Deadpool-onium

There You Go - 
 - being edgy and relevant, and also taking advantage of a certain Hollywood blockbuster's advertising budget.  The reason this came about was due to my consistent habit of throwing the motley into a pool of something molten and bad for you.  Nasty chemicals, I mean, not chilli-flavoured custard.  We've had mercury and sodium and other unpleasant swimming environments, and I was wondering what other metals with low melting points might be utilised to torment the unfortunate motley.  Well, there is Gallium - Art?

Gallium

     This stuff is barely solid at room temperature, and it would melt in your hand if you held it there, so there would be little difficulty in creating a pool full of it.  However, it is desperately dull stuff; not remotely poisonous or reactive.  About the only interesting thing about it is the name: "Gallia", which is Latin for "France".  We will come back to this.  O yes indeed.
     Then I thought of Bismuth, which is a heavy metal - always good for toxic fun! - except when I looked it up, it is highly un-toxic.  And, again, desperately dull in it's properties.  About the only interesting thing about it is the ability to expand on being frozen, which is unusual in a metal.  Nor is anybody sure where the name comes from.  Art?

Boring Bismuth

     It is radioactive, except so very, very, very weakly so that it might as well not be - it's half-life is a billion times longer than the lifetime of the universe.  Really, radioactivity, why bother?  
     Next to Bismuth in the Periodic Table is Polonium - and holy vibrating Dog Buns, is this a contrast to it's neighbour!  It is incredibly radioactive, being of the order of 250,000 times more toxic than hydrogen cyanide,* and inhaling 10 nanograms - that's billionths of a gram - is a lethal dose.  In fact it is so lethal that less than half a kilo of the stuff could poison everyone on Planet Earth.  Art?

DANGER!  KEEP WILL ROBINSON VERY FAR AWAY!
(Doctor Smith, however, can come up and hug it)

     So, I don't think as much as a thimbleful of Polonium would be a good idea, let alone a whole pool of the stuff.  I think we'll just have to find another element to torment the motley with.  Astatine?  Gadolinium?  Yttrium?**
     Okay, motley, you've got a day off from torture today.  Go sit outside and have a pot of tea!

More Of Yesterday's Big Event
No!  No drivelling on about the football final thing or those twosome getting hitched, I refer, obviously - obviously! - to that wargame mounted at Richard's house yesterday afternoon.
     Here an aside.  Because I am a terrible person, I confess that I popped over to read the 'Have Your Say' Comments on the Beeb website about Chelsea beating Manchester United, because schadenfreude is an entertaining thing.  Oh my, the base invective, venom and vitriol that poured forth - most amusing.
     Anyway, let us view a bit of the battle.  Art?

Note elephant not doing a lot

      At one point Tom (my opponent playing the Romans and allies) was moving his 'Velites' around.  These were fairly poor Roman citizens who couldn't afford armour and shields and Gucci handbags, who acted as skirmishers in front of the legionaries.  Tom, with a gift for phrasing, dubbed his Velites a "Meatshield".  Naturally this triggered Conrad's Pun Gene (never far from the surface).
     "What's Latin for 'meat'?" I asked.  We were unsure.  Richard suggested 'Gallus" (see? I said we'd revisit) for 'chicken', and then corrected it to 'carnae'.
     "Noble Roman Carnaescutum!" I then crowed.***  It didn't do me much good.  Art?

I lose

      At this point I'd lost enough units that the game was lost, although my Gallic forces were poised to give one set of legionaries a right shoeing.

      It was a fast-paced and enjoyable game, and having got to grips with the basics I'd be happy to play it again, with a bit more chrome in terms of rules added on.

Finally -
More of strange ships.  This is an unexpectedly fruitful subject, so get used to it cropping up.  Art?

Van Oord's 'Nexus'

     This is a cable-laying vessel, and from what I know is rather unique in the cable drum being laid horizontally rather than vertically.  The drum can accomodate 5,000 tons of cabling, and that picture above doesn't really give a sense of scale, so - Art?

Not the fibre-optic feebleness you were expecting, hmmm?

     We might come back to cable-laying ships, so you can observe how different the 'Nexus' is from previous vessels.  Art?

Oh, really, Art!
<sighs and gets Tazer>

*  There, there, HCn, don't cry.  You are still pretty deadly. 
**  Yes, these are all real.
***  It amused me.