Getting High

I Mean - OF COURSE!
Ascending to many miles in altitude thanks to being a passenger in an airliner.  What, did you have some other interpretation?
     This is a bit of a Stream-of-Consciousness posting, as it was triggered by an item on the BBC's website that I only spotted a few minutes ago, so we might be here for another thirty words, or another three thousand.  I guess we'll find out.
     Anyway, if Art will put down his plate of coke - 
     - what was that snigger at the back?  Allow me to illustrate exactly what our resident Neanderthal was eating -

Delicious.  To Art, anyway.

     Ah, silence from the audience.  You were thinking of this evening's title again, weren't you?  Get your minds out of the gutter!  Art!

"Pilot shortage: who's going to fly our planes?"

     Well there's a question and a half.  
     Which we will come back to after this aside.  Take a good look at those cockpit instruments: they're all digital and, to be frank, utterly dull and boring. What Conrad remembers with fond regard is all the fantastic electro-mechanical hardware that was around prior to the 21st Century.  I may have banged on about this in referring to "Doctor Strangelove".  Art?

CAUTION! Pressing the wrong button may trigger World War Three

     Lookit all them dials and switches and levers and buttons <pauses to wipe his suddenly sweaty palms> that you have to crank and press and pull, and note that there are eight levers there and a BUFF* has eight engines -
     How much more romantic they seem as compared to a touch-screen with a percentage bar.
     Anyway, about who is going to fly our planes? - if the ecopotties get their way then there won't be any planes to worry about, and then the Chemtrail Conspiracy Loonwaffles will have won.

The phenomenon

     I think we need another aside here, as (presumably) most of you are rational people and not Patent Swivel-Eyed Bampot Numpties.  Okay, the CCLs believe that, when you see an aircraft contrail, you are not seeing water condensing into a visible vapour thanks to cold air; no, you are seeing the - actually the details are a little vague as to whom is doing the chemtrailing or why and certainly not how - chemicals being sprayed to kill or dumb down the population.  The latter part seems to have worked.  This is so silly on so many levels that OF COURSE lots of bumbletucks believe it, and if you try to argue them out of it then, why, you are part of the conspiracy too.  Art?

July 1940: the Luftwaffe lays it's deadly chemtrails

     One wonders exactly why the LW would bother with chemtrails when it was using, you know, actual bombs.  Nor did Perfidious Albion mention the sinister Nazi chemical weapons being used upon it, when in real life such information would have been shouted to the heavens, with a weather eye cast upon South Canada to see how they took it.
     Where were we?
     Oh, yes, pilots.  Okay, "Who's going to fly our planes?"  
     The planes, stupid.  In the same way that a generation from now our cars are all going to drive themselves, in a couple of generations our planes are going to be flying themselves.  Seriously.  Art?

The Sinister's "Buran" shuttle

     If you were able to magnify that photo a thousand times, it would reveal that there was NOBODY in the cockpit.  Yep, this Ruffian invention went up and came down entirely on remote control, and that was 30 years ago; I believe that today's most modern civilian aircraft can indeed take off, cruise and land unassisted, the crew only there in a supervisory capacity.
     Erk!  Over halfway done on an item that came up only minutes before typing commenced.  Motley, you break left and I'll break right and together we'll get that last Messerschmitt.

I Explicate It So You Don't Have To
I have just finished "The Stand" by that up-and-coming young man Stephen King, and have bothered to note down things that may be crystal-clear to residents of South Canada, but which are murky or mysterious to people in the Outer Darkness, or Perfidious Albion.  Or, indeed, to other residents of South Canada, because it's an enormous place and what is common knowledge in one region is utterly unknown in another.
     So!  We come to Richard Speck, who is briefly mentioned, and who was a loathsome individual responsible for multiple murders, and that's as far as that goes.  Then there is "Table Mesa tract house".  Art?

Table Mesa

     What I didn't realise is that "Table Mesa" is a district of Boulder, rather than an architectural style.  Tract housing?  What we here in the Allotment of Eden would call a housing estate - a whole lot of similar houses in close proximity.
     Also, Boulder is about a mile above sea level.  That "Getting high" thing again.

Hello Dimya!  What's Your Poison?
I am, of course, being shockingly disrespectful towards Tsar Putin here, and I don't care, which probably annoys him even more.
    To what do I refer?  Well, the Great Patriotic War, of course.  Just as Doctor Johnson perceptively noted several centuries ago, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" and O Boy! do we see that working in Dimya**.  TGPW is what the Sinisters called the Second World War, because they began it by helping the Nazis, and then sat it out for several years.  Art?

     This sounds very dry, doesn't it?  Allow me to elucidate you and state that about 30% of all the "Sinister" tanks fighting in the defence of Moscow in December 1941 were British.  Sent there by Perfidious Albion (in case you were wondering).  Post-war, of course, the Sinisters lied through their teeth about this, as they would rather have drunk poison than admit 1) They helped the Nazis in 1939 and 2) British aid was any help at all.  
     Dimya is mentioned here as he is trying to wrap himself in the flag, and anything that might reveal an inconvenient truth about the past has to be stamped stamped stamped upon.  Keep on stamping, Dimya, you might earn postage points.

A British Valentine tank in Ruffian service.
(They loved these; they were so easy to maintain)

     Okay, now we've annoyed all the above, time to head back to "The Expanse" Season Four!


*  USAF acronym for "Big Ugly Fat Fella" a.k.a. a B-52 bomber
**  "Dimya" is the familiar diminutive of "Vladimir" in Ruffian; only his very bestest mates are allowed to call him this.  If he has any.