Back Two The Future

That's Cheating A Bit -
 - and NO! Two thousand times NO! It's not a typo.  That should give you a clue.  
     Here an aside.  Do donkeys sweat?  It came out of a conversation where someone (okay, it was Wonder Wifey) declared that they were sweating like unto a member of the Equus Africanus Aquinus family " - if they sweat."
     Well, let there be no mystery, yes, they do sweat when hot, which is only fair, since their ancestors originated in Africa, which tends to get a bit warm at times.

Close enough when spoken aloud

     Where were we?  Oh yes, we are looking back, to when that year 2001 was indeed the future.  I did confess to cheating a little, today's title should by rights be "Back Two Thousand And One To The Future", which is both a mouthful and too revealing.  I need to show you how clever I am, dammit!
     Going back to donkeys, did you ever hear of the "Donkey engine"?  I have, and it made me curious, so I checked up and it appears to be a species of steam-powered winch, widely used by lumberjacks to haul timber.  Art?

The steam donkey in all it's tawdry glory

     Which is looking back to the past.  Let us get back to the future.  Art?

There may be a theme here -

     I was highly delighted last night when digging through a box of books off in a corner under a concealing stack of DVDs - now a rarity in my Sekrit Layr - because lo! there was the very excellent Piers Bizony work on 2001.  I had recalled this as of last week, when the Beeb did a restrospective on the film and your humble scribe puzzled about where the book was.  It is unabashedly excellent, and buying it will count towards sparing you the horrors of the uranium mines when I take over.*

Could You Get Away With That Nowadays?
Okay, let us look at that volume to the upper starboard, "Man And Space", which - you may be ahead of me here - is about the exploration of space, nothing to do with architectural ergonomics.
     Although there is a connection between architectural design and the perception of interpersonal space, which is present in a "Bryant And May" novel if I remember correctly (and I usually do).
     Anyway - Art?

A big rocket taking off**

     This was published in 1970, when there had only been one woman in space, Valentina Tereschkova.  There were probably some on the ground making tea for the astronauts and taking notes, that sort of menial thing, so the title actually was pretty relevant.  Now?  Now women have weaseled/wormed/wended (delete where applicable)their way into the aerospace industry en masse, so this volume is probably never going to get another edition.     Which has nothing to do with what I meant to say, namely: the author is Arthur C. Clarke, you know, that Cornish bod responsible for the novel "2001".
And To Port -
You'll notice "Arthur C. Clarke's Chronicles of the Strange and Mysterious", which - you do see the theme here, I hope? - was published in 1987.  ACC generally takes a skeptical viewpoint on matters mysterious, supernatural or merely silly, and if you wanted to goad this mild-mannered man into an apoplectic rage, you simply had to say 'So, Arthur - UFOs?'

It's behind you!

     Anyway, I was pondering that the work was over 30 years old.  Had any of these mysteries been solved in the hiatus between publishing and now?  Some of the mysteries had their solutions published in the book, yet there were others where no conclusion had been reached, such as -

     But that's enough on a single subject.  Dammit, this Intro has been most of today's blog!
     I think we need to come up with another short article to reach count.  I know - "Tanks versus Cars" - if only we could work some zombies and puns into it.  Next -

TANKS VERSUS CARS!!
Ha - take that, puny car!  Let us begin -

Ooops

     This one is the car's fault, or more accurately, the driver's.  They "failed to see" a column of Challenger tanks driving along a road in the land of the Teutons and promptly ran underneath the tracks of the leading tank.
     How you can miss a vehicle ten feet tall that weighs sixty tons and makes the earth shake when it moves is an interesting question, albeit one that the driver didn't pause to think over for long.  She exited undamaged; the car was less lucky.

Wa-hey!

     And another car gets steamrollered into scrap by a Leopard 2, which looks to be Austrian from that flag on the glacis.  Note how the Chobham armour gives the turret a typically flat-sided look, because you cannot cast Chobham, meaning you have to work with plane surfaces.  
     The car?  No idea.

*  As well as reading BOOJUM! of course.
**  Apologies for the excessive technical jargon.