From Zenith To Nadir

I Can Tell What You're Thinking -
Not through trickery, since DARPA have now been reunited with their long-borrowed Telepathy Helmet in almost full working order, or so I hear.
     No, I can tell you expect this Intro to go on about that 2000AD character "Zenith", who was a repellent little goitre pursuing a career as a manufactured pop-star.  Art?

Thus

     Oh, and he was super-powered, too, though it took considerable prodding for him to do anything heroic, as he was initially as yellow as his trousers above.
     As for "Nadir", well, naturally you were expecting me to be going on about that stalwart champion of the consumer, good ol' Ralph.  Art?

Close enough

     Wrong on both counts!
     I think we can ignore Zenith, as that's what would annoy him the most, and instead concentrate on "Nadir", which came up as the answer in one of my crosswords.
     What is it?  Conrad wasn't too sure himself, except that he thinks it refers to the lowest point of anything, so what does the Collins Concise define it as?
     "The point on the celestial sphere directly below an observer and diametrically opposite the zenith".  Art?

The celestial sphere.
(Well, it's not a golf-ball, is it?)

     Where is this word derived from?  O I thought you'd never ask!  From the Arabic, actually, and the phrase "Nazir as-samt", which means "beneath the zenith".
     HOORAY YET ANOTHER WORD NOT DERIVED FROM GREEK OR LATIN!
     OUCH THAT COINCIDENCE HYDRA'S GOT IT'S TEETH IN MY BEHIND AGAIN

Really!  Where are your manners?

     For this is the third word in three days that we have found with no derivation back to that zombie language Latin, and the inescapable, unavoidable Greek.  That makes my fusion-powered pumping unit work at 5% over capacity.
     Ooops.  That was only supposed to be a couple of lines about "Nadir".  Okay, consider it your factoid of the day, motley, and then we can go back to toasting giant crumpets with a blowtorch.

Made up of yum

     Blimey, I shall have to call it a night, I keep falling asleep in my chair and drooling on the keyboard.  Old age catching up with Your Humble Squire, methinks, as a whole bottle of Bombay Sapphire can't possibly have anything to do with it.

It's Been A Long Time, Jack, Welcome Back

Conrad The Thief
Your Humble Scribe has been purloining a couple of concepts of late, though it's not reeeeeally stealing because I admit it, plus I have a winning smile.

See?

     So, I admit that today's title is in fact one of the lines from "Mad Jack" by The Chameleons, and it seems peculiarly appropriate.
     "Which Jack, O Aged Scribe Of Grim Demeanour?" I hear you quibble, and, pausing only to admit that mine is a face not made for smiling, I shall explicate.
     "Samurai Jack" is the chap in question.  Art?

Jack, with the demon Aku in the background

     Conrad loved this animated series.  The synopsis is that Jack, armed with an enchanted sword, takes on the time-travelling demon Aku, who is attempting to plunder and destroy Jack's medieval Japanese homeland.  Close to defeat, Aku hurls Jack through a time portal, sending him thousands of years into the future.  There, Jack must learn to survive in a world dominated (if rather chaotically) by Aku, forever trying to find his way back home.
     The series ran for four seasons and is highly regarded both for it's storytelling and animation; it scores 8.5 over at IMDB.  However, it finished without any kind of resolution or closure in 2004, which was a real ache in the bottom.

Sorry, Jack.

     Then Conrad discovered it was revived for a fifth and final season, one intended to really wrap things up and tie up all the loose ends.  A gap of 15 years is quite the intermission, but I'll forgive Mister Tartakovsy (the creator).     One thing of note is that this series is much darker than the Cartoon Network seasons, mostly because it was run on the Adult Swim channel, where there were far fewer restrictions; we see Jack kill real, live people for the first time, as an example.  The animation is well up to scratch, too.  Check this out - Art?

     You lose a lot of the effect thanks to it's being static; I like this scene, though.  Very reminiscent of "Sin City".  I'll get back to you about the White Wolf when I'm yarking on about the Coincidence Hydra - but of that later.

"DID SOMEONE CALL FOR MAD JACK?!"

     Okay, motley; can you eat your way through that litre tub of ice cream before I gorge myself silly on this giant jar of pickled gherkins?

What Have I Stumbled Into?
Typically, I cannot find what I'm looking for.  Whilst scouring the internet for pictures of insanely large Lego creations, and on one website in particular, I recall there used to be a little inset animation of a Lego flail tank flogging away at a Lego landscape and knocking a layer of loose tiles everywhere.
     Can I now find it?  No I cannot!
     On the other hand, I did discover a couple of brick nerds who were enthusing about their adaptations to a standard Lego tank.  Art?

