If I Were To Say "River In The Sky"

You Might Be Forgiven For Thinking That I Was Quoting A Song Lyric
After all, there is that folk-rock band The Weepies, an appropriately soggy name for people going on about extreme precipitation in song form.

Quickly!  A hankie for the lady!

     Then again, I might be musing about the weather here in Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell (only "on" and not "in" since we have had a spell of unseasonably bright and sunny weather of late), because as you know the green and mossy-backed denizens of this metropolis have to regularly endure the Atlantic falling in sheets from the sky.  Art?

Hard to tell what's the canal and what's not

     In fact I refer to another ship lift, and you'll see what I mean about a river, and the sky, in a moment.  Art?

Behold the boat lift!

     This 200,000 ton monster is at Strepy-Thieu in Belgium, and connects the River Scheldt to the River Meuse.  There are two locks within, which operate independently.  Here's a view from the upstream side.  Art?

     Clearly inspired by the designs of futurologist Gerry Anderson.  The overall idea is very simple; boats or barges float into the lock at one level, the locks seals and then either descends or ascends, the barriers are raised and the riverine traffic goes on about it's business.  I'm not going to bombard you with a whole slew of figures, only that the difference in water levels is over 70 yards, and that each lock masses a minimum of 7,000 tons when carrying a boatload.  Art?

The downstream lock barrier descends

     This is from inside the lock having just taken aboard a downstream vessel.  The barrier is being lowered to seal the water and boats inside.   Next!

     The ascent begins.  The videos you can see on Youtube film this in either timelapse or speed up several times, as the whole upwards or downwards journey takes seven minutes, or ten yards a minute, or about a third of a mile per hour.  Speedy they are not!  Art?

Counterweights

     Yes, those big rectangular things are indeed counterweights, these ones going down as the lock goes up, and they will rest at ground level when the lock has reached the upstream position.  Art?

Approaching upstream

     As is apparent here, the ascending lock is about to reach the final position where it mates with the upstream release.  Apologies for the lack of clarity in this video, it wasn't that clear to begin with and putting it into full-screen mode hasn't helped make it any less muddy.  Art?

Free!  Free at last!

     The upstream barrier has been raised, allowing the boat to move out and onto the river.  You can see the water falling from the raised barrier, which is why the folks out in the open on the boat kept their hoods up.
     You can have a few more figures.  The volume of traffic on the two rivers has increased nine-fold since the ship lift opened in 2002, and well over two million tons of shipping pass through it annually.
     There you go, the fascinating world of ship lifts.  Go on, admit it, you're impressed, aren't you?

Sorry I couldn't find any puny humans for scale

     Motley, let's recreate this with <thinks> duct tape, cardboard and gallons of water*!

"Gamut"
It was a Cryptic crossword answer, before you ask.  I've heard and seen it in use, because I've read so much, yet never until today had I wondered where it came from.
     "The full range, as of emotions," defined my Collins Concise.  It went further.  "14C.  From medieval Latin, "Gamma", the lowest note of the hexachord as determined by Guido D'Arezzo."  Oh, him.  Art?

Peculiarly appropriate.  Also, Coincidence Hydra time <winces>

     You added Gamma and the first note of said scale, which used to be Ut.  The sequence went Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si - so with the whole thing you had a gamut.  "Ut" was changed to "Doh", and there you have the Hawkwind album title above.  Which was a large part of the "Space Ritual" album I was going on about a couple of moons ago.
     This is proof, if more were needed, that the Universe is conspiring against me.

The Coincidence Hydra.  Staple diet: Conrad's tender hind-quarters.

The Youth Of Yesteryear
Ah, me, what a fruitful source of entertainment r/AskReddit is.  I have a NuclearRevenge story that I shall have to blue-pencil a bit before posting, as it involves salaciousness; in the meantime I was reading what South Canadian students got up to in high school, where "got up to" means up to and including "malicious property damage and actual bodily harm".  These sort of things used to happen at the end of the senior's last term, as a kind of Rude Salute to their educational establishment.  Art?

