The Bazaar Had A Veneer

So To Speak

This will take a bit of explanation.  As you ought to know by now, Your Humble Scribe is a fiend for his Codewords, and he generally gets to solve one per day, meaning that he is both clever with words and experienced in Codewords.  Art?

Pah!  For lightweights only - they have THREE letters to work from

     For the uninitiated, every letter in the alphabet is given a number from 1 to 26, and you are given two letters to start with in the MEN Codeword, usually a vowel and consonant.
     Okay, we had been given "O" and "R", and there was a six-letter word ending in R, which meant that 21, the letter preceding it, had to be a vowel.  The whole thing went 4,21,10,21,21, R.
     What would fit?  Okay, normally you never get AA as a combination in English words, though there is one that fits: BAZAAR.  Art?

A bazaar
(From the Persian "Bazar")

     There was also another word that began with an R, after which came 5 - so 5 has to be a vowel.  I counted up the number of 21s on the grid and there were about 15, whereas there were only 10 x 5 (although, and I should have paid attention, at least four words ended in a 5).  So, I decided, the answer had to be VENEER.

Here's veneer

     OUCH!  Dog Buns, that Coincidence Hydra has it's teeth in me glutes again - there I was, looking up the origin of "Veneer" - which is from the Old French "Fournir" meaning "To Furnish" - and the first thing I see on the page is "Velvet Underground" (my Collins Concise is soooo eclectic), which is weird, as I've just been listening to Mott The Hoople doing a cover of VU's "Sweet Jane" live, which is pretty good, possibly better than the album track.
     That worked, because then another word that intersected VENEER would be SCENE, except things started to go wrong when that meant another four-letter word would begin EVC.
     Whoops.  So, it was BAZAAR after all.
     I didn't take a photograph as I don't want to relive the horror.

Veneered planks
(This will make sense on Facebook)

Stanchions
(This will make sense on Facebook, honest)

More On Michael
Wittman, that is.  If you recall, I said I'd detail a bit more about him, and here it is.  He'd been panzering about on the Eastern Front for 3 years without suffering a scratch, before being sent to Normandy with his Heavy Tank Battalion 101.  On 13th June he caught a column of vehicles from Perfidious Albion's 7th Armoured Division, and caught them napping.  He drove along the column and brewed up thirteen tanks and fifteen other vehicles, which is where the Wehraboo fanboy adulation usually stops.

The end result

     The Nazi's Noble Night then rashly proceeded into Villers Bocage, where, without any infantry support, his tank was promptly knocked out and he had to make an undignified exit on foot.
     We last meet him on August 8th, where he again rashly - do we see a theme developing here? - takes his tanks on a drive at the British and Canuckistanians, out in the open as if they were indestructible.
     They weren't.  They ran into the crossfire of Sherman tanks from the Northants Yeomanry and the Canuckistanian's Sherbrooke Fusiliers, both of whom had Sherman Fireflies, armed with the wickedly-powerful 17 pounder gun that was a lot more powerful than Wittman's TIger's 88mm gun.  One of these Fireflies hit Wittman's tank, which did not simply brew up, it exploded in spectacular fashion, so violently that the 15-ton turret was thrown a good 30 feet away.  Art?

Thus
(Note the turret has landed upside-down, as you can see the crew 'basket' sticking up)

     What was left of the crew was presumably buried in a matchbox.  This was bad news for Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels, as he had only recently built Wittman up into a war-winning hero in the mould of Siegfried, destined to go on to fame and glory.
     Ooops.
     Tomorrow: the Nazi fetishisation of TANK.  And shizzle.

Sherman hole-puncher

What Have I Stumbled Into?
You remember the Jawa Sandcrawler made from Lego that I mentioned a few posts ago?  I came across Jane, the possibly dotty yet motherly and warm-hearted Lego fan I also mentioned in the same post.  She has built both the Collector Star Destroyer and Millenium Falcon models; when I mentioned the Sandcrawler she immediately recognised "It's a bespoke model", which it indeed is.
     She then told me of another modeller who'd done Wayne Mansion in Lego, with the Batcave beneath it, in another bespoke project.  None of your wimpy Lego boxed sets here!  Art?

Is that a dinosaur?

     This is the shop-available version, which you might be satisfied with if you knew naught of the bespoke version, which looks like this -

This thing is six feet tall

     An utter monster.  It's a shame we don't have a picture with puny human for scale.  Total number of bricks used come to approximately 100,000.
     Made by someone with entirely too much time on his hands.*
     Of course the tale doesn't end there, as Lee told me of someone who'd done Saint Pancras Station in (he guessed) OO railway scale.  We shall come back to this ...

Finally -
I don't want to hang around here for long as it's getting on for teatime, and I don't get paid for this, you know <pauses for sympathy, gets none, sulks and carries on>.
     Okay, I recall whilst reading "Forgotten Tanks etc." that one person pushing amphibious tanks of enormous size claimed there were tracked vehicles of 1,200 tons in existence at that time - 1940, so amphibious tanks blah blah blah.  This surprised me as I don't recall ever hearing of or seeing any such thing, and the applications for such a vehicle escaped me.  A quick search on Google, then a longer search on Google, revealed no such vehicles
     Were they talking out of their bottom?**

Yes

     Meet Franz, one of NASA's crawlwers, which come in at 2,700 tons each.  Originally designed to carry entire Apollo rockets from the Vertical Assembly Building to the launch pad, they later did the same with the Space Shuttle.  You can see the puny fire engine present for scale.
     But not built until 1965.


     And with that, we are done!

*  Irony, in case you missed it
**  Some people can do this.  Butt, still ***
***  Do you see what - O you do