M4 Sherman Crab flail tank

     They are demonstrating what their add-on kit does for the tank, and it's not a bad likeness.  One of them demonstrated the flail action -

Crank, baby, crank!

     He has to wind a little handle on the side to make the flails move; doing the same via a power source that rotated the drum automatically and electrically would, he said, have been very tricky and also expensive, so - a hand crank instead.
     For mine-sweeping, before you ask.  The chains would detonate any mines in their path, without damaging or destroying the Crab, thus beating a path across minefields.  There aren't many clips of Crabs in action, I'm afraid, so I'm not going to post one*.

The World Is Back In It's Rightful Place
It feels that way.
     Okay, earlier this week - code for I can't remember when and cannot be bothered to look - I mentioned that the Lego Shop beneath the Dark Tower had carelessly allowed one of it's large exhibits to fall over.  The 'large exhibit' being a Star Destroyer, they will have had to re-erect it verrrry carefully, lest it fall apart in their hands.  Art?

Restored

     Ignore the legs in frame, ta very much.

And Back To The Battlefield -

"Battlefield Earth", that is.  If you remember, I was remarking upon the intervention of Franchise Pictures who came in to save, if not the day, then at least John Travolta's vanity/pet project, BE.  They did this frequently, with verrrrry complicated financial packages that, in this case, off-loaded 35% of the film's financing to a Teuton company, Intertainment.

The film industry's lifeblood

     All would have been well if BE had done even reasonably well at the box-office, but of course it tanked - do you see what O you do - to a remarkable degree, which is where the suspicious Intertainment now started to poke around and do some forensic accountancy.  They then discovered that, rather than forking out 35% of production costs, they'd been underwriting more than 85%.  Not good!
     There's more.  An investigation by the FBI, no less, found that Franchise  had blatantly lied and defrauded about BE's budget.  Instead of being £45 million, as they claimed, which is still rather on the low side for an epic blockbuster, they'd only actually paid £30 million and the remaining £15 million went straight into their pockets.
     Oops.

Blood transfusion

      No wonder it looked rather cheap and nasty.
     Intertainment sued Franchise and were awarded £75 million, eventually, after a long court case, and by 2007 Franchise went bankrupt**.
     This kind of "creative accountancy" is why film studios hate, hate, HATE having their accounts exposed to public view, as it reveals all their dirty little tricks, which is what makes it so darn entertaining for the rest of us.

Heh.

Finally -
Dog Buns!  I had my nose in that much-esteemed tome by Professor John Buckley, "British Armour In The Normandy Campaign", wherein he was assessing the combat performance versus morale of various British and Canuckistanian armoured units, with a lot of details and tables and extrapolations and - you get the picture.  Complex.  So, I was busy examining these details even as the bus went swanning past that poster with "Russian.  Ruthless ", and I only realised half a mile further on <sad face>.
     Still, it does allow me to put up a picture of a ruthless Ruffian, so it's not all bad.  Art?

A Ruthless Ruffian.
Stop smiling, dammit, you're spoiling the image!

     That's Comrad Botvinnik, chess champion extraordinaire, who would leap over the chess board and rip his opponent's throat out with his bare Bolshevik teeth beat his opponents by a wide margin.

 

*  I'm horrid like that.
**  They were lucky.  Intertainment were aiming for £220 million

A Battlefield -

Just Not How You Imagined It ...
Conrad was watching a short snippet on Youtube where a chap called Corey Mandell was holding forth on his career as a screenwriter, as a result of which he ended up doing scripts simply because of the money involved, and which he also ended up hating.  Hating hating hating!
     This is why he moved into teaching, which he does at UCLA, finding it immensely more rewarding and enjoyable than soullessly churning out tat.  Art?

How to scare cats the Corey Mandell way!

     Corey found himself in a bit of a pickle; none of the scripts he'd worked on had ended up as real live actual films, and he was getting faintly desperate to get something - anything - to fruition.
     So he said "Yes" to "Battlefield Earth".
     I don't know if you've ever seen this farrago; I have, once, and once only, and I would only every do it again for a dare whilst wrapped around a lot of beers.

That's as big as it gets

     Well, Corey explained some of the reasons for it being dire: the original studio involved, Fox 2000, ended up walking away.  None of the other major studios wanted anything to do with it, because Scientology (and it needed a very big budget).  In came Franchise Pictures, independents who specialised in rescuing star's vanity projects, and who took his script and generally mucked around with it, before randomly shuffling the pages, removing every seventh one and excising the letter "E"*.  The film was supposedly budgeted at £45 million, which was kind of on the cheap side for what was supposed to be an effects-heavy epic.

