Conrad - Feeling Clever AND EVEN ANGRIER!!

Yes - TWO Exclamation Marks
I know this is bordering on near-Continental levels of manic hysteria, but I have my reasons.  Last night I began typing out today's blog, and got a couple of hundred words down.  This morning, before leaving to catch the bus I added in a picture from the Bookbub page "51 Greatest Science Fiction Novels" (it won't load at work) and when I actually arrive at work and sit down to type stuff out, what do I get?


     THE FRIKKIN' REFORMATTING CURSOR MALFUNCTION!!  Every time I move the cursor it reformats the text, until the page looks like an explosion in a font factory.  Thus I am having to type this out from scratch and so long all the prep work <sighs deeply>.
     As I would have begun -

Of Course I AM Clever But A Little Backup Doesn't Hurt
Or even a lot of backup.
     Or any backup.
     For Lo! we are talking about the intellectual development of the kids of today, and specifically one of my smaller relatives, that being Ella, whom at 12 is as tall as her mother really tall.  Her mum put up a photograph of a Computer Science homework page, which, if Art can put down his dish of coal -


      Sorry for the sheer scale, I can't reduce it down handily.
     So, can any of you out there solve the latter three problems?  It took me a minute or two, but I managed, and then sat back feeling rather smug.  Hint: you are looking for patterns, which are NOT necessarily mathematical solutions.
     As I mentioned when replying with the solutions, this is the sort of thing that people over at GCHQ do: look for patterns, repetitions, uniques, sequences, all that sort of thing, which is why Bletchley Park recruited crossword compilers*.
     Okay, motley, how fast do you think you're going to go when I light that rocket strapped to your skateboard**?

Colin Furze, we need you now!

Back To Those 51 Sci-Fi Novels
I know, I know, it irritates the grit out of the literati, who insist that it ought to be "speculative fiction", which is why I do it <snickers evilly>.
     Anyway, from what I remember when adding in the detail this morning, the next volume on the list is "1984" by George Orwell (a.k.a. Eric Arthur Blair), which, if we can get a cover illustration thanks to Art -

Thus

     Of course I have read it, as many as twice, because it is a thoroughly depressing work.



SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILE

     Plus, there is no happy ending.  O noes.  The protagonist - we cannot call him a "hero" by any stretch of the imagination - ends up a broken, subservient drone after undergoing everything he is mortally scared of in Room 101.  Pundits today love to draw comparisons with contemporary society and how we are already living in the hell of 1984 blah blah blah -
     Yes, but we have Netflix.

Or - are you watching him?

An Unholy Mad Mutant Combination
If you know anything about aerial warfare, then you will be aware of the Spitfire, an aircraft so curvy it's pervy, and which looks fast standing still <rambles on about the Battle of Britain for a couple of hours> and the counterpart to the Spitfire would be the Messerschmidt 109, which had a more brutalist look to it, and which was dangerous for beginners. 

                 
                                    One of these things is not like the other
     It just so happens that an RAF pilot landed on what he thought was the Isle of Wight in 1942, except it turned out to be Teuton-occupied Jersey.  They fell on his Spitfire with great delight, and sent it to Germany, where they replaced the nose and engine with that from an Me 109, producing a "Messerspit".  I bet they were patting themselves on the back over that one.  Art?

The beast in question

     Somewhat ironically, it was faster than a Spitfire, yet more manoeuvrable than a 109, and was a delight to fly; Teuton pilots loved it to bits, which is what it ended up in after a bombing raid by the RAF in 1944.

More Matania
Yes, the forte of Ol' Fortunino, to wit: painting scenes from the First Unpleasantness.  He was an officially-accredited war correspondent, you know, and attended at first hand in France and Flanders.
     Here an aside.  That "An Englishman At War", which is the war diaries of Colonel Stanley Christopherson, that never arrived, is chokingly expensive on Abebooks; some chiselers in South Canada want £360 pounds for a copy.  A used copy.
     Where were we?  O yes -

Thus

     This is a scene that would have been horribly familiar to any soldiers of Perfidious Albion: hauling a gun through deep mud.  In this case it is a trophy, and you can see the bodies of some of the previous owners to the left, along with someone looking the worse for wear.  The gun is, I believe, a 10.5 cm howitzer and it would be wise of the captors  to chalk their unit details on it, for it might otherwise be claimed by a different unit.  Depending on the date, if it is later than July 1917, then there might also be some Teuton mustard gas shells lying about.  Perfidious Albion didn't get these until September 1918, so if they did come across any of these horrid impedimenta, those captors would very definitely use said howitzer to fire them back at the Teutons. 
     There you go, now you know more than you did five minutes ago.


Finally -
As you ought to know by now, BOOJUM! likes to occasionally feature an unusual ship, because normal is boring.  Art?

Behold the boat

     This, gentle reader, is a small-scale replica of the "Nautilus" as seen in "20,000 Leagues Beneath The Sea", which was commanded by Mister Received English Pronunciation himself: James Mason.  It's a pretty snazzy replica, I think you'll admit.

The original, with puny humans for scale

 *  You know, Station X, Enigma, bombes, Alan Turing and all that jazz.
**  This is experimentation, not cruelty, so it's allowed.