Hark Hark! Look At The Shark!

Don't Panic -

Because, remember, Sharks Are Our Friends!  Just look at that toothy grin.

     Okay, this is either a case of serendipity or that Coincidence Hydra is getting ever bolder and more daring.  Yesterday I featured an article on the Beeb website about how the Allotment of Eden can expect to see lots of new species of sharks, which will flock to these waters due to global warming.

     Well, one customer decided to get ahead of the crowd and check out the UK for water quality, food availability and the application of a little pant-wetting terror.  Art?

     As you can judge scale from the boats in the background, this is no dogfish.

     Expect this to feature in the yellow press with terrible puns about 'Jaws' and 'Sharknado'.

     Now, time to see how many raw eggs the motley can be made to swallow in 60 seconds!

Lies In The Skies

Before I read "Night Fighters" by Bill Gunston I fondly imagined that the RAF's brylcreem boys in their giant flying mallets (okay, Lancaster bombers to you) simply plotted their way to target using maps, pencils and sextants.* Not a bit of it; their aircraft bristled with stuff like Monica, Oboe, Gee and H2S.

     Trouble was, all this electronic stuff was a boon to the Luftwaffe's night fighters, which could track bombers very easily indeed, passively homing in on these emissions, or by using their own radar sets, or by getting instructions from ground control.  Art?

Aerials, not clothes-horses

     Enter 100 Group RAF, who were a kind of Monty Python's Flying Circus Of Dirty Tricks; once again proving that, for guile and cunning, you need to get up early in the morning to get the better of Perfidious Albion.  One of their party tricks was to jam the Teuton ground controllers by broadcasting noise on their radio wavelength, and to make sure that that noise WAS EXTREMELY LOUD, they used a microphone bolted to the inside of one of their aircraft's engines.  They also had ABC - AirBorne Cigar - which jammed any VHF frequencies the Teutons were using, by having a German-speaking crewmember scanning their wavelengths.

     They also had this.  Art?

A Mosquito, with a very nasty bite indeed

     This is one of 100 Groups 120 Mosquito night fighters, which accompanied the bomber stream over the Continent.  This is a topic entire in itself, so that story can be told at a later date.

See?

A sextant is a measuring device that, by means of horribly complicated calculations, can be used to determine exact location and/or time.  They do not require batteries, petrol, sugar or acceleration up to Mach 3 to work, and have been around since the 18th Century.  Art?

A pervert's delight!
(Well, maths pervs, perhaps)

     Perfidious Albion's bombers had a small perspex dome in their upper surface, from where the navigator could take a sighting of the Moon or stars.

     So there you go.

Not To Be Confused With  -

A Sexton, whom is an official employed by a church or other religious building to oversee the physical upkeep of the premises and grounds. The word is derived from Latin "Sacristanus" or "Keeper of sacred objects", which became "Segrestein" in Old French, and then to "Sexton".  Art?

Hmmmm.

     Please do not try to determine astronomical measurements by lining your local sexton up with the horizon, as you might put your back out.

Nor Yet Confused With -

The Sexton self-propelled gun.  This was a highly-successful pairing of Perfidious Albion's 25 pounder gun with the chassis of a Canuckistanian Ram or Grizzly tank.  It was intended to make artillery support more mobile and flexible, and was roundly cursed by the unfortunate Teutons who got to experience that mobility and flexibility at the sharp end.  Art?

CAUTION!  Makes a loud noise

     You never know, a crew member in a Sexton might have been a sexton, and - because artillery needs to know exactly and precisely where it is located - he might even use a sextant.**

I Leapt On***

Here's something entirely tangential that I only just discovered.  I was going to add another post along the lines of "not to be confused with Lepton", because, hey, you never know when the components of subatomic particles might come up in conversation.  Though it is reaching a little to imagine you'd confuse it with "Sexton".  Art?

All magnificently clear?

     The thing is, leptons come in two versions, the electron lepton, and the neutral lepton - which we all know and love as the neutrino.

Finally - 

I was pimping the blog a bit on the Space Opera FB site, which you are only supposed to do if it contains science-fiction, so I'd better include some, eh?

<thinks>

     Aha!  That bounder Bendis (Brian Michael Bendis, comics scripter and occasional artist) puts up comic artwork on his Twitter feed, and he put up one entitled "Starlight", which rather struck my fancy.  Art?

Guns!  Swords!  Spaceships!  Elderly white-haired heroes!

     The artwork looks very Moebius inspired, and those most efficient staff at Travelling Man in Manchester got it in for me yesterday, so I shall be in there on Saturday to collect it and pass on my informed opinion.

     Providing, of course, that the Zombie Apocalypse doesn't arise in between ...

*  This is not a rude word.

**  A touch of whimsy.  Still, it may have happened.

***  This is bad.  Read on.