Dawn Of The Replicannots

As Opposed To 'Dawn Of The Replicants'
Who appear to have ceased operations as of 13 years ago.  Really, some people!  They can't be bothered to update reality with the sad fact that they no longer exist as a going concern, as if that will somehow make it all better.  Rather like The Hours, in fact, who last put an album out in 2009, if I recall correctly, but who - again! - refuse to admit that they are long dead.
     Zombie bands.  What, the Rolling Stones aren't zombie enough for you?  The ones who aren't cyborgs, that is.

You're dead.  And, frankly, you're not fooling anyone.

     Where were we?  Okay, that was i - hang on a minute <guys?  GUYS!  can you keep the party in my head down for the next twenty minutes?  Thanks ever so>
     Okay!  yesterday we broached the subject of Replicators, which were seen to have been invented by the Strugatsky Brothers a good 20 years before ST:TNG dared nick the idea er "Pay homage to" said concept.
     Naturally, Conrad cannot leave a concept like this alone.  O no.
     So, you have your Replicator.  What next?

"Prune juice!  The drink of a WARRIOR!"

     CONRAD:  Replicator, replicate me a kilo of pure diacetyl morphine!*
    REPLICATOR: <dings>
     CONRAD:  Okay, I want one hundred and fifty bottles of seventy proof vodka, two pints in volume each.
     REPLICATOR: <dings>
     CONRAD: Sweet!
     REPLICATOR: <dings as a wheelbarrow-load of candy, toffee and mints arrives>
     CONRAD: Hmmm.  Well, it would be rude to put it back.  Now, replicate me a Colt M1911 semi-automatic pistol with a thousand rounds of .45 ammunition!
     REPLICATOR: <dings>
     CONRAD: <with a wild light in his eyes> Replicate me Raquel Welch as a nineteen year old!
     REPLICATOR: <dings>
     CONRAD: Five times!
     REPLICATOR: <ding ding ding ding ding>





    
      I think you begin to see the problems associated with Replicator Abuse.  And we haven't even begun to touch on plutonium or uranium 235 yet, nor Bacillus Pestis, nor land-travelling sharks -
     Your Humble Scribe suspects that, were Replicators ever to become reality, they would come with ineradicable restrictions hard-wired into them that would instantly detonate with a force of 97.835 megatons were you to try and physically get round them.  Or notify the nearest police station, which would probably be kinder on the neighbourhood.

I didn't pull that yield out of thin air, you know.

     Okay, motley, you now have to get out of the maze barefoot.  Oh, those? - they're just mousetraps.  Two hundred and fifty thousand of them. Let me just turn out the lights ...



Kangaroo Cranes
No!  Not some wild radioactive mutant monsters from the Australian outback - we did test nuclear weapons out there, you know, on the principle that Perfidious Albion is too small and densely crowded to go letting off the Big Bang Bombs in the backyard, where as Oz is much larger and far less densely poplulated, and the Ockers are tough enough to shrug off a bit of a basting with fallout.

                    
                              Do not ask.                                         Merely wonder.      Okay.  So that's what they're not.  Art?
                                                     

     There you go.  That's the Bourj Khalifa under construction, with an early and late stage of the build.  Those cranes you can see are the Kangaroo Cranes in question.  They were installed on the lower stages of the building, where they lifted pre-formed floor elements into place.  Once they had erected a set number of floors, they moved further upwards to the top of the building and repeated the process.  Hence they might be considered to be leaping upwards and thus the name.      Well, I thought it was interesting.  And, once again, whose blog is it?
Justice Is Served.  Damn It.
Your Humble Scribe notes with interest that The Verve's incredibly catchy if not exactly joyful "Bitter Sweet Symphony" has now been recognised as their own thing - finally! - and from now on all royalties will drop into their pockets, rather than those of the Rolling Stones and/or Andrew Loog Oldham.  Thus ends 22 years of disgustingly greedy behaviour by one Allen Klein, a total sleaze who managed the cyborg zombies and whose prime interest seems to have been getting his snout in the trough as deeply as possible for as long as possible.

How to scare cats the Allen Klein way!

     My concern at this situation being rectified comes from an ongoing novel what** I am writing, which still doesn't have a proper title yet.  In it our hero Niall does a bit of very sharp practice and essentially cons two greedy music business types out of a considerable amount of money.  I make mention in passing of how two conniving music business types swindled The Verve out of royalties - the allusion is implicit, but it's there.
     And now I shall have to remove it, or at least add in a little more material.  If I pick said MSS up again.  It's been a while.

Niall's house.
(Haunted, of course)

Gallium
If you recall - AND YOU'D BETTER BECAUSE YOUR DESCENDANTS LIVES DEPEND ON IT*** - we  discussed the usage of Gallium Arsenide in the creation of lasers, specifically the one on my laptop that no longer works.
     Okay, mused Conrad - silently, for he was amongst company at work and did not wish to cause alarm - where does that name "Gallium" come from?  And then, more darkly "I bet it has a Latin root."

France
(or Gaul for the old-fashioned)

     It does indeed.  The discoverer of Gallium was French, so the name derived from the Latin for Gaul (oldey-timey France, don't you know) which is "Gallia".  This is a whole lot handier than the wise old Ruffian Mendeleev's placeholder name for it: "eka-aluminium".

Eek a Mouse.  Close enough

Finally -
We need only come up with another hundred or so words to break the ton barrier.  What can we witter on about for this requirement?
     Ah!  Yes! "The song of the Volga boatmen".  Art?

Thus

     These are "Burlaks" or those who pull river barges, since humans are cheaper to keep than horses, and we are talking 1873, before much of Holy Mother Ruffia got railways, which again were cheaper to keep than humans.  Ironically it was painted by Ilya Repin as a way to bring attention to the wretched state of Ruffian workers, and was promptly bought by a titles aristocrat.


     And that'll do for today.  Dosvidaniya!





*  Which you would know better as "Heroin"
**  Deliberate grammatical error to see if you're paying attention
***  No pressure.