We Are Living In The Future

But Of Course!
I hear you reply.  "The future, one second at a time, right?"
Wrong.  You see what happens when you assume?  You make mistakes.
     No, I do not mean literally, but metaphorically.  It struck me as I was looking at the Space-X Dragon capsule; this is 2020, our present.  How did people of the past see our present or their future?
     Okay, this is an opportunity to re-use an idea from our GIANT ANIMAL theme, namely "Land of the Giants".  Art?

This is the "Spindrift"

     How very quaint.  This is what 1970 fondly imagined 1983 would look like.  1970, YOU WERE WRONG!  

Still wrong!

     Just to satisfy my pedantic manners, let us have a look at what civilian passenger transportation in the aviation industry looked like in 1983, hmmmm?  Art!
            

     Reality is a little over-engineered, don't you think?
     I can now humanely stun two birds with one high-speed yet non-lethal plastic projectile, because that list of The 50 Greatest Sci-Fi Shows Ever has arrived at Number 31, and - Art?

"Space: 1999"

     Conrad has fond memories of watching this series Friday evenings, back in 1975.  So they left themselves with more wriggle-room that LOTG, yet here were are in 2020 and - the Moon is still in orbit.  Not that I'm going to pull a sad face at that; it's just we never got a Moonbase as big as that which Commander Koenig holds sway over.  Did they ever rationalise how Barry Morse vanished after the first season?  I suppose they were too busy wondering what possibilities that shape-shifting girl could bring to the table -

Plus they had those really cool Eagle spaceships

     Of course a lot of the plots were silly, even if the execution was excellent, but what else can you expect from Gerry Anderson?  Recall "TV 21"'s fantabulous artwork and inept storylines.  Also, there were frequently explosions - excuse me, EXPLOSIONS which every teenaged schoolboy knows are essential to move the plot along.

I bet it was a Friday, too

     If I were to carry on with this idea, I think the next film up would be "Akira", which had the tagline "It's 2017 and Neo-Tokyo is about to explode".  Patently, Tokyo is still there and hasn't been destroyed nor rebuilt as Neo-Tokyo.  Art?

NO IT ISN'T!

     Conrad seems to have missed the rampaging gangs of armed bikers turning the cities into urban war zones, too, or did lockdown put a stop to them?  So, 1988, you got the future wrong also.  Let me know if any dangerously powerful psychic mutants with anger management issues turn up, okay?
      Motley, go turn the calendar page over, I feel like being deliciously naughty and moving to June 1st ahead of time!

Meanwhile, In 1943
Conrad is enjoying Myles Hildyard's memoir of his wartime exploits, "It Is Bliss Here", as a member of the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry.  If you bothered reading this blog over time then you'd appreciate Conrad's chasing up books about this regiment and it's members.
     Miles was one of the unfortunates sent to man guns on Crete, and was captured when the Teutons invaded.  He and colleague Michael Parish then escaped, and in conjunction with a couple of other soldiers and a Greek, managed to escape via boat to Turkey.

Myles' pad.

     General "Jumbo" Wilson (so-called because of his sheer bulk) wrote the very well-connected Myles a letter of congratulation, which never saw the day of light until Myles' book was published, and a good thing too, as it would have caused an uproar of outrage because of how it ended.  I shall quote some here:
"We are settling down in Syria now the Vichy French have gone at last, but I would very much like to be rid of the Free French as well.  Of all the despicable nations, I put them as low as any, and it is not to be wondered at that they collapsed as they did in the spring of 1940.  They trust nobody, not even themselves, and are as corrupt and deceitful as can be.  It is not surprising that De Gaulle chose the double cross as his emblem ..."

Myles to right, as an Intelligence Officer

     Oo-err, Matron!  Blimey, imagine the Axis powers getting ahold of that!

Back To Space
Perhaps "Back Into Space" would be more appropriate, for I refer to the Dragon capsule that docked with the International Space Station yesteryon, sent aloft on a SpaceX Falcon rocket.  Art?

