Rock And Roller

 Every Word True -

Just perhaps not how you expected it to be ...  You know Conrad, ever a one to jest with words.

     Well, this evening Your Humble Scribe finished watching the third episode of "Lovecraft Country", which sees Letitia buying a pig in a poke, property-wise.  For, whilst we are nowhere near Ardham, this house is haunted.  Art?

"Holy Ghost"

     And no, these are not cute, cuddly, charming, comedic ghosts, either.  No, they are pant-wettingly horrid and - DAMMIT EDNA! Yes, Edna came barging into my Sekrit Layr, banging the door wide open whilst the haunting is taking place.  Luckily my hair is already white ...

     Okay, we'd better get this part over and done with.  Yes, Conrad has been doing still more of the jigsaw, I bet you're dying to see how far I've gotten with it.  Well, wait no longer.  Art?

Et voila

     As you can see, the gaps are getting filled in.  I have a kingfisher, two puffins, a ladybird, a butterfly and and owl to add in.  Where there are gaps tend to be areas of anonymous bland colour, without any defining features; the number of pieces continues to decrease, however, so we're slowly getting there.

     And with that, the Intro is over.  There.  I can be concise when I try.

Back To Today's Title

Yes by Jove, Christopher Cazenove.  I bet you never got up this morning, had breakfast and thought "Yes, how did the Allies maintain aerial superiority over Normandy after D-Day?"

     Well, Vulnavia, one reason was because they could put thousands and thousands of planes in the air.  Another reason was their employment of airfield construction units, because having your airfields actually in Normandy itself is a lot handier than having them the other side of the Channel.  Art?

"Chaps?  You're supposed to sit inside the aircraft."

     
The RAF and USAF - hey I'm trialling a new font, "Antic Slab" because I loved the name - had scads of airfield construction units, who had 3 Emergency Landing Strips in action by the end of D-Day itself, no mean feat especially as they were often under fire.  Art?

     These pictures give you an idea of the amount of kit that the Allies threw at problems until they were overcome, and there would have been envious Luftwaffe pilots muttering about what they had to put up with.  At centre starboard you can see an RAF construction unit building a road by laying down a bed of - rock.  Art?

Here's the roller.

     For the record, those bombs won't have been fused, as otherwise a bit of a wobble and there'd be a crater thirty feet across.  They aren't fused, are they, chaps?  Chaps?
     Better back off and give them some room.

     These pictures are from a recent purchase that I didn't put up any pictures of, so let me remedy that right now.  Art!

     Let's try Antic Slab again.  Why that name for a font I have no idea, especially as it's not at all slabby.   Indeed, it is rather more elegant than the  Verdana, which I am using in lieu of Trebuchet (yep still haven't worked out how to resolve that one).

More Musings On Mental Myteries

I got this input whilst falling asleep last night: "Winrich Kolbe" and, given my general reading, confidently expected him to be a minor part of the Third Reich, or even the Second Reich.  Art?

Confidence misplaced

     I couldn't have been more in error!  He was a German-born yet South Canadian television director, by way of being an architectural student in South Canada.  He got drafted into the South Canadian army in Vietnam (as a foreign national?) and apparently served in the artillery as a forward observation observer - at least a frisson of military history there.  He was best known as being a director on four series related to that obscure Sixties cult show, "Starry Trek", until he retired.  Then he went on to become a professor teaching Art and Design.  Kind of a full life, eh?

"Denise was convinced Winny had stolen her porridge."

     Well now  -the "Add Caption" function has stopped using Times in Small so I've had to add it in myself.  Blogger!  <shakes head and imagines Listy being in a purple rage by this point>.

     Of course none of this answers the question exactly why Ol' Winny's name popped up in my mind last night ...

"Rotherhithe"

Nor this one <sighs dramatically and wags a cautionary finger at Memory>.  Conrad idly wonders if the name has any connection with "Rotherham"?  According to Wiki, the name derives from the Anglo-Saxon "Hryder-hyd" (thus Rotherham may be "Hyder-Haeme") and means 'a landing place for cattle', as it was for centuries part of the dockland environment of London.  Art?

Look at it, being all -Hithey

     Most of the docklands were filled in and have since become gentrified by the upwardly mobile <do we hack and spit at this point?>, dock work having died out by the Eighties.  One dock, Canada Dock, has been partially remodelled into what is now know as "Canada Water" as a miniature late.  Art?

Plus this architectural atrocity

     Blimey!  It looks like one of the secret headquarters used by global paramilitary organisations straight out of Gerry Anderson, except not in a good way.
     Rotherhithe is also the location of one of the worlds' first underwater tunnels, built by the Brunels to allow travel beneath the Thames.  It was intended to be a rail tunnel, though they ran out of money and it had to be pedestrian, at least to begin with.  Art?

     The story of it's construction is an epic in itself, and we may come back to it.  As of today it's part of the London Overground Network, which rather takes any romance it had away from it.

  
Finally -

Your Humble Scribe is bashing this stuff out during his lunchtime, as of course - obviously! - he would never stoop to doing it during work hours, unless <thinks> the zombie apocalypse arrived and - and - er - you had to be given vital pointers on how to survive.  Yeah - that would be a public service, wouldn't it? and I'd still be paid?  Because civilisation might not collapse completely overnight, and we'd still need toilet rolls.  And gin. As an antiseptic analgesic pain-reliever, of course.

Blue?  That cannot be healthy.

     Let's shift to Antic Slab - because we are so truly done done done!