This kinda place

     There was one which seems to have all the hallmarks of an urban legend: the seniors would release three (or four) pigs into the school, and paint numbers on their backs, viz: 1,2 and 4 (or 1,2,3 and 5).  The school janitors, custodians and teachers would thus spend days if not weeks searching for that missing pig, because they are so stupid and had never heard of such a prank ever in the history of South Canadian high schools.  Or something.

It's already a meme, for heaven's sake!

     Conrad wonders if this event ever actually happened.  Because he is a grumpy old empiricist.

Finally - 
I only need a short article to hit the Compositional Ton, so I shall only add in the bare bones of an article I intend to do more justice to at length and a later date.  Okay, there is a company in South Canada called the "Black Rifle Coffee Company", who make -
     - videos of current and ex-military South Canadians commenting on war films and how unrealistic they are.  And coffee, as well.  Art?

A big fan of that British radio program -

     Here is Matt, the owner, who decided he was going to do Rambo's exploding arrows in real life.  This is a much bigger challenge than it might seem at first, for all sorts of technical reasons, the principal one being Not Getting Killed, which we will definitely be going into in more detail.  Because what's not to like about Exploding Arrows?

     And with that we are most definitely done!

*  Tomorrow I'll see if anyone has done the same in Lego

Your Love Keeps Lifting Me Higher

No!  I Am Not Referring To That Soppy Love Song 
By some darts player, if I remember correctly.  I'm a bit hazy on the details, not being particularly attentive when bland songs from the Sixties get excessive airtime in this, the Twenty-First Century.  Honestly, we can put a man on Mars, but we cannot come up with better radio playlists?  

Remarkable!  A pop music career and a professional athlete.  Where did he find the time?

     And that's not all I've got to yark on about today when it comes to sports.  I am currently nibbling away at a very difficult Cryptic Crossword in my Reader's Digest compendium.  Let me show you the - sorry, what's that?  No, we haven't put a -
     OKAY FORGET I EVER SAID THAT OR WROTE IT <damn chronometric confusion> er - what I meant was "We will put man on Mars" sometime in 2034 - er - perhaps 2034 -

What it will may look like.

     Back to the crossword - the clue was "Vain court star in America (7)".  Of course I deduced that the "America" bit was "US" so we had U _ _ _ _ _ S, and I went all about the houses until deciding that what they meant as "Vain" should have been "IN vain", or, in other words, USELESS.  
     So, then, what the blue blinking brainstorm was SELES?  I Googled it, just to see if there was anything to find and Hay Pesto! - Monica Seles, Yugoslavian tennis star of the Nineties.

     HOW THE FNORPING BUMBLETUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THIS!!

     It's a measure of how cross I was that you get two exclamation marks there.

Monica.  And no, you do not get to see her immodestly short skirt.

     Where were we?
     O yes, the Krasnoyarsk Dam.  Art?

Sic

     As you can see, it blocks the river completely, so shipping cannot get through it, or else it would be a bridge.
     However, those Ruffians can be pretty smart cookies when untrammelled by idiot politicians breathing down their necks.  They realised that they could build a ship lift that would physically transport vessels in a moving dock, up over the dam and down the other side, allowing riverine transport, hooray!
     Whilst quite elegant in theory, the practice was quite daunting.  But they did it.  And now we come to today's title, except for "Love" please substitute "Ship Lift".  Art?

     Here we see a barge loaded with Big Heavy Industrial-Looking Things, being floated into the mobile dock, with the dock in it's submerged position on the downriver side of the dam.  Art?

     The mobile dock now moves backwards up the railway.  Art?

     Looking up the ship lift railway from the downstream side as the dock sloooooowly moves upwards.  Note the trees to the side; it appears to be autumn.  Art?

     
     This is the faintly terrifying prospect from the road beneath the dock as it moves slooooowly forward.  I don't know about you, but the sight of something that massive at least fifty feet overhead gives me the billy crins.  In fact I think my billy crins have billy crins.  Art?

      Another moment of existential terror.  Here the whole enormous dock is rotated through 1800, so that when it descends the upstream side of the dam, the barge will be able to float out without any kind of tricky manoeuvring required.  Art?

