On A Crusader

NO!  That Is Not A Typo
I have warned you about making these assumptions before.  I did not mis-type "On a crusade", even if we touched on the subject earlier today.
     Okay, if you recall correctly AND YOU BETTER HAD then you remember that Conrad is annotating the autobiographical work "Alamein To Zem Zem" by Keith Douglas.  Keith, fed up and bored at 7th Armoured Division HQ, deserted from Cairo and drove to his erstwhile regiment, the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, where he was unofficially put on their strength.  There he took command of two Crusader Mk. III tanks, this being the model with a bigger gun and smaller crew than the Mk. II.  Art!

Keith, with the - er - "borrowed" truck he took from HQ

     Despite, or perhaps because, of his poetic nature, Keith proved to be pretty canny as a tank commander despite a lack of experience and his on-the-job training.  For one, he mention's the Crusader's low profile as being one of the most important things about it, or any tank, and he's right.  The lower the profile the easier to hide and the harder to hit*.
     He does mention that he and his crews had cause to curse their Crusaders.  Art?

Crusader Mk. III in desert camouflage

     Quite by coincidence I found a description in one of the Appendices in Corelli Barnet's "The Desert Generals", where it lists the defects present in the Crusader, and there were plenty; 47 had been revealed with the prototype alone.  O yes indeed!  To wit: "When the eventual production model - now named the 'Crusader' - eventually reached the Middle East in 1941, it came off the ships with the nuts and bolts only handtight.  It then proved so mechanically unreliable that the C-in-C Middle East had to reckon on having twenty-five per cent reserves to cover those in the workshops."
     This was a consequence of rushing to production without proper testing and development, itself a consequence of losing the majority of British armour in France in 1940.
    Hence the curses of Keith!  The Crusader: exceedingly nippy when it worked, which was not all the time.

Here's One I Mentioned Earlier
Yes, we are back to more of "How To Cook That", and Professor Ann Reardon taking on the lying vloggers at "Blossom", whom seem incapable of telling the truth, and about the only thing they get correct is the time bar at bottom of the screen.  You could, in fact, say that Ann is on a crusade to crush criminally-conceptualising content farms.
     This analysis concerns their lying about how to get multi-coloured popcorn from popping corn and Skittles.  Art?

     Step One: add oil to a pan, then the corn kernels and Skittles.  They cut away in order to then cut back and show all the vibrantly-coloured popcorn, which raises a couple of points.  Art?

     What they did is simply empty a bag of multi-coloured popcorn into the pan and pretend they'd cooked it.  Ann, being a consummate professional, tried doing what they instructed in order to get multi-coloured popcorn.  Art?

     That's what happens in real life.  The Skittles stick and burn and the smoke thus generated renders the popped corn - which has stubbornly remained popcorn-coloured - utterly inedible.  So, if you followed 'Blossom''s advice, you now have a spoiled batch of popcorn, burned Skittles and a pan that needs one heck of a scouring.

My Afternoon Sorted
Yes, still more about elephant guns!  Conrad has mentioned that work "Sniping In France" by Major Hesketh-Pritchard, and indeed has thrown in a couple of shots of various editions, no pun intended.
     Well, my beady greedy eyes were drawn to the legend "Sniping In France pdf" when I checked on Google for some pictures of the cover.  "pdf" implies that there is a readable file for this work held in reference, possibly because of the age of the original - it was published in 1920, and is thus out of copyright.  Art?

     I am currently up to Page 88, and a fascinating read it is, too.  HP himself was a very experienced big-game hunter, and firmly believed one could translate that practice into sniping, which he eventually did.  Snipers generally have a bad press, being seen as cruel and remorseless, and not very sportsmanlike, which is entirely true; it is also true of Perfidious Albion that, having decided they needed and wanted snipers, they went after that end with considerable vim.

SMLE with telescopic sights

Life Imitating Art
There was an hilarious thread on The Flop House's Facebook page earlier today, where people were invited to doom themselves in a horror movie.  Here's my favourite:

 "Wanna fool around by the swimming hole near the cemetery?"
"The cemetery near the haunted nuclear power plant on the anniversary of the sorority massacre?"
"Yeah!"
"You bet your ass I do."

     The trope of reading a dusty old tome written in an unknown language, which might or might not have a binding made of human skin, came up several times, as did ones about going out alone into the night with only a flickering torch to investigate mysterious sounds.  Now, you might dismiss these - and there were over 90 entries on the thread - as being attributable to shoddy script-writing and horror films more interested in guts and gore than a plot.

True.

     You might - and you'd be wrong.  People, it seems, can manage to be as excessively stupid in real life as in your average poorly-written slasher film.  Case in point:

     Just some of the 6,000 who attended two illegal raves around Oldham and Manchester this weekend.  Look for a spike in Covid-19 in your communities, you feckless wastrels.
     Actually, Conrad just remembered that his zombie magnum opus, "Revelations", has mention of something very similar, except it takes place in a deserted city-centre office block.  Of course at least one of the attendees has the dreaded zombie plague before they start to display symptoms, meaning that everyone in the crowded, sweaty throng ends up a revenant.  Art imitating life imitating art!

Finally -
Well, we've hit the Compositional Ton and I want some tea, so goodbye to you, but before we go a nod to another of the three things no blog can do without - 
       


*  Wehraboos take note.