Red Rover, Red Rover -

Let Elvis Come Over
Don't worry, this is nothing to do with the ballfoot game, which we will be touching on incidentally later on.  Nor is it anything to do with either Mister Presley or Costello.  It is, in fact, a quotation from a Judge Dredd series in 2000AD, and if we poke Art with a bamboo skewer we might get a result -

The future of motoring

     Elvis, you see, is a car with the mind of a small boy, and the personality traits of a horde of psychopathic killers.  He slays his owner and goes on a rampage, only being placated by a ton of gifts.  Indeed, he takes Judge Dredd hostage, keeping him trapped in the driving seat.
     Big mistake, Elvis.  Using the Secret Judges Code, Dredd orders that hover-wagons full of corrosive acid be gotten ready, to be used as soon as he escapes.  Incidentally, the code used only three dots and a line squiggled on the windscreen - information density, eh?  Lighting a fire inside Elvis, Dredd gets ejected clear - at which point Elvis is sprayed into a puddle of metallic goo.

Good thing, too

     And there you have it, a lengthy discursion about something entirely unrelated to the real Intro.  Seeing as how we've made this item so long, I think it counts as the Intro.
     So, it only remains to strap the motley into a lawn chair lofted by 50 weather balloons and see where the wind takes it!

The Real Red Rover
"Red" as in "Red Planet Mars".  NASA and ESA are both working on a mission to take place beginning in 2020, ending in 2026.  The idea is to send a first Martian rover out in 2020, which will do nothing but collect soil and rock samples, storing them in containers.
     The second, much more ambitious project, is to send out a second multi-component mission in 2026.  A second type of rover - Art?

Groan-inducing puns

      - will roam the Martian surface, collecting all the previously stored samples.  These will then be returned to a rocket that also came down with the rover - Art?

Blast off! - from Mars

     This will rendezvous - a word not often used in these pages - with an orbiter left above the atmosphere, which will then make the return journey to Earth.
     The principle behind all this is that it's simply not possible to send robotic rovers or laboratories to Mars that can do more than a fraction that a complete terrestrial lab can.  And to truly know Mars, we need some bits and pieces of it.
     Obviously this is a complex mission, and many things could go wrong with it.

The sinister and hostile Martian Rock Snake for one ...

I Did Mention Ballfoot -
Don't worry, I shall not be delving into the mysteries of off-side or whether VAR helps or hinders the game, rather a tangential mention of your humble scribe's native cunning.
     When Wonder Wifey returned home from emptying the shelves at Tesco, she asked if I'd been watching "the match".
     Actually, no.  It completely slipped my mind because I was watching more of "The Rain", which is dramatic but O! so bleak, plus another episode of "Happy!" which ticks all the Tut Boxes - swearing, nudity, drugs, violence, language, double-parking - and finally the first episode of the "Lost in Space" reboot.

I swear, these people are ****-magnets.  If you see them coming - avoid!

     Reminded that the ballfoot game was on, I took my daily constitutional walk into Royton, noting that the roads were unusually quiet for late Saturday afternoon.  The pubs were not!  They must have been making some coin; there were raucous cheers from "The Halfway House",  the "Junction"'s beer garden was packed and there was a crowd outside and inside "The Bluebell Inn".  Art?

The view back towards The Mansion

     Because everybody was watching the match, the Co-Op was deserted and there were more staff than shoppers, which is partly why I made my way there, getting the purchases done double quick.  A result, you might say.*

Finally -
"Is is a boat?  Is it a plane?"
     A bit of both, actually.  A picture would be a good starting point here.  Art?

Arrr, Jim lad!

     This is the "Cosmic Muffin" and no, I've no idea either.  It started off as a plane, which is obvious.  Art?

A one-of-a-kind

     Plane rendered inoperable in 1964, it was bought up and converted into the boat you see above, which could sail on water and shizzle like that, being a boat.

There you are.


*  Strained ballfoot analogies at no extra cost.