Them Crazy Czechs

Please Note The Absence Of Puns
It would be soooooo easy to mix in a few, but I shall be strong and refrain.
     What we now deal with today as Czechia and the Slovak Republic were previously known as "Czechoslovakia", which is handier and more efficient, if less helpful in pushing up your word count.
     Your daily life is more influenced by Czechoslovakia and it's predecessors, Bohemia, Moravia, Ruthenia and Carpathia, than you might imagine.  For one thing, "Budweiser" is the Teutonised version of Ceske Budejovice, where the drink was created.  Art?

Bohemia the Punjabi rapper.  Not what I meant, actually.

     You find a lot of towns in Central and Eastern Europe have changed names several times over the past century, going from a Teuton one because they were part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, to a Slavic one.  "Lemberg", for example, became "Lviv" and then "Lvov" -

Beautiful Bohemia.  The right one

     Which has little to do with beer.  One of the Czech's (which we will use for handiness rather than typing out a list of countries) claim to fame is the "Polka", a folk dance that became popular in Europe during the nineteenth century and which spread to South Canada in the aftermath of the Second Unpleasantness.  Quite where the name came from is debatable; the popularity of the dance is not.  Art!

Polka dancers.
(Conrad, large, ungainly and with big feet, stands in awe of anyone who can dance)

     So, beer and dancing.  The Czechs also contributed to Perfidious Albion's efforts during the Second Unpleasantness; the highest-scoring pilot in the Battle of Britain was a Czech with nineteen victories.  They were present during the Siege of Tobruk, as part of the Polish Carpathian Brigade, and the film "Tobruk" is a Czech film about this.  Art!

This one.  NOT the silly one with Rock Hudson.

     So, battle, beer and dancing.  One might also say "Blitzkrieg", because of the HUSSITE WAGON FORTS! a phrase you probably didn't wake up expecting to see today.

You were not, one hopes, expecting a photograph?

     Jan Hus is a whole blog post in himself.  You can consider him a kind of Proto-Protestant about a century ahead of the real thing, whose doctrine offended the Roman Catholic church.  O my how it offended them!  They took their religion verrrrrry seriously in those days, and they made the mistake of i) lying to him about his person being sacrosanct in writing, and then ii) executing him when he turned up for a chat.  This was a bad move because you can't do anything to a martyr, which is what he became.  
     Anyway, one of the tricks up the Hussite's sleeves was the aforementioned war wagons, which were used in numbers to provide mobile firepower with protection.  Art!

Thus

     You can also see a couple of chaps with flails, which were a signature Hussite weapon, adapted from the peasant threshing tool.  The thing about a flail is that the end is hinged or on a chain, meaning you can strike someone behind a shield, and the flail users frequently added metal studding or spikes to make it extra-specially unpleasant.  The Hussites stood off six crusades declared by the Vatican, and weren't defeated until fifteen years after their struggle began, so between wagons and flails they must have done something right*.

Mikhail with his flail

     So, blitzkrieg, battle, beer and dancing ballrooming.  There is more I could go on about but I don't want your brains to glaze over.
     Motley!  Let's test that assertion about flails.  You hold the shield and I'll - no, no, it doesn't have any spikes or studs in it -

How Very Interesting ...
Conrad has promoted Ann Reardon's "How To Cook That" Youtube channel as a beacon of skeptical enquiry amidst a sea of sensory sewage, as she takes on Youtube "Content Farms" which pump out innumerable videos of 'Life Hacks' that don't work.
     Having caught up with her latest release, she points out that one content farm, "5 Minute Crafts", is now debunking the video releases of another content farm, "Blossom".  They must have been rattled by her constant debunking of their own cruddy content!  Art?

That's shaving foam, not whipped cream

     This is the myth, promoted by Blossom, that you can clean up spilled gunk on your carpet by covering it with shaving foam and leaving it for 15 minutes.  Guess what?  It doesn't work!
     We shall come back to this.

Still Banging Away
For Lo! are we not back on the subject of elephant guns again?  Yes we are.  
     Back in the First Unpleasantness, the Teutons initially had an advantage in sniping when trench warfare settled in, to the extent of having special armoured plates for their snipers to use.  Art?

"You look - I'm having a fag break."

     Matey there is risking his neck in a literal sense, as there's no cloth covering the rear of the shield, so anyone keeping an eye on it would see the now opened firing slot.
     "But it would take a ridiculously good shot to put a bullet through such a tiny hole!" I hear you object.
     Hmmm no.  The wilier and wealthier British officers started to bring their own elephant guns to the front lines in 1915.  Remember the disparity between normal rifle ammunition and those for a Nitro Express?

Big enough to be an effective club

     These things would go through the shield and the sniper and continue on their merry way, frequently throwing the armoured plate into the air and across the trench, to the grim satisfaction of any Tommies watching.  No pictures apparent of same.  Art?

There may be something in here.

Finally -
Can't hang around, there's some potato salad still left from yesteryon and it won't be there for much longer.  Chin Chin and Ahoj! (Czech for "Goodbye")


* Or wrong, if you were watching from Rome.