A Forty Foot Mosquito With A Biscuit

I Know That Sounds Bizarre, But Bear With Me

After all, you're not paying for this, are you?  
     I refer, of course, to the De Havilland Mosquito aircraft, which weighed in at about seven tons, and which had a wingspan of 54 feet.  If you encounter insect mosquitoes with those dimensions, you are either; consuming illegal drugs; living in the hellish radioactive wastelands of AD 2361; or you are Ant Man.  Art?

Thus

     Now, I know the next thing you're going to go on about is the biscuit.  Well, this biscuit was entirely unedible, being made as it was of steel and high explosive.  It was a bomb that came in at 4,000 pounds, and for some unfathomable reason - RAF humour anyone? - it acquired the nickname of "cookie".  Art?

Brutish and British

     The Mosquito, stalwart that it was, could quite easily carry a two-ton bomb all the way from the Allotment of Eden to the Teuton High Temple (Berlin, that is) during the Second Unpleasantness.  Now, you know Perfidious Albion: all cricket-playing niceness on the surface, with all the manners of a rabid prop-forward underneath, so it was inevitable that someone put the two together, and so the Light Night Striking Force was born.
     An offshoot of the Pathfinder squadrons, the LNSF was used to mount dummy raids on widely separated targets across occupied Europe, drawing off Teuton nightfighters to try and deal with raids that didn't really exist.  They also executed what was nicknamed the "Milk Run", flying all the way to Berlin to drop cookies on it, sometimes twice a night.  A different crew would fly the same aircraft the second time, so the first crew could get some sleep, a luxury denied to the residents of Berlin.  Art?

Thus

     Herr Hitler, by now based in Berlin, also declared that he wouldn't go to sleep until the all-clear sirens had sounded, which meant the small hours of the morning.  Must have played havoc with his sleeping patterns, not to mention his decision-making capacity, especially that period when the LNSF hit Berlin 36 nights in succession.
     There is more to this story, but I don't want to overload a single post with aerial death and destruction.  For do we not have terrestrial death and destruction to deal with?!
     Okay, time to get the motley really drunk and then strap it into the centrifuge set for 6G!*

What the motley looks like
(Perhaps.  Opinions differ)

As Albert Einstein Said -

There is a great quote from "The Return Of Captain Invincible"**, except it's in German and I don't have either the original nor a translation to hand.  Which is not what I wanted to talk about.  How does it go?

"Each step is the inevitable consequence of the preceding one"

     Unless you're doing long jumps to get around, I suppose.  I think Art had better put in a picture to explain what I mean.  Art?

Mazes

     Note the absence of cheesy puns.  Those on the left are colour-coded, meaning you can only move from one colour to a specific other, and very challenging they were too.  I had to refer to the Answers page to complete them, as I simply couldn't manage unaided.  That more traditional one to starboard I got in about 90 seconds with a modicum of luck.  The track you can see is really drywipe pen on an acetate sheet, so the maze is not ruined for anyone coming afterwards.  How thoughtful am I!

Thus

Finally -
I have been reading a work called "Armed and Dangerous: A Writer's Guide to Weapons", by one Michael Newton, in between - er - breaks from work.*** There are a couple of points I'd debate, in particular his classifying of Perfidious Albion's primary light machine gun of the Second Unpleasantness being <Mister Hand redacts a 150 page screed for the sake of humanity> Czechoslovakian!

The rather stylish Czechoslovakian flag

     Where were we?  Oh yes.  Michael rather coyly notes that some hack writer had come up with a plot line whereby 100 atom bombs had been stolen, and the hero would recover exactly one bomb per book, leading to an immensely long publishing run and a tidy income for the author.  Sadly, it was not to be: the stolen atom bomb plot got wrapped up in four books and the whole series came to a screeching halt at Number 13.
     You know Conrad.  "What is this series?  What!  I must know!"
     Easier said than done.  Michael was careful not to mention the author, the hero nor the title of this series, and Google has been spectacularly unhelpful.
     If you know, there is the Comments section ...


