A Touch Of Terror

Actually, That's Underselling It
I refer, of course, to that dramatic reconstruction "Chernobyl", which is what Your Humble Scribe describes as "Train-wreck television"; entertainment so awful, horrid and terrible that you simply can't stop watching it.  And by "A Touch" I mean "Being slapped around the chops repeatedly for a good hour or two".
     Oh - you were expecting fluffy bunnies, butterflies and flowers?  The Little House On The Prairie is THAT way -
     There were a couple of stand-out scenes, which are going to be SPOILER-laden, so stick your fingers in your eyes at this point if you've not seen Episode Two yet.
     Now, if we may proceed -
        
                                     Fiction                                                                      Reality
     This is where one of the "Liquidator" helicopters crashes after flying over the naked reactor core.  In reality it clipped a set of cables, before the tail rotor and tail collapsed and the aircraft fell out of the sky: it's a helicopter, with all the aerodynamics of a breeze-block, and when I type "fell" that's exactly what it did.
     Due to the radiation, communication by to and from the helicopters by radio was not possible, which meant alerting or guiding from the ground was not possible,and said radiation may have compromised the helicopter's structural integrity, too, making a fatigue failure many times more likely.

The article in good health.

     Then, too, the aircrew were flying non-stop missions to dump retardant agent on the atomic pile, way beyond safety limits in terms of radiation exposure, never mind exhaustion or sleep deprivation.
     That's One.
     The second jaw-slackening moment came when a colonel took his lead-covered truck for a drive, as close to the burning core as possible, with the caution that the lead might still not be enough.

Sic

     This truck had been armed with a heavy-duty high-capacity dosimeter in order to determine the levels of radiation present.  These had been put forward by the two initial idiots in charge as 3.6 Roentgens per hour - because that was as high as their simple hand-held dosimeters went.  This, despite a high-capacity dosimeter burning out the instant it was switched on, and a cruder back-up version registering 200 Roentgens per hour - again, the highest value it was capable of reading.
     On arriving back at camp, the colonel sprightly jumps from the cab of his truck and approaches the on-site disaster reps.
     "It's not three point six Roentgens," he announces.  "It's fifteen thousand."

A Sinister dosimeter

     Depart two idiots stage left, under escort (shortly to decorate the inside of a prison cell).
     Grim stuff indeed, yet compelling.  We have yet to reach the point where robots are deployed, which is sure to come next week.  I shall let you know.
     Oh, motley?  Come and look at this!  <pushes motley into the shark enclosure>


Back To The Finns
(Finns - sharks - do you see wh - O you do).  One of BOOJUM!s normal rules is that we steer clear of politics, although of course this proscription can be dropped at any moment if, in our venal opinion, it means more traffic.*
     And so back to Ol' Kaarlo Juho Stahlberg, the first president of Finland (1919 - 1925).  Art?

That's a presidential moustache!

     Ol' Kaz had a bit of extra-curricular excitement in late 1930 - entirely unwanted - when he and his wife were kidnapped by Finnish members of an extreme-right wing group who threatened to either murder him or send him to the Sinisters - which would have been the same thing slightly delayed.
     The universal expression of outrage across Finland at this dastardly act meant the kidnappers didn't dare carry out the murder, and were extremely wary of going near the Sinister-Finnish border, too, Ol' Kaz being a highly recognisable figure. 
     Eventually he was freed, and the Lapua Party (the kidnappers) went into free-fall.  The end.

Get that Helsinking feeling - holiday in Finland!

As One Thing Leads To Another -
Conrad cannot remember quite how he got to a Youtube page that featured "Matt Hartless And The Maverick Seven", but he did.  And they were performing at a festival or event calling itself "Delirium", which does not really sell it as a delightful experience, unless you enjoy having your chops slapped for a couple of hours.  Art?

Matt et al

     As so often, this triggered off a series of recollections in Your Humble Scribe's grey matter (which, thanks to age, is probably an ashy-white by now).
     "Aha!  What was that bizarre self-referential novel that was a sequel to "The Time Of The Hawklords", which was itself bizarrely self-referential?"
     'The Queens of Deliria', it transpires.  Art?

Delirious indeed.

     I've never read it.  I did have TTOTH, which has an utterly bonkers concept behind it: an alien Death Generator (always the worst kind) has been activated at the centre of Planet Earth and is now threatening to destroy the scattered survivors of humanity, who exist in a barren wilderness without tins of baked beans or copies of 'The Times'.  Only the music of Hawkwind can stave off the Generator's lethal effects, and only the band members themselves can save humanity!
     As I recall, it doesn't end especially well for humanity, which is down to @ 500 survivors.  Then those Queens turn up ...

The edition I had

Finally -
I think I have my Saturday morning and early afternoon plotted out already, since I now have a backlog of Cryptic Crosswords and Codewords to do.  The reason for this is that I've been determinedly ploughing into "The Doomed City" by the Strugatsky Brothers, which is a prescient title in light of my first post above, and the background to TTOTH.
     What an ending! 
     If you want a literary equivalent, then go read Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge" -

CAUTION! Not a happy ending

     Or, for those who prefer a more visual metaphor, go watch "Jacob's Ladder", right to the end and don't be distracted by the terrifying Wobbly-Head Men.**

CAUTION!  Not to be used for DIY around the house

     I'm not going to go into any details here today, as we've already had as much Slavic doom as is healthy for oneself, but - O Rest Assured! - that we'll be analysing it in future.  My current Bus Book is now Nick Lloyd's "Passchendaele - A New History".









*  We have no shame.
**  Really.  They are extremely disturbing in an understated way.