Folie A Deux

Or, A Shared State Of Delusion
Like those readers who think  that BOOJUM! is amusing, as does Conrad.  Mind you, he has an excuse - do you?
     In order to explain this fully I shall have to refer back to that splendidly typical English eccentric, Colin Furze.  You remember; the chap who has a mental blind spot when the words "Health" and "Safety" come into view.  How else can you explain his design and construction of a bicycle that fires one thousand firework rockets - whilst he is peddling it?  Art!

Amazingly, he survived

     I would recommend you go look at Colin's Youtube channel now whilst he is still alive, because one of these days he's going to - oh, I don't know, build a nitroglycerine-powered wheelchair, and it will take the bits a week to come down from orbit.
     Okay, that's Ol' Col', ever one to think big.  I have only just encounted a young Swedish lady who appears to be channelling the spirits of every garden-shed crackpot robotics inventor who ever lived, and especially the ones who built dangerous robots.
     Gentle readers, may I introduce Simone Giertz -

The title is nothing less than the truth

     Simone, it seems, loves loves loves building robots to carry out simple tasks.  Her problem is that she is not very practically skilled nor experienced and lacks a background in engineering; Colin gets by on his immense practicality.*  So her robot builds are always a fascinating experimental process; trial-and-error made concrete, if you will.
     She does finally get her Hammer-Wielding Robot to work - Art?

     This is the robot on television.  Simone later demonstrated her robot in her workshop, smashing various artefacts and causing your humble scribe to fall off his seat due to laughter.
     Fortunately for the safety of the Western Hemisphere, Simone and Colin are separated by the Atlantic Ocean, because if they ever got together - let's just say the Nitromethane-Fuelled Sledgehammer-Windmill Destructo-bot would not be long in arriving ...

Destructo-bot: the aftermath

     Now to see if the motley can abseil down the side of the CIS Tower faster than a zombie being lowered behind it!

Still Going With The Bigger Bang
One presumes that the Teuton army of the First Unpleasantness had several inventors in the vein of both Colin and Simone, tasked with creating new and hideous methods of rendering one's fellow man extremely dead.  One result is just visible at the very bottom of this display case at the Duke Of Lancaster's Museum.  Art?

     You can just see the butt and breech of a monstrous great rifle, whose barrel goes off for several feet to starboard.  This, gentle reader, is the 'Mauser 1918 T-Gewehr', an anti-tank rifle intended to combat the jolly unsporting use of tanks by the Allies.  It was a beast of a rifle, weighing in at 40 pounds, with gigantic recoil that made it very unpopular with users.  Art?

You should stick your fingers in your ears, mate.

     If you didn't destroy the target with the very first round, you were going to end up with an injured shoulder due to that recoil.  Which may be why they had two men to use it - one to fire and one to recover, swearing, at the bottom of a trench.

A captured version - obviously far too heavy to retreat with ...

Quickly - are the Rolling Stones still a collection of cyborg zombies?  They are?  Phew!  I was worried they might have been restored to human status.  That would have been bad news, I can tell you.

This Will Make Sense If You Came Here Via Facebook
Because by the time you get here, the rhyme will have become self-explanatory.  Okay, what is the only way to make that disgustrous drink sherry palatable?  Why, to put it in a variety of dessert composed of jelly, fruit, custard and cream topping!  Art?

A bunch of -

David Drake
You may not have heard of Ol' Dave, but Conrad has fond memories of reading the very first volume of "Hammer's Slammers", just about one of the defining works of modern military science fiction.  Art?

Rolling hot, as they say.

     This collection of short stories concerns a mercenary armour unit of the distant future, commanded by one Armand Hammer - whence comes their name.  The weapons and equipment were so convincingly detailed that there are wargame rule sets that deal with this specific future history.  Art?

Very - meta.

     And once again, this will make more sense once you've read the intro on Facebook.  That is, as much sense as you can expect around here.

Finally - 
Let us bow out with a herbivorous dinosaur of the Cretaceous period, one which could motor along for brief periods at 60 m.p.h. in order to escape from meat hunters from Hammer's predatory dinosaurs.  Enter Gallimimus, which means "Chicken Mimic" and since it didn't have claws, fangs or talons, it needed to emulate the chicken.  Art?

A quick chick

Later!


*  And luck.