Eee Bee Gum

Okay, Time To FORCE You To Notice
That I have changed the font.  Ha!  This is Times, not Trebuchet, and is the default in picture captions.Why change?  Why not!
     As for that title, NO IT IS NOT MIS-SPELLED!  You should know Your Humble Scribe well enough by now to know Conrad does not spell things wrongly, despite the idiot spellchecker's inbuilt South Canadian bias.  It is a sly reference to that Northern expression here in the Allotment of Eden "Eee by gum", which is an exclamation of surprise at how capricious life can be.

E.g. "Eee by gum, it were not a panda stalking them, after all."

     Here an aside.  Brewer's doesn't list "Eee By Gum", but it does explain what "e.g." means - "Exemplii Gratia" or "For the sake of an example".
     Where were we?  O yes - more about bees.  Did you know that Robert Duvall featured in an episode of "The Time Tunnel", set one million years into the future, where society is ordered along the lines of a beehive.  Art?

|The future is silver and pointy.

     Anyway, what I wanted to mention, still keeping with the music and bees theme, was a song by that French synthpop duo Air, called - 

The album it's from

     "Be A Bee".  All about being a bee.  Which you'd expect; if it was all about  being a banana or a Landrover, I think we'd all feel cheated.
     Okay, I think that's enough humour squeezed out of that particular subject in one go.  Let the nonsense begin!*

When It Is Possible To Be Entirely TOO Clever
A problem I wrestle with on a daily basis.  I look at myself in the mirror and think Wow! how fat and out of condition are you <the horrid truth courtesy Mister Hand> EXCUSE ME! - and think - Dog Buns! You've made me lose my train of thought.
     Anyway, there I was watching that entertaining and illuminating Youtube channel "Ushanka Show", by Sergei Sputnikoff, which was about books written by South Canadians who'd been and lived in the Sinister Union.  Enter one Zara Witkin.  Art?
                                   

     Sergei calls Zaz an uber-geek when it came to numbers and calculations, which is kind of important if you're an engineer, as both Zaz and Sergei were and are.  Zaz went to the Sinister Union to help them out with his engineering abilities, and the Sinisters were probably flattered that one of the Eeeevil Capitalistic Swines wanted to come work there, so they let him.
     The problems began with a parade in Red Square, which Zaz watched.  He counted people, and measured off time, and calculated how many people had been in the parade in total.  Sinister radio proudly stated that a million people had marched.  Zaz told the people he was at dinner with that his calculations came to only three hundred thousand, which is still a fair number.  The Communist official there present then loudly criticised Zaz for his "counter-revolutionary mathematics" because, in the Sinister Union, the propaganda was what was real, never mind the facts or truth or evidence or anything as miserably puerile as, you know, reality.

Red Square with a billion tourists.  BECAUSE THEY SAY SO!

     We shall come back to this, because naughty Zaz and his mind just wouldn't stop thinking.

You May Not Like Your Job Much, But -
Yes, we are back to the subject of "Big Week" by James Holland.  Don't worry, there's a finite number of posts I can make about a single book.
     By the time Big Week came around - February 1944 if you recall today's earlier post - the Luftwaffe was in dire straits indeed.  Fuel was in very short supply, since the only source was the Romanian oilfields at Ploesti, the Wehrmacht never managing to conquer the Sinister oilfields at Baku.  This meant very curtailed flying hours for pilots, who came to battle with a fraction of the training time of Allied pilots.  Thus they were pretty much dogfood when getting into combat.

The Me109

     Another problem was their aircraft, since the Me 109 was getting long in the tooth and had been upgraded as much as was possible.  The FW 190 was better, but still lagging behind Allied fighters.  Their production was severely hit by Operation Argument, and even if the planes were being produced, the pilots were rubbish.  There simply weren't enough of them, and due to this the only way to stop being sent into combat by the Luftwaffe was to die, which is a little drastic if you ask me.  Then there were the accidents ...  The Me 109 was a tricky aircraft to take-off in, and land safely, and there were thousands (possibly as many as 11,000) of these aircraft lost to crashes on take-off or landing.  Luftwaffe aircraft - more dangerous to their pilots than the enemy (check out the Me 163 if you doubt my words).
     So, as I said, you may not like your job, but you do get to go home at the end of the day very much alive.**

CAUTION!  Not suitable for cutting hay.

Finally -
More of memory and books.  I remember reading a couple of novels back in the late Eighties or Nineties, about a South Canadian mercenary called, IIRC, "Breckenridge", and a couple of his jaunts in Africa.
     That's it.  No idea what the titles were, nor the author, and can I find anything about these whilst searching on Google?  No I cannot!  I remember that in one there were a couple of mercs from Perfidious Albion working with him, both on motorbikes, and I think one got killed, and that's about it.  Not a lot to go on.  
     On the other hand, I DO remember the title of another childhood novel - "Bottersnikes and Gumbles", about two peculiar breeds of creatures that exist in the Australian outback and are always at loggerheads, the nasty and ill-tempered Bottersnikes, who seek to enslave the harmless and put-upon Gumbles, and if Art can put down that fuel rod -

Holy heck!  "Adapted for TV"?   Egad and bejabers!

*  What do you mean, "did it ever stop?"
**  Taxation officials excepted: they were never alive in the first place.