*  This won't be pretty and we shall probably need sick-bags.
**  One of only two musicals that I like.
***  I can't concentrate with ferocious laser-like intensity all the time.

I Predict A Rite

Yes, You Did Read That Correctly

Forsooth, is this not BOOJUM! - yes it is for those uncertain - and is it not created and run by one of the internet's biggest spelling pedants? - the answer once again is yes - and thus how likely is it that I would put "Rite" by accident instead of "Riot"?
     Quite.  0%.  If negative percentages were a thing, then there'd be one.

A record I dislike, actually

     Okay, onto the meat of the matter.  Have you heard of 'Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable'?  If not, then you ought to.  I have the 17th edition, a massive tome of considerable weight.  Art?

Several pounds worth

     Picking a page at random is an illuminating and interesting way to waste an afternoon, because you start to cross-reference other entries and before you know it, 1:30 ante meridian has arrived, and you need to be up for work at 6:00 -
     But I digress.  Which is pretty much business as usual round here.
     "Belomancy" is the entry I came across in BDOPAF, and it struck me as interesting enough to describe it to you.  The word comes from the Greek for 'dart' - "Belos" - and "divination" - "manteia", and means the rite of divination by arrow.  A set of labels were attached to several arrows, which were then loosed by archers, and the advice on the label that went furthest was the advice followed.
     Don't mock it.  The Babylonians were fond of it, and Babylon was a mighty city.  The Scythians were also passing fond of it, and they turned into the Russians, so the jury is still out on that one.  Besides, it's no dafter than people turning to the astrology column in The Metro for advice.

SO predictive - who knew!

     There you are, a little education about classical Greek lexicography and ancient Mesopotamia.  BOOJUM! - mixing interesting facts in with complete drivel.*
     Okay, time to see if a roomful of rabid dogs can make the motley climb up the chimney from the fireplace!

A Fur Coat You Can't Take Off

Ah, the carefree life of a dog, eh?  Eat, sleep, play, walkies; repeat.  Quite where the phrase "a dog's life", meaning a miserable existence, comes from Conrad cannot fathom.  Probably some benighted country beyond the borders of the Allotment.
     The drawback of being a dog with a particularly dense fur coat is that you can't take it off in hot weather, and since the weather of late has been especially hot, poor Edna Wunderhund has been suffering.  Art?

Edna, looking (literally) sheepish

     Wonder Wifey had been giving her a cold shower in the afternoon, which she was extremely reluctant about.  Edna, not WW.  Plus there was the risk of having her shake all the water out of her coat.
     Enter a barely-acceptable substitute: a damp cloth draped over her back.  She will put up with it for a few contemptuous minutes before shrugging it off.  Apparently she is too cool to be wet.

Observe And Report

Pub Quiz colleague Phil has finally gotten round to gifting your humble scribe with a pair of 'Observer's Book of -" which he had dug out of the attic, these being "The Observers Basic Book Of Aircraft" in a Civil and a Military variant.  Art?

Subdued lighting for dramatic effect

     They hail from 1967, so they are an interesting slice of late 60's technology, where the turboprop and jet were still flying side-by-side.  Now, the question is, will they have the BAE One-Eleven?  I intend to find out.  I can also show you their inner layout.  Art?

     Since that's not especially illuminating, you have a photograph of the plane in question, a load of stats about it, and then silhouettes from head-on, port and underneath (which I should probably call "ventral").

Finally -

Still watching "The Rain", and only up to Episode 4, but I see it's been renewed for a second series.  Damn.  That means there is no overall resolution to Series One.  If it were set in the UK it would all be over within thirty minutes stage time.  You know, this being the Pond of Eden, where it rains a lot all the time.

Yer average UK summer day

*  Hey, it's harder than it looks.

Damn It - You Humans!