Very Gerry! (Anderson)

     This is the first time in a decade that South Canada has used it's own hardware to send aloft men or supplies, since previously they were using Ruffian rocketry and capsules, which no doubt helped line Dimya's pockets with a rouble or two.  The Dragon is a private enterprise venture, coming out of Elon Musk's SpaceX company, which means that the future is beginning to look a bit more the way Robert Heinlein predicted, apart from that bit about slide rules.

Bad weather prevented a launch on Wednesday

Finally -
Nope, not going to explain about "slide rules" again, I've done it already.  Go and Google if you're curious.
     Right, I'm going to tie things up here by ending with Stromboli, which Myles describes passing en route to Salerno.  You may remember that the ending of "Journey to the Centre of the Earth" ends in the bowels of Stromboli.  It's a volcanic island north of Sicily, which has been in a state of constant eruption for several millenia; a bit like the world's biggest grumbling appendix.  Art?

The volcano ejecting lava "bombs".  Kind of <ahem> Stromboli-des

     And with that, we are done!

The Kriknud Spirit Is Abroad Today

As It Was Yesterday

This peculiar island race are so unaccustomed to weather that is hot, dry and sunny that a species of madness takes over when all three of these conditions arrive simultaneously; in times of old they would be compelled to go off and conquer somewhere hot, dry and sunny so they could experience summer all year round; nowadays they flock to the nearest beach instead.  So Johnny Foreigner can breathe a sigh of relief.

Not you, Dimya, not you
(and that gesture is rude in mixed company)

     Your Humble Scribe has just been reading, with some disbelief, about four people who jumped from the heights of Durdle Door into the waters beneath.  Three of them were airlifted to hospital with unidentified injuries.  Art?

Durdle Door with puny human masses for scale

     The drop is about 70' high.  Did the jumpers bother to check out what lay in the waters beneath?  Probably not.  Did they check that the water was deep enough to prevent them hitting the seabed?  Nope.  Were they wearing shoes, did they keep their feet flat, did they cross their legs before impact?  Highly doubtful.

     Your Humble Scribe, out of sheer ghoulishness, did a little checking on how dangerous it is to jump into water from height.  It turns out: pretty dangerous.  Art!

At this height, it starts to get risky

     One forum poster said they'd been jumping from 30' to 40' into Westerville Lake, and unlike his friends, he was wearing shoes, and consequently was the only one able to walk the next day.  Art?

The Big One - 95' high

     They may have banned people, or tried to ban people, from jumping the big one above, as a fall from that height can easily be fatal.  One poster on the forum stated, with assurance, that falling from over three times one's own height was when things start to get increasingly risky.

     The thing is, people tend to think of water as nice and yielding, which it is if you simply sit in a bath of it.  If you hit it from a height of 70' it's like hitting wet cement thanks to your velocity.  Trust me on this, Mythbusters did all the work for me.

Buster, busted

     Just to end on another ghoulish note, Conrad remembers the tale of an Hollywood stuntman who jumped from a height into water, when he had both eyes intact.  Nobody noticed the matchstick floating on the water ...

Speaking Of People But Lightly Endowed With Intellect

Skeptoid threw up mention of another conspiracy theory so staggeringly daft that you wouldn't believe it if it were made into a sitcom, and yes it is that far-fetched.

     Okay, you may not know it, and Your Modest Artisan certainly didn't, but the Vatican has a small number of priests who are also professional astronomers, who work at the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope in Arizona.  Art?

Note the clear blue skies

     This particular gizmo is based where industrial and light pollution are minimal, allowing photographic work of outstanding clarity to be conducted.

     "Aha!" crow the paranoid loonwaffles - or mabye they raven, or even rook - something dark and sinister in bird form, anyway - "That's just the cover story!"

