.  It's job is to recover bogged or broken-down tanks off the beach, and to push stranded landing craft back to sea - those ropes on the front act as a cushion.
     These seem to be very much a British thing, I Googled and didn't find any results for "Ruffian BARV" or "South Canadian BARV".  Well, the South Canadians being such terrific chums of ours, they can probably borrow a few.


More Minor Domestic Events
Yes,  I should cocoa, it can't all be blood and thunder and atom bombs and supernovae, you have to have a little grounding to make the exceptional seem - well, exceptional.

Okay, I weakened

     We have a new lightweight hoover, or vacuum cleaner as the Beeb would have it because "Hoover" is a proprietary trade name and that would be advertising and YOU CANNOT DO THAT at the BBC -
     Oh yes - we're not the BBC.  I forget at times, as I am a much-loved institution in my own head.
     I do apologise.  A moment of madness.  Confused by traffic stats <ninety minute sojourn redacted by Mister Hand> and Bulgaria!
     Where was I***?
     Ah yes the hoover.  With multiple heads, capable of being held one-handed, cordless, the real question is - what does Edna think?

Not a lot!

     She doesn't like it at all when in operation.  If silent and unpowered she will tolerate it.  When powered up it transforms into the most evil object in the world (which as we all know is a hedge-fund manager who eats babies for breakfast).

There Will Be Blood
Yours.
     Don't worry, that tapping noise isn't Conrad at the door with a large knife, it's just the deathwatch beetles in your wooden leg.
     Art, can we have that illustration?

     What I meant was - two days to become a phlebotomist?  Really?  
     Yes really except - oh, I don't know, it costs £7,500 for the course.  Oddly enough the NHS says they need to train you for six months.  That "no experience needed" criteria is also a bit of a worry.  Thus, when you next turn up to have your appendix removed again, this will explain why that man taking your blood, the one with all the tattoos and teeth filed to points and who is shaking uncontrollably, is doing what he is.

A Tall Order
Fans of the blog with long memories, or who desperately search Blogger for photographs of huge cranes, will recall when Victoria Station was having the roof taken off.  This required crane so immense that it required another crane to put it together.  Can we?

More crane than is good for you

     When Conrad shuffled into The Electric Goldfish Bowl on Monday, what did he see that brightened his eye?  Why none but this -

     I have even managed to get cars in to indicate scale, that this is indeed a whacking big crane a long ways off, not a small crane close up, because that would be cheating.

Finally
I haven't insulted First Bus today, so I shall have to allow my rage to sit and simmer overnight in order to come up with a bit of creative slander.  On the other hand, it might be libel.
     Which has nothing at all to do with what follows.  Art?

Which Viking God are you?
A question me must all ask ourselves at times.

     I haven't bothered to take the quiz, because I'm pretty sure there wasn't a snowy-haired sarcastic Viking God who dined on remaindered offal and banged on about war chariots all the time.


*  Us.  The Brits.
**  Splendidly apt name, don't you think?
***  24/7 party in head makes concentration difficult at times.