I Am Weaving On A Jet Plane

No, I Didn't Misquote Matey
 - in fact, I think you deserve a poke in the eye for that.  How many times do I have to tell you that Conrad is indefatigably correct in his grammar and spelling?  Bar the idiosyncratic argot that we make up for BOOJUM! that is, which Blogger has still not gotten around to assimilating, after -
     - GOOD LORD ALOFT!  I honestly didn't realise it, but today marks the seventh year of BOOJUM! to the very day I started.  Goodness gracious me, seven years.

To celebrate, here's me in a suit and hat.

     Back then, you had finished reading the blog almost before you'd started, and it was so succinct I can post the 16/06/2013 item in it's entirety:

First post on this newly-created Blog.

I feel like a four-year old riding their new bicycle without stabilisers.  I am, after all, 51 years old and much more familiar with pen and paper - make that fountain-pen and paper - than all this new-fangled digital mummery.

Where were we?  Oh yes, Father's Day.

Drove over to Richard's* to play a pseudo-Franco-Prussian War wargame.  Over the span of 6 hours I got beaten by Andy, playing the French.  Not that he got by cheaply or easily, oh no.  Casualties were high.  And the game turned out to be more balanced than I had first feared; sitting back and crushing the French with awesome Prussian artillery might be historically accurate but my! it would make for a boring game.

*Richard's charming ex-chapel is located in a location so remote it makes The Middle Of Nowhere look like Times Square at rush-hour.

     Ah for the days of pithy single-item blogs, hmmmm?
     Back to today's title.  You recall that yesterday I was blathering on about the Jumo 004 jet engine that the Teutons produced towards the end of the Second Unpleasantness?  They had come up against all sorts of technical problems that had to be surmounted before the engines could be hung on an aircraft and sent off to war.  Art?

The Me Two-Six-TooSoon

     Forgive me my little punnery.  The thing is, these engines were not what you'd call "mature" technology, in that they had to be rushed into production out of desperation instead of going through a proper developmental process to iron out all the problems.  Thus it was that they might only last for 25 hours of operation, or (!) 10 if you were unlucky or not that brilliant a pilot.  If you were throwing your jet around in dogfights or chasing bomber streams whilst avoiding escorts, those hours would whiz by like nobody's business.  Plus you put extra stress on said engines if you tried a bit of yawing or pitching*. Art?

Aircraft tug

     It is widely put about that the Luftwaffe's jet aircraft were towed to the runway from their hangars to save fuel, as you can see above.  Conrad also suspects that it was to prevent the engines from wearing out before you even took off.

     We cannot be horrid about John, he was one of the nicest blokes imaginable, and it's a horrid irony that he died in a plane crash.
     Motley!  The South Canadian Land Speeders are looking for rocket-sled volunteers, and I gave them your name.  You can practice by going down the stairs on a tea-tray -

Australia: The Metaphorical Sharps-Collection Point For The Planet
Indeed.  When the Good Lord made planet Earth and invented all the critters and crawlers upon it, he took stock afterwards and decided he'd been a bit liverish with some things, which were frankly rather dangerous and horrid, so he put them all in Australia.
     And so we come to Ann Reardon, the lady who fronts "How To Cook That".  She had this miniature monster run by her foot - Art?

     As Number One Sun informed, it's male a Funnel Web Spider, widely regarded as the most dangerous spider in the world.  Their bites kill people.

The sight alone would be enough to finish off Your Humble Scribe

     Rather than hammering it to a shapeless smear on the floorboards with a steel-toecap boot (which would be Conrad's instantaneous reaction), the Reardons captured it in a plastic tub, then took it to their local hospital.  You see, the spider's venom can be milked to come up with an anti-venom for treating people who've been bitten.  Very responsible!  Apart from Number Two Son, who had to end on a note of menace.
     "I wonder if there's a nest of them ..."
Music Versus Physics
You should all by now - AND IF YOU'RE NOT THEN YOU NEED A GOOD EXCUSE - be aware that Conrad is one of the world's most enthusiastic hair-splitting pedants imaginable, standing ever-ready to parse any comment, aphorism, adage or assertion unto the logical limit**.  Who can forget his calculations as to how much a swimming-pool full of molten lead would cost you!
     Anyway, Donovan, the folky singer from the Sixties who is still around.  Art?

Don

     Conrad, thanks to Spotify, has been playing his song "Try And Catch The Wind", which has a mournfully plangent chorus which goes:

"Ah, but I may as well try and catch the wind."

     Implying that his erstwhile task is impossible, because catching wind -  
     Yes, very poetic.  BUT WRONG.     We shall assume that matey is trying to catch the wind in his hands, which is his first mistake, because what is the surface area of a pair of human hands?  About a square foot.  Art?
          

     Not only that, the ratio of surface area to mass is far too low, as human hands are pretty dense material, which is Don's second mistake.
     Thirdly, the human wrist joint is not the most efficient method of transmitting acquired energy, bound about as it is by muscles and tendons and tasty red flesh.
     You may be able to see where I'm going with this by now.  Patience! the greatest virtue.
     Abruptly we transition to the Netherlands - not "Holland" which is only one of the provinces thereof - and their centuries-old battle with the sea.  Art?

Thus

     Here you can see a whole lot of wind-catching going on, very successfully.  These "Mills-of-Wind", as they are known, utilise very large surface areas to catch wind, several hundred square feet of surface area, completely dwarfing the human hand.
     You will also notice the vastly improved surface-area to density ratio, and whilst it's not apparent, there is a mechanically sound method of translating the rotational forces thus captured.  In every way these Mills-of-Wind prove Don wrong.  WRONG WRONG WRONG!  Art?

A Mill-of-Wind's interior

     Music = 0 Physics = 1
     Bear that in mind when you warble your next song out, matey.

When The Earth Moved For Me
WASH OUT YOUR DIRTY MINDS!
     You should recall Conrad's posting last week of various pieces of heavy plant equipment trundling up and down Tandle Hill Road, giving it a new coat of tarmac.
     Well, yesterday they were up at the Rochdale Road end, meaning that we could take pictures of them from The Mansion's kitchen.  So we did.  Art?

     You can see the road-roller moving in at the back.  There were a couple of these at work for hours, and although they aren't big, O my did they make the house quiver!  So much so that our feisty little Edna lay equally a-quiver on Wonder Wifey's lap.
     As of today all the tarmac laying is completed, and the second band of chaps has been around to apply road markings, the really important bit since we and the neighbours  feared a huge elongation that would have made parking really difficult.  But no.  All is well.
     At least until the council come up with yet another idea for creating lots of noise and vibration!

Finally - 
Your Humble Scribe has to come up with an interesting fact for this afternoon's conference call.  What could it be?  The green ray at sunset?  Jeff Goldblum the jazz musician?  Or (a bit of selfish self-promotion) - BOOJUM!s birthday status?
     Problem solved ... <rubs hands>


*  Y'know - weaving.
**  Echo & The Bunnymen reference for you there.