     Apparently the Vatican is actually an anti-Christian organisation, which is using the VATT, whose real name is LUCIFER, in order to find aliens out there, whom the Vatican will invite to Earth to take over in the name of the Devil.

      You may notice that this conspiracy theory jibs somewhat where it collides with reality.  Art?

The sooper-dooper James Webb Space Telescope
(figure out an anagram of SATAN out of that, if you will)

     The idea that a relatively small, terrestrial optical telescope has the ability to detect alien civilisations would have proper astronomers laughing until they choked.  The JWST will potentially have such an ability, yet it hasn't even been launched and won't be until 2021 at the earliest.
     That's just detecting aliens. Given that any life-bearing planets are likely to be tens, if not hundreds, of light-years distant, how can the VA- sorry, the LUCIFERans communicate with them?  Because we have nothing that can travel faster than light, any communication would take at least decades and more probably centuries to occur.

"Father Perroni was a patient man.  A very, very patient man."

     So, imagine several centuries have elapsed, and then several more centuries, in fact a millenia, because once again any aliens are limited to travelling at the speed of light at best.  Our Alien Overlords land their fleet of spaceships in the deserts of Arizona, exit and are immediately crushed and roasted by Earth's gravity and solar radiation.  Aliens, you see.  Not like us.
     Skeptoid used logic and science to fillet the LUCIFER telescope conspiracy; Conrad has instead used sarcasm and irony, because there are only 24 hours in a day.
     Next!

Sorry, couldn't resist

A Bit Of Gloasting
As compensation for not getting the MEN and thus it's Cryptic Crossword and Codeword, Your Usually Humble But Not This Time Scribe has been giving his edition of "Code Words" some hammer.  I purchased it originally last March as a means of passing the time whilst en route to Barcelona.  Art?

     This was a tricky one - you only get 2 letters, and have to work out which squares need to be blacked-out.  Of course I smashed it, eventually, because how fair is it to have "TOADFLAX" and "CROUTON" not to mention "BRONZED" and "LAUREATE" as solutions?  Thankfully I have background experience with the Skeleton crossword, so that helped.

Finally -
We are actually over the Compositional Ton, so this last is only because I wanted more than just three items.  Trouble is, what to put?  I don't want to invest in a detailed article of several hundred words.
     "Kuffs".  That film with Christian Slater as the lead.  Or is it "Cuffs"?  He plays a kind of private policeman in a major South Canadian West Coast city.  Art?

It was a "K"

     And no, I've no idea why this suddenly popped into my mind.  But it rounds the blog off nicely.

Tot siens!

Answering A Question You Never Asked

Because Logic Get Out Of Here
Okay, I take it we're all familiar with "Doctor Who", the BBC's flagship dramatised documentary series.  As you should surely know by now, technology only caught up with real-life at the beginning of the Sixties, which is when broadcasts of the program began.
     Jump forward twenty five years and what's this?


     No!  it's not a microwave for flat food.  It is a Video Cassette Recorder, which was able to play pre-recorded tapes that were sold or rented at that time.  It was big in it's day, believe me.  Art?

The one with GIANT RATS!

     There were only a few "Doctor Who" serials available on video, and Conrad once asked Kim, who happened to be working at the BBC, why there weren't more.  She had no idea, so Your Humble Scribe did some investigating, which was not easy in the pre-internet age.
     One problem was that the actors who featured in these serials had signed contracts at least a decade before the advent of the VCR, meaning that everyone who was named in the credits had to be contacted in order to get their approval; no approval, no release.  Rumour has it that the Beeb kept trying to get approval from an elderly actor who had long since died.
     That was Problem Number One.  Prob. 2 was actually being able to lay hands on the old cans of film stock that had been used to record the programs, since the Beeb had deliberately destroyed thousands of cans of film in order to make room.  "Build more store-rooms" seems to have been beyond their grasp.
     Prob. 3 was that there might be copies held by BBC Enterprises, that arm of the Beeb which sold programs abroad, but their filing system consisted of throwing things in a skip and then stirring them with a spade.  Film reels of "Doctor Who" have been found in the cleaner's cupboards at BBC Enterprises.

