Death, At Last!

I've Promised Yet Not Delivered
Also, you can forget anything like "Love" featuring in this post, unless it comes as I explain a Cryptic Crossword clue, because "Love" as a tennis term means "Zero" which can be written as "0" which is almost the same as "O" the letter -
     Sorry, where were we?  O yes - death.  For Lo! we are back on that pamphlet published during wartime again, which, if Art will do the honours -

I only left it like this for a second!

   

     This is the bit I was castigating earlier.  If you scan the text you will see that Italian tanks are not mentioned at all, which is kind of lying-by-omission.  There is a reason for this, in that Italian tanks were not very good, and the tanks of Perfidious Albion were a match for them.
     What made British tank crews believe that their Teuton tank opponents were so much better in terms of firepower was not the tanks themselves, actually.  Teuton policy was that you didn't waste tanks in fighting other tanks; that was the job of anti-tank guns.  Their 37mm <shudders again at having to use loathsome Metric measurements> and 50 mm and 75mm anti-tank guns had a much higher performance that the guns present on tanks themselves, and they operated aggressively right up alongside said tanks.  Art?

The beasts themselves

     Teuton tanks, on encountering British ones, would fall back on their anti-tank gun screen, which would rapidly scrag the British tanks, then the panzers would roll forward to finish off what was left.  This happened until well into 1942, before the British understood what was happening.  You see, a/t guns are designed to be low profile and difficult to spot, which they were; if you are being shot to bits the tendency was to attribute this fire to the much more visible tanks.

Panzer Mk III with short 50 mm gun

     I could, of course, write this entire post about nothing more than this subject, except there would be peals of protest at what amounts to mental cruelty.
     Ho there, motley, fancy a nice cup of tea and a biscuit?*

More On Whaley Bridge And Water
If you have read BOOJUM! with any frequency or regularity, then you know we have covered the collapse of several dams in the past.  Whilst they are not common, dam failures usually feature an extremely rapid collapse and a consequent flash flood that can be likened to a concrete wall thirty feet high travelling at a hundred miles per hour.  If the Torrbrook Reservoir dam collapsed, the residents of Whaley Bridge would have seconds, not minutes, to get out of the way.  Art?

The story so far

     "Sandbags" refers to about a ton of sand in each "bag", not the pillow-sized things the word conjures up.  
     Anyway, the Beeb has an extremely interesting page on the dam, and dams across the Allotment of Eden in general.  There is reference to the "British Dam Society", which does somehow seem especially British, although who could resist the appeal of extremely large civil engineering projects?**

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-49196766
     That there is the link, as there's lots of interesting stuff, including one about dam inspections, which have to be carried out annually.  This is why the last time a dam collapse killed anyone in the Allotment was back in 1925.
     Of course, we've seen a similar crisis occur back in 2017 in California, South Canada, when the Oroville Dam's main spillway got pounded apart.  That, too, is an earth embankment dam, the same design as the Toddbrook one.  Art?

The spillway, scragged

     So far Sunday has been sunny and dry absent the CEASELESS EVER-POUNDING RAINS, although - er - the sun has gone in.  And those clouds look a tad sinister ...
"Brouhaha"
Er - yes, you guessed it, another of those words that simply pop up into my head for no reason.  On Friday it was "Sephiroth", a character from Final Fantasy 7, a computer game I've never played and indeed know nothing about, so how the heck his name popped I really don't know.  The mind - it's great when it works, isn't it?

A French farce

     Anyway, the word above, according to Brewer's, means "a noisy commotion, a hubbub", and - Hurrah! - it's not Latin or Greek in origin.  It arrived in English in the late 19th century having originated in France, where it was spoken in farces upon the stage, though said "Brou ha! ha!".  Of course the English way is better.
     Hmmm.  I wonder, I wonder.  "Hubbub".  Where does that come from? -

Hmmmmm.

     I really shouldn't comment, after all there is a fast food chain in Belfast that is also called Boojum, without the exclamation mark.



Finally -
Just finished watching the third episode of "Dark" and yes, I was right about time-travel.  This episode was mostly set in 1986, and there was a telling montage at the end, all the characters we witnessed in 2019 juxtaposed (not a word I get to use very often) pictured against their earlier selves, with a couple of hideous moustaches, and the same horrid dubbing into South Canadian.  It all seems to tie up with Professor Tanenhaus and his "Journey Through Time" book, and what is that extremely complex machine he's tinkering with at the end?

World's most complicated musical box?

     I am also three episodes into "The Boys", which is quite different in detail from the comic books, sufficiently so that it has me interested, at least.  Though they have dialled back on the sex, drugs and gore as otherwise I don't think it would have been made at all.  The corporate-controlled superhero organisation is still there, where the Vought Corporation have thought of everything, or think they have, because already Homelander has shown himself to be a bit of a swine.  Okay, a lot of a swine.  Art?

Guess which fictional superhero he satirises?***

*  I did it!  No threatening references to poison or explosives!  It has taken a while, mind.
**  Perhaps it's just me.
***  Begins with an "S"