BOOJUM!: When The Pussy Was A Wussy

Also Why You're Not Spyin' A Lion
For Lo! We are back to bashing in the brains (or lack of them) of the credulous and witless and gullible: Yes, Your Humble Scribe is back on the subject of "Eight Unsolved British Mysteries" that the BBC has been promoting, when they are no such thing. We've already solved four of them. What's next?

5. The Beast of Bodmin

There are plenty of reports of oversized creatures roaming Britain’s hills and forests, but none is more famous than the Beast of Bodmin. Since the 1980s, there have been over 60 reported sightings of a large animal, similar to a cat, stalking around the West Country. It’s said to have savaged livestock and other animals. There have been photos (always blurry) and even video. Yet there has never been any confirmation that such an animal really exists. So is the Beast of Bodmin really out there? Who can say, but you might not want to go camping in that particular bit of Cornwall.

Bodmin Moor; picturesque but a bit bleak

Shall we break that down? Actually that was rhetorical, I'm going to break it down whether you approve or not. Okayyyyy -
" There have been over 60 reported sightings -" ah yes. Human eyesight; notoriously inaccurate. It is also difficult to assess scale at a distance, meaning Mrs. Moggy being mistaken for a panther.

No, Art, no.

"It is said to have savaged livestock -": reductio ab absurdum est - why invent a gigantic feral animal when there are perfectly capable native animals that can do exactly the same thing? One is minded of Kenneth Rommel's investigation into cattle mutilation in South Canada, which found exactly no evidence of anything abnormal. "There have been photos -" Yes, there have. Highly unconvincing ones of poor quality with nothing to judge scale by. There was an investigation carried out by government body the Ministry of Fisheries and Food, who, unsurprisingly, found exactly no evidence of anything abnormal. Not only that, Those Killjoy Scientists found the whole thing implausible. For one thing, since these beasts have been reported over decades, there would have to be a whole population of them, and there simply isn't enough food (for which read passing humans and cattle) to sustain them. Nor is the panther adapted to a British climate; looking out of the window I have been seeing squally showers and hailstorms, which if sustained over a period of months, would definitely see off wild cats in the wild. Nobody has ever found the carcass of a dead panther, nor panther hairs, nor panther droppings, nor indeed anything panther-related.

You're testing me, Art. Testing me!

A mystery solved is no longer a mystery, which is why the Beeb appears to ignore the solutions to these eight items. One feels a loud "Bah!" coming on.
Motley, let's do a hard-boiled egg-eating against the clock challenge! I've boiled and shelled 20 eggs, and the first to finish - "Egg-bound"? Don't talk rot, there's no such thing. Ready in three - two - one - GO!
Reprise Of The O-Boats
I didn't tack this item on to the end of Jim Holland's documentary about the Type XXI U-boat because I'd gone on at length and was well over the Compositional Ton. However, he pointed out that even if the Valentin U-Boat Bunkerwerke had become operational, it would have sent U-Boats out into the River Weser in order to reach the Baltic.

The river

However - and you knew that was coming, didn't you? - the Weser is too shallow for the Type XXI, which would have had to sail down it on the surface, hence becoming an Oberseeboot. You can bet that the beady eyes of the Brylcreem Boys and the USAAF would have noticed any such O-Boats in transit, and fighter-bombers would have been stooging around to catch them. Or possibly some Flying Porcupines (as the Short Sunderland flying boat was known) as they could stooge around for simply hours and hours and hours, and could carry flares for illumination.

This kind of thing

Ol' Jim himself was aghast at the sheer and grotesque waste of resources inherent in this project.

Colin Does Not Die At The End
At least not this time. I refer, of course, to Colin Furze, eccentric British inventor par excellence, who builds something extremely dangerous on a regular basis and then proudly puts the building process and end result up on Youtube. I recommend you go have a look whilst he is still alive and in one piece, as Youtube will surely pull all his videos when his Portable Anti-Matter Cannon destroys both himself and Greater London.

Conrad is unsure what this is, except that it looks dangerous.

This item was inspired by Lee, my work colleague, who mentioned someone who'd built a replica Landspeeder from Star Wars, based on a golf cart. This sounded like the kind of unusually safe project that Colin would undertake, so I did a quick Google ONCE IT GOT HOME IF THERE ARE ANY MANAGERS READING THIS. Yup. Art?

Image result for colin furze landspeeder

Before

After

Well done Colin! The end result being hawked for charity for £50,000.
STATUS REPORT: Colin is still alive and well as of this post*.
Finally -
We only need a short article to get to count, so <thinks> I shall regale you with shots of my Coyly Anonymous Employer. I make sure never to comment on them, or about them, or say anything that might give away their identity. Anyone who works there and sees my photos will immediately know about whom I am talking, as will anyone who works in the Dark Tower, as there's not that many organisations in there.
Anyway, enough wibble, let's have a series of photos. Art?