How Mister Ed. - Made People Dead

Perhaps That's A Bit Of An Exaggeration
And I suppose I'll have to fill in a bit of background, too.  Okay, "Mister Ed" was a talking horse on a television program of the same name, who apparently had the equivalent of a human intellect, too.  He used to natter with his owner, Wilbur.  Art?

Able to read, too, apparently.

     It sounds a bit of a <ahem> one-trick pony, but the show ran for years in the early Sixties.  Them wacky South Canadians, eh?  Or perhaps they were just simpler times.
     Anyway, the point is that Mister Ed was a horse.  Why does this matter?  Because the horse was the prime-mover for the armies of Europe way back when in the First Unpleasantness, which we have been covering in my analysis of "Four Years On The Western Front" by one Aubrey Smith.  Him being a member of a transport section.
     Yes, there were motor vehicles in all armies at that time, and the proportion of them grew larger over time, yet the horse remained supreme.*  

CAUTION!  Will not run on hay and oats

     The war effort simply could not have been sustained without Horsey, and Horsey needed lots of tender loving care if he or she was going to pull wagons or guns or limbers all day long.  Water, hay and oats at the least, plus getting rubbed down and kept away from nasty noisy things, and occasionally being inveigled into a horse-respirator when there was gas about.
     One of the contributing factors to the Teutons getting a right shoeing from mid-1918 onwards was their shortage of horses; Horsey was very much an expendable asset, and with the naval blockade imposed by Perfidious Albion (at her most perfidious), there were no imports arriving.  Initial captures from France and Russia bolstered things a bit, but by 1918 there were no Teuton cavalry on the Western Front, which meant their Last Big Gamble, the Kaiserschlacht of March 1918, was restricted to walking pace.

Captured, due to lack of Horsey.
(And you'd need a lot of Horsey)

     Colonel Wilfrith Elstob, that rock of the defence of Manchester Hill in March 1918, exhorted his men to be certain and kill any Teuton horses that came into range: "They can replace a man, they've got plenty of men, but they can't spare a single horse!" to paraphrase his cry.  Which was quite true.

That's quite enough of that, Art.

     Okay, motley, now that we've glued those lead-soled diver's boots to your feet, let's see if you can outrun this slavering pack of Mutant Cannibal Oranges!**

When Rufus Met Doofus
Here's a grim little tail that proves someone can simultaneously be very clever and also exceedingly stupid.  And yes, "tail".
     Okay, back in 1945 the science of nuclear fission was in it's infancy, and at Los Alamos the South Canadians were constantly fiddling around with fissile materials to see how they behaved, or mis-behaved.  One humble lump of plutonium was given the nickname "Rufus".  Art?

Rufus, behind beryllium hemispheres.

     The idea of having it between two hemispheres of beryllium was to see how close to critical Rufus could be brought, beryllium being a reflector of neutrons; good practice was to have inserts between the two halves so that the complete sphere could never be made, because if that happened, enough neutrons would be reflected to cause Rufus to go critical.  Got that?
     Enter Louis Slotin, one of the physicists from the Manhattan Project.  When testing Rufus for criticality measurements, he used to raise and lower the upper shell by using a thumb-hole in the top, and he didn't bother with the inserts at all, instead using a screwdriver blade to stop the sphere from completing.  Richard Feynman called this extremely stupid behaviour "tickling the dragon's tail"; Enrico Fermi warned Ol' Lou that he'd be dead within a year if he carried on in this daredevil fashion.

The lab in question

     You can guess the rest.  In one test the screwdriver blade slipped, the sphere became complete and there was a bright blue flash as Rufus briefly went critical.  Slotin twisted the top off the sphere and prevented anything else from happening.  It was too late for him; he died several days later from acute radiation sickness.
     "Rufus" underwent a name change, to "The Demon Core".

     Hmmm.  "Unrelentingly morbid" seems to have been the theme so far for today's post.  Shall we change that?

Dam!
And, once again, I have to warn you that, NO! that is not a typo.  Really, how long have we known each other?  And in all that time I only ever mis-spell words deliberately for comic effect.
     Anyway, time for Art to earn his plateful of coal.  Art!

The one with the water in it

      When I first saw that picture, I imagined it was of Ladybower reservoir, with it's faintly terrifying overflow channel, and that the lost village referred to is the one that got drowned when the reservoir was formed: Ashopton.  Art?

Some time ago

     Most of the buildings have now collapsed, and the remnants are only seen when water levels are very low.
     However, it turns out that this article is about a village in India, one Curdi by name, which was similarly drowned when a dam was erected to supply both drinking water and hydroelectricity.  The waters recede sufficiently for the ruins to emerge once a year.  Art?

The ruins

The Salaulim Dam in action

     I think you can understand my initial confusion, as the two overflow channels do look surprisingly similar.  There you go - BOOJUM! educating you one factoid at a time.

     Well, we've now broken the ton, and I need to get some lunch, put laundry on and amble down to Royton and the Co-Op for some ingredients.


*  Note avoidance of that weary pun "reined supreme".
**  A concept I nicked from Matt Howarth