Gadzooks!

And Demme!
Plus other appropriately obsolete swears.  For today I have dusted off the historical miniature replicas that are so NOT toy soldiers, dug out a rulebook and am preparing to game a wargame of the English Civil War.
     Here an aside.  Civil wars are notorious for being as uncivil as it's possible to get; for some reason having a go at your brother really brings out the worst in people.  As an example, the Ruffians lost SIX TIMES as many people in their civil war as they did in the First Unpleasantness, and it went on for longer, too.  Inevitably, the Sinisters used it as a means of legitimising themselves, so in a couple of years expect Tsar Putin to be banging on about how he defeated the evil capitalist swines way back in 1919*.

"Nobody took the Bolsheviks seriously at first.  It was the hats."

      Our own English Civil War is sufficiently long ago that we can look back on it with a certain fond regard, and a bit of a sneer at the foppish wags in floppy hats.  So - you want evidence?  Art!

      Several boxes of bits, along with the inevitable paste-table-covered-with-cloth to serve as the gaming table.  Oh, and that's "The Wolf Brigade", a depressing anime saga coming to it's depressing conclusion.  It's supposedly set in an alternative Fifties Japan, and the military hardware is all Teuton Second Unpleasantness issue -
     Where were we?  O yes -

     This is a ruleset from Peter Pig's "Rules For The Common Man" range, which go for the simple-and-playable ethos; they always insist it's trickier to come up with a simple game system than one with oodles of charts and tables and subsets.  They may be right.  Anyway, I've only used this ruleset once, years ago, when my ECW stuff was on flimsy plastic bases and in small numbers.  We shall see if having them based en masse on sturdy MDF renders the rules unplayable or not.

      Motley, what say I poke you with a pike?

More Of Militaria
Your Humble Scribe distinctly recalls another ruleset, possibly "Panzer Marsch!", where the Close Support tanks of Perfidious Albion's desert forces were only allowed to fire smoke shells, rather than High Explosive.  They (the rulemakers) allege there was historical precedent to back this up, which Conrad has always been suspicious of.

Conrad, to whom suspicion comes naturally

     I suppose a little explanation is required here.  Before Perfidious Albion got her hot sweaty hands on the South Canadian Grant or Sherman tanks, her own tanks lacked the ability to fire HE shells, as they were armed with the 2 pounder, that could only fire solid armour-piercing shot.  This was known to be a bad thing, because you need HE shells to deal with stuff like dug-in infantry or machine gun nests or swinish Axis passing the port to the left, that sort of ruckus.  So!  A certain number of tanks were given a 3 inch howitzer, which could fire HE shells very handily.  The A10 on display at Bovvie is a CS version.  Art?

Thus

     Now, I have been reading Stanley Christopherson's diaries, and in the pursuit that came post-Alamein he was in charge of a CS Crusader, when the regiment happened across a Teuton rearguard.  Ol' Stan got out on the flank and proceeded to shoot up a 50 mm anti-tank gun.  So, rulebook - it might have been "Blitzkrieg Commander" - take that and put it in your pipe.   And do not, as Stan did, make the mistake of putting said lit pipe in a trouser pocket ...

A Bit Late To The Party
Typical, hmmm?  This should have gone with that prescient and well-informed review of "The Thing", and why the mincing work-shy fops who bruited themselves around as "Film critics" hated it when it came out, yet who now fawn over it and hope nobody with a long memory happens to be around.  Did I mention I went and saw it at the cinema?  Art!

     Besides, I think that "Cats" must have staked an inalienable right to that title in quotes.

I Think It's Time For A Little Monster -
Another referral to that list which Abebooks cobbled together many weeks ago, and which we have been dipping into when the muse fails to come up with the goods.  Today we have -

This

     The small blurb underneath describes the titular short story as being about a sea monster in outer space, and Conrad would just like to point out that Polyphemus was one of the cyclops, who liked nothing more than to dine on freshly-killed human.  So, having not read one word of "Polyphemus", I shall merely note that it, too, has but a single eye, and that any humans in the story are likely to be seen merely as Edible Menu Items.  Nor do I think you'd walk away if Ol' Polly got at all huggy with you.  Still, horses for courses.

Finally -
We only need a short item to hit the Compositional Ton - no thanks to Euphrosyne or Terpsichore, the slackers - so I am not going to go into too much depth (hah!) about the Hay Inclined Plane.  This was one method used in times past to raise canal traffic from one water level to another, because rivers and canals will insist on going their own sweet ways.  In common with other such engineering features, the HIP was superceded by other forms of transport, such as the railway.  Let us see what there is left of it.  Art?

At the bottom

     Canal barges would be loaded on a cradle, which was winched up or down the inclined plane, and deposited in the upper or lower canal branch.  Art?

Yes, it's only a model.

     There don't seem to be any photographs or daguerrotypes of the HIP in operation back in it's heyday, so you'll have to make do with the model and the grassily overgrown remnants that there are today.

     And with that, we are done!

*  Don't laugh.  Laughing is treason <laughs>