It's Over, Sardoba

For Lo!  We Are Back On Dams

No, this is not a long, boring, uneventful story about how a dam was constructed properly with the right materials and is still holding back millions of tons of water.  Rather, it is about an Uzbek dam that failed catastrophically and suddenly, soon after construction, killing four people and making thousands homeless. Art?

Before

     It's hard to find any pictures of what the dam looked like when it was pristine and unsullied, of course, so that above will have to make do.  There have been allegations that corners were cut during construction to bring costs down, which is never a good idea with structures retaining nearly a billion tons of water.  You can be sure that Mother Nature will find any flaws or weaknesses, sooner rather than later.  Art?

After

     The subsequent flooding was so bad that it affected neigbouring Kazakhstan, 50 miles away, and can be seen on NASA satellite imagery.  Here's another view of the breach, with puny humans for scale:

The Sardoba Dam from head-on

     In an interesting aside, the dam was intended to supply water to the Sirdaryo region of Uzbekistan, which is largely desert.  Conrad distinctly remembers reading in a book on great historical battles from his youth, about Genghis Khan's army surprising another by crossing the Sir Daria desert, widely seen as an impossible feat, and thus falling upon them like a wolf on the fold. 

     There was a great deal of noise and bluster from the Uzbek government about investigating whom or what was responsible for the collapse, and given that it took place 3 years ago, one wonders if they have come to any conclusion or not.  Given that the chap doing the investigating is the one responsible for building the dam, probably not.

"It was aliens.  Go ahead, aliens, deny it."

     Motley!  You are going to lie across the stream and thus dam it, and I am going to - no, no, they're inert hand-grenades ...
     

Back To "The Boys"

Yes, more from the good Doctor Hope and his sick Sick Notes.  I hope you appreciate how Conrad filters and amends shots from Season One of this show, because it is manifestly NSFW, given the levels of swearing, sex, violence and drug use in it; which makes it pretty faithful to the original comic book in terms of themes.  In terms of plot, it's gone waaaay off-track, so one doesn't know what to expect next*.

     Okay, in this item we are dealing with that amoral, narcissistic man-child with anger-management issues, Homelander.  Art?

     Here we see Homelander giving Stillwell both barrels of his laser vision; I deliberately stopped the video at this point, because the next shot shows how he's basically burned everything from her eyeballs to the back of her skull into vapour, with horrid little glowing ashes for poetic effect.

     The good Doctor thoroughly approves of this scene, as he details just how instantly fatal such laser 'surgery' would be, since it immediately destroys the brain-stem, and without that your clock stops ticking.  One wonders if Homelander can control the range his laser-vision operates at, or modulate it's intensity, since normally one would expect those beams to punch right through a victim's skull -

     Of course, I could be overthinking this ...

Bendis Recommends Again

We venture once more into that Lockdown List that Brian M. Bendis has compiled for your viewing pleasure.  He had to whittle it down a lot, because if there was sufficient web-space available, he'd be recommending a total in the thousands.

     Anyway, his next selection is "The Nail" (insert bad joke about "Black Hammer" here**).  Art?

     From what Brian says, this is a re-imagining of the Justice League where the Kent's have a puncture and never come across Superman as a baby, with all that entails afterwards. Note that Green Lantern is centre stage on the above title, so he may be filling in the position normally assumed by Supes.
     This sounds interesting, rather in the vein of "Red Sun" where Kal-el's spaceship touches down in the Sinister Union rather than South Canada ... but there are other comics on the list that I'd buy before this one.

     <wallet sighs in relief>

     Besides, there's that bibliography list from "Firepower" to work through!

     <wallet faints>

You What?  And Why!

Conrad is always poking around odd areas of the internet (which is why my Avast! is always on and up to date), which usually lead to even odder areas, and one such I found featured kid's cartoons of the Eighties and Nineties that had been adapted from films.  The thing is, the films they were derived from were definitely NSFW and equally Not Suitable For Children; the reason these cartoons came into being was that you could use them to flog cheap franchised tat, with both tat and cartoon being made cheaply in Asia.  The first cartoon they listed was "Toxic Crusaders".  Art?

Toxie and chums

     Don't ask me, I've never seen it and don't feel any the poorer for not doing so.  Bear in mind that it was a covert means of promoting cheap tat associated with the show - 

Good for whole minutes of fun

     Hmmmmm.  Okay, also bear in mind that the source of this tat (cartoon and merchandise both) is "The Toxic Avenger", a film with an "18" rating that features extensive gore and violence, and if Art will put down his bowl of coal -

Toxie ponders life's big questions

     Before you knock it, be aware that this film had three sequels and a musical spin-off, so enough of you watched it to make a difference.


Finally -

That's "Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves" out of the way, so I now only have two more of Plum's works to finish before I can send all seven to the charity shops in Sodom-on-the-Wold (o alright, "Royton", there, happy now?), nestling among the contents of another bagful of books***.  This means that there will be a little more space for the Book Mountain to be dispersed into, and allow me to purchase a couple of tomes to add to it ah - to learn how to make daisy-chains er yeah daisy-chains not books at all. 

Chains of daisies.

     And with that we are o so very done.

* This is a good thing.  Now, what we need next is an adaptation of "The Goon" ...

**  You remember?  The first comic BMB recommended.  You DID read about it, didn't you?

***  MY POOR BEAUTIFUL BOOKS!