Well There Yugo

It Was Only A Matter Of Time
Before this came up as a pun, after this week's earlier "Well There You Go".  I did a little bit of background checking about the Yugo, because it is a car, and Your Humble Scribe maintains his wilful ignorance about the Boxes With A Wheel At Each Corner.  For one, it was widely despised as one of the worst cars ever.  Art?

The humble and unpretentious Yugo

     It was some kind of licence-made copy of an Italian Fiat design, and was what one might call "basic".  You didn't have to pedal it, but just about.  I don't know what the fuss was, back in the Sinister Union this would have been a luxury motor that you'd be on the waiting list for years before getting a chance to buy -
     Anyway, the build quality could be highly variable depending on when you bought your Yugo; however, with regular maintenance these roller skates could live a long and productive life.  There are still 50,000 of them driving around in Serbia, after all.

But not if Mister Clarkson gets his way

     I think one of them is a kind of visual pun in "Dragnet" after Tom Hanks and Dan Ackroyd have destroyed their way through an array of other official police vehicles.
     Enough of cars!  Let us move on to - O hang on, I've got to let the motley out of the boot of ours.  It was an experiment to see if pedestrians could hear it screaming*.

Ah, those zany East European artists, eh?

Another One For The Haul
Conrad got his last order of his latest book tranche yesterday, "Death of the Wehrmacht", by that military historian's military historian, Robert Citino.  Conrad, as is his wont with every book he buys that possesses a bibliography, had to go through and tick off the ones he already has, because he is a sad completist anorak.  Art?

The cover

My tell-tale marks
(Note Toozey's work to starboard)

      Somewhat to my surprise, I had a lot of the works he lists.  None of the stuff Ol' Bob put down that's written in Teuton; that's the difference between him and I - he's a proper academic, I am the living definition of "dilettante".

     Look out!  It's the -

 - Ginnungagap.

The Circle Works
For Lo! are not back to discussing boat lifts?  Indeed we are, and today we cast our bloodshot optics at the Falkirk Wheel, one of only two active boat lifts in the UK today, and a far more impressive specimen than the Anderton Boat lift.  Art?  Panorama!

Cameron Lyall's panoramic picture

     The big idea was to connect the canals that run between Glasgow and Edinburgh, which have a big height differential between them.   Rather than use a system of locks, a boat lift was decided upon, and it had to be a boat lift unlike any other.  So - Art?

One at top and bottom

     Here you can see each of the caissons has a boat in it.  Once these are properly positioned, watertight gates shut each caisson off, and the whole wheel begins to rotate, with the caissons gimballed in the arm so they remain horizontal at all times, all 500 tons of them.  Art?

The view from downstream

     This is the wheel at rest, where it has either completed it's 1800 sweep, or is yet to make it.  Let us catch it in mid-rotation.  Art!

Halfway there

     Here you can see the watertight barriers keeping the water in; the boat to starboard is ascending, the one to port descending, which is apparent by virtue of seeing which has gone into the caisson stern rearwards.  Also visible is the gearing that keeps each caisson horizontal within the wheel; you most emphatically do not want 450 tons of water slopping around as it's being lifted.  Note also the crowd of onlookers in the background behind the fencing, all doubtless going "Ooooh!" and "Aaaah!" and "Gosh this brings back fond memories of seminars about the Scottish Englightement".

Rotation nearly completed

     The structure is designed to last for 120 years, so you aren't going to be around when it gets put out to pasture.  Of course by then we'll have teleportation gates that will move objects of any size to anywhere on the planet**.

Back To Another Series - "Top 50 Television Science Fiction Shows"
Conrad only hopes you can forgive him for constantly referring back to lists like this.  I mean, it's not as if you have to pay for any of this, is it?  Though a complementary Comment or two wouldn't go amiss HINT HINT.
     Okay, we are now down to Number Forty  - "The Six Million Dollar Man".  Art?

Steve Austin running fast in slow-motion

     All Conrad ever caught of this series were occasional glimpses, as it was not deemed popular in the household, so it has rather passed him by.  However, it was such a cultural phenomenon that even he knows about it - and I think I did see the pilot, which had Darren McGavin as a rather cantankerous old git in charge of things?
     One of my friends at school had read the book the television series was based on, and could (annoyingly!) quote chapter and verse about what was difference.  FYI, the television Steve had bionic legs, a bionic left arm, a bionic eye with range and infra-red options and a geiger counter built into said bionic arm.  The novel version's eye was only a camera, incapable of vision, and he had a poison-dart gun built into a finger.

"In his time off, Steve liked nothing more than to twiddle dials."

     Allegedly the studio had a list of feats that Steve was and was not capable of, e.g. he can jump two stories high, but not three.  Your humble scribe wonders if it would be profitable to go through all five seasons and analyse every feat of strength or skill and see if they pass muster.  Or is that just me?

Finally -
This will all make sense once I post it on Facebook.  Art?

Circular spooled cassettes of acetate

*  And do you know what?  They couldn't.  Then again, our boot is soundproofed.
**  Just like the Krell.  After all, what can possibly go wrong?