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Sunday 18 October 2020

An Invitation To A Ball

You May Be Forgiven -

 - for thinking that Conrad has been reading "Pride And Prejudice" for too long, and he will start talking about 'entailments' and 'quadrilles' and '-shire Militia'.

     Sorry, no.  The only reason I read P&P is because I'd read and not been especially impressed by "Pride And Prejudice And Zombies", which was not half as clever as it liked to think it was.

Entirely forgettable
     For Lo! we are back on the subject of "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" and the story of how globe-trotting archaeologist and - er - 'acquirer' of artefacts, Professor Henry Jones, ended up in dire trouble deep in a cave, having looted laid his hands upon a rare and valuable gold statue.

     We now skip to his headlong escape from a giant stone ball that comes whamming down from the upper levels of the cavern, something absolutely iconic in cinema.  Art?

NOTE THE STALAGMITES
(
also, how and why did they carve it so smoothly?)
     Remember when Conrad loudly proclaimed that this hidden cave system was exceedingly old?  Those stalagmites provide a clue as to approximately how old, because there are accretion rates for these things and an average is 0.0051 inches per year.  If we estimate that one about to be crushed as being all of 12 inches high, then that means this stuff was built 2,300 years ago; or, at the other extreme, with the dizzying accretion rate of 0.12 inches per year, at the very earliest this stuff was built 60 years ago.  The happy median is probably several centuries. So, do we still think all this crude seventeenth-century booby-trappery would still work?  I think not!

"The Goonies" has a similar plot hole

     Then we have the wrecking ball itself.  Your Humble Scribe would estimate this as weighing in at about ten tons.  Then, too, it would have to be smaller than the cave entrance for the builders to be able to roll it inside and up that inclined ramp, nicht wahr?  In that case it will come speeding out of the cave entrance as Indie dives to safety, won't it?


     Maybe not, a squashed hero is hard to come back from and you don't want the film ending after ten minutes.  It may not be obvious here, for which I apologise, though there seems to be a timber baulk across the top of the cave entrance which is intended to stop the ball.

     As if!  A mass of ten tons travelling at a good fifteen miles per hour hitting a piece of wood that's been left in place for three hundred years at least?  The timber would disintegrate into cloud of splinters and the stone ball would end up in the river.
     That's not all, either.  Remember how the South American tribesmen all kneel in superstitious awe and obeisance to the golden idol when it's held aloft?

     HOW DO THEY KNOW TO KNEEL IN AWE!  That idol has been shut away in a hidden cave for at least sixty years and perhaps as many as two thousand, so they can't recognise it for what it is; it would be utterly unknown to them -

     Of course, I could be overthinking this a little ...


     
Ann Reardon, Internet Detective

You may know Ann as the presenter of Youtube's channel "How To Cook That", but she also has a significant side-gig as a debunker of fake viral videos, and it's always a joy to see a new one of her investigative visions on Youtube.  One of her consistent targets are the 'content farms' on Youtube that churn out dozens and dozens of fake videos.  Art?

Ann and long-suffering husband-cum-guinea pig Dave
     In her latest, Ann focussed on a channel calling itself "Mr. Cakes" that has 222 million views per month, which works out at over 2.66 billion views per year, or one of every three people on the planet.  MC turns out to be built on sand.  


     One of their clips has 4 million views, except not really.

     The supposed chefs?  Fake.  All cut and copied from generic stock photos.  The descriptions of said chefs?  Also fake, also cut and copied from generic websites.


     The videos are all produced by "YumUp Ltd.", which is based in - 
     - Hanoi.  They claim to have 100 Youtube channels but refused to divulge any of them to Ann when requested.  Doing her own digging she rapidly found 28 of them, all of which cross-reference and promote each other, which partially explains the number of views.  Ann also found that thumbnails rarely reflect what's actually in the video, choosing the example of a heart-shaped chocolate cake about to be cut into.  Art!

      Here the thumbnail crops up 11 times and never once contains the thumbnail content.

    Despite all this behaviour, typical of a content farm out to make £££ by any means possible, Youtube won't lift a finger against them, as they also make £££ by letting them operate.  What's the issue?  That genuine content creators and producers will get remorselessly squeezed out by mass-spamming tat.  Just remember, if you 'Like' "Mister Cakes" you are murdering baby seals and burning down orphanages.


A Matter Of Mass

Over on the S.O.T.C.W. Facebook page, a member posted a photograph of an unlikely and unwieldy-looking vehicle.  Art?


     Someone suggested that there was a tank behind the APC and the two are just coincidentally close together, which isn't the case, as the shadow of the gun barrel is correctly in line with the shadow of the APC.  Another suggestion was as a test-bed, and yet another was that it was a gimmicked-together fake, which Conrad tends to agree with.  You see, a turret like that would weigh A LOT, five tons at a guess, and would significantly shift the centre of gravity upwards.

     This would have two results: one, the suspension would rapidly become knackered, as it's simply not designed to deal with such an increase in weight; two, the whole thing would be prone to falling over if traversing even the slightest slope, especially if the gun was traversed away from pointing directly forward.  A third consequence can be drawn, in that the APC would no longer be amphibious.  When these had been fitted with the much smaller turret from Saladin armoured cars, they had barely any freeboard and would sink if the turret was even slightly mis-aligned.  How much more so with this beast!  Art?

About the limit of what you can get away with
     Of course, I could be overthinking this a little ...


Finally -
Dog Buns!  Listy, he of the "Overlord" blog over on Blogger, who has had books published and everything, came up with an answer to his own question "What was the most important British invention of the Second World War?".  He chose to bypass those who responded "Radar", "Bailey Bridges" and even "Organisation of the Civil Service" (?), instead putting forward "Plastic Armour".

     He then builds up the background to the requirement, essentially being needed to protect merchant vessels at sea from air attack -

     - and then stops before getting to the actual explanation.  Bah!  "Tune in next week" kind of cliff-hanger.  Art?

     No.  Not at all what I meant - O we'll just have to wait for Listy to complete his "To Be Continued", the titillating swine! (his blog link below)

http://overlord-wot.blogspot.com/


     And with that, we are done!


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