A Game Of Throngs

Say What You Like -
- but your humble scribe (which is me, for the confused) is ever one to delight in what the Teutons called "Schadenfreude", which can be translated as "A malicious enjoyment in the experienced misfortune of others".  This is a rare example of the German language being succinct.  Usually a Teuton anagram is longer than the original phrase in English, because Irony.

Yeah!  Irony - no, wait, hang on -

     Anyway!  I have been trawling amongst the Beeb's sports pages, and specifically those that deal with sport, and even more specifically those that deal with the ballfoot sport.*  There has been a concatenation of dialectic neologisms - okay, a draw of ballfoot teams against one another, which has created a flurry of conspiracy claims.  Art?

Tinfoil hat and tinfoil cat.

     This is fascinating stuff - the frothing conspiracy theorist in the raw, as it were.  Most of all, they maintain that the draw - excuse me - The Draw Is Fixed.  

Fixed drawer.

     No evidence of same - obviously! - but that doesn't stop them from pontificating about it.  As with all conspiracy theories, all you need to duplicate an Illuminati Skull-Crushing Global Dictatorship is a whiff of whimsy and a bus ticket.**  And there are 21 pages of comments there - truly a game followed by hordes - nay, throngs! - of people.  
      What's that?  You thought this was going to be about some ridiculously obscure television program about dragons and poisons?  Get out of here, you're making it up!
     Let us now put the strait-jacketed motley into the belly of a stunt jet and send it into a tropical storm!

The Continent: Part One In an unusual display of both common sense and pacificity, the nations of France and Spain decided to come to an accommodation about an island that lies in the river constituting their mutual border.  This is, as I say, unusual, since both nations have for centuries gone to war with one another whenever they were bored, or their monarchs felt a bit frisky and needed to work off some energy.  Art?

     Pheasant Island sits in the middle of the river Bidasoa, as depicted above.  By treaty as arranged in 1650, for six months of the year it is French, and for the next six months it is Spanish.  It's uninhabited, and tidal,*** so that you can walk across to it at certain times, which means the police occasionally need to chase illegal campers off it.  Not only is it uninhabited, there's considerably less of it than there used to be, as erosion has worn away half of it.  So by 2350 this particular eyot may be no more.

The Continent: Part Two
This is an altogether less charming story, unless you're an icicle.  Indy Neidell, he of The Great War Youtube channel, goes out in the field sometimes.  And he paid a trip to North East Italy, where the gallant Italians (because they were on our side) waged frigid war against the beastly Austro-Hungarians (the bally enemy, don't you know).  If Art will stop mooning about Mara Corday for a minute -

     Yes, there was an Italian Front in the First Unpleasantness, and as visible from the above, a jolly unpleasant place it was, too.  Not only did you have hostile chaps in different uniforms taking pot-shots at you, with wind-chill factored in the temperature could get down to -45C.  Indy, well bundled up against the cold, was still visibly frozen, and he made the point that this was in September, when it was considerably warmer than January or February.

And you thought your commute to work was hard ...

     You couldn't dig a trench in a mountain made of rock with a humble spade, so power tools and explosives were used with gay abandon to dig holes and tunnels and caverns, and to hollow out accommodation inside a glacier for 300 men.  Said accommodation wasn't exactly comfortable, but it beat standing out on a mountainside being transformed into a human icicle. Art?

If you can't go over it, you gotta go under it

   And there, gentle reader, we shall leave it for today.  Tomorrow - tomorrow we shall deal with that existential threat to humanity, the Blue-crested Quaking Vomit Newt!^^



*  This description always slays me.  You?  Who cares.
**  In a pinch, do without bus ticket
***  We did a series of articles on these last year.  BOOJUM! - educational and entertaining.^
^  Yes we are.
^^  Don't laugh, they are armed with strangle-gas bombs