Talk For 30 Minutes About A Film -

Without Preparation
It's a Tweet thread over on Twitter, and has been replied to by Professor Gary Sheffield, who Tweeted "Went the Day Well?" and a few others that seem to have vanished into the ether.  He also claimed to have performed this feat in real life, which I would have paid folding money to have seen.
     For those of you who have been living up a pole in the middle of the Empty Quarter for the past 80 years, WTDW is a "what if" film made in Perfidious Albion in mid-Second Unpleasantness, when it looked as if the tide was turning against the Teuton curs (sorry I just love that insult so much!).  It was made and released in late 1942, when the threat of an invasion of this - sorry - This Sceptred Isle, had vanished.

Not for some, it didn't!

     The film concerns a platoon of German paratroopers disguised as British soldiers, who are the advance force of an invasion attempt.  I won't spoil the film, but you can rest assured things do not go as planned.

"But I only arsked 'ow yer 'at stays on, Mister."

     Of course Conrad mused on this topic whilst taking Edna for a brisk stroll down Tandle Hill Road, pursued by a wind from the very Arctic, for you well know he is a film buff/sad cinematic anorak/pontificating windbag (delete where appropriate) on the subject of films he enjoys.
     Could I manage this challenge?  I'd like to think so.  One of the hilarious running gags we have here at BOOJUM! is your humble scribe's readiness to quote from his 5,000 word monograph about "Forbidden Planet".*  Shock surprise: no such monograph exists.  
     That is not to say that it could never exist, because I mused, as Edna dawdled (the benefit of having a built-in fur coat), on the subject.  Art?

Matted-in

     There's the production itself: a relatively lavish budget with name stars, a serious script and in colour, when most Fifties sci-fi fillums were black and white schlock, frankly.  Then you have the script, which is inspired by Shakespeare's "The Tempest": Doctor Morbius takes the place of the magician Prospero, Altaira that of Aerial, and Robbie the Robot stands in for the monster Caliban.  The soundtrack had been composed and performed by Louis and Bebe Barron, who were not members of the Musicians Union, so they couldn't be credited with having created music - which the producers got around by calling what they did "Electric Tonalities", which is a much better description, in my mind.
     
                                              The Barrons at work

     There you go, that's over a hundred words and I've barely scratched the surface.  Plus I could talk really slowly, which would stretch things out, and would have to, as normally I mumble very quickly.
     Now to blindfold the motley and send it into the Razor Maze!**

Still Not A Tank!
If you recall, I have of late been babbling effusively about a bit of military kit that Perfidious Albion possesses in large numbers, namely the FV432.  This is an armoured personnel carrier, basically a big metal box on tracks, armoured enough to shrug off small arms fire and shrapnel, which carries the tea-swilling infantry around.  Art?

CAUTION!  Hot liquids may present a battlefield hazard

     That there is the Boiling Vessel for an FV432, in which you make tea, which propels the infantry in the same manner that diesel propels the FV432.
     Okay.  Let me re-assert that the FV432 is NOT a tank.  Even if you stick a recoilless rifle on the top, it is not a tank.  True, there are lots with the Peak Engineering Machine-gun Turret installed - 

Thus

     It is still NOT A TANK.
     Thank you.  That is all.

More Of Explosions
These ones, though, are volcanic, and nothing to do with humans being horrid to each other.  In today's earlier post I mentioned Hunga Tonga Hunga Haapai, a newly-arrived volcanic island in the Pacific, which may be around for several decades.
     Let us now jump to the Atlantic, and Iceland.  In the Sixties a new volcanic island formed just off the south-east coast of Island (as the natives call it), named Surtsey.  Art?

Surtsey in 2017

     It has shrunk considerably since emerging from the waves, so you might call it semi-permanent.  Estimates are that it might last another 100 years, since that part of the island now exposed to the sea is covered with extremely robust lava flows and is highly resistant to erosion.
     Human interaction is deliberately kept to an absolute minimum.  The Island scientists who go there to study must tread extremely lightly on the land, literally and metaphorically, so they don't contaminate anything.

"A fixer-upper opportunity for the first-time buyer"

     I didn't have any particular reason for adding this in, only that it chimed with the Tongan volcanic island and the idea of a semi-permanent habitat is intriguing.

Good Luck And - What?
I have just been reading of an Antarctic expedition to locate the "Endurance", a ship which contained Sir Ernest Shackleton polar expedition, and which was sunk by sea ice over a century ago.  Thanks to impeccable record-keeping and navigational notation by the original crew, today's searchers know pretty much where to look.  It's in the Weddell Sea, which seems to have a perpetual crust of ice upon it, necessitating the use of an ice-breaker to get there.

<sighs>  No, Art, no.

     Let me just charge up the Tazer and set it to "Torment" - oh, what's that, Art?  You've got the proper image?  Let's see.  I may forego the Torment.

Torment foregone

     This ship will be sending down a mapping vehicle to build up a picture of the seabed.  Once - or if - any anomalies are found, a scout vehicle will then be sent down.  The problem is that the pack ice will reform and block any hole established in the ice, so the vessel in question, the Agulhas II, needs to shimmy around.
     My question follows - this ice-breaking vessel is South African, correct?
     South Africa: a land of baking hot inland terrain and golden beaches, entirely untroubled by ice.  Why, then, do they need an icebreaker?

Time for pizza!

*  It is so hilarious!  It IS!
**  Yes, I nicked this idea from an horror film.