I've Gorn And Done It Now -

Just To Prove That There Is Some Planning Behind This Scrivel -
 - although a lot of it is ad-libbed, I admit, and because of the psychic stew

 - psychedelic stew, close enough -

 that makes up my mind, I'm never sure quite what is going to pop out.  Or up.  Art?

Conrad's inimitable scrawl

     It may seem bafflingly brief, if you can read it at all.  Kindly cast your eyes at Number 8, "The Gorn As Monster", which was going to be tackled later in the blog, except now I'm obliged to lead with it because of audience expectations.
     <sigh>
     Okay, this cropped up yesteryon, when I was trying to make the point about monsters that carried weapons, and - you know, it's harder than you think to find any such example.  Monsters, by their sheer monstrousness, tend to be already armed with talons and fangs and giant poison spines and laser eyes and acid for blood, so they are less reliant on the manufactured deadly artefact.  So, I chose the Gorn, from a little-known cult Seventies - sorry, it really is that obscure I forget sometimes - Sixties show called "The Star Trek".  Art?

They dropped the "The", apparently

     The episode is based on a short story by Frederick Brown, or, in some time-warp paradox fashion, it may have been created as an identical story by Gene Coon for the series yet completely independently, neither author  - look, plainly someone has been messing about with time-travel here.
     My point yesterday is that the Gorn (Gorns?  Gornies?  Gornish?) are not only frightening in appearance, they are also brutes in behaviour, who probably slobber their port right out of a bucket, never mind passing the decanter to the right.  Art?

Aftermath of a Gorn party

     My assertion is based on their massacring the helpless and defenceless civilians of the Cestus III Outpost, then decoying the Enterprise crew into an ambush with a faked message, and trying to kill them all*.  Plus, when the Gorn captain gets pitted against Tibby (a derogatory Academy nickname he detests) in single combat, he doesn't try to negotiate or discuss or arbitrate, does he?  No, it's straight in for the kill.  Art?

One of them has halitosis

     Captain Kirk (see I can be respectful) has a moment of weakness as he prepares to bash the monster's brains in, pondering if it isn't merely misunderstood.  Dammit, Jim, don't go all Social Justice Warrior on me - leave the namby-pamby touchy-feely stuff to Jean Luc Picard, get in there and bash brains!
     <another sigh>
     It was not to be.
     There you go, my rationale about Gorns.  Hang on, did that monster feller have any footwear?  <checks Google>.  No he didn't**.  So he might develop podiatric trouble, and thus you'd have Gorns with corns -
     Motley!  Come here, put this metal bucket over your head and let me hit it with a hammer, to distract people from the sheer awfulness of that idea.

When you've got no tinfoil

Stormin' Like Norman
Yesterday I was bemoaning the fact that strange facts and images will surface from the depths of my mind, unbidden, from where they have lain in treacherous silence for decades.  Like the adventure strip I couldn't remember from a comic I also couldn't remember, yet which I tracked down yesterday.  Go me.  Art?

          Courtesy the blog "Great News For All Readers", and below a link:

http://www.greatnewsforallreaders.com/

     Your Humble Scribe is a tad confounded, being as how I thought the protagonists were sword-wielding savages from prehistory.  O well, that's what the passage of 50 years does to your memory.  I don't suppose it's too much of a spoiler to reveal that Tom Taylor does indeed find his dad, and there is a sequel story called "The Terrible Trail From Tolmec", which has a kind of logical symmetry that Conrad finds appealing.

Thus

     I think we shall come back to "Thunder".  This topic has legs.

Meanwhile, Back In 1642
The Battle of Little Splene has just finished it's twelfth turn, and it's turning into what frequently happened in battles of this period: two separate cavalry battles on the wings and an infantry tussle in the centre.  Art?

     Just to illustrate what's happened, let us view the very beginning of the game.  Art!

     Very neat and tidy!  What you can't see in the latest picture is three Royalist units that have Routed off the field; the Polemos rules mean that if a unit is in rout and runs into another friendly unit, it is removed from play.  This reflects a complete breakdown in discipline and organisation in real life, which happened a lot, since these were not trained, experienced soldiers for the most part, but barely-trained levies.  In real life a unit that routed as on the tabletop would be scattered for miles, and the officers and sergeants would take days to round them mostly up.  Not all, as some would take the opportunity to desert.

Oh!  Hello Ollie - I was just - er - bigging-up your chaps, honest.

Big Brick Bridge
If you remember, AND YOU SHOULD, Your Humble Scribe was pondering about a bridge that the log-on screen displays, and which was alleged to have used a million bricks for it's construction. Art?

Behold the Balcombe Bridge

     In fact it's known as the "Ouse Valley Viaduct", and I think that picture above is an old one, as the structure was extensively renovated in the Nineties.  Art, again!


     The picture blurb is highly inaccurate, since it took eleven million bricks to build it, and they were transported to site by - O irony! - barges on the nearby canal.
     My question yesterday was "Why build this enormous bridging structure instead of merely constructing a railway down into the valley, a very small bridge and then another sloping railway on the ascent?"
      Time and Technology, Conrad, time and technology! <said in a chiding voice to himself>.  The line that the viaduct serves was designed with a 1 in 264 incline, so the bridge merely continues this almost-horizontal layout, rather than the (guessing here) 1 in 7 descent and ascent into and out of the Ouse Valley.  Why is this relevant?  Art!

A 2-2-2, whatever that means

     Because that's the kind of locomotive we're talking about.  This is, after all, at the dawn of the railway epoch (another answer in my Collins Crossword Collection) and the trains would not have been able to deal with a gradient of any great degree.  It was easier to build a line that was consistently horizontal rather than invent trains forty years ahead of their time, unless they had a time machine***.  Is there -

"NO!"

      Fair enough.

And with that, we are O so done!


*  Thank heavens Tibby found a Magical Golf Ball Projector to defend themselves with!
**  Er - are we sure it was a "he"?  You know the effect Tibby has on green-skinned women; perhaps all that desperate clinching was her - no, no, the idea is too terrible to contemplate <reaches for eyebleach>
***  Well, you know, the Star Trek writers and Frederick Brown seem to have had one ...