Really, I Do My Best
I acknowledge that my eventual goal is the domination and enslavement of the entire human population of planet Earth, backed up by my starship invasion fleet - who are taking their own sweet time getting here, the lazy swine - and to this end I keep on doling out helpful pointers on what lines of technology and research you ought to avoid -

 - like this

so that you're not all extinct by the time 1,257 interstellar dreadnoughts show up.  The reason DARPA dropped their project on the Self-Replicating Cyanide Snail (a horror hermaphrodite if ever there was one) is entirely down to me.  Likewise the Szekely Scientific Institute abandoned the Killer Potato when I warned them of the possible consequences.

No, no - it was a little more subtle

     But there is only one of me.*  Consequently, there are many Very Bad Ideas out there that might come to fruition, in which case that shuttle you can see with a telescope leaving Earth orbit is me.
     Let me gently shove the motley into a vat of molten vanadium and continue with this theme in more detail.**

Of course, there are still traditional worries - like kudzu ...

How The BBC Had Me Worried
The Beeb, for those of you unlucky enough to live beyond the shores of the Allotment of Eden, is our country's premier broadcasting organisation, which also has a website.  There I saw a sideline that had me concerned.  Art?

SILENCE!

     Take a look at the picture of a triffid above.  In fact, let me egg the pudding a little and prod Art with a bamboo skewer -

Guess which word is the most alarming?

     "Talk".  There you have it.  Plants communicating with each other - IT'S THE THIN END OF THE WEDGE, MATEY!  THE THIN END OF THE WEDGE!
     <pauses to let throbbing veins cease their throbbing>

 - And Then There's This -
I did bang on yesterday about how self-driving cars either herald the dawn of human obsolescence, or that the era of Philip K. Dick has dawned, and believe me, neither are a good thing for Hom. Sap.  Then the BBC blithely starts putting this about - Art?

Dog Buns!  Really, you humans!

     I have repeatedly warned you lot about Skynet, and if you don't stop mucking about with robots and teaching them how to learn, you're going to regret it.  The next thing you know that drone above will be mounting Hellfire missiles and machine guns, alongside 150,000 others that came off the production line.
     "Self-learning drones" - it's like North Sea cod voting for more fish and chip shops!

What Really Had Me Going -
Here an aside - I know this post has barely begun but - whose blog is it?  I remember reading that doyen of late C19 and early C20 speculative fiction, HG Wells, and his short story "The Empire Of The Ants", which presupposes a threat to humanity from hostile, organised ants.  Of course, he had to salt the plutonium - no, that's an anachronism - cream the porridge - yes, that's better! - by giving them the ability to inflict fatal venomous bites.

Also a rubbish film

     So worrying about a potential threat from ants has been with us for well over a century.  What does the Beeb do to drive my blood pressure up?  Why, they come up with a title like this!  Art?

Ant-like robots navigate without GPS
       - which was accompanied by a picture that made me do a double-take. Art?  Do the business, will you?

     They looked sinisterly robotic in nature, until you take a closer look and realise that they're actually real ants with paints applied to them, for the purposes of identification.  Phew!  Just what the world doesn't need - ants that don't die or age or need to eat or rest; the organic version causes quite enough trouble as it is.
     The denoument of this tale is a bit of a damp squib.  There I was, picturing a scuttling, seething sussuration of murderous miniature metallic monsters, and instead we get the following.  Art?

The "ant-like" robot

     It's as big as a shoebox, and with all the menace of a fried egg sandwich.  Hardly lives up to the headlines that drip fear with every nuance, does it?
     Oh well, I suppose I shouldn't grumble at there being one less threat to you lot.  Now, excuse me, I have to go to see the Senior Research Director at Porton Down and explain why the Venom-voiding Vampire Viper  is actually a very bad idea indeed, especially the plan to make it Vertical - by giving it wings.

I rest my case

     





*  At least, I think so.  There may be clones ....
**  Hang on, is Vanadium expensive?  If so, substitute <thinks> Uranium Hexaflouride!