I'm A Moron For Choosing Boron

Just My Luck
I pick an element, render it molten, fill a swimming pool with it, and discover that it's fundamentally dull.  The only interesting thing about B5 is that it has a very high melting point, circa 20000C, so your swimming pool needs a ceramic lining and industrial heating elements.  And that's it.
     To get anything fun* out of Boron, you have to form a borane compound with hydrogen, which is when this dullest of elements gets more interesting.*  Art?

Borane-fuelled jet engine

     These compounds are all intensely poisonous, and explode on contact with air.  Whoopee!  They have been trialled as experimental jet fuels, and burn with a characteristic bright green flame.  The only downer is that they're not radioactive, which is a bit of a bummer but you can't have everything.
     Now, I'm not sure what liquid element we're going to fill that swimming pool with, but it certainly won't be gold, as it would cost over £2 billion to fill it.  I shall ponder on this awhile and get back to you.
     Right, we can put the motley onto an electric scooter and send it the wrong way down the M60!

Logistics, The Underlying Musculature Of War
I made that up myself; aren't I clever?   After "money is the sinews of war".

     It is a truism that military professionals think in terms of logistics, and the amateurs in terms of tactics.  Which smacks of the truth; you can plan all the bold, sweeping mechanised manoeuvres you like but you won't get anywhere without fuel, will you?  And how does that fuel get to you?   How much can you stockpile versus daily requirements?  
     And so on.  Thus we come to a recent purchase of mine.  Art?

     Back in the day, if you wanted to move things in bulk, you did it by rail.  The modern palletised transporter moving by motorway was unknown - heck, there weren't even any motorways then.  Hence the importance of rail transport.
     I've never been into trains, although I did visit a model railway exhibition once, and I was the youngest person there.  Would you believe there's a market for the name-plates from signal boxes?
     But I digress.  I also mentioned the Matilda tank earlier, and here one is again.  Art?

I like re-using previously posted pictures.  It feels so deliciously naughty ...

     The reason I use that photo is because it's a tank hull manufactured at the railway engineering works at Swindon - more rail industry - and would likely be sent out to North Africa.
     One of the reasons that Rommel wasn't the Wunderkind that propaganda and rosy hindsight made him out to be was that, typically of Wehrmacht generals, he knew little and cared less about logistics.  Perfidious Albion, however, did.  One of the reasons the British and Commonwealth and Allied forces in North Africa never suffered the exigencies of logistic problems that the Axis did is because of railways.  The British built a railway from Alexandria out into the desert, and kept extending it over time, which meant they could efficiently move bulk supplies forward to a railhead, instead of the far more labourious and incredibly fuel-guzzling truck convoy.  Art?

Of what I speak

     For your information, that's an A13 Mk.IV Cruiser, as you can clearly tell from the sloped spaced armour on the turret.  These tanks had seen a lot of mileage by the time war broke out, so it made sense to railroad them forward instead of wearing out their tracks and engines.
     I wonder how fast one of these would go if you fuelled it with Triethyl Borane?

The Gobe Festival
Imagine that, I alight from the bus and there's an interesting-looking poster looking right at me.  So interesting, in fact, that I took a photo.  Art?

Thus
(arresting, ain't it?)

     This turns out to be a free 3-day festival of Hungarian and Transylvanian music and culture, in Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell's Albert Square.  Oh, and FOOD.  Don't forget the food.  One of the days clashes with an event that my friend Richard is putting on in the back of beyond's back of beyond, but the Sunday looks pretty full.  I know little about Hungary, as do most of us here in Perfidious Albion, but am willing to learn.**  "Free" never hurts, either.  And neither does FOOD.


Time to light the blue touch-paper and cackle wildly!  Oh, and retire, too.  Yeah, safe distance and all that.  Later!



*  Defined as either toxic, radioactive or explosive, and preferably all three
**  Hungarian, or Magyar, is apparently one of the Finno-Ugric languages, and the Hungarians have some distant ancestry with the Mongolians IIRC