Well Well Well!

There I Was, With A Primed Atomic Grenade And Both Arms Broken -
But enough of my wartime service, what I really wanted to talk about was a complete sideshow of a sideshow as regards the Second Unpleasantness, concerning -
    Cameroon!
     I only know one person from Cameroon, that being Janice, who is pretty much a force of nature. Art?

Her sprogling, Harman.  Available for modelling sessions.

     Back as of this day today in 1940, Cameroon is loyal to the semi-puppet Vichy government, who blather on about <goes to look it up> "Travail, famille, patrie" with a sub-text of "Ignore the Teutons and perhaps they'll go away" and a side-order of "See what bootlicking proto-fascists we can be!"
     Suddenly!  There arrives on the scene Philippe Leclerc, one of those Frenchmen who detested Vichy as much, if not more than, the Teutons.  He stages a coup d'état and Hay Pesto!  Cameroon is on the side of truth, justice and not rounding people up to mass-murder them.  Art?

Mister Leclerc with a mate

     Monsieur Leclerc was not a chap to take lightly, as he loved nothing more than getting into a scrap with tanks and guns, and he was pretty handy at commanding same.
     Hmmmm.  I had expected the date to be full of stuff about the Battle of Britain, but a little variety is good for the soul (if you have one)

Like me.*

     A technical note:  It took me 20 minutes to reboot, restart, update and restart my office PC before I could get to typing this scrivel, so there's a lot less of it than there ought to be.  Fortunately, before I left home I had wit enough to add in some photographs and a line of comment.  The line of comment is the important bit, as otherwise the text goes a bit weird.  Weird as in "awkward and bad" not "fascinatingly different".


My My, It's The History Guy
We continue our parade through THG's choices of Top 5 Tanks, with -

     That's our hero the Centurion, and an "ARV" is an "Armoured Recovery Vehicle", which means it can recover other armoured kit on the very battlefield itself, even when - especially when - the shot and shell are flying.
     Here an aside.  That mobile metal fort it's towing is a Jagdtiger, one of the species of Teuton Gigantomania Panzer, which clocks in at about 70 tons.  Like the other whacking big panzers, it got produced in extremely low numbers, broke down a lot and was very difficult to recover thanks to that enormous weight.  In fact I doubt it could be recovered; certainly not by a Centurion ARV as they are a couple of decades apart.
     Back to ARV!  Art?

Tooling around

     THG informed us that the staff at Bovvie (for thus we appellate Bovington Tank Museum) prefer to use the Centurion ARV because it's simply better than more recent ARVs.  Towing the semi-mobile metal fort above certainly proved no problem.

Get Wet
My old dehumidifier, which I always address in my head as "DH", is pretty long in the tooth, and not performing all that well.  What ought to happen is that, as the trap fills with water leached from the air, it raises a small float, which eventually acts to switch the whole thing off when "Fill" level is reached.
     The trouble is, this has not always been happening of late, and the prospect of DH shedding copious volumes of water into the floorboards for hours on end while I am at work is not an encouraging one.  I like my water to be either in the shower, a glass or the pet's drinking bowl, not flowing around my feet.

The usurper

     Enter the dragon.  That is, if dragons were dehumidifying devices, which they are in  a way, if a tad destructive - if dragons were small electro-mechanical devices.  There.  That covers all options.
     I cannot risk the good health of all my thousands of comics and books by not having a DH, so this new one was acquired last night.  Rather more bells and whistles than the old one, which had but a dial.  Plus, it puts out quite a breeze, which is welcome in clammy weather like yesterday's.
The Haul



Finally, it has arrived!  I ordered this about a month ago and it's been carried by postal snail all the way from far distant South Canada.

O frabjous day, calloo calllay.**

     This is the third in Lansdale's series about Leonard and Hap, the aggressive gay black guy and the combative ex-con who has absolutely no goals in life.  As usual, whole sequences are laugh-out loud funny, even when you wince at the same time.  I shan't spoil the plot for you, mostly because I've not read much of it yet, rather than because I'm a wonderful human being with scruples and morals and suchlike baggage.      I wonder whether the television series is any good?

Stop Press!  Planet Earth Still Here!
I just thought I'd confirm that, after the alarming news of earthquakes at the fracking site up here in the North West of England.  Your Humble Scribe never reads about this without worrying recollections of the dramamentary "Doctor Who" and 'Project Inferno'.

A hot time was had by all

     Then there was that "Future Shocks" story in 2000 AD, where two kids in their shed are plotting on eventually developing a force-field that will protect South Canada when nuclear war breaks out and destroys the planet entirely, apart from South Canada, which then takes up a stable orbit around the sun -
     A distant possibility but one that worries me.  IT WORRIES ME!


Finally -

Proof, were it needed, that it is dangerous to combine a bored Ruffian with multi-ton armoured vehicle and (probably) a snootful of vodka to boot.  Art?

The beast in question

     This isn't a tank, let me disabuse you of that notion right away, it's an Armoured Personnel Carrier, though if you were standing in that shop waiting to buy a big bucket of borshcht (or whatever it comes in), and you saw this bearing down on you, the difference would be pretty academic.
     Our hero stole it from a driving school, which is immediately a cause for worry - are road conditions in Ruffia so bad that you need not only four-wheel drive but caterpillar tracks as well?  Thank the lord aloft it didn't have a turret and a gun.
     To cap it all, matey stole a bottle of wine from the impacted supermarket, perhaps to conceal the fact that he'd already wrapped himself around a few snifters of pop.

Oooops.

     Someone is not going to be happy about that.



*  I think.
**  Lewis Carroll reference for you there.