Mine, All Mine!

Though You May Feel Less Acquisitive When You Read On ...
Okay, I have to admit that this item was a result of more digging about thanks to David Lister's "Forgotten Tanks and Guns of the 20s, 30s and 40s", which does feature some desperately obscure stuff.  I think he discovers this material whilst literally rooting through old paper archives for his Real World Job, and has written stuff up for his blog in consequence.  Your Humble Scribe cannot complain, it's an interesting source of information you aren't ever going to find anywhere else.  Art?

The work in question

     Ol' Listy describes a device which quite boggles the mind: the "Ferret" land-travelling torpedo, devised as a private venture by Allen engineering.  This monster was the exact opposite of a ferret -

NO!  Art-

Better

     It weighed three tons, could manage the dizzying speed of 1/4 m.p.h., and I cannot find any illustrations of it at all.  It would simply be turned on and pointed at a target, heading for it until impact, whereupon - BANG.     However, whilst trying to find a picture for your education, I came across an illustration that I mistakenly thought was the Ferret.  Art?

With crank handle for scale

     This, ladies, gentlemen and those unsure, is the Simms Land Torpedo, invented by Mister Simms in 1915 all by himself, and it is one of the first examples of a remotely-guided explosive device, as there was no driver.  Instead it was controlled by wires that ran from the rear, and that solid part at the front is the HE charge it carried, amounting to probably quarter of a ton of explosive, quite enough to make eyes water when it went off.

Fiddly bits identified

     I found this on "Tank Encyclopedia" - just so they don't sue me - and am slightly surprised that I didn't discover it earlier this year, when I was going on about remote-controlled devices of the First Unpleasantness.  I had found out quite a bit about French mobile mines, yet never realised there was a contender from Perfidious Albion.
     Despite being a thoroughly perfidious idea, sadly Mister Simms massive mobile mine never got further than the drawing board; though now the idea is out there I am sure some enterprising wargamer will build a scale model and work up some rules for it.

They did for the Bob Semple!

     Yes, motley, you just sit quietly and drink your tonic water.  Let's hope you learned your lesson last night: eating three litres of ice-cream in one go is not a good idea.

Spotifynding OutI did mention yesterday that I've now got a Family subscription to Spotify Premium, and have already added 78 tracks amounting to 6 hours plus playing time, under a playlist titled "Play List"*.  This includes an 1981 album by the Plastic People of the Universe, who are a Czech rock band who set themselves up in 1968 after the Sinisters invaded Czechoslovakia.  You inner city gnagster rap-happers think you have it hard?  These people were thrown in prison or deported merely for playing entirely unpolitical songs, and had to become an underground culture all of their own, not daring to emerge and play openly until 1989.

CAUTION!  Long-haired men cause despotic regimes to lose the plot

     Anyway, that's not what I was intending to go on about.  No.  In a previous iteration of Spotify Free I had created another playlist titled "Rob", which has ported over into Premium.  And it has 1,402 tracks on it.  So many that it's really awkward to even scroll down, and the scroll bars don't work properly, and it's really difficult to get tracks to play, or stop playing once they start.  I shall have to prune it, definitely.  I wonder if you can merge old and new playlists?                                 Aim                                                                                      Dragonforce      Eclectic, eh?
Beautiful Spitzbergen!
Well, it was bound to happen.  You know all those random names and words that pop up in my head from time to time? (and I promise we'll get back to Thrasybulus in future) - yesterday it was "Spitzbergen".
     I knew this was something to do with islands and Norway, and so it proved when looked into a tad further.
     Spitzbergen is the largest and only permanently inhabited island of the Svalbard archipelago, a bunch of islands that belong to Norway because it couldn't give them away of history.  Art?

"Suddenly, the middle of nowhere was jealous"

     The population is only 2,700, living in a few widely-scattered settlements too small to be called towns.  Principal industry is mining, although tourism is becoming important.  There are considerable numbers of Ruffians there, working in the mines; given the climate they probably don't get very homesick.  There are no roads between the settlements, so if you want to travel you either go by ship or snowmobile (or walk).  Wiki notes that Spitz is one of the safest places on earth, with virtually no crime -
     You may have just suddenly realised that this place is the inspiration for "Fortitude", as I did when a-reading the description initially.  And yes, they have polar bears.  Ferocious, deadly, terrifying pol - 

"Yeah?"

     Then we have "Operation Zitronella" of the Second Unpleasantness - which is quite another story.  Perhaps tomorrow ...

Finally -
A rationale: I have been typing this blog entry up on the night of 23rd October, so forgive me if the tenses slip a little when it gets posted tomorrow.  There's no sinister reason for this - no, I don't have the inside word on when the Zombie Apocalypse will occur - and is entirely due to work.  Yes, plain old boring office admin: I shall be having one of the quarterly chats with my manager tomorrow and I've done NO input on the topics involved.  So, tomorrow - which will be today when you're reading this** - instead of hammering out BOOJUM! before logging-on, I shall be pondering big work-applicable questions: can we have an inflatable punching bag for staff?  An artisanal coffee-machine!  Free crystalized ginger!  A Comsat Angels Appreciation Day!

The Comsats.
(Any excuse.  Any excuse)

*  No marks for imagination, Conrad
**  Confused?  That makes three of us!