BBC Enterprises: very unenterprising

     Prob. 4 was the stuffy, not to say hostile, attitude of the senior BBC staff to what they sniffily dismissed as sci-fi; as if documenting the life or death battles against sinister alien hordes was a silly fantasy!  When they realised that there was money to be made, they begrudgingly changed their attitude, a little.
    Not all was lost, either.  Some brave souls have been contacting foreign television stations in order to see if they retain copies, or the originals, of "Doctor Who" serials that were purchased back in the Sixties or early Seventies.  This is how "Tomb of the Cybermen" was discovered, in pristine condition having been sold to Hong Kong and then stored carefully afterwards.  Art?

The pant-wettingly horrifying Cybermen

     Not everyone contacted has been on-side.  "What in the name of Allah are you talking about!" was the response from Iranian state broadcasting.
     It also has to be said that a fair number of film cans were returned by ex-BBC staff members who had <ahem>  'acquired' them after shooting ended, as personal mementoes.  Thank you, O light-fingered ones.
     Inevitably there are conspiracies about this.  One person I spoke to said that there is a small group of loonwaffles who believe the BBC has every episode of every program ever made on microfilm in a secret underground vault, only awaiting the return of King Arthur to release them*.
     So there you have it.  I know you didn't ask, but BOOJUM! takes it's educational responsibilities very seriously.
     Motley!  Today we're going to discover whether that survival training course was worth the money, by hurling you naked into a swimming pool.
     No, they're not koi carp, they're piranhas.

Swim, motley, swim**!

Back To The Battle Of The River Piellorick
We have now gotten to Turn Seven.  I say "we" because Conrad is playing both Royalist and Parliamentary sides, which is no great stretch for me; it needs a bit of finesse when carrying out actions that need to be kept secret from the other player, but I manage.  Art!

     What you can't see here are Wardlow's Dragoons after crossing the Bouelle Bridge; they got charged by Aston's Loyals, caught on the flank and were routed.  Conrad didn't realise how badly disorganised a formation is after crossing a bridge, so I think Essex's Foote brigade will keep a-marching until they reach the open ground west of the Piellorick River.  Meanwhile the Royalist baggage train is having trouble getting out of their encampment in Upper Gullette, thanks to being so close together amongst the hovels.  Art?

     They now have to choose whether to shift the wagons or take on the Roundheads, as they don't have enough Tempo Points to do both.
     Also, I'm pretty sure this is the first ever outing for my 6mm scale windmill.  I don't care if it's the wrong design, it's staying!

Lykke Til!
Which almost exhausts my knowledge of Norwegian.  Whilst watching Episode 6 of "Ragnarok" Your Humble Scribe discovered that 17th May is Constitution Day in Norway, where the Norks celebrate Norway becoming an independent kingdom as of 1814.  There are lots of parades and marches, principally of children, and people wear traditional costume, wave Norwegian flags and generally enjoy themselves.  Military participation is deliberately restricted to a few marching bands, as the Norks have never felt a need to go out and conquer the world.  Art!

Obviously not the 2020 event

     Sons (and daughters) of the Norwegian diaspora across the world tend to get together on Constitution Day and eat traditional Nork food, including the legendary Lutefisk, which Conrad is going to try one of these days.  When I get to Oslo.

Finally -
I need to go get some tea, so I don't have time or the space to do justice to one of the barmiest crackpot conspiracy theories I've come across recently, so I shall just tease you with the title: "The LUCIFER Telescope Conspiracy", and then refer once more to that staggeringly insane one we've used as a benchmark of Stupid: "Finland Does Not Exist, It Never Has, It's All A Conspiracy To Sell Fish".  Art?

Residents of Helsinki were bemused to be told they are completely fictional.

*  I think.  This is me reading between the gaps.
**  Don't worry, motley's taste horrid