Indiana Jones And The Teample Of Doom

There You Are -
I do hope you're not annoyed or bored with all these tea- and coffee-based puns, because they're going to continue for as long as they amuse me, and they continue to amuse me.  You ought to know your humble scribe and how he loves to muck about with words and language; take Saturday at work for example.  Phone traffic was way down on the absurdly high levels of earlier in the week, so I had a chance to really work on the M.E.N.'s puzzle page.  I got through the Cryptic and Normal Crosswords, the Codeword, the Split Solution, 2 Gogens, the Easy and the Hard Sudoku (and the Hard one was hard!), the Alphamuddle, the Wordsquare and the Niner.  Foolishly I binned the paper, because I know you readers are a skeptical lot and would require proof.
     

But I have an honest face!
Well, a face.

     Okay, we can now send the motley out on it's absurdly long and spindly legs.  Lykke Till!

More About Siege Warfare
Earlier in the week we went over siege warfare in the age of antiquity, that is to say, before gunpowder was discovered.
     I did touch on this whilst inflicting hysterically amusing slander on Windbag Willy, who would turn a simple "Hello" into a three-page soliloquoy, the dastard.  Anyway, fortresses and castles and the like had all been designed and built to a certain pattern pre-gunpowder, usually with a considerable height to them.  They presented lots of vertical surfaces, which were difficult to hit with pre-gunpowder missile weapons, due to their ballistic trajectories.
     Enter gunpowder.  Thank you so much, China, for making the world a much more interesting and exciting place!
     A cannon could fire a cannon-ball with much greater velocity than the old, torsion powered siege engines.  It could also fire in a flat trajectory, which meant those big vertical walls were suddenly very vulnerable.

Quiver in fear, castle!

     Along came Vauban and Coehorn, who clearly saw that fortifications had to change.  They produced works that were a lot shorter, with lots of angled surfaces, meaning that artillery shot would be more liable to bounce off without doing damage.  Art?

A Star Fort, for obvious reasons

     The works tended to be considerably deeper than previous designs, meaning that if a cannon-ball did hit, it had to dig through a lot of property to do any damage.  All those angles mean you could bring a crossfire to bear on any attackers venturing into your comfort zone.
     By the Eighteenth Century and the Age of Reason, we find that sieges can be mathematically calculated and plotted: it would take so long to complete lines of circumvallation, then so long to build caissons for your siege guns, then so long to sap forward and establish closer caissons, then so long to reduce the defences, then so long to send in your forlorn hope.

Thus

     If you were the defender, your choices involved timing.  If you surrendered the moment the oppos turn up, you'd probably be allowed to march out carrying your arms.  Waiting until they deployed for the siege and you'd only be allowed to march out.  Stick it out until the end and you were liable to be massacred en masse, survivors being sold into slavery.
    
"9th Company"
This is a Ruffian film, made in 2005, about raw recruits joining the paratroopers and being sent to fight in Afghanistan.  It actually follows a lot of the plot conventions of Hollywood films, kind of swapping the swamps of Vietnam for the mountains of the Hindu Kush.
     I won't spoil the ending, but if you watch it, careful who you root for, as not everyone makes it.

Watch it, he may be wee but he's wiry!

     Given the amount of military kit on display, I don't doubt it got official backing, even if the end is downbeat and not especially happy.  Ah well, who expects a happy ending in a Ruffian film?

Enough of gloomy military matters!  Let us instead have <thinks> Jack of all Spades.  Art?

A taste of Jack's endeavours

     Jack builds what the South Canadians call "Rube Goldberg" machines, which we here in the Pond of Eden (it's raining again) would instead call "Heath Robinson".  Here is a link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzlsqGTiEoU&t=265s

     This has to be one of the most intricate ways ever to make a point and raise a flag.  Be warned, it takes about 3 minutes to follow it through to conclusion.
     I know I shouldn't really be saying this, but some people do have too much time on their hands ...