Contact!

I Do Like A Touch Of Ambiguity
Mostly because I picture you all reading the title and wondering just what, exactly, the dastardly old curmudgeon is on about now?
     For instance, back when I was still working on "Revelations", the old zombie genre novel, I would throw in a "Contact!" or two as this is authentic military jargon.  "Contact, my two o'clock, estimated fifty-plus revs, out."

They're coming to get you, Barbara ...

     However, that's not what this particular title is about.
     Then there were the stick-and-string aircraft of the First Unpleasantness, where an ack-emma (or "aircraft engineer") would swing the propeller round as hard as he could, simultaneously shouting "Contact!" so the pilot knew to actually start the ignition.

     All being well, this would indeed get the motor running, at which point our ack-emma danced nimbly out of the way of the spinning blades of death, whilst one of his comrades removed a set of chocks from beneath the aircraft's wheels, allowing it to move forward onto the airfield.
     Fascinating stuff, eh?  Sorry, once again not what we're on about today.
     For Lo!  We are back on that Top 10 sci-fi films of all time, or at least up until lunchtime today.  Diving right back in -
Number 8:"Contact": Another one I've seen, albeit not for an age.  It comes across well, probably because the source material is a novel by Carl Sagan, scientist and science communicator par excellence.  Thus it amounts to speculative fiction, rather than fantasy, and the protagonist is <gasp!> a lady.  

How to scare cats the Jodie Foster way!

     Don't go into this one expecting to see a lot of space battles or three-eyed alien lizardmen thirsting to slake their unspeakable lusts on nubile human women, in between blowing up orphanages and puppies.  The title gives it away - more about communication between alien civilisations than conflict.  Although there is one big explosion, I grant you.

Nope, this ain't it.

Number 7:"Her" Nope, not seen it, and don't intend to, either.  For one, it's a soppy love story.  No, make that a schmaltzy soppy love story, and thus I daren't even look at it.  Diabetic, don't you know.  For another thing, Conrad detests all mobile phones, and that's the core of this farrago.  

Close enough

     I don't care how highly it scores on IMDB, Conrad has decided he doesn't like it, which means there is as great a chance of seeing it as there is of his voluntarily seeing "Grease".  Which is to say, none at all.
     Now, that's enough cinematic nonsense for an Intro.  Let us see what happens when we force the motley to drink a nitromethane cocktail and smoke a cigar simultaneously!



This One Won't Take Long
The BBC's website seems to be grimly determined to propel Women's World Cup Ballfoot down our collective craws, which is a bit rich for this ballfoot ignoramus.  I don't even care for Men's ballfoot, only the Commentaries, and none of the Women's sidebar articles sport any comments.  I am told this is because male commenters put some fearfully dubious content on there in the past, which needs constant curating and editing and banning, etcetera.  So, it's less bother to avoid having Comments, if disappointing for those of us who love to wallow in bile.*
     So, imagine my sense of amusement when I spotted the following photograph.  Art?

     NO.
     Moving swiftly along -

Sharks Are Our Friends!
If it's on the Beeb website, then it must be true.  Apart from the Have Your Say commentaries, which are pretty much libel-barely-disguised. 
     Anyway, they lead with an article about one Ilena Zanella, who one day happened to be scuba-diving and encountered an enormous <collective word for a lot of sharks> of hammerhead sharks.
     Were this Hollywood, or even Direct To Video, then a few dismembered body parts would have washed up on a beach the next morning, and her husband/lover/hairdresser would have sworn undying hatred against the eeeeeevil hammerheads, cue at least a quadrology of bargain-budget thrillers with bad CGI sharks, and a nuclear-powered hammerhead variant in the last one -

See?  I am NOT raving.**

     Fortunately for all hammerhead sharks everywhere, Reality Prevailed, and Ilena was both awestruck and impassioned by the spectacle of several dozen hammerheads circling her and not turning her into dog chow.  In fact, they were frankly repelled by the bubbles originating from her scuba gear; that's how ferocious they are.  Art?

A scalloped hammerhead

     Herein the link to the article, should you wish to read a little more about her shark-saving charity:


https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-48626224


     Sharks: a whole lot friendlier than Mister Hand.


The Endgame At Gallipoli
To sum up: the campaign at G. was a classic example of "mission creep", where the initial naval operation spawned a ground war that expanded far beyond the first plans, until Lord Kitchener finally gave the order for evacuation.
     In what might be seen as an hilarious irony, the staff work and planning for the evacuation were impeccable; had the landings and consequent actions been planned with this thoroughness, the Turks would have been trounced.
     Anyway, the evacuations took off all the troops (35,000 of them), guns, lots of stores and draught animals, for the cost of one sailor killed when a supply dump was blown up.

The unlovely landscape

     The somewhat surprised Ottoman troops came down to the beaches on 7th January 1916 to discover that Perfidious Albion had, perfidiously, vanished.
     Of course, it wasn't that simple.  All the withdrawals had to be done at night, so as to go undetected.  Front line musketry and artillery firing had to remain as normal, with faked supply dumps taking the place of the removed real thing.  A long, suspicious period of silence in the British front lines was instigated well before the evacuation, which inevitably tempted Ottoman troops to have a nosey - only to be repelled by mass gunfire.  Thus, on the night of the evacuation, silence was taken as normal.  Troops debouching to the beach muffled their transports wheels, and took care not to make noise themselves. 
     There was also Scurry's "drip rifle".  Art?

Invention of an ingenious Ocker

     As you can see, water from a tin above dripped into a tin below, which was affixed to the trigger.  When the lower tin reached a certain weight, the trigger was pulled and the rifle fired, long after those who had set it were gone.  End result was a trench still apparently occupied by lively, wakeful troops.


Finally -
You may have noticed that I used the word "Dastardly" up above, and, inevitably, Your Humble Scribe wondered where this word comes from.
     Well, from the Old English "Doerd", which means "Sloth or dullard", in a negative way, which has come to refer to a person of low moral fibre.

Positively hotching with fibrous matter

*  It's not just me here, is it?  Is it?
**  Yet!  Not raving YET!  added Mister Hand, gleefully.