The Way To Dusty Death

I Apologise For Quoting Shakespeare
The Barb of Avon as I call him, since Your Humble Scribe b****y well hates him, and can only thank the Fates that I never had to study his Sonnets at "A" Level, or I'd have gone stark staring mad.*

NO!  Art, you drivelling bafoon, not THAT kind of stark!

     Besides, I think Alistair Maclean used that as the title of a novel, so we're good to go.
     Anyway, what we are to discuss now has nothing to do with palace intrigue or witches or mooning teenaged lovers, but rather the landscape of Egypt and Libya during the Second Unpleasantness.

Rom and Jom.

     You see, most people think of the war in North Africa as having been conducted in the sandy wastes of the Sahara, when in fact it was mostly fought on the stony plateau that projected inland from the Mediterranean for a few dozen miles.  Art?

Study this carefully.  There will be questions.

     Before the arrival of war, this region of North Africa had been hugely undeveloped, with minimal transport routes and even less traffic.  Come the arrival of enormous motorised armies whizzing back and forth, the stony surface of the desert gets ground to a powder as fine as flour and as abrasive as diamond.  Those present considered many of the desert storms they endured to have been caused, created and generated by this process of mechanical erosion.  Art?

Aircraft taking off

     This is not merely local colour.  Oh no.  As you can see from the above, the amount of dust raised by simply moving around was enormous.  Trucks, tanks and aircraft had to be kitted out with special filters to reduce the amount of dust ingested, and still suffered excessive wear and tear, since any kind of friction between moving parts resulted in greatly increased abrasion.  This meant more frequent overhauls of engines, with a much higher demand for spare parts than normal, and a consequent increase in the amount of shipping required, not to mention an even greater need for lubricants.  Some anorak somewhere would be well-advised to make their graduate thesis how much of a logistical burden the presence of this diamond-dust added to the burden of waging warfare in the desert.**

An M3 Honey at speed

     Now, motley, we're going to send you down the log flume, balancing a jar full of nitro-glycerine on your head!

More Of The Strugatsky Brothers
Whilst we are being serious, let us return to the brothers, and, Your Humble Scribe ever being one to break convention, I started reading the Afterword in "The Doomed City" - and I haven't even finished it yet!  O what a rock and roll rebel my.
     The brothers noted that, once they'd finished the manuscript, they put it away, firmly convinced that it would never, ever get published.  This, you see, was during the height of the Sinister empire, when Thoughtcrime was an actual offence, not merely an amusing satirical term.

<purses lips thoughtfully>

     This phenomenon was so common there was a term for it: "Writing for the bottom drawer", meaning that you wrote it and then put it away.  I can see why "The Doomed City" would not meet with the censor's approval: it has some unrepentant Nazis present in the actual City, and they aren't monsters of evil and depravity.  The physical barriers to escape from the City are a bottomless abyss to one side, and an endless wall of infinite height on the other, which any self-respecting professionally-paranoid Sinister censor would immediately spot as a metaphor for life in the Sinister Union, and ban the book.
     What ho!

KGB Headquarters.  LOOK AWAY, QUICKLY!

     Hmmm, that was quite a bang over at the log flume.  I wonder -


The Way To Dusty Meth
Ha!  Do you see - O you do.  My curiosity was piqued by an early episode of "Justified", where a backwoods meth lab run by a trio of low-lifes is blown up by the simple expedient of chucking a Molotov cocktail into it.

Before

     Several characters maintain that meth labs blow up all the time, and indeed this does seem to be a comparatively frequent occurrence.
     Why is this so?
     The horribly volatile and explosive and toxic and shock-sensitive chemicals in use are one cause.  These may include, but are definitely not limited to: red phosphorus; lithium; ether; hydrophosphorous acid; acetone; ethyl alcohol and probably tanked propane gas and jerricans of petrol to fuel both generators and lab equipment.

Red and dead

     That's one cause.  Another is that these "labs" are more akin to a kitchen full of bodged-together kit made from left-over baked beans tins and duct tape, rather than proper glassware and retort stands.

A hasty retort ...

     The combination of both factors above also pales when you consider that most of the people cooking up methamphetamine are bumbling amateurs, with no training in safe lab procedure, and who are frequently off their trollies on their own product, not to mention smoking as well.  This fruitful combination usually results in another Darwin Award winner helping to strengthen the gene pool by removing themselves from it, with a bang. 
     Almost as big a bang as that one over at the log flume.  Let me just see what -
     Well.  I never knew that logs can fly.

Another "Before" photo

The Laud Of Light
Ha!  Do you see what I - O you do.   Yes, we are back onto clickbaity territory and "Game of Thrones" again.***  Art?

IGNORE THE DOG BUNS COFFEE CUP!

     Anyway, what I wanted to comment on was the - I'm not quite sure what to call the ceremony - a drunken debauch?  hardly fitting to call it a wake.  At least Tormond didn't kill anyone.  You see, the whole thing appeared to be lit by candles, and lighting scenes by candlepower alone is very difficult.  Ol' Stan did manage it in "Barry Lyndon" but I think he essentially invented new cameras and lenses in order to do so.  Besides which, his colour palette was a teensy bit lighter than the miserably gloomy Winterfell setting.  Art?

You see?

     And there we will leave it today, as the drivel meter is reaching into the red zone.

*  Yes you would be able to tell the difference!  Cheeky swine.

**  Quite a lot, one suspects.
***  As games go, it's quite ferociously unpleasant, don't you think?