The Stupid - It Burns!

 Less Humourously, It Also KILLS

You hopefully recall Conrad's blathering on last night about the "Darwin Awards", celebrating those individuals who remove themselves from the gene pool thanks to some spectacularly stupid behaviour.

     For instance.  You, the gentle reader, are presumably familiar with these items of ordnance.  Art?

               

     You would not feel it incumbent upon yourself to take one of these home if you happened to come across it in a field, would you?  Of course not.  They're dangerous, especially if they're old and corroded, so a sensible person would leave well alone and (in this country) call the Royal Logistics Corps, for the Loggies are the go-to people for bom - sorry, "Explosive Ordnance Disposal".

     There is a persistent theme on the DA website, however, of people who not only take these things home, they actively try to cut them open with power tools.  Including cutting torches.  Perhaps they think - if they think at all - that because it's not gone off already, it will never go off.  It always ends badly for these people, and what's left of them gets buried in a teabag.

     However, that's not the ghastly end I wanted to talk about today.  No, in the DA's "Slush Pile" of stories sent in by readers was another one from Australia.  This one concerned a lab technician who was dissolving geological mineral samples in acid.  Hydrofluoric acid.

     You can already tell where this is going, can't you?

     We've already encountered HFA on the blog before.  It's positively evil stuff.  Art?

How it should be done

     The thing about HFA is that it penetrates right through the skin and attacks the skeleton, and -

     - you get the idea.  NOT something to muck around with.  Matey, performing the dissolving, apparently felt he was too cool for school and didn't bother with any Personal Protective Equipment.  He seems to have been ready to go down to the beach and catch some rays.  Art?

How not to do it.

     He spilled the acid on his legs.  When the ambulance crew came he was sitting in the pool outside, hoping it would all go away.  It didn't.  They had to first amputate his leg (!) and that still wasn't sufficient as he died anyway.  If he had any explanation as to why his lab procedure was so sloppy, it didn't make the literature.

     So, children and Vulnavia!  A grim little tale about how dangerous HFA is.  Always have calcium gluconate gel to had when working with it, is what Conrad says. 

Onto Lighter Matters

It wouldn't be hard, would it?  Okay, you will be glad to hear that Your Humble Puzzler has now completed the RSPB jigsaw he's been working on, at least as far as it goes.  Art?

Tah-dah!

     There are (Antic Slab again for a bit of variety) 4 pieces missing.  I shall have a grovel around the Sekrit Layr tomorrow and see if any turn up.  What I did find were two pieces in the box that were from a different jigsaw puzzle entirely, being backed with blue card not grey, and of a colour palette and mix entirely absent from the RSPB one.  Let me know if you purchase a jigsaw puzzle with two pieces missing.
     Now that this distraction is out of the way I shall be getting back to the wargame.  

The Wargame

I did mention that Turn 8 was going to see (metaphorical) blood being shed, didn't I?  And so it has.  Art?

     It's all gone completely pear-shaped for Parliament's cavalry, that close-up above being them routing from contact with the Royalist horse.  The King's men were rolling killer dice totals, with the Roundheads being abysmal in comparison.  What tended to happen in real life was that the Royalist cavalry would pursue their opponents miles from the battlefield, only returning when the infantry battle was over, regardless of who had won.  The Polemos rules I'm using do make this a possibility, so the Parliamentary infantry may hold firm.  Though they are outnumbered nearly two to one.

"Thee Kings Companie preparre to most valiantly defendeth their barrels of Rum"
(And someone seems to already have a hangover)

Bendis Recommends -

Of course I can't take advantage of all these works that BMB listed earlier this year, as I'm not working in Gommorah-on-the-Irwell and thus cannot pop into Forbidden Planet or Travelling Man on the way home <sad face>.  I'll be going into the sinful big city sometime, mind you.  So, Brian, what's the next recommendation?

     (I should point out I don't scope these out in advance so what I find is as novel to me as it is to you).

     "The Three Kings".

     You see, there's the thing.  There's hundreds of search results featuring "Three Kings", yet nary a one appears to be a comic book.

     "Better go back to the source," I reasoned.  "Bendis will have the artist and writer down, which I can use to narrow the results."

     Er - no.  I cannot find the original list!  Your Humble Scribe found one from February that has a few common entries and that's it.  Oooops.  Where is the original and how did I find it?  Brian!

     That's the scamp himself, in comic form.

     This, I tell you, is going to take a bit of internet detective work to solve.

"Tamales"

I know, I know, that's a bit of a non sequiteur.  Blame "Pointless", that horribly fascinating game show presented by Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman.  If ever I am in the lounge when it comes on I am ALWAYS delayed by thinking "Oooh I'll just see if my answers were right and Pointless."  Art?

     In case you've been living atop a pole in the desert for the past decade, the format is that teams of two are given clues to a set of answers.  They have to choose one from the set, preferably the most obscure answer, because a panel of 100 people have also been asked these questions.  The answer with the lowest score is the best, and what you aim for is zero points - which is rare.  Or you can get the answer wrong, as above, and get penalised with 100 points.  Erk!

     Anyway, a set of food items that began with "T" came up, and of course - obviously! - Conrad had to stay and guess them all.  The one I didn't get was "Meat and vegetables steamed in a maize husk", which was -

Tamales!

     Whoops, there we are, all done and everything.  Thanks for watching, folks, and remember - keep watching the pies!