What?  It's a battlefield, with earth

     Of course we now knowthe film was a colossal cinematic colostomy container, widely panned by - everyone, I think - as being so uniquely bad it ought to be sealed in a concrete tomb and despatched to the bottom of the Challenger Deep.
     Then things start to get really interesting ...
     Okay, motley, I challenge you to a contest playing Lawnmower Simulator!

The very real thing

Bitten By The Coincidence Hydra - AGAIN
It had to happen: Your Humble Scribe's behind is too tender and tasty a morsel for the Coincidence Hydra to resist for long.
     Thus is was as I strolled nonchalantly to the Dark Tower this morning, past all the covered concession stands, because you can't leave anything lying around loose in Gomorrah-On-The-Irwell or it will vanish, and what do I see?
     No!  Not a possum pickling plums with picric acid.  Art?

     After me banging on about how 'Gusto' is derived ultimately from the Latin 'Gustatus'.
     What are the chances, eh?

What Have I Stumbled Into?
It appears that the Lego conspiracy stretches further than anyone would have believed, yeah even unto the Antipodes.  Say hello to a little creation worked up by Australian Ryan Mcnaught (also known as "Brickman") in his garage.  Art?

     This beast took him 8 months, £3,500 and 35,000 bricks to complete, not to mention uncountable times spent stepping on bits of Lego and hopping about in pain.  Art!

     Ryan got something more than appreciation from this build; Quantas, the Ocker airline, flew him to South Canada so he could take part in a Lego convention held there annually.  He needed to break the A380 Airbus down into components that would fit into 3 large suitcases, as the assembled build is too fragile to be toted around whole.  And, yes, it would take days to rebuild it.
     Obviously, some people have entirely too much time on their hands** ...
     
"Gurus"
We shall come to where I picked up on this word in a little while, O Yes Indeedy Ally Sheedy.  You have surely heard of it being bandied about in the media, in one of two senses: an acknowledgement of someone's expert status on a particular topic; or a particularly bumptious, self-important oaf***.  Usually mentioned in connection with the ballfoot game.

Definition the second

     Where does it come from?  None other than Sanskrit!  OH HOORAH ANOTHER WORD NOT DERIVED FROM EITHER GREEK OR LATIN!  KALLOO KALLAY! <ahem>  The original word is "Guruh", meaning "weighty" - in the sense of intellectual firepower, not over-eating, though with Conrad you get both at no extra cost - which transposed into the Hindi "Guru".
     And there we have it. 

Not sure about this one, Art ...

     Dog Buns!  Missed that poster with "Russian. Ruthless -" upon it as I was nose-deep in a book when the bus went past it.  Well, I can try tonight, or tomorrow morning unless stricken with a fit of absent-mindedness.

An especially ruthless Ruffian

TIK Versus The Wehraboos

This one might need a bit of explanation, and I've only got three minutes before I commence the nose/grindstone interface.
     Okay, "Wehraboos" are those uncritical, slavering fanboys who insist that the Wehrmacht (and by implication the SS) was the greatest army in the world, evah, with the coolest tanks and guns and shizzle, and it really won the war, except by a cruel trick of fate that probably involves aliens and time travel (and the International Jewish Consipiracy!) it didn't.  Art?

A clinically accurate depiction

     It is no secret that the Wehraboos fly into a frothing rage if you dare to even suggest that the Tiger tank was perhaps not the invulnerable steel juggernaut they worship, and so it was with a book that TIK picked for review.  Art?

Get ready for some fanboy frothing

     This work addresses the patently biased memoirs and 'reports' that came out of captured or collaborating Teuton generals, who had been asked to analyse the Eastern Front post-war for American study.  It's a bit long to go into here, but one of their contentions is that the Wehrmacht fought a war just as dirty and atrocity-filled as the SS, who were for long the lightning-rod for blame.  This isn't really up for debate, unless you have a shrine to the MG42 in your bedroom cupboard.
     Up jump the Wehraboos, all hurling one-star reviews at Smelser and Davies.  TIK bothers to go into a couple of these amazingly biased and tangential "reviews" and pretty much shoots them full of holes, using things like LOGIC and EVIDENCE and FACTS instead of pretty daydreams.
     Bah!

TIK looking less than stern.
(But the steel is there beneath the surface)

*  Perhaps.
**  Said without a hint of irony
***  Which is Conrad?! <hard questions asked courtesy Mister Hand>