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!