The Abuse Of A Bus

Here You Will See More Of Conrad's FROTHING NITRIC IRE!
Perhaps we ought to upgrade that to CONRAD'S FROTHING CHLORINE-TRIFLOURIDE IRE! because there are few chemicals more terrifying or dangerous that ClFl3.
     If you recall, this hideous substance was discovered in 1820, yet found no practical use until the Sixties, where it was used to scour circuit boards clean.  It was once described as "The chemical too deadly for the Nazis to use", as they stockpiled it for use against enemy fortifications, and then had second thoughts.

Prospective target

     Once again, let us shudder delightfully as we recount the sheer horror of ClFl3, the most powerful fluorinating agent know to man.  This stuff can only be kept in a very limited number of containers that experience an oxidation on their inner surface; thus the actual Hell Chemical does not directly contact the metal.  All good?  Yes, unless the container undergoes any kind of stress or trauma, because that will breach the oxide layer on the inside.  If a flake of oxide is shed, or a shear line forms and exposes bare metal - why, then you have a fluorine-metal fire! which is best dealt with by running very far away very quickly.




     Chlorine Triflouride will spontaneously set fire to things that have no business igniting.  Concrete?  Ablaze!  Sand?  Ablaze!  Water? An enormous explosion that creates two deadly acids that will dissolve you from the inside out and the outside in!  Glass?  Ablaze?  Ashes?  Ablaze!  Yes, this stuff will set alight the ashes of something that has already been burned.  In the case of an accident in a chemical storage warehouse, a ton of ClFl3 was voided from a container that was dropped from a forklift.  This stuff ate through a yard of concrete flooring, and on into the soil below; the responders dealt with it by evacuating everyone to a mile distant and waiting until it had all been reacted with.
     Which has nothing to do with First Bus.  O noes.  You see, I was at the bus stop this morning by 06:15, ready for the 06:20 bus, and I chose to walk to the more distant bus stop atop the hill because it was chucking it down.  Art?

A day of dismal downpour

     I think you can get an idea of how depressingly disgustrous it was.  And - the bus didn't turn up.  
     The next one was late, unsurprisingly, because it had to pick up all the passengers who were waiting for the 06:20 bus, meaning that I only got into Gomorrah-in-the-Irwell with enough time to spare to make a pot of tea.  No toast or waffles until an hour later.  Art?

Please note entire absence of bus

     I promise, when I take over, the first people into those (blunted!)  Compost Shredders will be First Bus executives, and they will be washed down into those coffers with a ton of ClFl3.
     I say, motley, shall we have a cream tea with strawberries?

Bitten By The Coincidence Hydra - AGAIN
This item has a bit of a history.  Okay, Listy over on his blog (which is a whole heck of a lot more sensible than BOOJUM!) has an entire article devoted to the Merchant Navy of Perfidious Albion during the Second Unpleasantness.  By chance I had been reading "An Englishman At War", being the diaries of Stanley Christopherson, and he had been extolling the virtues of the Merchant Navy in maintaining Tobruk during the Great  Siege.

Sorry about the kilometers

     No, that's not the Coincidence.  Listy went on to mention that the MN was made up of people from across the globe, including - women! and might even include people from countries that were actually at war with the British, such as the Japanese.
     This is where Kenji Takaki comes in.  He was Japanese, and came to This Sceptred Isle from Japan in search of a better life, whereupon he joined the MN.  After a long and interesting career at sea, which included being taken prisoner by the Teutons and put in a PoW camp, he went into - acting!  Obviously.  He was much in demand in war films, where he played - Japanese soldiers!  Including "A Town Called Alice".
     What was one of the lead items on the Beeb's website yesteryon?  A huge collection of film posters being sold.  What was one of the posters O-so-prominently featured?

THE COINCIDENCE HYDRA STRIKES AGAIN!
(Kindly get your teeth out of my nethers, Hydra)

     Conrad is unsure exactly what ATCA is about, though probably not civil architecture and road planning.
Vic-Torious
Ouch.  I refer - obviously! - to that pioneering ghostbuster Vic Tandy, he who discovered the Fear Factor Frequency.  That is to say, sounds at 19 Decibels or lower cannot be heard by humans, but they have a definite effect on the bodies of Hom. Sap., bringing on hallucinations in the peripheral vision, trembling, sweating and nausea - as said, all the sounds of fear.

Hmmmm
<taps fingers on Tazer but doesn't use it>

     One location he was asked to test was Warwick Castle, a splendid post-medieval pile with scads of ghosts and ghost stories attached.  Art?

Very castle-y

     And guess what?  He found very high levels of infrasound present.  This could be due to two factors: electro-mechanical equipment generating oscillations at 19 Db, by design or accident; or parts of the physical structure acting to create a standing wave if, for example, winds of a particular speed or direction move over the structure.
     Ghosts solved!
Finally -
I didn't take any photos so you'll just have to roll with me on this one.  You hopefully remember Ann Reardon, whom I think is a professor in food science, and her Youtube channel "How To Cook That", which puts some serious effort into debunking fake food videos on Youtube.  Art?

Words don't quite fail me

     She followed the recipe that "5 Minute Crafts" posted on YT, and found she needed to add a lot more ACTIVATED CHARCOAL (yes you read that correctly, charcoal) to make the ice cream black rather than grey.
     She was careful to give the resulting disgusting grey sludge to "Dave" for testing.
     Dave tested.  Dave did not like.  "It tastes weird.  And gritty," was his observation.
     The black sludge went down the drain.

And with that we are done!