The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters

You Know What I Mean, Don't You?
Perhaps not.  After all, how up are you on 220 year-old Spanish etchings and epigrams?
     I refer - obviously! - to that talented Iberian artist Goya, who came up with an etching for part of a collection in 1799, with today's title.  Art?

Behold the - er - monsters.
(Perhaps they were scarier back then?)

     Conrad can't say this is especially scary, unless you suffer from Strigiformophobia or Chiroptophobia*, and perhaps Ailurophobia*.  Anyway, what Goya meant was: "Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels." 
     So, what any artist ought to seek to produce is created by the blending of reason and fantasy, because otherwise with fantasy alone you get ATTACK OF THE KILLER TOMATOES!  Art?

Probably best not to ask.

     I return to this <ahem> fruitful topic, despite it being a cheesy load of old tripe**, because 1) John Astin is in the sequels and 2) Because of a helicopter crash.
     First, 1).  Stepfather to Sean Astin, John had a trademark manic aura about him; you can imagine him egging on Colin Furze to invent something like an ultra-violet laser for dealing with vampires, or deliberately crashing NASDAQ because it sounds like fun.  Art?

WOULD YOU LET THIS MAN BE YOUR BABYSITTER***?!

     Secondly, 2).  Recall, if you will, that the film's overall budget was £60 thousand pounds, which is about the catering bill for a Hollywood film nowadays.  However!  They do crash a helicopter, which the plot asserts is because the pilot was attacked by - hang on, savagely attacked - by a flying tomato.  Art?

This may have inspired Colin Furze's Spinning Belt of Knives

     There you go, seconds before the crash.  Art?

The smouldering remains to port

     "Wow!" I hear you say.  "Impressive stunt and special effects work on such a shoestring budget!"
     Ah.  
     Yes.
     The thing is, it was a real crash, which the pilot walked away from, and since  cameras were rolling and captured the whole dangerous event, the producers hastily adjusted AOTKT plot around it.  One wonders what dilemmas they would have faced if he'd been critically injured or died.
     There you have it.  A subtle segue from high-brow culture to the gutters of Hollywood.
     I say, motley, fancy some gazpacho soup?

Speaking Of Segue -
Another example of how my "Collins Big Book of Crossword Puzzles #5" is not the cipher I thought it would be.  The clue was "Smooth transition (5)", and it ended in "E".
     MERGE, I thought.  This didn't work out as I came close to finishing, so I looked up the answer, which was - "SEGUE"
     My Collins Concise informs me that the word comes from Italian, and "Seguire" meaning "To follow" and it was principally used as a musical term, being derived - obviously! - from the Latin "Sequi".
     Here endeth your lesson for today.  Art?

No, Art.  I shall punish you later.

The Boy Holland And Tanks: "Nazi War Machines Secrets Uncovered - Panzers"
Yes yes yes, this is more about the Channel 4 documentary as presented by James Holland, and I know he's actually 49 years old (looking good, though, James, looking good) but the "Boy" part comes from his gleeful enthusiasm about both the subject matter of this item and getting to drive things.
     Yesterday I mentioned him getting to drive a Marder tank-destroyer but couldn't find a relevant picture.  Today I have just the thing.  Art?

Here you go.

     Jim manages to drive it without embarrassing himself, which Your Humble Scribe mentioned yesterday was because this vehicle had been designed by the Czechs, people who knew what they wanted from a tank in terms of simplicity and reliability.  When it comes to the Teutons designing something, as James and a few of his interviewees mentioned, it had to be Deutschland Uber Alles.  In practical terms this meant A Bigger Gun With Thicker Armour, and because Herr Schickelgruber had demnaded that this be so, it happened.
     Ol' Jim and Dave (Head of Bovvie) looked at the Panther tank, the Teuton answer to the T34, and O My! Grandma, what big teeth you have.  Art?

A 7.5 cm big tooth, in fact

     All the Wehraboos concentrate on how BIG the Panther was, and how BIG the gun was, and how THICK the armour was, etcetera etcetera.  Dave instead showed Jim the Panther gearbox, which had over 60 pieces.  Art?

The beast in question

     It was horribly complicated, prone to breakdown from the day the Panther was introduced to the war's end, and was extremely unforgiving and difficult to use.  Making an error in moving from first to second gear could strip the gears, cripple the tank and require the whole front be removed to take out the power train for repair.
     You don't hear the Wehraboos crowing about that.
     Next up, our boyishly handsome presenter gets to have a lift in a Mercedes-Benz G4, which you can see in the background below.

Someone is excited!

     The reason he wasn't allowed to drive it himself is because this 70-year old beauty is worth about £10 million.  It was a model of ahead-of-it's-time luxury and precision engineering, and Jim was practically beaming with excitement when being tootled around as a passenger.  You could feel the nervousness of the driver, allowing Jim to open doors and tilt up seats, reducing the overall value by £1000 with every greasy fingerprint ...

The million-pound beast in question

     Very lavish, and as Jim and others pointed out, a waste of resources that typified the Teuton approach to war - over-engineered, complicated and expensive, and, in the case of the Panther, You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of Our Immobilised Panzers.
Finally -
It is a given that, if you purloin something that does not belong to you, the original owners will make strenuous attempts to either recover what has been stolen or prevent such loss being suffered again.
     It is thus with some trepidation that I see ESA and NASA are co-operating together, in order to obtain rock and soil samples from Mars.  Art?

The prototypes in action

     Not only do they intend to collect these samples, they intend to return them via rocketry and satellites to Earth.  Which is kind of like the burglars leaving a set of GPS co-ordinates back to their lair.
     Why is this an issue?
     Because the owners of said samples might very well want them back.

     Keep watching the skies!


*  No, I shan't explain.  Go look them up.
**  I can go on ad infinitum about food puns.
*** Reply: Hmmm, I'm not sure, what's he smoking there?