     Here the dock is on the upstream side of the dam, as you can see from the view to port.  I have a close-up for you -

     See that small box-like structure slightly north of centre?  And the indistinct vertical blob next to it?  That's a puny human, for scale.  Just so you know how freaking enormous this thing really is.  Finally -

     Fully immersed, the dock is now able to let the barge float free, with the assistance of a couple of tugs.
     Now, you can't have followed any of that and not been impressed, can you?  I think we might come back to ship lifts, they're impressively big engineering thingies.  I wonder how many others there are across the globe?
     Motley, let's re-enact this using the stairlift and a barrel of water*!

Excuse me, I just have to add this in here in order for it to make sense on Facebook.  Art?

I really don't have to tell you who this is, do I?

     If you're unsure, just think of someone who hates Japan so much that they regularly stamp it flat.  Turning it into an - er - Japancake.

If I Were To Say "Pole Barn" -
You would, given that this is BOOJUM! expect some cheesy pun or picture along the lines of that below - Art?

Behold the barn

     Actually - NO.  I came across the term in an r/AskReddit post about Prorevenge (which is a quantum level below Nuclearrevenge), where a builder had skipped out on completing a pole barn for the poster, who was a farmer.
     A pole barn, it seems, is (usually) a wooden structure that doesn't need a foundation; it is based on posts that are individually set in concrete, meaning it can be erected on all kinds of land unsuitable, or just really expensive, for a full concrete foundation. The rest is made of wood panelling.  Art?

Pole barn carport.

     And now we all know more than we did five minutes ago.
     Oh, that revenge poster?  Through remarkably persistent detective work, they tracked down the errant builder and offered them a choice: finish the barn or face prosecution.  They completed the barn!

And Now - An Internet Cliche
I shan't apologise; in these dark times even a smidgeon of amusement is welcomed.  So, for many years a set of small cookbooks have stood upon our worktop, being more a decoration than a resource.
     Until last night, when I took out the "Potato" one and looked through for recipes I could work with.  Hay Pesto - Spanish Tortilla!  Art?

Those are the recipe books in the background.  Note gap because "Potato" is out being used.

     And you know what, it was pretty tasty.  Also veggie, for those out there who like that sort of thing.
     Also, whilst on the subject of food, and in exactly the same spot, the literal fruits of my shopping endeavours this morning.  Art?

     So we now have SEVEN onions and SEVEN tomatoes!  Truly, my cup runneth over.  Or - well, my cupboard, anyway.

This will all make sense on Facebook, honest.
       





*  What can possibly go wrong?

Dam Ruffians!

As A Counterpoint To Today's Earlier Post
This whole item was triggered when I spotted an update by the endlessly fascinating "Ushanka Show" on Youtube, a channel I heartily recommend if you have any interest at all in the former Sinister Union, as Sergei, who runs the channel, lived there up until 1995.  He has a lot of insights that the Sinisters would not have liked the Evil Capitalist West to know - like the Three Strangers Rule, where three perfect strangers pool their money to purchase a litre bottle of vodka and then proceed to get pie-eyed on it.  Or maybe only a bit tipsy; them Ruffians can handle their drink.

Mum did the weekly shop -

     Actually that's very naughty of me, and I shouldn't stereotype like that, except it's so hilarious to see that vein in Dimya's temple throb so.
     Okay, let us balance the modest ridicule of our Slavic brethren with some honest admiration.  
     Siberia!  Which is what makes up a very great deal of Ruffia and has done for centuries.  It used to be the destination for those exiled from European Ruffia back in Tsarist days, and is still only lightly sprinkled with human populations.  The Sinisters, back in the Fifties, when they were attempting to engineer everything and cover the map with concrete, saw an hydroelectric opportunity at the Yenisei River in Siberia.  Art?

Thus

     They realised that there was potential for damming the river and thus creating hydroelectric power, which, once you've built your dam, is FREE!  And nothing gets a government interested more than the word FREE, with or without an exclamation mark*.  Art?

