All The Sounds Of Fear? All The Smells Are Here!

With Entirely No Apologies To Harlan Ellison
Because he's a grown-up and, really, his shoulders ought to be broad enough and his skin thick enough to be associated with unpleasant odours.  I mean, yes, he's dead, but I wouldn't expect anything that minor to stop him, as it most certainly wouldn't have done whilst he was alive.
     Here an aside - don't complain, we've not had one of these interjections for a while now - I do tend to conflate and confuse Harlan with Norman Spinrad, for no good reason I can determine.  


     Not only do neither of them resemble the other, one is alive and the other is not.  Plus, only Harlan wrote "All The Sounds Of Fear".  Art?

Shrieking, moaning, wailing, etctera

     Anyway, that has absolutely nothing to do with what I wanted to mention, which is the appalling stench hanging around the upper reaches of Little Sodom ("Royton" if we're being formal".  One gets off the bus and walks into a solid wall of noxious stink; or exits the house and ventures into vile vapours indeed.  If you recall, Your Humble Scribe has about 3% of a normal Hom. Sap.'s sense of smell, so if I think it's bad, it must be truly dreadful.
     The reason?  

Slurry!

     This loathsome liquid is some kind of effluent - I'm not going into the breakdown of exactly what since I want to keep my dinner down - that the local farmers on the local farms spread on the local fields.  And, O lord aloft, are there ever a lot of local fields.  Thanks to the sun this concoction heats up and spreads it's scent all over the locale.  What a shame I cannot photograph a smell.  Then we'd really have a story.
     Normally in hot weather like this I'd leave the windows open, to keep the room cool.  Not today.  And not tonight, either.
     Motley!  Get over here, we have a greased pig that needs to be a-rassled.

The motley's moment of triumph

Still A Bit Feary
In this afternoon's post, I calculated how many guns and mortars were firing at the hapless Teuton stubble-hoppers during 12th Division's attack on their lines as of 12th and 13th August 1916.  Hundreds!  In fact the combined weight of their first salvo would have come to 4 1/2 tons; imagine that lot descending on you from the heavens ALL AT ONCE and you begin to see that the lot of a front-line Teuton soldier of the First Unpleasantness only got more horrid over time.

The "Frontschwein" prepare for a bit of a hot time

     Not all that ordnance would be firing on the enemy's front-line trenches, mind you, as artillery had a lot of jobs to do.  
     If you're not interested in artillery tactics you may skip this bit, or go make a pot of tea, though I do have to ask the question - why are you here?

Hmmmm?

     A lot of the 18 pounders, as well as the Stokes mortars, would be firing on barbed wire (both the stuff in great dense webs or in specific locations as an obstacle)  in order to destroy it.  The medium and heavy mortars would be firing on enemy bunkers, redoubts, headquarters, ammo dumps and similar in the front-line trenches, as their bombs were exceedingly powerful but didn't have a lot of range.  The 60 Pounders would be used in counter-battery work thanks to their long range, to make the life of Teuton gunners as miserable as possible, whilst the 4.5" and 6" howitzers would be firing on more distant bunkers and shelters, communication trenches, villages and bridges.

18 pounds of bad news about to be delivered

     The 12th Division, like other British infantry divisions of the First Unpleasantness by this point in the war, had two brigades of artillery, which were always numbered in Roman numerals - confuse the Hun, don't you know! - which were LXII and LXIII brigades (or 57th and 58th for the sensible).  The assemblage of guns mentioned above would all have different rates of fire, so after that first appalling salvo, the weight of shell delivered would abruptly tail off.  Even so, the 12th's two brigades, firing in a sustained manner so as not to destroy their guns, would still be dropping almost 2 tons of shells on those Teuton stubble-hoppers every minute.
     Ouch.  Indeed, rather Feary.

     I say, this is all rather grim and technical, and of interest only to military anoraks, of whom there are not enough in the world the less said the better.  Let us laugh gaily, skip through the daisies and choose another, lighter, subject!

"The 13th Floor"
This came up in conversation with Lee this morning, since we had no work to do - IT malfunction not laziness I assure you - and I had queried whether the Dark Tower had a 13th Floor or not?
     It turned out that it has, which led Lee to reminisce about a comic strip he'd seen in his youth, said comic belonging to his brother, which he kind of remembered as either "Buster" or "Eagle".  Said comic strip being called the title of this post.
     Conrad, who believes himself to be something of an expert on comics,* immediately jumped in.
     "I bet it wasn't 'Buster' as that was generally light-hearted and silly in nature.  I'd go for 'Eagle' and at a guess say the artist was Eric Bradbury."  Art?

Typical Eric

     I was half-right.  The comic above didn't last too long, as the publishers got verrrry nervous about just how scary it was, and it was therefore amalgamated into 'Eagle' - a process that would take up an entire BOOJUM! post to explain.  "The 13th Floor" was one of the strips that got carried over. Art?

Er - okay, maybe not so light after all ...

     The background was that Max, a sentient computer, controlled Maxwell Tower, including a 13th floor that he could populate with whatever he wanted.  And if any outsider behaved even the slightest bit off to the tenants of Maxwell Tower - why, they'd end up taking a trip to the 13th floor, and were never seen again.  Alive or sane, anyway.

Max. Not an A.I. to get on the wrong side of.

*  Erroneously!  <the horrid truth courtesy Mister Hand>