Of late we here at BOOJUM! have been banging on about underground fires, and I polished off yesteryon's post with an appropriate picture, that of the gas crater at Darvaza. This has been labelled "The Gates Of Hell", which is a pretty fair description, though I suppose it falls beyond the remit of strictly "underground". Since it's my blog, though, I get to decide what goes in, and I say it goes in. Art?
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| With puny human for scale |
Those geologist's bare bones are probably gracing some gulag graveyard by now, since the expected weeks-long fire has now been burning for 48 years, shows no signs of going out and it now a tourist attraction. Tsar Putin is probably plotting an invasion as we know he covets money and fame, but - he is likely to get his fingers burned*! Art?
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| Yuri regretted throwing his lighter into the pit in a fit of rage |
All you need now to complete the picture is a fifty-foot scaffolding pole and a marshmallow the size of a dustbin.
Motley! Balance this canister of liquid gas on your head and I'll play William Tell with a Barrett Light Fifty and incendiary ammunition, okay?
About That Recursion
If you follow the blog EXCUSES WILL NOT BE TOLERATED then you ought to know by now that Conrad likes comics. Up in the Book Vault I have about 1,300 of them, plus countless boxes full of trade paperbacks.
Thus it is no great surprise to find Your Humble Scribe's brain pondering on comic strips, and there was one that popped into my mind earlier today, whose name I had some trouble recalling at first, until I recalled it was - Art?
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| Please note the obligatory mis-spelling (Irksome in the extreme**) |
The idea is that our protagonist, who may even have a name <Googles hastily> nope, he remained proudly anonymous, is run by little people inside his head. Given that this barmy concept makes me sound as if I'd been at the cooking sherry already, a bit of evidence is needed. Art?
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| Thus |
The strip had an initial run of 17 years, so the concept chimed with some of you out there, and it was revamped a couple of times, surviving into the Nineties.
This is the recursive bit: everyone in this comic universe has Numskulls operating them, right? Well, then presumably the Numskulls themselves have Numskulls operating them. I bet they never examined that as a concept, did they? Of course, if you run with this as an idea you'd end up needing an electron microscope to read about the Numskulls within the Numskulls within the Numskulls within the Numskulls within the Numskulls within the Numskulls <Mister Hand intervenes for the sake of mercy>. Since there are well over a thousand strips to search, I shall leave that onerous task to you, gentle readers.
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| Their influence lives on |
Quickly, Vulnavia, to the Anti-Locomotive Defences, for I hear a
Oh. It's not an imminently infiltrating steam locomotive.
This Will Make Sense On Facebook, Honest -
From the Indian subcontinent, we bring you the region of Sindh -
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| Sic |
Did The Earth Move For You?
NO SNIGGERING AT THE BACK!! Then you can go wash out your dirty minds; how many times do I have to exhort you that BOOJUM! is entirely SFW?
Okay, the road that we look upon from The Mansion's kitchen window is Tandle Hill Road, which has suffered a lot from wear and tear over the decades we've been here. Every now and then the council send out some hi-viz jacketed artisans who patch up a few potholes and then move on.
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| The road as was |
Not so this week! O no. There were warning placards attached to every lamp-post down the road's half-mile length a fortnight ago, warning that resurfacing was going to take place and NOT TO PARK THERE DURING THE RESURFACING. DURING RESURFACING, DO NOT PARK HERE. HERE NOT PARK RESURFACING WHEN. NIE PARKUJ PODCZAS WYMIANY NAWIERCHNI.
Of course, the Kriknud spirit meant there were half a dozen cars parked on the road near our house, which meant the police tracking down owners in order to get them shifted.
Conrad was busy working in his Sekrit Layr when the house began to quiver. Nope, not the interfering Steam Locomotives: there was an enormous piece of industrial plant at work on the roadway. Art?
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| Enter stage left |
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| Not only causing the earth to shake, but making an appalling stink, too. |
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| What it did |
As you can see, the Road Replacing Robot, or RRR for short, scrapes off the top inch of tarmac, by heating it presumably as there was a peculiarly vile scent drifting about, getting it down to a constant level. And incidentally making The Mansion shake.
Of course, because the road entrance was coned-off with a big sign saying "ROAD CLOSED" and the RRR and accompanying truck blocked the road as well, you inevitably had some Kriknud numpties trying to drive in and past them. There was an alternate route but it's obviously much better to get your paintwork chipped and scratched from RRR's spewing gravel geyser and bash your suspension and undercarriage on the raised ironworks. If these people weren't driving cars they'd be diving off Durdle Door.
Finally -
Whilst listening to "We Have Ways" our hosts Jim and Al were discussing that perennially popular topic, namely "Did the Ju52 used by the Brits in "Where Eagles Dare" really have the range to get to southern Germany and back?"
One of their correspondents tackled this in exemplary fashion, working out the normal range of a Ju52 and taking into account the payload and possibly having additional internal fuel stowage, and the figures still came up short. Art?
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| "Tante Ju" |
Conrad will have to go back and listen to them reading out the number-crunching, because such magnificently anal-retentive pedantry ought to be recognised -
HOWEVER! (you knew that was coming, didn't you?)
Did those calculations make any allowance for a strong, e.g. 100 m.p.h. tailwind?
Conrad suspects not ...
Catch you later!
* I made this one up all by myself.
** It might just be me.
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