Obsessive, Compulsive And, Above All -

Dedicated!
I could have fitted that onto the title but was curious as to what would make people curious, and so here we are.  
     I very much regret to say that I have acquired an interview for a potential job next Tuesday, which if successful would put a most severe crimp in my days of having a lie-in, drinking pints of tea, getting through my book mountain and walking Edna.  Still, into each life a little rain must fall, eh?

Often literally

     Thus I have been busy checking out bus and Metro (Greater Manchester's tram network) to see if it's realistic to cross Babylon-on-the-Irwell* to Lesser Hades**.  It is, yet it requires your humble hack to creak out of bed earlier than the dawn, only returning to his Sekrit Layr when the shades of dusk are falling.
     None of which has anything to do with what follows. 

"Vera Cruz"
No, it's a film, not a person. You may remember Conrad banging on about bean-counting and how many South Canadian 'adventurers' there were or were not and when did they get shot?  

That's Joe; grubby except for his grin

     I now have to confess that I got the numbers wrong; there are originally 15 merc - adventurers, of whom two quickly succumb to Joe's rather definitive management skills (i.e. he kills them).  That leaves 13 who ride into an ambush in the Mexican village at the 45 minute mark.  Okay?
     Good.  Now, last night your modest artisan was playing the film backwards and forwards, down to one-third normal speed, and could only identify 1 adventurer being slain.  Thanks to distant camera work and editing, I managed to count 11 of the South Canadian rascals riding out of the ambush, so another one appears to have bitten the dust, without me being able to determine who or when.  
     However!
     When we next get the assemblage of evildo - adventurers assembled, there are only 9 of them.  Art?

Adventurers my hairy white posterior

     Of course one promptly gets blammed by the rebels, leaving 8.  Of these, only 1 survives, but you don't get to see 3 of the other scu- adventurers get shot.
     Dammit!  You know what THAT means, don't you?  I shall have to go back and replay the last 10 minutes frame-by-frame to find the answer.
     OCDedicated, like I said.

Oh By The Way
It is odds-on that your talented typist is simply hotching with Aspberger's Syndrome, because he is a bean-counter beyond belief.  As you surely know by now, he invented the world's most boring hobby - checking if the film Goofs on IMDB were correct or not; this has taken a back-seat of late as my laptop would not play DVDs any longer.  I used to type up the notes on my PC whilst playing the film on my laptop, you see.
     I dusted off the laptop's little light that blinks - a laser toyou - and Hay Pesto!  It plays again.  So the World's Most Boring Hobby can recommence.

It wasn't a typo.

    In further proof that Conrad's mind does not work the way yours does, I did go through the end battle in "Saving Private Ryan" and worked out that the SS troops attacking the village had suffered at least 70 casualties.  Given that they were a company-sized outfit, this means that they lacked the troops to even begin defending the village successfully, thanks to Private Ryan et al.

Rough day at the office

     Bean-counting.  It's what makes the world go round***.

A Parthian Shot
Literally, because - well, you'll see.  Bear with me on this, it takes a roundabout route to get there.  A bit like Tuesday's bus and tram journey.
     Okay, one of Conrad's recent purchases was "Britain's War Machine" by David Edgerton.  Art?

My edition

     Mr. Edgerton - I think we'll call him Dave - makes a compelling assertion that, far from the belief and propagated image of the Allotment being frail and alone in 1940, it was in fact a mighty military colossus with global reach.
     Conrad, as he is wont to do, took a look at some pages that dealt with the war in North Africa, and the belief and propagated reportage that British tanks were highly deficient compared to Teuton ones.  Dave contrasts guns and armour and illustrates that the bally Hun had a vanishingly small interval when this was true.

The terror of the Teutons - Matilda

     I then went to the Osprey work "Tactics of the Desert War" by the sorely-missed Paddy Griffiths, and confirmed it was Teuton tactics that made the difference.  They would push their anti-tank guns up forward aggressively, with their tanks; if they encountered British armour the panzers would fall back onto their screening AT guns, which were far smaller and harder to see than a tank.  Once in range the British would come off the worst, and blame the panzers.

The bane of the British 

     "Yes, yes, but where does this 'Party in a shop' come in?" I hear you quibble.
     PARTHIAN SHOT!   After the Parthian mounted archers of antiquity.  They would simulate a retreat, causing their enemies to pursue them, and SUDDENLY they would turn in the saddle and let loose an accurate rain of arrows.  This is harder than it sounds as the stirrup had not yet been invented and the Parthian archer had to control their mount solely with their knees.  Art?

Thus

     So there you have today's Parthian shot.


*  Manchester
**  Salford
***  Not literally, because angular momentum and inertia do that job.