Oom Beroofen

 Ha!  I Bet That Baffled You

Frankly, it baffled me when I read it.  It was an expression said in "Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves", when Aunt Agatha thinks Bertie (her nephew) was sneezing, when in fact he was trying to say "Jeeves" through a mouthful of steak and kidney pie.  Try it yourself and see how you mangle the English language.

Mangelwurzels.  Close enough.

     Of course, being an anorak of the first water, Your Humble Scribe wrote it down and diligently searched the internet for an explanation.

     Which you'll have to wait for.  I do like to effect an air of suspense.  Art?

     Here we go right back to Atompunk, and do you see what I did with that crack about "air" and hav - O you do.  This craft is what the Royal Aeronautical Society thought an aircraft of the future might look like from the perspective of 1966 (so a little out of the definitive atompunk era, if you'll forgive me).  Futurologist Gerry Anderson would have loved this, especially as the "Fireflash" nuclear-powered plane that featured in "Thunderbirds" was only safe for passengers for ninety minutes.  With radiation concerns like that, 'From Europe To Australia In Ninety Minutes!' has the shine taken off it, especially if there's a headwind.

Fireflash: sleek; fast; also good for microwaving food

     Anyway, back to our monster atomic plane.  To judge from the puny humans for scale, this beast looks like it has the wingspan of two B52s, and it must mass in excess of 200 tons, given how much protective shielding that reactor needs.  I bet it needs a runway as long as Glenn Field to take off from (two miles I believe).  Not only that, it needs a new reactor when it lands?  Look at the size of the 'crew craft'; it's tiny, so they don't have a lot of supplies in there and therefore they can't be aloft all that long, which means by deduction that they must be pushing this thing to the limits of engineering performance in terms of speeds reached - a Mach 32 nuclear accident waiting to happen, anyone? Art!

     These models are from 1957, so are a truer representation of atompunk, especially that flying boat version at lower port.  The print is too small to read, so all I will say is that they proposed to solve any reactor problems by ejecting it at sea.  Yes, and what would Flipper do then?  
     O very well I'll put you out of your misery.  "Oom beroofen" is the phonetic spelling of "Um Berufen", which is Teuton for "Touch wood" and what you might say to someone erupting with a sneeze.

Close enough.

     Motley! I heard you sneezing and sniffling earlier today, so I'm going to Oom Beroofen you with this cricket bat -

From Potential Disaster To An Actual One
Dear readers, if you hail from the blessed shores of This Sceptred Isle, then you ought to be familiar with the tenterhook tale of Toddbrook Reservoir and dam, where the dam's retaining wall had been extensively undermined and things looked grim for the town below the reservoir, Whaley Bridge.  Art?

     At one point the whole thing was within thirty minutes of being flooded, a fate only avoided by volunteers laying sandbag retaining walls on the top, and they'd only have had twenty seconds or so to get clear if the whole thing went.

     Inevitably, there were numpties in Whaley Bridge who refused to leave the town, because it was all a hoax caused by swamp gas over Venusian ball lightning.  Or something.  Conrad has called them out before, because if the dam had gone, they'd have seconds, not minutes or hours, to get gone.

     This brings us to the real meat of the matter, a terrifying dam collapse in Brazil at Brumadinho.  We have some pictures of the disaster in progress.  Art?

     This is the moment when the dam collapsed, and it goes in the space of seconds.  You can see the timer at lower port, and this includes at least a dozen seconds before anything happens.  270 people died because the warning alarm didn't function and the whole mass of spoil came on at 75 m.p.h. so even if you had warning and a car the chances of escape were slim.

     This is an open-cast mine, being flooded by the toxic slurry, still moving fast over a minute later.  At upper starboard there is someone driving a truck towards the flood, unaware of exactly what's happening.

      The empty dam, with another intact one right next to it.  

    So, residents of WB who refused to move, still think you can outrun a dam breach?  The only positive thing here is that Toddbrook only (!) holds 1, 250,000 tons of water, whereas at Brumadinho they were hit by 2,000,000 tons. 
     Large bodies of water - not to be messed with!

     Ooooh, that was grim, let's have some light relief.

Ye Battel Of Lyverysh Kiddnie Continues

Yes it's true, mettle guru.  We are into Turn 12, and things are a rather mixed bag at this point, which we can illustrate if Art will put down that nuclear fuel rod -

The eagle's-eye view

     This move it was Parliament who spent the most Tempo points and outbid the Royalists, meaning they got to move first, which is a real tactical advantate, except after their bidding they only had 3 points left and thus couldn't do anything.  For the first time in 3 games I did get to fire an artillery piece, which I dubbed a "saker" as that's one of their various types; the rules have them as only effective at very short range, because that's what they were like in real life.

     Another first.  That pair of cavalry units in the centre of the screen are Royalist cavalry recoiling, and because their Officer base, representing Lord Wilmot, was directly behind them to give them an added boost in combat, he got caught up, too - and removed from play.  Erk!  This hasn't happened before, and it royally (do you see what - O you do) messes up what's left of the King's cavalry on this wing, as they now have no-one to give them orders.  According to Polemos' rules, the overall Royalist General, the Earl Of Lindsay, can issue them orders, but has to be in line-of-sight, which he's not.  And if he moves away from his current position to remedy this then his 'added boost in combat' won't apply to his infantry.  Because I am not cruel*, I shall permit Lord Wilmot to come back; however, it has to be from the North edge of the table.

     I'm sorry, I only meant this to be a quick recap and now you're as well acquainted with the Polemos rules as I am.  Ooops!

"Lord Wilmot bravely advanced in the wrong direction."

Finally -

Here's a little number-crunching for you.  As you should already know, Your Humble Scribe is carefully and slowly making a longhand index of the enormous collection of Canadian war diaries he found online at Canadiana Heritage.  There are 1,353 files, none of which have a title, nor is there an index.  Art?

"SITREP - all quiet, nothing to report"

    I only put these here as an example of what the files contain.  On average there's about 1,500 pages per file, and I've covered 57 of them, containing 85,000 pages.  That's out of a total of over 2,000,000 pages.

     Conrad may be working on this for quite some time ...

*  This is a lie <the horrid truth courtesy Mister Hand>