Only briefly, though, just to reassure you.
"How can this be?" I hear you ask. "For today we have had nothing but snow and rain, and the sun has been conspicuously absent from the heavens."
Indeed it has, and I'm not talking about sunlight. Artificial light, don't you know. My aged standard lamp has of late been leaning at a drunken angle, which was due to the threads <long boring explanation redacted by Mister Hand> so, here's the new one. Art?
In this version the upper light is only illuminating a small circle of ceiling, so I took it down by one extension length, meaning it's now illuminating a lot more. Art?
This model is known as a "Father and child" which seems a bit unfair as it's usually the mother - anyway, the child arm houses a small but extremely bright bulb, of which I had several spares. Looking into it whilst switched on produced the temporary dazzlement. These kinds of bulbs are also very fragile, and a slight knock will put them out of action, so I am glad of the separate handle for moving the arm around.
What's that? You thought that this was going to be about a cover of a song by the frankly unlikely named Bruce Springsteen? By the equally unlikely monickered Manfred Mann? Get out of here, you're making it up!
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| Close enough |
Righty-ho, time to motley in a wheelie-bin and run it down a flight of steep steps!
Damn You, Cracked!
It is a constant contention of your modest artisan that whenever time is short or a pressing appointment is in the offing, you can always guarantee that the Beeb website will be stuffed full of interesting links. The contrary also applies: when you've got hours to spare at the weekend, all it shows is stuff like "Vapid celebritute falls over when drunk" or "Pervy old letch is accused of being Letchy Old Perv" or variations thereon.
Anyway: Cracked. Art?
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| Avoid. AVOID! |
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| See? I'm not making this up! |
The Days Of Perky Pat
No, nothing to do with the Philip K. Dick story collection. It perhaps ought to be plural, as we are referring to the "Perky Pats", which is a nickname for the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, one of the more famous regiments in the British American army.
"Oh no!" I can hear you sigh. "Are we back on the First Unpleasantness again?"
Yes we are! I am delivering this in small doses, as I don't want to overtax you, my devoted audience. Plus, I am aware that the Columbo marathon is still on.
Vimy Ridge: captured over three days in April 1917. Art?
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| How those nice polite Canadians say "Hello!" |
The "History of the Canadian Machine Gun Corps", hereafter HCMGC as it's not a title that trips lightly off the tongue, recounts some statistics about the battle. One is that the cost of the artillery bombardment was $17,000,000, and those are 1917 prices. Each of the four Canadian divisions that took part stockpiled 1.5 million rounds of machine gun ammunition, or 6,000 boxes, or 60 tons, if you want some metrical variance.
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| 22 pounds each |
The British Americans captured the ridge with about 10,000 casualties, yet inflicted 20,000 on the Teutons, who afterwards pretended that they never wanted the ridge in the first place and it wasn't really important, nah nah nah.
It is widely seen in Canada as the event that really cemented the country's status as a country, and it is spectacularly unwise to say bad things about it to a British American. Particularly if they happen to be a Perky Pat.
Finally -
I do go on about this, but it is important and needs to be said: Barney is the single biggest source of evil on the planet today.
That's not what this post is about, however. No! Instead I want to show you, contrary to what "Doctor Strangelove" would have you believe, how bomb-y a South Canadian nuclear bomb looks. Art?
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| The B41 |
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| The Mk15 |
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| The B28 |
I could go on, but I think that this is where we came in ...
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