Inclined To Be Kind

No!  Of Course I'm Not Talking About Me
For, as you should know by now, Your Humble Scribe is a rather horrid curmudgeon at heart, who is never happier than when contemplating the orphanage being foreclosed upon, or seeing someone one piece short of their 1,500 piece jigsaw.

O no, how could that happen?  Where could it be?
O hang on, it was here in my pocket all the time.  I'll just complete it.

     No, what I meant to talk about was Victorian railway bridge design, a hot topic on everyone's lips.  Or - is it just me?
     Okay, those reading who aren't goldfish will recall Conrad wittering on about the Ouse Valley Viaduct and why an enormous bridge was constructed, etcetera, yaddah, blah.  Well, take a look at another awesome piece of brick-built architecture.  Art?

From the air

    This is the best shot I found that displays the whole enormous structure, which took 11 million bricks to complete, and which remains one of the biggest brick structures in This Sceptred Isle, and indeed the world.  You can see the River Mersey wending it's way, this being the geographical feature that the viaduct was created to surmount.  Let's get a closer look for scale.  Art!

With puny human cars for scale

     The River Mersey had scooped out quite a wide plain and as a consequence the bridge needed to be just as wide.  It's tricky trying to find any indication of the height difference between the river bed and either Heaton Mersey to the north and Stockport Town Centre to the south, though this picture does hint at it.  Art?

See below

     This is the crux of the matter and the reason why such a large edifice was constructed.  Railways, you see, need to operate on very, very shallow gradients, and all the more so when we're talking 1840, when the viaduct was built.  Steam locomotives of the time would have been incapable of managing a gradient of even one in thirty; to do without a bridge you'd need to render almost horizontal miles and miles and miles of track north and south of the Mersey crossing; which made it quicker, easier and cheaper to simply create a bridge.
     The effect of gradients is felt even today.  Doing some digging-around for this article, I found that the stretch of line from Stockport to Buxton has a gradient of one in sixty, which is sufficiently steep that there are several models of train that simply cannot manage it.  And we are one hundred and eighty years more advanced than when the Viaduct was built!
     Thus today's title; to be considerate of steam locomotives, the architects and planners and builders had to have as gentle a gradient - or incline- as possible.  How jolly considerate of them!

Viaduct with puny human pub for scale*

     Motley, have you seen my patented hose-clipper and punch?

There we go!

     Come over and shake my hand.

Potato Pancakes, Polish Style
Or, if you like, "Placki Ziemniaczane".  Conrad made seven of these this evening, for the first time ever, and they weren't bad.  Art?

     I cheated a little, as you can see, and used fresh parsely in the batter mix.  Rather than spend an hour and some of my precious skin and blood grating by hand, I used the food processor.  Perhaps I should have used the really fine grating attachment, although I suspect if Your Modest Artisan had done so there would have been a lot more water present in the batter.
     There are 5 left for lunch or tea tomorrow; it would have been a bit greedy to scoff the whole lot tonight**.

Great Squeaking Bats!
I made that one up all by myself, good, isn't it?  Quite serendipitous, too, because it's serendipitously relevant to our next goggle at a strip from the "Thunder" comic.  Art?

A frankly rubbish cover picture.  Bad editor!  Naughty editor!

     "Black Max" was unusual in that it was set in the First Unpleasantness, a conflict most comics avoid like rikketsial haemorrahagic fever, and it had an outright villain in Baron "Black Max" Maximillian Von Klorr (!), an eeeevil Teuton aristocrat who bred giant killer bat.  Hey, every man's got to have a hobby!  He sent these killers in the skies to attack those other killers in the skies, the gallant chaps of the Royal Flying Corps, which is cheating, frankly.  The artwork was really good, too, done by Eric Bradbury and a Spanish bloke, Alfonso Font.  Allow me to add in a page from "Blimey!", the now-defunct blog about British comics, as an example:

Art by Mr. Font

     And the link for Blimey! -

http://lewstringer.blogspot.com/2017/07/will-black-max-return.html

     "Black Max" was popular enough to survive "Thunder"'s merging with "Lion" in 1972, and Your Humble Scribe is pretty sure he remembers reading a Summer Special wherein the RFC is trialling a gyrocopter -
     -  but I digress.  Next!

Belt Up
This is a consequence of reading Adam Tooze's "The Wages of Destruction", where the Nazi economy pretty much lurches from one crisis to the next, even when they have occupied most of Europe.  Slave labour is inefficient and Frenchmen won't work hard for an occupation force, shock horror who knew the surprise!
     Also, steel, the bedrock of a modern military machine, is always a weak point for the Teutons.  They don't have a native supply of iron ore, so they rely - O so desperately do they rely! - upon the flow of same from Scandinavia.

<Insert Swedish Joke here>

     You'd think they would try to rationalise and reduce wastage of iron and steel, wouldn't you?  Not at the very bottom rungs of the military ladder.  Art!

Behold the belt of bullets

     This is an ammunition belt as used by the Teuton's MG34 and MG42.  Note all those metal linkages, made out of - steel!  In-demand, short-supply, valuable steel.  And, given the rate of fire of both these Teuton weapons, they went through an immense number of such belts.  Conrad pretty sure they didn't bother to salvage them after use, either.

Stuffy old British linen belt

     It would be interesting to work out what tonnage of steel was expended on disposable Teuton ammunition belts, a task beyond Your Humble Scribe in the fifteen minutes before I commence nose-grindstone interfacing.  

Finally -
This will all make sense on Facebook, honestly.  First of all, we have a halibut, which name comes from the Middle Dutch "Hali" for "Holy", as it was eaten on holy days, and "Butte" for "Flat", because it is.  Art?

Thus

     - and 

- some icewater melt

*  Taunting me with WHAT I CANNOT HAVE!
** Though I could have done.  I'm not soft or anything.