Getting Laid

No!  Wash Your Filthy Minds Out -

 - after you extract them from the gutter.  This post is nothing at all to do with hanky-panky and in fact deals with that most fascinating of subjects, LITHIUM WAFER BATTERY DESIGN! deep-sea pipe-laying.
     For yes!  Thanks to the march of technology, marine operations in deep waters offshore are now becoming increasingly feasible in financial terms.  That can be your factoid of today to take away and keep.
      This all stems from a very peculiar ship that I came across earlier today.  Art?

'Seven Waves' in dock

     You can't deny it looks odd, and whoever designed for Gerry Anderson would be taking notes at this point.  This is the 'Seven Waves', a vessel belonging to Subsea 7, and it's a deepwater pipe-laying vessel.  That much was easy to find out, but that huge vertical structure?  That took a bit of digging to discover.  Art?

'Seven Waves' at sea

     It turns out to be a vertically tiltable lay tower, which lays piping whilst keeping it under tension and thus controllable, and it can lay that pipe in up to 1.5 miles of water.  It can tilt up to 70 out of the vertical to accomodate shallow water, and a whopping 450 when not laying pipe, in order to pass under bridges.
     That's not all.  Your humble scribe noticed that the VTLT cannot lay that pipe over the stern - so I concluded that the Seven Waves must use a moon pool to deploy the piping.  Again, this took a bit of digging, but an official Subsea 7 pdf confirmed my conclusion.
  Hooray for me!

Moon pools
(I ain't gonna explain - we covered this earlier in 2018)

     Now, there is only time to hurl the motley into the seething waters of Niagara Falls!*

The 'Thunder Stone'

Earlier today we covered a colossal piece of masonry-movement, the Baalbek Trilithons, several 800 ton blocks of stone, which were moved less than a mile from quarry to temple build-site over hard, level ground.
     How, then, to move a granite boulder that weighed in at circa 1,500 tons, and move it over 3.5 miles of swamp and uneven ground?  Art!

Like so -

     A Greek engineer in Russian service came up with an ingenious plan - put the stone on a metal sled, then have the sled move over a track made up of giant ball-bearings held in place by that same track.  Motive power was provided by brawny Russians - never any shortage of them - and the stone was moved from it's resting place to the Baltic, at a rate of 150 yards per day.  Because the stone's excavation and movement took place in winter, the ground was frozen solid, easing the removal and transport.
     Here's a picture of the end product:

That's Peter the Great, that is

      Now, Conrad felt that 'Gigantomania' was a Sinister-Russian era kind of thing.  Clearly it had precursors ...

<ironically enough, I am now eating a Chicken Kiev, which has taken revenge for any perceived slight against it's fellow Slavs by squirting molten butter down my chin>

Getting Paid

Or, sometimes Life Imitates Art.  I have just finished watching the last episode of Season One of "The Rockford Files", where Jim has to deal with a shady businessman who is cooking the books in order to deceive both his artiste repertoire and business partners.  Art?

Jim with client
(Come on, don't tell me I have to indicate which is which!)

     The biting irony here is that James Garner (who plays Jim Rockford for those with a short attention span) had to sue Universal Studios to get a fair return of profit percentages, since the studio claimed TRF was a big money loser for them (see previous paragraph).  Long ago I read an interview where he detailed all their accounting tricks to show how TRF made a loss (see previous paragraph)- when it was actually a financial cash cow that did well globally for years and years (see previous paragraph).
     End result = victory for Jim.  The studio settled out of court - presumably under a non-disclosure agreement - which is code for "We've lost but don't want to admit this in court, as other folks might be inclined to sue us, too, and there would be a precedent."
     Nice one, Jim.  How do you feel about that?

"Pretty chirpy, Connie, thanks for asking."

     Say what?  How come all these people who reply are calling your modest artisan "Connie"?  Was there a memo I missed?

I mean, look at him -

     That's not a face that goes well with any diminutive, is it?  I am perturbed that my hatchet-faced visage and desiccated constitution are not being taken seriously enough. Very perturbed.



*  Don't worry, it's in a sturdy protective barrel