The Literary Tee Tea For Me

One Of My Ex-Colleagues Knows Me Only Too Well ...
Don't worry, it's nothing secret, so he will never mysteriously vanish whilst on his way to have a little chat to the police -
     No, this concerns a tee-shirt, hence the "Tee" of the title, and tea, the cup that cheers and not inebriates, and me, Your Humble Scribe.  Me.  You know, the person who writes this stuff! - what, did you think it was all churned out by some writing algorithm?
     Art!

Apt.  Accurate.  Got me down to a  -

     This does sum Conrad up pretttttty well.  As you should surely know by now, my Book Mountain never grows any less, since I never stop buying books they magically appear out of nowhere.  My reading of same has been slowed of late by a side-project I have, which I may inform you about if you're good.  Maybe if you're bad, even.
     "Know things" is rather a broad term.  Conrad now knows how to make pierogi from scratch, or why neutron flux is an unholy terror, and that the USS "Forrestal" weighed 59,500 tons (we shall come back to this later on).  
     It's the tea situation that worries me.  Before this wretched coronavirus, Your Humble Scribe got through three pots of loose-leaf Darjeeling over the weekend, which was a fine and sustainable rate of consumption.  Now, though, working from home, I am getting through two pots per day in the week in addition to the regular three at the weekend.

I realise talking about tea-leaves is a bit dull, so here are some people jousting on mobility scooters.
I joked about this as a sport earlier today.  Me and my big mouth.

     I've used up about half the stock I got from my work-shadowing at A Major Supermarket last year.  This is getting serious.  Why, who knows what effect this crisis is going to have on tea plantations in India?
     Motley, what say we stand in the backyard paddling pool after filling it with water, and then try slapping each other with electric eels?

Electric Eels*!

     
Sharks Are Our Friends!
I hereby apologise to all sharks for not banging on about this topic of late, and can only plead guilty to the fact that I need a day of at least 25 hours length and the ability to exist happily without sleep in order to fit in all my occupational diversions (we shall come back to this later).
     Pausing only to throw a flight of darts at the board upholstered with the face of Peter Benchley, let me re-introduce the Weasel Shark, a creature that combines two of the animals we here at BOOJUM! revere above all others.  Art?

"Weasel shark, weasel shark.
It's bite is worse than it's bark.
For a shark it's rather small.
And, to be honest, it doesn't bark at all.**"

      Whenever I mention sharks, I always bring in that free boardgame that came with an edition of "Strategy & Tactics" magazine, about a GI in Vietnam who gimmicks up a radio that transports him through time and space to a world where there are land-travelling sharks - no, no, I am perfectly sober, honest! It's impossible to track down either magazine or game, but today I did stumble across a - well, let's just have Art illustrate for us -

     Conrad is unsure if this is hilarious or terrifying.  Add your take in the Comments.

The Battle Of Lower Spleine Continues
 O my yes! Those of you not interested in Historical Miniature Replicas, or the English Civil Unpleasantness can SIT BACK DOWN! because this is interesting***.
     Turn Nine had seen the mostly complete failure of cavalry units on both sides to manage a Charge successfully, as the rules balance out both the  charger and the chargee, and only a lucky dice roll makes a Charge effective.  So Conrad decided Turn 10 was going to see what a bit of Close Combat resulted in.  Art?

     This is rather disordered compared to Turn 1, when everything was neat and symmetrical.  For reference:

     No plan survives contact with the enemy, hmmm?
     Anyway, the first picture shows things as they stand after the Parliamentary forces had - unexpectedly getting the first move in - carried out a close assault on the Royalist's left flank cavalry and centre infantry.  I do have a close-up of the central action.  Art?

     That lone infantry base to upper-left is Essex's Parliament Foote, who have just crashed into one of Gerard's companies, after giving it a good dose of lead.  The Royalists have been completely stuffed and are now in a state of panic flight backwards.  This has caused them to run headlong into one of their supporting battalions, causing it, too, to fall back.
     You can also see from the big picture that I've finally managed to get rid of the Unwanted Geographical Feature!
     On a more technical note, there are a lot of problems for the units here that are a result of me not having them deploy properly; essentially there's no room to move because units in "Polemos" cannot move backwards, only wheel left or right to manoeuvre.  I guess what I should have done was begin from scratch, but as i) Conrad is lazy and ii) this is by way of an experiment anyway, Your Modest Artisan is going to carry on.

Black Flag = punk anarchists!

I Did Threaten This Earlier -
You remember my comment about the USS "Forrestal" in the Intro?  Well, MetalBall Studios had something in their list of ficitonal land-travelling vehicles that triggered a memory.  Art?

The Carrier, of course.  That MAWLR thing is just silly.

     The memory was of an idea I had back in the Seventies, of putting an aircraft carrier on tracks, so that it could not only paddle the seven seas, but shed water and crawl about on land, to the confounding of enemy naval strength.  Clearly other people had the same idea, so I was onto a winner.  
     Whether or not you could do it in real life - that's another matter altogether - but, you know, I think I may go away and number-crunch the concept.  I shall get back to you on this one.

Finally -
Your Humble Scribe was reading yet another r/Reddit channel on Youtube last night, and was vastly amused by one that had the title, "Foreign visitors, what was you WOE moment in America?" (we are using "What On Earth" rather than the much cruder original).  There were some common themes, such as how easy it is to get hold of guns - they can be bought off the shelf in Walmart - and how enormous catering portions are.  What tickled Conrad was a comment about a catering establishment he'd never heard of: "Golden Corral", where the OP said that everything lay under a bath of liquid butter.  I think he was jesting - but am not entirely sure.  Art?

They do a "Help Yourself Buffet" - Conrad is going to get to one of these, somehow.

     And with that - we are done!

*  And I'm not sorry, not one bit.
**  I think I've typed this doggerel up ages ago, which is code for "I'm pretty sure I typed this up a geological age ago, but I'm too idle to bother go look it up and confirm."
***  It is!  It so is!