Styx And Pieces Of Eight

Greek Mythology Ahoy!
As you know, Conrad is a tad ambivalent about classical Greek civilisation and it's legacy.  For one, the Greek language tormented hundreds of thousands of public school pupils, and we still regularly use a whole clutch of words derived from Greek instead of perfectly good ANGLO-SAXON ONES.  On the plus side, they did gift the world history, arts and sciences, plus their own contemporary superhero stories about the gods and demigods.  Also, Greek warfare was raised to a combination of an art and a science.  Art?

The siege of Tyre.  Fascinating! - as long as you weren't Tyrian.

     "Get on with it, Conrad," I hear you quaver.  "The kettle's boiling."
     Go and pour your pot, then, for this will take a while.

     All done?  Properly brewed?  O good!  Now, let us move on to a member of the Greek underworld, namely Charon.  No!  I don't mean he was a Hellenic gangster - he lived and worked in Hades, the Greek version of Hell, which seemed to have a considerably lower ambient temperature than the latter.  Art?

Charon and his water-chariot

     Charon had a pretty sweet gig; he rowed the souls of the dead across the River Styx, which separated Hades from the world of the living, in the same way that the English Channel separates those unseemly, over-emotional Continentals from us.  To ensure that he did his job, relatives of the departed would leave a coin under their tongue or over their eyelids, as payment.  Yes - Charon - nascent capitalist!

One for each eye ...

     As proof that he really was in it for the money, you could also get out of Hades - if the price was right - as Hercules proved.  Mind you, it would take a pretty resolute character to refuse Ol' Herc a return trip anywhere.
     Oh, before you ask, that above was a birthday present for Darling Daughter from Jayne, who has an eye for the unusual.*  Art?

Your carin' sharin' Charon

     This is about as SFW as I can find for an illustration, as far too many have bare flesh on view, which will not do.


Ha!

     What's that?  You thought that this entire blog was going to be about the Eighties proto-prog band Styx and their platinum-selling album "Pieces of Eight"?  Pshaw!  Get out of here!  I don't believe any such record ever existed and even if it did - er - it would simply be a huge coincidence.**

Propagating Plutonian Planetesimals




More of Charon - because this is one of the 5 satellites of Pluto, a fact that will come up in any Google search you do, and also because that damned default Facebook definition keeps coming up with blurb about 'Astronomy', so this is a case of two birds with one anti-aircraft missile.***  Art?
     The striking thing about Charon, as a moon, is that it is whopping compared to Pluto, so big in fact that the two moons do not rotate about Pluto but at a point (a "barycentre") between the two.  It has half the diameter of Pluto and one-eighth the mass.
     Oh yes - "Planetesimals" are very small planets.  As I recall The Bad Astronomer saying, there really is no simple definition of how big a celestial body has to be before it gets dubbed a 'planet'.

 More Of Homework
It's a dirty job but someone's got to do it.
     "What?  What!" I hear you chorus.  "What selfless trial of self-abnegation are you putting yourself through this time, Conrad?"
     Watching "The Giant Claw", that's what.  Another Giant Critter entry in the Fifty's array of prehistoric monsters that threatened the earth and the fate of humanity and the Universe, or at least whether your cakes might bake overlong in the oven.  That sort of thing.  Don't underestimate how tasteless and dry an over-baked cake can be, believe me, I've - hang on, we've gotten off-track here, haven't we?

Notice how they keep the beastie's head out of shot ...

     Screeching and swerving back on track, this is a film of two parts.  The first part is that involving the actors, who give it their all, and Mara Corday is certainly a sleek and slinky leading lady, whom I'd never heard of before.

The lady in question

     Rather rocking the Gina Gershon look, nicht war? 
     I suppose I should take umbrage with the title - after all am I not a hair-splitting pedant of the first water?^ - because the titular monster has a pair of claws.  Two.  A brace.  More than singular  A number between one and three.  Do you see what I'm getting at? 
IT OUGHT TO BE "THE DEADLY CLAWS"  CLAWS PLURAL!  PLURAL!!
     I apologise for the almost Continental level of hysteria there, yet you can see my grammatically-correct point, can't you?

     <ahem - short pause as Conrad's blood pressure dwindles back to normal>

     Then  there is the second part of the film, where the producer farmed out  the special effects to a cut-price Mexican effects house, who squeezed every dime out of their $23.57 budget.  Art?

Shriek in terror at the giant flying - er - Turkey?

     I could go on about this - and will do, believe me! - but that's enough words of wonder about the execrable for today.

Finally -
The sheer nihilism that exists throughout every cell in your humble hack's body delights - obviously! - in explosions, and the bigger the explosion, the better I like it.  Even better is something of significant size is being blown into very small pieces with a very big bang.
     Enter the Grain Power Station chimney.  Art?


     There's no nearby structure to give a sense of scale, so allow me to inform you that this beast of a building was 801 feet tall (none of that metric nonsense here) and came in at 40,000 tons deadweight.  And it went BANG! most spectacularly.
*  The only way to explain why we are friends.
**  Yes, another one.
***  Okay, okay, in the season's spirit - a touchy-feely pair of Nerf AA missiles. There.  Happy?
^  A resounding "Yes!" was heard across the land