The river, with flowery backdrop

     It took them years to construct the dam, with more turbines being added up until 1972, and they'd started in 1956.  To date there have been no safety issues, leaks, collapses, deaths or anything untoward with the dam, which is probably why you've never heard of it.  Art?

With puny human cars for scale**.

     Given that the dam has created a huge artificial lake, there has been significant impact on the local environment, with frequent fogbanks created when masses of air with different temperatures collide.  Also, since the water released by the dam is above freezing, the Yenisei doesn't freeze downstream of Krasnoyarsk for hundreds of miles.
     The tale is not over yet, because the Sinister engineers also constructed a ship lift.  Art?

Thus

     We are going to go into a lot more detail about this incredible bit of engineering - but not today.
     There.  I think I've been positive enough for anyone east of the River Bug to forgive those cracks about vodka.

Except Dimya.  He's a bit of a harder sell.

     Sorry, no comments for the motley; it fell in the lake whilst we were fishing, swallowed a lot of water and had to have it's integument flensed before getting an internal activated carbon flush.

This Is Matchless
Whilst poking around the corners of Youtube last night - hey, it's lockdown, a man's got to have some hobbies - I came across one that looked legitimate, although it might have been bodged together in some way.  It was done mostly in time-lapse, for reasons that will become very clear as we go on.  Art?

      This is being constructed out of thousands and thousands of matches.  You probably can't tell what it is at the moment, and I shan't keep you in suspense.  Art?

No!  Not a light bulb.

     It's a cannon.  Got that?  As in an artillery piece that fires a cannonball.  Art!

Obviously

     The creator then added a few thousand trimmed matchsticks as the projectile, and by now you must realise why it was done in time-lapse, as the whole thing must have taken hours to construct, in between leaving the glue to set. He then took his artefact out to a - well, I hope it was distant and deserted spot - then set up a trail of vertical matchsticks that led to the cannon.  He lit them and moved away apace, which was only sensible.  Art?

The eruption begins

     You can see things beginning to kick off here as the cannon starts to both ignite and prepares to launch it's payload.  Art?

      This whole sequence lasted about a second.  He did film it from four different camera angles and played each back in slow-motion, getting a bit more mileage from the event.  Predictably, there was little left of the cannon.  Art?

The sad remnants

     Some people have altogether too much time on their hands***.
     Oh, as you may have noticed, if I go to Full Screen on these Youtube videos then the synchrony bars that have been an issue disappear.  There is still the reflection of some white-haired old duffer to cope with.  Sorry about that.

Back To Rolling Stone's List And Number 43 -
The Man In The High Castle.  Art?

      Conrad started watching this when it came out but didn't follow up on it and would now have to start back from scratch, which is not altogether a bad thing.  I recall seeing adverts for it on the way into work one morning and was utterly flabbergusted - like flabbergasted but even more so - that it ever got made.  I mean, Philip K. Dick has been pretty successfully filmed in the past, but a television series where the Axis won the Second Unpleasantness?  It ran for three seasons and created a world with a lot more depth and twists than PKD had managed.  You know, I shall have to track it down and start from S1Ep1 again.  What a chore***!

An in-joke

This will all make sense on Facebook, honest -

Finally -
A small anecdote to help us hit the Compositional Ton.  Your Humble Scribe set his alarm for 08:00 this morning, then wickedly stayed in bed for another 20 minutes, before getting up, getting dressed and re-posting the blog links on Facebook and Twitter.  Then I ambled into the kitchen to get a pot of tea going, and a mushroom and cheese toastie.  As I put the toastie into the microwave I noticed the display.  "09:42" and at first I thought someone had set it to cook and not zeroed the clock.
     No such thing.  I paid attention to my Fitbit and it was indeed 09:42, because all the digital kit around the house had automatically updated.     So, yes, bah!

Yeah, yeah, mock away

     I think Horologia is getting it's own back for me going on about smashing clocks to bits yesteryon.  Just you wait, clocks; I'll get my own back.  O yes indeed.

     And with that, we are done.


*  "Mark" not "Point".  South Canadians take note.
**  Big sucker, isn't it?
***  This is irony.