Road Signs

Sorry If That's A Rather Dull Title
It will, as is par for the course here (sorry for using golf terminology), take a bit of explaining, with a few tangents encountered along the way.  You know BOOJUM! and tangents, we cannot resist going off on them once discovered.

Tangential stuff

     Okay, the roots of this item come from a Cryptic Crossword clue that was in yesterday's The Metro.  "They are no witch doctors but follow the signs (13)", and Your Humble Scribe had about every other letter, including the first, which was "D".
      You're not going to get the answer, which was DIAGNOSTICIAN, and a more made-up word you will scramble to find.  It's not in my Collins Concise, which is a black mark against it.  Really, whomsoever compiles these things has made them hard enough without adding in stuff that doesn't exist.
     You're going to start asking about roads now, aren't you?  <sighs>
     Right, for this we're going to need to go back to the Corridor Crew, those Youtube rascals, and what they were doing in deconstructing a series of special effects.
     One of their targets is "The Fast And The Furious 5", where some people in cars (sorry about the lack of detail, I've never seen it and never intend to) drag a bank vault along the streets of Whoknowsville, smashing up everything en route.

A behind the scenes shot

     Not sure, but I think that above might be a test run for the 'vault' as there's an awful lot of stuff to add in by greenscreen otherwise.
     It looks pretty spectacular, and one of the Corridor Crew geeks asks of their car stuntman guest, "Is that real?" because there is a difference between what one arranges in the real world and CGI.  Car stuntman guest responds "yes" to which geek responds with a startled "What!" and this expression -

Geek to port.  Correct that - Open-mouthed geek to port.

    They then go on to break down the scene, revealing that the 'bank vault' is actually another vehicle with a vault around it, which is why they can control how and where it moves.  Does that make them diagnosticians?*

Thus

     One of the reasons for doing this Real World rather than CGI is because in Real World, you don't have to model anything: reality does all the work for you.  In CGI you have to work out the physics of objects, take into account things like gravity and centripetal forces, light sources, wind, friction and shizzle like that, any one of which may make things look subtly wrong on the big screen.

Thus

     It's actually a really interesting clip, analysing what goes into the scene that we, the viewing public, have no idea about if it goes well.  Eric, the stunt guy, also has an hilarious anecdote about filming "Inception" that will have to wait until tomorrow.
     Okay, motley, I challenge you to a wheelbarrow race - up Mount Snowdon!
          
                        Mount Snowdon                                                                     A wheelbarrow**

Dark Tourism?
I'll give you dark tourism!  The BBC has an interesting article on what one would, indeed, describe as "Dark Tourism", for people who find that sitting on the beach basting themselves in oil is not really hitting the high notes, and who want to see something with a little more emotional impact.
     Like the Chernobyl nuclear sarcophagus, or the nearby town of Pripyat.  Art?

A combination of sad and creepy

     The tours here are strictly controlled, as there are hotspots of contamination and it's not really a place to hang around in unless you either wear a hazmat suit with air filter or have molten plutonium running in your veins already***.  The recent television series - which was excellent, by the way - will have piqued interest even further.  And, if you were enough of a glutton for punishment to have watched "Return Of The Living Dead 4", which is a truly execrable film, then you will have also seen ghostly old Pripyat at the beginning.  I can't find any screenshots from the film and I'm certainly not going to pick it up again, so use your imagination.  Art?

Luxury Sinister-era swimming pool!

     You might think Pripyat is a bit of a hard sell - not really, there are lots of ghoulishly interested folks out there.  Instead, spare a commiserational thought for the Mordor Tourist Board; they have it really hard.

"Mount Doom offers splendid views over the surrounding landscape with in-built heating facilities"

     I think we'll come back to this topic, as it bears closer examination, and it's always fun (if a little dangerous) to mock Sauron.
     Tomorrow - 9/11 Ground Zero! (perhaps)

     There will now be a short pause as I go warm up a pitta bread.  Rock and roll lifestyle, eh?

A Gap In My Reading Itinerary
Just to let you know that I've finished "Captain's Outrageous", the 6th in J.R. Lansdale's series of Hap and Leonard novels, wherein our heroes take a trip to Mexico and fall into more trouble than you and your Morris dancing mates can shakes sticks at.  You may be interested to know that Hap's usual luck with a love interest holds true, with a significant proviso.  An old character checks out, a familiar one comes back and we meet the equally proficient and sinister Veil.

Close enough

     What I now need to do is get back to that "Books In Series Order" website and find out what the next 3 novels are, and from there to Abebooks.  O frabjous day!  Mind you, when I order them, there's no guarantee that they'll arrive in correct reading order.  O the torment!

Finally -
We only need a small item to polish everything off and hit the Compositional Ton, so let me tell you how clever I was this morning about the Cryptic clue "Distant line of little pigs (6)" which began with "F".
     I won't leave you without the answer, because you'll never get it unless you cheat AND WE'RE HAVING NONE OF THAT ROUND HERE.
     "FARROW".  It sounded vaguely familiar and agricultural, but because I was on the bus and absent my Collins Concise, I had to wait until getting access to Google, when I discovered that it refers to a sow (that is, a female pig, not a term of insult) having a litter of piglets - hence the clue.  Art?

DINNER!
(Sorry, Anna)

*  I'm sorry, do I sound at all bitter here?
**   Lest there were any doubt
***  That would be me.