Not In Vain, Brain

"Ha!" Said Conrad, Snapping His Fingers
 - and spraining one of them.
     I think I ought to begin with an apology, since I had a photograph of Roy Thinnes and Michael Rennie in yesteryon's blog, and even went so far as to allude to Michael as if we'd come back to him - and didn't.
     Sorry, folks.  A little, anyway.  You see, as happens with some frequency, I recalled a film I'd seen on television many, many years ago.  It starred Michael Rennie, and it had something to do with him being a cyborg.  Art?

Probably his most famous role

     You recognise whom I am talking about now?
     No, I have no idea what caused this image to pop up in my mind, just that Oscar, in charge of memories, appears to arrange them by throwing sticks of dynamite in there.
     Anyway, a little Google-fu and I had my answer.  Art?

Top half?  Bottom half? Split lengthways down the middle?  Inquiring minds want to know!

     Mike stars as Garth A7, a time-travelling cyborg from the future, who travels back to 1966 in order to stop his grim, dystopian, mind-controlled future from happening.  If I can cattle-prod Art into consciousness -

Behold his futuristic and highly-advanced time machine in the background!
(Did I say this was a low-budget film yet?)

     Conrad seems to remember one part where Garth unbuttons his shirt and reveals, not a set of pectorals and some curly hair, but a load of machinery implanted into his human torso; CYbernetic ORGanism, you see.  I cannot find a picture of same on teh interwebz, so you'll just have to make do with my word-painted picture.
     Okay, Conrad 1 Memory 0.  Or should that be the other way round?  

The future.  A nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

     Stand still, motley!  These paintballs have been partially refilled with nitric acid, and I need to see how - STAND STILL!  

More Mucking About With Memory 
Plus Conrad being all deductive and inferring, which was an answer to Crossword 179.  
     Yesteryon I was bewailing the fact that I have a retentive mind, and that obscure bits from decades ago keep popping up for no good reason (see above for more on this than you may want to know).  My article was about a comic strip I kind of half remembered, in a comic that was probably new at the time.
     So!  I went through a long list of British comics, some of which I was familiar with, some not at all - and to my surprise I did see a "Vulcan" in there, so now I can confirm that the British V-Bomber force had an influence on comics - checking out what their initial publication date was.
     Oho.  And also aha.  Art?

 


     Note the date at upper starboard.  I had eliminated nearly every other comic on the list based on initial publication date; this one only ran for a couple of years before being absorbed, by "Lion" I think.
     The two different prices were because this comic came out during decimalisation, when This Sceptred Isle was moving from the old LSD system - NO SNIGGERING AT THE BACK! - to a decimal one, where instead of eleven farthings to the groat, you had one hundred pence to the pound.

Thus

     In fact, Conrad even remembers the television advert that came out at the time for this comic - a tree being hit by a lightning bolt, and they had The Steel Commando lurching, bullets bouncing from his body, at some hapless enemy soldier -

Really, every clown wants to be Hamlet, don't they?

     Anyway, there was a list, see, on a blog that I found "Great News For All Readers", and I shall throw in a link so as to avoid solicitors and injunctions -

http://www.greatnewsforallreaders.com/blog/2016/10/14/on-this-day-17-october-1970-thunder

     And the entry on "Thunder" had a list of the strips, and what do you think I found?

     I'll tell you tomorrow*.

Bricking It, Part One
Normally this is a British abbreviated vulgarism that I shan't explore too fully, meaning that one is anxious, to the extent of being rather miffed, possibly even irked.
     However, this is BOOJUM! and - we like to take the path less travelled, which is ironic in the case of railways, especially after Beeching.  Because - Art?

     I doubt you can read the blurb here, thanks to screen glare and font size; it says that a million bricks were used to build this bridge.  You can see how large it is thanks to the train atop it, and it is, nary a doubt, an impressively large structure.  Sorry, no idea what bridge it is.
     Conrad, being deficient in romance, wonders why they didn't just lay the line down that gentle descending and ascending gradient, with a far more modest bridge in the middle that wouldn't have needed more than a few thousand bricks?  Quicker, simpler, cheaper all round.  Unless - was there a pressing design need for a million-brick monster like this?  If only we had an architect to hand!

No, no, Art - a real architect - O never mind

     One supposes that this bears a little research, in order to identify the bridge and the reasons for using so many bricks to construct such a large edifice.  But not today.

Bricking It, Part Two
We've not had any Lego megastructures for a while, have we?  So, allow me to introduce the Henley Street Bridge in Lego.  Art?

All 70,000 pieces of it

     Yes, yes, yes, 70,000 bricks is not as impressive as a million.  How much larger is that thing in the real world, hmmm?  If the Lego one were scaled up only x14, it would contain a million bricks, and still wouldn't be anywhere as large as the Real World Bridge.  Art?

Yes, that is Ecto-1

     The real thing is an unlovely-looking concrete structure out of the Modern Brutalist school of design, though they prettify it at night with lighting.  Can't be bothered to show you.

Finally -
Because we have lack of TANK so far in today's blog, I thought I'd illustrate one of the Sherman "Tulip" rocket-firing tanks that Stanley Christopherson mentioned another armoured regiment using in the latter days of the Second Unpleasantness.  Art?

Hot rails to hell**.

     Stanley's friend said that you had to aim by manoeuvring the whole tank around, and that the rocket's weren't especially accurate.  To judge by the above, the tank commander would have to be safely inside the turret with the hatches down when these things were launched!  They were, he informed Stan, absolutely devastating when they hit, and their noise alone terrified their hapless opponents (probably nearly as much as a Steel Commando).

I think that's us done for today.  Chin chin!

*  I know, I know, I'm a swine.  Heh!
**  Blue Oyster Cult in-joke for you there