CAUTION! Atom Bombs At Work!

Believe It Or Not, This Is A Real Thing
We have to go back to the Cold War and the Sinisters, who didn't have to worry about protesters or pollution or plutonium, and their "Peaceful Nuclear Explosions" program, which set off over a hundred nukes in order to generate seismic data, put out underground gas fires, generate camouflets that could be used for disposal of toxic waste and a few other reasons.

The Chagan site detonation

     Their program came to an end in 1989, with a mixed balance sheet of successful detonations and a few highly dangerous contaminations.
     I seem to remember that Piers Anthony's "Triple Detente" also mentioned using nuclear weapons to blast a route through an inconvenient mountain range, although the engineers had to wait for the background count to reduce to levels that Hom. Sap. could survive.

The edition I had

     Then, I recall, in an episode of "Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons", the plot centres around a nuclear weapon civil engineering device that Mysteron agents have stolen and intend to detonate in an underground car park in London.  Which would be bad for London.  Very bad.

Said device

     Anyway, this leads on to what I really wanted to show you.  Over on the Space Opera Facebook page someone posted a link to a Youtube animated clip, and here's a couple of still from it.  Art!

     If you think you've seen this spaceship before, then you're partially right: it is the "Discovery" from "2001: A Space Odyssey", but re-imagined as a Project Orion spaceship, propelled by nuclear bombs fission propulsion devices.  I did try to get a shot of one of these bo - devices detonating, but couldn't - the explosion is over in a fraction of a second and the pause function doesn't have the resolution necessary to capture the frame.
     Because a couple of stills don't do the whole thing justice, please find below a link to the Youtube clip.  It's only 1:42 long but worth watching.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-sWM-nGTsk&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR1J-aBeJsgSvAXiDFgsV6lyDcAXpy8epjwhRpxUQ77T31ObY17oKb4kKoM

     Okay, motley, break out the XBox and we'll tackle Global Thermonuclear War!

Food Fakery
Conrad came across an interesting item on the BBC website earlier today, entitled "The fake 'kitchen hacks' with billions of views".  I don't know if you waste your time watching these things - Your Humble Scribe certainly does not - but if they have millions of views then someone is.
     Reporter Chris Fox tackled some videos that promise remarkable results from out of left field recipes.  Art?

A "Milk carton flan", supposedly

     You add marshmallows and eggs to a carton of milk, shake it up, microwave it for ten minutes and - Hay Pesto!  A flan.  Except not.  Chris followed the recipe to the letter, and then found a major problem.  Art?

     As you can see, his carton is too tall and will not fit.  Conrad would have been tempted to use brute force.  Chris, however, was more analytical.  How did the poster get their carton into the microwave?  Simple.  They cut the bottom off. Art?

     And then stand it upright again.  At this point one begins to realise that the posters are deceitful bottomholes who cannot be trusted.  Chris puts his mixture into a sports shaker that will fit in the microwave and gives it ten minutes.  End result?

Definitely not a flan.

     He bravely takes a taste - a prudently small one - and declares the resulting glop to basically be scrambled eggs.
     Strike one for 'Blossom', the lifestyle channel pushing this fraud.
     We shall come back to this clip, as there's more rowlocks being promoted.

"Pandour"
A word that cropped up in Prof Citino's "The German Way Of War", which I was unfamiliar with.  No!  It is not that cute and tasty* black and white thing from China that eats bamboo.  It is a name given to Croatian militia who served with the Austrian armies of the seventeenth century, who acted as light infantry.  Art?

Pandours.  Nowhere near as cute as pandas.

     They typically operated as skirmishers, ahead of the main columns and lines of the Austrian army, as well as raiding baggage trains and ambushing small bodies of enemy troops.  They weren't intended to indulge in stand-up battles, rather to make an utter nuisance of themselves and spread alarm and despondency in their opponents.  It would take the deployment of an awful lot more enemy troops than there were pandours present to stop their spiteful activities, which would again influence how many enemy were present at the climactic battle.

Likke Till!
Which is Norwegian for "Good luck!" and is the one thing I remember from watching "When Worlds Collide" with Norwegian subtitles present.  Because why not?
      Anyway, thanks to "Ragnarok" I have learned another Norwegian word: "Mjod".
     It's the Norwegian for "Mead", that delicious alcoholic beverage made by fermenting honey, and which is thus very very high in sugar content and which I cannot thus have TAKK SKAL DU HAR SA MYE DIABETES! (Which is Norwegian for THANK YOU SO MUCH DIABETES!)

<gazes adoringly>

     This is exactly what you'd need to wash down a couple of panda-burgers* beef-burgers with, alongside a plate of baby pearl potatoes and lashings of spinach.
     Dammit, now I've made myself hungry.  Better crack on with this and get some tea on the go.

Finally -
Once again, I'm not sure how I got here, but I was checking out the lyrics to that Hawkwind ditty "PXR5", which is a track on their eponymous album.  Art?

Look away!  Look away!

     This is the unexpurgated cover, because if you look closer you can see that the plugs are incorrectly wired.  There was a considerable hoohah about this and the albums had to be sent out with a sticker covering this EVIL WIRING DIAGRAM THAT IS ENSNARING OUR YOUTH ON THE PRIMROSE PATH TO HELL*, or something like that.  Because it is a well-known fact that electricians rely on album covers to do their job, or something like that.

     And with that, we are most certainly done.  Done done done!


*  Bad Conrad!  Naughty Conrad!