Empire Of The Census

Ha!  Do You See - O You Do
And I thought I was being so clever.  Of course, all the cinematically-literate amongst you will instantly recognise my punning reference to "Empire of the Senses" , a Japanese film from the Seventies with a very high tut-factor, which I am not going to risk getting a picture from, so wash out your dirty minds.

Title in Japanese is "Ai No Korida"

     What I really want to refer to goes back nearly a century, back to when Perfidious Albion still had an empire, and a globe-spanning one at that, because I have been reading "Action This Day", a collection of essays about Station X and Bletchley Park and the Enigma-codebreakers*.

Bletchley Park: nice digs

     Perfidious Albion, you see, regarded the nascent Sinister Union with a great deal of suspicion, which was well warranted, since the Sinisters sponsored the Communist International, an organisation dedicated to fomenting revolution and civil strife.  Plus they were generally bad eggs all round.  In order to monitor just what malicious fun the Sinisters were plotting, the Government Code and Cipher School eavesdropped on their radio communications from several listening stations on This Sceptred Isle.  They also had outstations in Palestine, and in India, and in Kenya, the better to hear what was being said - which is where the idea of a tally or census comes in.

The British Empire in red.  How ironic

     All these different geographical stations across the world enabled considerable coverage of the Sinisters' radio traffic, and this didn't stop when we suddenly became their allies, instead of the evil Western capitalists, in June 1941, when Hitler proved to be an even better backstabber that The Little Sod With The Moustache**.

A British Typex cipher machine

     I say, motley, should we CRTIJJ  AERTOV  WERINIRT  POKWESEN  WER ONWOE IK?

Sorry To Quote The Barf Of Avon, But - "Brave New World"
Yes, we are back to that list of 51 sci-fi novels you need to read before the robots rise in revolt, shortly to be followed by the zombie apocalypse, and only slightly before the impact of asteroid IPT7640/YHIC.
     Okay, if Art can put down his knife, fork and coalscuttle -

No, I don't know what it is, either.  A Metaphor, I suppose.

     Yes, Your Humble Scribe has read this, a long time ago when (I think) it was given away free with The Guardian, and I don't recall a whole lot about it.  My long-term memory isn't at fault, so it cannot be that memorable a novel any more, even if it was big back in the day (which was 89 years ago, after all).  It was published in 1931, and is supposed to be a depiction of a Dreadful Dystopian Future, because people get to have lots of sex and take plentiful legal drugs <insert wry comment on contemporary society here>, and are conditioned to be happy with their lot in life.  An early take on eugenics and genetic engineering, one would say.  Oh, I say "supposed to be" because this future looks positively rosy as a garden centre compared with Orwell's infinitely bleaker "1984".
     Okay <grits teeth> "Oh brave new world, that has such people in it", from "The Tempest", which gives me an excuse to -

Inspired by "The Tempest"

     I do like to get the taste left by Shakeshaft out of my mouth with a little Altair.

Droogs, Play Yer Glazzies Over This
The more literary amongst you, as well as Kubrick afficionadoes***, will recognise the strange words above as being from "A Clockwork Orange", and you are absolutely right.
     Here an aside.  Did you know that the 'Nadsat' argot Alex and his mates spout is in fact a kind of corrupt Ruffian?  "Droogs" comes from "Druks" or "Mates" and "Glazzies" is from whatever the Ruffian is for "Eyes", and "Horrorshow" is in fact pretty close to the Ruffian for "Very good" which is "Khoroshchow".

Very good at being an horror show

     For Lo! We are back at that Nottingham art gallery showing artworks created from, or based upon, Lego.  Art?

Behold!

     Once again, Your Humble Scribe hopes there are measures - stern, strict measures! - taken to prevent horrid little reptile children from pushing this sculpture over and destroying it in an explosion of bricks, for otherwise, were the builder to be present, there would undoubtedly be an explosion of the old ultra-violence.

Watch out, matey.  That Ludovico is after you.

A New Way To Waste Time Research Stuff
Conrad only last night came across a Youtube channel he'd not seen before, which goes under the generic title "Ask Me Anything", and - of course and obviously! - the first clip he clicked upon was someone who stated they'd served long years as a "missileer" in charge of South Canadian ballistic missiles.
     O boy was it interesting.  There were several unexpected responses to questions.  
     First of all, let us define terms.  There are currently three South Canadian missile fields, in Wyoming, Montana and North Dakota, which is down from the Cold War high of nine.  Each field controls 150 missiles, and there are 90 missileers on duty at any one time in 45 teams of two.  Art?

Who lives in a place like this?

     That's the protective cover over a missile silo.
     So, the answers:
     No, they do not carry sidearms and thus cannot force a reluctant colleague to launch or die.  There is no Big Red Button - rather two keys so far apart that one person cannot turn them both at the same time.  Uniform regulation is lax.  Broken toilets can take many hours to fix as the plumber needs to be either an airman with secret rating or a civilian with same.  To become a missileer you need a college degree, to enter the Air Force and to pass a battery of extremely stringent tests.  So many Air Force entrants want to be fighter pilots that it's not that difficult to approach the Big Bang Bomb guys, though that selection test is a toughie.  There is NO ALCOHOL in what they call "The capsule" or what you and I would describe as the "Underground Bunker", and if I have to explain that then you are Officially Beyond Hope.  

This cannot happen now.  Cannot.  Absolutely can not.  Not in any way.
(Have I made you nervous?)

*  Technically they were cipher-breakers.  Just so you know.
**  Stalin.  That would be ten years in a gulag for me.
***  I could have just said "fans", except that wouldn't have been as impressive.