Conrad: Your Hasty Toast

Ha!  Do You See - 
 - O you do.  Yes, I did mention on Facebook earlier on that I was venturing into Royton in order to get some toast.  Except I was jumping the gun (the "Hasty" part) and it was actually bread, which I classified as 'raw toast'.  And today's earlier post was titled "Conrad: Your Tasty Host".  Such felicity with language, eh?
     Now that hilarity is over with, we can carry on.
     As you should know by now, Your Humble Scribe is a hair-splitting pedant of the very worst/best/worrying kind.
     So!  Art?

"Jack had a talent for DIY surgery"

     I have just completed watching "He Never Died", which is a very bleak black comedy with lots of gore, so pretty much made exactly for me.  They do get one of their props wrong, though, and this is a bit SPOILERY so you might want to cover your eyes and move right along -


     Okay, Jack's lady friend Cara, poking around in his steamer trunk full of money, finds a sepia photograph of soldiers in the trenches of the First Unpleasantness, with the legend "1914" on the back.  Kind of like -

 - this, except muddier.

     Jack is one of the pictured soldiers.  The thing is, like the soldiers above, Jack and his two mates are wearing the Brodie-pattern helmet, which was not issued until late 1915 and then only in limited numbers.  So, the date is wrong.
     There!  Don't you feel empowered by being able to criticise someone on a minor point that no more than one in ten thousand people would ever notice?  I do!
     I have had to pause "The World at War: the War in North Africa 1940 - 1943" because it's being tooooo distracting, I keep identifying the tanks and trucks and artillery pieces and aircraft they show - that was a Ford Truck, Canadian Military Pattern, shown in German camouflage because they'd captured it -

The Ford CMP.  An ugly vehicle, it is fair to say.

     Don't worry about the motley, it's currently in a stupor having drunk a gallon of tea whilst eating twenty-three cream scones with jam, the glutton.

And Now - Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles!
I did warn you that we were going to take a closer look at Ian Stuart/Alistair Maclean's "The Dark Crusader", and that it would be a tad SPOILERY, so here is another warning, despite the book being as old as I am.

So - SPOILERY STUFF AHOY!

     Art?  An illo, thanks very much.
            

     I had fondly imagined that "The Dark Crusader" referred to the secret agent John Bentall, him being all - well - you know, dark and stuff.
     Not a bit of it.  TDC is actually a British guided missile built to mount a nuclear warhead, designed to use a solid rocket fuel, rather than liquid versions.
     Here an aside.  This novel is from 1961, and Ol' - er, whom should it be? <tosses a coin> okay, Ol' Al comes up with a suggestion that the Ruffians are about to start building ICBMs with a warhead using anti-protons - anti-matter.  Interesting speculation there, but several generations too soon, I fear.*

Not easily done!

     However, Ol' Al is on much sturdier ground when he mentions TDC as being a rapid-launch vehicle thanks to it's solid rocket fuel, as compared to the relatively doddering pace the Blue Streak was capable of.  Blue Streak, you see, was liquid-fuelled, which meant it had to be fuelled on the launch-pad, which took at least twenty minutes.  TDC, although fictional, reflects the far greater readiness of a solid-fuel missile, not to mention the much greater safety.  Liquid rocket fuels, almost without exception, are toxic and corrosive - as well as simply itching to explode all the time.

Okay, it's not a Dark Crusader.  So use your imagination.

     Okay, you can come out from behind your hands, all the SPOILERY stuff is now out of the way.

Back To Barca
Ha!  You should have seen your faces!
     No, we are not returning to the fair Catalan port city of recent memory.  Instead, the "Barca" I refer to is in fact Hannibal Barca, that chap who gave the Romans a good hiding every so often, especially when in Italy itself.
     Here we change subject, to that of "Game of Thrones".  Were I still at the Co-Op, Dave The Professional Yorkshireman K***y would promptly leap in here and declaim it was all based on Yorkshire, or the Wars of the Roses anyhow, and probably weasel in a few cracks about cricket and rugby, too.

Oo-err.  The bailiffs are coming!

     The thing is, Conrad is concerned about the Night King and his zombie army, who have now breached the Wall and are heading south.  Your Humble Scribe suspects that, although Winter Is Coming, any drop in temperature will be too little and won't reach far enough south that the zombie army can march there unaffected by heat and sun.  A bunch of rotting undead in a temperate climate, or a sub-tropical one, will decay to bits.

You know, I don't think he likes my strategic analysis

     AS LONG AS THE FOOLISH HUMANS ADOPT A FABIAN STRATEGY!
     Fabius was the Roman politician who ordered their legions not to confront or battle Hannibal, thus depriving him of glory, propaganda and plunder.  So too the same in GoT: avoid bringing the zombie hordes to battle, for any engagement will only increase their numbers.
     You need to evacuate ahead of the shambolic undead mass, nipping at their sides and rear with quick, in-and-out raids using archers, preferably mounted for speed.  Keep them under observation, so you know where the White Walkers are located, and perhaps try a little long-range assassination using obsidian-tipped arrows?  Or that monstrous wagon-mounted bolt-throwing engine, again using a bolt tipped with obsidian -

That looks most uncomfortable.  And probably gives you piles.  Would you like a cushion?

     But I need to go put some laundry in the tumble-drier, bodge up a lunch for tomorrow and get some tea. 

     Viszontlatasra!**



*  We have touched upon the use of anti-matter in strategic weapons already.  Google for it.
**  "Goodbye" in Hungarian