Aaaaand once again Conrad is faced with the chore of making sense of last night's brief irruption into Blogger.
Unlike most mornings, I think I have a handle on this one. Art?
The copy I had The copy I have
IF you have been paying attention - and a sound knowledge of BOOJUM! is the only thing that will spare your descendants when my invasion fleet gets here - then you will know that tank is a Matilda, and that is a 25 pounder gun-howitzer, both of which made life miserable for the bally Hun, whom you may also know as "Jerry". Or not, the slang of the 8th Army could be a bit inpenetrable at times.
"Good Old Dependable Jerry" - a line to conjure with, eh? Art?
 |
| "It's in the trees!"* |
O I say. On a whim, I was listening to "Eclipse", that track from "Dark Side Of The Moon" and what's in the lyrics? "And if the dam breaks open many years too soon" <checks Toddbrook Reservoir> Phew! Still intact! Er - did Roger Waters - again, how apt! - know something the rest of us didn't?
Where were we? O yes. Reliability. This is a bit of an odd concept for us today, gazing back at Gazala all those decades ago, yet it was a literal killer in the desert. A vehicle or weapon or TANK was reliable if it ran consistently and with a relative minimum of maintenance. I say "relative" because the desert was an extremely wearing environment for anything that sported moving parts;
think not of sand seas as with "Beau Geste" and rather more of level rocky plains, as per above, which the passage of enormous numbers of vehicles would turn to dust as fine as flour but one heck of a lot more abrasive.
"Okay, aged white-haired scribe", I hear you calling: "reliability?"
Well yes. The pamphlet doesn't go into this, but the fact is that British tanks were pretty rubbish as regards reliability. The Teuton's tanks had been around since the late Thirties, and so all their teething troubles were sorted out. They also had a lot fewer varieties of mobile tin can than did Perfidious Albion: mostly the Panzer Mk III and Mk IV. Their Mk I and Mk II were 'let go' earlier in the desert war, in that once they were lost, they weren't replaced, as they were (that phrase again) pretty rubbish.
Mk I Mk II
Whereas the original A9s, A10s, A13s and Vickers Mark VI that Perfidious Albion used in North Africa were well worn before the first shots were fired in anger. The Crusader, or A15, had been rush rush rushed into production and was woefully unreliable and broke down if you looked at it. The Matilda was fine, if rather slow. British tank crews loved the M3 Stuart because you could get it up to 50 m.p.h. on good going, it didn't break down and you could do
That's enough merry martial mayhem for one day. Let us move on!
Hmmm. I didn't load up any photographs last night so you're still not able to bask in the view of heated Goose And Cabbage <sad face> perhaps tonight. Further domestic details - Conrad dozed off after his alarm stopped making a noise, and thus had to Bolt For The Bus and barely made it, during which process the time-saving measure of not bothering to re-promote BOOJUM! had been exploited. So there's less traffic reading it than usual.
 |
| Not sure what's going on here, but that is definitely a bus. |
In our own, inimitable way. After all, who would want to imitate a collection of musings about tanks and cryptic crossword compilers, salted with pictures of zombies and atom bombs?**
 |
| Funny you should ask ... |
Not about anything in particular, it's just how I am most days. You know me, ever ready to fly into a bit of Frothing Nitric Ire at the nudge of a forelimb.
Anyway, there is an enormous poster advertising this farrago in the Arndale Centre, which I have to walk past on a daily basis. I can make out what seem to be birds, yet the green things with snouts puzzle me mightily. Are they angry, too?
 |
| An angry bird putting it's feet up for a rest. (I could be wrong here) |
This film makes me even angrier than I was before, and I was glowing incandescently with rage prior to typing this. I'm now at the stage of giving off x-rays.
 |
| No, Art, no. |
Suit 1: Wow, those Lego movies have made a boatload of money.
Suit 2: Boatloads of money.
Suit 3: Boatloads.
Suit 4: Echoes was partly written by Roger Waters and involves imagery about water
<Suits 1, 2 and 3 murder him>
Suits 1, 2 and 3: Sticklebricks aren't a thing any more. Let's select another child's construction toy and make a film about that. To be released in the summer holidays, when parents can torment their offspring by making them go and see it.
Bah!"Animals": Hey, other people are getting in on the Pink Floyd puns. This is one of my favouritest of their albums, and it really stood out at the time, and consequently. There is that tale about the giant inflatable pig getting loose, when their hired marksman wasn't around to shoot it and deflate it back to earth, and how they had to redesign their giant inflatable touring pigs as Roger Waters wasn't happy about them - a first world problem if there ever was one - and
Ooops, sorry. Yeah, there's this film which sounds like a chick flick, the end.
* "Night of the Demon" reference there for you.
** Rhetorical question. Do not answer.
No comments:
Post a Comment