Gimme A Vee

No!  I Am Not Advocating Rude Gestures
If you do not hail from the Pond of Eden (as it has been horribly soggy of late) then you may be unaware of the gesture to which I refer.  Art?

How very uncouth!

     This is a very rude gesture indeed, and not at all to be confused with what Sir Winston came up with, which is totally okay and indeed recommended.  Art?

V for Victory, unless being delivered to Herr Hitler, in which case it means "F*** ***"

     No, your humble scribe is referring to the 21st letter of the alphabet, "V".  For we have a theme tonight, which hasn't happened for a while, as this stuff mostly just pops out of my head when I sit down at the keyboard.  Less 'Stream of consciousness" than "River of rant", however.
     Now, let's see how loudly we can make the motley howl when shooting one-inch diameter ball bearings at it, from a bait catapult!

Loudly!

Vaagso
Lovely, lovely Vaagso, a port in Norway as many towns there are, and the last time the British were there they blew it up and burnt it down.  Despite which, the local Norks still love us.
     No!  They were not visiting football fans, for we are talking about almost exactly 77 years ago, during the Second Unpleasantness, and the visitors were Commandos out to destroy fish-oil factories, sink ships and generally cause creative mayhem.

Vaagso before - er - "remodelling"

     Fish-oil, you see, of which Norway was the world champion at producing,* can be used to make glycerine, which is used in explosives.  Hence Operation Archery, on 27th December 1941.  The Commandos had a much stiffer fight than expected, since by wicked coincidence an experienced Teuton mountain warfare company was on leave in the town at that exact time.  They still got scragged even though they had a tank, which the Brits found and blew into very small pieces with lots of plastic explosives.  Those Teutons not killed were taken prisoner, as were any local Quislings, and 70 Norks went back to Perfidious Albion, too, in order to join the Free Nork Forces.

"Hande Hoche!  Fur zu der krieg ist endet."

     You might think the local residents of Vaagso would be extremely angry at having their town burnt down or blown up or shot full of holes.  Not a bit of it!  They went gleefully about helping the Commandos, carrying sackfuls of ammunition and grenades and helping with the wounded.  From this you may gather that the average Nork detested their Teuton occupiers, as indeed they did.
     The raid, predictably, twisted the tail of Herr Hitler, because this was the umpteenth time Norway had been raided and he feared an all-out invasion - which, in his fevered imagination, would have knocked Finland out of the war and brought Sweden in on the Allied side.  His answer was to stuff 370,000 men into Norway, where they had precisely no effect on the war at all.

Quite.

Vindaloo
No!  I am not referring to that horribly catchy ballfoot game song, all about a bucket of curry - I think, it's a long time since I listened to it.  
     No, what I refer to is that curry dish itself.  I discovered, whilst reading my dictionary earlier this afternoon (something everyone does, right?) that the word is neither Hindi nor English.  Art?

CAUTION!  Can burn your gob off.

     It is a curry to be treated with a certain wary respect, as it is HOT.  
     The name?  It comes from the Portuguese "Vin d'alho", meaning a sauce of wine and garlic.  Because back in the day the Porks were just as good/wicked/acquisitive (delete where necessary) at empire-building as Perfidious Albion, and even to this day there are Portuguese enclaves on the Indian subcontinent.

Next, I was wondering what else to stick in here that began with a "V".  Could I shoehorn in a reference to Thomas Pynchon?  There is the novel "Vineland", and then of course it hit me like a ball-bearing fired from a bait-catapult - "V" - Tom's debut novel.  Duh!

"V" By Thomas Pynchon
Ol' Tom cranked this one out in 1963 - Dog Buns!  53 years ago - and your humble scribe has read it, and enjoyed it, but can I describe it?

My edition

     Only with difficulty.  Let's see - you have Benny Profane, and Herbert Stencil, and Pig Bodine, and the Whole Sick Crew, and a search for the mysterious character V.
     Ol' Tom seems to be something of an Anglophile, as all his works contain references to the Pond of Eden, and "V" - whose chapters are apparently arranged to mirror the letter's structure if you can believe that though I never noticed - ends up in the port of Valetta, Malta, as Perfidious Albion's armed forces assemble for the Suez Invasion of 1956.  Ol' Tom must have researched this pretty thoroughly as it's not the sort of detail you'd expect a South Canadian to have knowledge of.

Valetta, home to a Semitic language using a Roman alphabet.  Which is unusual.

     As with most of Ol' Tom's work, you cannot put "V" down for a couple of weeks and pick it up expecting to get straight back into it, as you will have forgotten all the plot intricacies and the enormous cast of characters.

Very Hot Stuff
I mentioned flamethrowers earlier today, which naturally caused my little green cells (so much snazzier than boring little grey ones, dahling!) to ponder on the subject, and thus we come to the Livens Large Gallery Flame Projector.  Emphasis on the "Large".  Art?

With puny humans for scale

     You may remember that daft Fifties sci-fi fillum "War of the Colossal Beast" - well, the LLGFP was "War with the Colossal Beast" as it came in at two tons.  This is why it only got used on a handful of occasions: you needed to dig a tunnel under No Man's Land to get within reach of the Teuton lines, at which point a hydraulic jack forced the projector proper above ground.
     One criticism levelled at the LLGFP was that it could "only" fire three ten-second bursts.  What the actual heck?  "Time Team", with help from the Royal Engineers, built a replica LLGFP and I've seen the film.  It's terrifying.  The thing shoots a mass of flame for a hundred yards - Art?

"Only"!

     When first used, 50 Teuton soldiers immediately surrendered after one shot, and you can't blame them.  The prospect of being turned into a human casserole tends to concentrate the mind wonderfully well.
     It may be cheating on the theme a little, but you can't argue the LLGFP wasn't hot hot hot.




*  They might not have been, really, but it sounds better this way.