The Devil's Digital Distraction

Or, The Mobile Phone
Unlike Wonder Wifey, who would die within minutes were she ever to be separated from her mobile phone, your humble scribe treats mobiles with lofty disdain; we didn't need the damn things to build and maintain an Empire, did we?  No.  That's good enough for me.
     However, as mentioned, WW cannot understand how anyone cannot long for the latest mobile phone with all the fiery desire of those who need a fix.  So, when she looked at the old model - Art?

Don't ask me the make or model.  It's a phone.

      - you could tell there was going to be trouble.  Unkind words were said about it, along the lines of "does it have a bird pecking out pictures on bits of stone inside it, like 'The Flintstones'?" Also "It's from 2014!" as if that were explanation enough.  Thus it was put to me that a new phone could be mine, and it would do everything but make coffee for me.  You know your humble scribe by now; a creature of habit who hates any change in his routines, so this concept was greeted with considerable suspicion.  Art?

"What is this Tel-E-Fone of which you speak?"

     The new piece of kit arrived yesterday, and was immediately pounced upon by WW, who set it to sinking and upfigging and sundry mysterious deeds.  Of course, the REALLY big question was whether I would need a new phone number.   Fortunately the answer to that was "No".*
     Apparently it is a Samsung Galaxy J3, and the only reason I know that is because the laptop said so when I was uploading pictures.  Art?

Again, it's a phone.

     Okay!  Enough pettifogging prating about phones, let us send the motley out into the thunderstorm with a four-foot metal rod attached to it's head!

Firefly
No!  Not the Joss Whedon sci-fi series, which I kind of liked, and which you have to watch in order for the film "Serenity" to make any sense, as I saw the film first and wondered what was going on.

What it's not

     No, I am of course - obviously! - referring to the Sherman Firefly, a variety of tank as used by the Allies during the Second Unpleasantness, because we are back with "Tank Action" By David Render again.
     Here an aside.  The Sinisters loved the Shermans that got supplied to them by the South Canadians, because they were amazingly reliable compared to the gimcrack stuff churned out in Ruffian factories, and they were palatial inside by comparison, too.
     Right, we need a picture.  Art?

Not sure where this is.  Bovington?

     The gun is noticeably longer than the standard 75mm gun of the normal Sherman, because it is the frightening 17 pounder as produced by Perfidious Albion.  This fired an extremely high-velocity armour-piercing round that would render any Panzer it hit into flaming scrap metal.  If using a state-of-the-art APDS round then it would Swiss-cheese regardless of where it hit - side, mantlet, hull front, none made any difference.

75mm shell on the left, 17 pdr on the right

     David points out that, whilst the Firefly was the bees knees in taking out panzers, it was a bit rubbish in other respects.  If you look at the photo you can see a big bin on the back of the turret, which is the tank radio; the gun took up so much room there wasn't any space left for the radio, so it got stuck outside, making it vulnerable.  The hull machine gun was also removed, because 17 pdr ammo took up a lot of room (just compare the shells above).  The 17 pdr high explosive round wasn't very good, either.
     I can see your eyes beginning to glaze, so we shall move on -

Don't Be A Brute-O, Say Hello To Pluto
I just made up "Brute-O" because I can't think of anything else that rhymes with "Pluto", apart from that author PJ Caputo, and he has nothing at all to do with astronomy.
     Anyway, I did make a pun about the planetismal being almost a "sled dog" and never explained it, so here goes.  Art?

Nice and big so you can pick out the details

     Those are dunes, not of sand, but of solid methane ice crystals, because Pluto is cold - -2000C would be a scorcher of a day there.  The atmosphere was thought to be too thin to support anything like winds able to transport ice crystals, but here the dunes are as proof that something's made them.  Perhaps a mechanism to do with the mountains at the top of the picture.
     So, Sir Patrick Moore's assertion that this world is icy and cold is correct, yet he was entirely wrong about it being dead and static.

Finally -
I wonder if the motley read this first?

     I imagine Number One is "Don't go out in a thunderstorm".  Oh well, motleys are two-a-penny.



*  Phew!  A narrow escape there.