Your Hair-Splitting Pedant Returns!

That Would Be Me
Just so we're clear.  
     You should know Conrad by now, any excuse to point out a flaw or a failing is like meat and drink to him, and would be so even if he were vegan.
     "What is it now?" I hear you sigh in weary resignation.  "Did someone forget to use an  apostrophe properly?  Or only use a single space after a full stop?"
     Whilst those are both egregious crimes in their own right, no.
     No, I refer to another gaping plot hole in "Where Eagles Dare".  Art?

High drama!*

     To recap, if you've not seen this film - GO AND SEE IT RIGHT NOW! - at this point Major Smith has jumped onto the cable-car as seen above and is fighting it out with the two traitors, a fight he wins; he then has to jump onto the reciprocally-travelling cable-car going back up to Schloss Adler.
     All jolly exciting stuff!  Brian Hutton, the director, must have been hugging himself when he reviewed the dailies for this scene.
     Yet cold hard logic, that favourite intellectual tool of Conrad, says otherwise.  Art?

The moment of truth

      Here you can see Major Smith about to do his jumping act, just starboard of upper centre, as the two traitors - hope I'm not spoiling this for you - are now in the cable-car.
     However.  Conrad counsels caution.  The Major and Mary have a pair of sub-machine guns between them, and it would be oh so easy to let the cable-car swing out from under cover and then riddle it with gunfire.  The traitors have but a single pistol with only a few rounds left; they wouldn't stand a chance.

Sorry, I cannot find a single image of an exploding cable-car.  How shocking!

     Or, more pragmatically, the Major could just have dropped one of his handy little bundles of high-explosive onto the cable-car as it passed, on a thirty-second delay.  Bang.  Problem solved.  No need for athletic, death-defying stunts, but then again where would all those unemployed stuntmen go?
     There you go, another plot hole uncovered, and you're welcome.
     I say, motley, all that snow has got me in the mood for some ice-cream; shall we break out a tub of vanilla and rhubarb?

It'll All Make Sense On Facebook
Of course it will, that's why it's here.  Art?

It makes sense now, doesn't it?

The Haul
SIT BACK DOWN!  You will endure what I have to say, because I say so.  Art?

     From top port clockwise: I have a disk of ABTF, and that's all - no case, just a little plastic sleeve, which I have filed away somewhere so secure that I cannot find it.  Well, now I have a proper case and I can sit down and review it properly.  If you haven't seen it, then be advised it's one of the last Big War Films made with period equipment and advisers who were there during the real thing, and it's one of the few films to accurately depict how pant-wettingly terrifying it was to be under bombardment by the Royal Artillery.
     Deadpool 2 because I saw it at the pictures and enjoyed it, and James Brolin makes a splendidly citric Cable.

Also, Zazie Beetz looks hot
(But you only get to see her here from the neck upwards)

     And both seasons of "The Expanse" because it's awesome hard sci-fi space opera, and I've only seen it via a <cough cough>ed version, so this is me making up for that.  Season 4 returns in December, and it's different enough from the novels that you don't know what's going to happen eventually.

     Excuse me, I need to go put the oven on.  Back in a jiffy! 

     "Normandy 44" is by James Holland, whom you may know from the "We Have Ways Of Making You Talk" podcast, and - surprise surprise! - it's a signed copy, too, with an illegible inscription on the inner cover.  "Oh Goodie!" I hear you sarcastically yodel.  "Just what the world needs - another book about D-Day."
     It's rather more than that; Ol' Jim follows the battle in Normandy over the weeks and months after D-Day, not merely the day itself.  He also puts forth in statistics the incredible logistical tail supporting the combat arms, and between Page 45 and 48 he puts across one of his underlying theses:  this is Big War, being fought by the Allies to their strengths of firepower and technology and mechanisation; a combination that Nazi Germany simply cannot match.

An example of Detroit at work

     Conrad has also sneakily looked ahead at Ol' Jim's sneeringly dismissive rebuttal of Wunderboy Wittman's epic status (especially amongst Wehraboos).  I may go into this in more detail later but the facts of the matter are this: Wittman swanned up and down the Eastern Front in tanks for three years with impunity, especially in 1943 when the Sinisters didn't have anything to match a Tiger tank.  Transferred to Normandy, he lasts about 8 weeks, when he and his crew discover emphatically that the Tiger is definitely no longer invincible**.

     Okay, enough of matters martial, let's have something light and frothy!

Relatively Light And Frothy
Okay, and now we hearken back to Thursday, when Quizmaster Steve asked the question "The Troodon was the smartest variety of what?"
     Conrad, seeing the suffix "-don" guessed at "Dinosaur", and do you know what?  I was right.  Always nice, being confirmed in one's cleverness.
     Of course, it didn't end there.  Art?

The Troodon: a bit of a goggle-eyed git, to be frank

     Why was it considered the smartest dinosaur?  Because that didn't stop it from getting extinct-ified, did it?
     This supposition is to do with body mass versus brainpan: it had the largest brain in relation to it's body of any dinosaur, which makes it about as intelligent as a bird - like the dodo, one suspects.
     Well, I have something to tell Steve the next time I see him.

     Okay, we have now gone over the Compositional Ton, and I need to go put stuff in the oven and on the hob, so - for now, we are done!


*  Do you see what I - O you do.
**  Tee hee!