A Man With A Pole

Ah!  There We Are

Please note that this can not be - actually <thinks> you could have it the other way round, Roman Polanski being whom he was and all that.

     However!  Tonight, or today, or whenever, we are looking at that character from the Napoleonic era of warfare, whom Art will introduce with a big fanfare.

To make the point explicitly clear

     Yes, the lancer, a cavalryman whose chosen arm meant he had a literal impact on the battlefield beyond his physical presence.  A lancer, you see, could be mounted on a small horse, because it was the speed of interception that counted rather than the mass behind it.  

     I mention this because of "Once Upon A Time In Hollywood", where the cast go on about a television series and characters under the title "Lancer".  

     Foolish Conrad!  

     Abstemious Conrad!  

     I did not realise that they were referring to the actual, real and definitive series "Lancer", which I actually saw and enjoyed waaaaaay back when at the end of the Sixties, or the beginning of the Seventies*.  Art?

Nobody from Eastern Europe involved

     "Johnny Madrid", you see, whom is portrayed by Timothy Olyphant, ought to be more fully realised as "Johnny Madrid Lancer", as he is one of Lancer's two sons - there you go, more emotional freight than you realised existed!

Luke Perry as Wayne Maunder as Scott Lancer

     I hope you are as confused as I am at this point, trying to work out who is what and when.  Perhaps it's all a big fairy story, and all we need to do is click our magic red shoes together - 

Hello History Guy!

Phew, at last, a touchstone of terrestrial <thinks> tankology?

     As you may already know by now, The History Guy is a South Canadian Youtuber with a pash for British tanks, and unusual ones at that.  None of this "Tiger/Panther/Sherman" nonsense for him.  You can see his choice for Number 2 above, which was a Chieftain with the gun removed and a remote-control system installed.  A driver could sit in the belly of this beast and steer by looking at a television screen - shades here of the SPV and Captain Scarlet - without having to look at the cruel outside world.

     When doing what it was designed for, that is, allowing people with anti-tank missiles to try and hit it, the sensible driver decamped to a command vehicle, which you can see in the second photo above.  He could then drive the Crazy Horse up to 4 miles away before the radio link broke down.

Chiefy with gun

     Because having a 55-ton engine of death on the loose at 30 m.p.h. would be the very archetype of A Very Bad Idea, Crazy Horse was fitted with a very small fuel tank, so that if it did decide to go walkies, it couldn't get very far, and would probably only kill a very small number of people.
      Way to go, The History Guy!

"We Have Ways Of Making You Talk"

I have a considerable backlog of these podcasts to catch up on, and my bright idea of "O I know I can listen to these and carry on performing other miscellaneous tasks simultaneously" proved to be utterly mistaken, in that the damn thing requires too much attention to be able to do anything other than drink a pot of tea and listen, listen, listen.  Art?

The rascals responsible

     By way of another coincidence, Al mentioned the author Peter Caddick-Adams, whose recent work "Snow and Steel" I have bought and read; do all these scholarly types know each other?
     Anyway, I do like Jim's sniffily dismissive attitude towards the Wehraboos, even if his understanding of nuclear weapons leaves a little to be desired.  Case in point being Michael Wittman, whom is elevated to near-divine status by the Wehraboo fanboys as a Teutonic ubermensch warrior, who bestrode the Eastern Front like a colossus for years, knocking out unbelievable numbers of Sinister tanks, until he was transferred to Normandy, where he did the unforgivable and rapidly got himself killed.

Bad Michael!  Naughty Michael!  Uncle Josef** is very cross with you!

     Conrad counsels caution about those thousands of Sinister tanks destroyed, since the Teutons frequently lied lied lied about such things.  Nazis being dishonest!  what a concept.

How To Be A Bombardier Without Killing Anyone
This ticks both the Military History and Music boxes, so it gets my vote.
     I suppose there might well be an artillery rank of "Bombardier", and - O go on, I'll do a little digging around for you -

Vindicated!

     Yessss!  The Royal Field Artillery and Royal Horse Artillery -
     Here an aside.  Although both the RFA and RHS used horses to draw their guns, the latter used a smaller model of field gun so they could gallop with it, the better to get out of the way, or indeed into harm's way, especially so in the opening months of the First Unpleasantness.
     Anyway, yes, they both had a rank of "Bombardier".  There was also an aircrewman who was the "Bombardier" in that he controlled when the bombs were dropped.
     "Okay," I can hear you quibble, "That's the lethal bit.  What about the non-lethal?"
     Art!

Behold the Bombard!

     This is a Breton instrument used in playing folk music, so Your Humble Scribe has, by extension, decided that anyone who plays one of these is, indeed, a Bombardier. 

Surrender or we Bombard you immediately!

Finally -
We only need a short article to hit the Compositional Ton, so what shall it be?
     Aha!  An article on the Beeb's website goes on about the tremors at Ground Ze - I beg your pardon, at that place in the Fylde, at Preston New Road.  Art?

Is it supposed to bend like that?

     The latest one hit 2.9 on the Richter Scale, and if there were Comments allowed on this story, you can bet the first to do so would be telling us all that this is a ridiculously small tremor that you couldn't even feel if you were directly above it.
     Maybe so, maybe so, but the point is that these tremors have been growing progressively larger over time.  Where will this madness end!

Hopefully before this happens.

 

*  It was a long time ago, work with me on this.
**  Josef Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda wanger.  This is a shockingly disrespectful way to refer to him, and we don't care.