Fly Me To The Moon -

Well, OBVIOUSLY! 

I mean, there's no way you're going to swim there, right?  Nor will jumping up and down flapping your arms get you very far - Hom. Sap. not designed for unpowered flight.  And while we're about it, that song I nicked today's title from goes on to bleat about some patently unrealistic events.  

    "Let me play among the stars -"

     Certainly! When, that is, you come up with a functional Faster Than Light Drive, because otherwise it's going to be all Generation Ships* which trudge along at ridiculously low velocities, which cannot be called "playing".  Art?

Take your pick

    I'm so glad we got that out of the way, astronomical inaccuracy does displease me ever so much.  We may come back to that song, because a helpless hapless target is all the more amusing to torment.  Yes, I am thoroughly evil <tweaks moustache and cackles>.

     Your Humble Scribe is whanging on about astronomy because it's part of the blurb over on Facebook and it's been conspicuously absent from BOOJUM! in any quantity for a while.  Thus I have been examining a link that got bookmarked earlier this year, about a Return To The Moon.  The first step to getting there is a spacecraft, in this instance one dubbed "Orion".  Art?

Orion en route

     This puppy is still in the testing stages and is due to take a powered flight aboard the Space Launch System (a.k.a. "A Whacking Big Rocket") next year.  The SLS is a monster of a rocket, built using lessons, know-how and technology derived from the Space Shuttle.  Let's see if Art can dig up some useful pictures of it - if he can put down his plate of coal.  Art!

SLS with puny humans for scale (those tiny ant-like dots)

     I caution you not to confuse Orion with 'Project Orion', which you will immediately recall was the pusher-plate nuke-propelled Sixties design briefly considered and then rejected as a template for the "Discovery" in "2001: A Space Odyssey".  O no.  For this particular project comes under the heading of "Artemis" <tries to think of pun>, whom classical mythology tells us was the sister of Apollo; kind of keeping it in the family, hmmm?  

Artemission Control says "Go"**!

     Motley!  Come over here.  In the tradition of astronomy and mythology, I am going to punch you.  There - "Orion's Belt!"


Of Course We Have To Return to Ol' Stan

Stanley Kubrick, that is.  Yesterday we left him busily plotting how to re-create Vietnam in England, ho-ho!  Step one was to import and then keep alive 200 palm trees, which do create a nice mise en scene when you see them.  Step Two was to import one hundred thousand plastic tropical plants from Hong Kong (presumably nobody in Perfidious Albion or Europe stocked quite that many), since they were a lot more background than the palm trees, which got a supporting actor nomination star billing watered a lot.

FMJ 1986 or Vietnam 1968?

     Step Three was to acquire the Big Ticket Hardware items; tanks, trucks and helicopters.  Stanley - er - "acquired" four M41 tanks from (it says here) "a Belgian officer he knew".  The helicopters were actually the British Westland Wessex painted up to resemble the USMC's CH35s.  Art?

     Both are hideous things, in Conrad's opinion the ugliest craft ever to have wobbled into the skies, though one does greatly resemble the other.
     They also had Little Ticket Items, like that mechanical run-around-cum-cargo-hauler that the Marines loved to bits, the 'Mechanical Mule'.  Art?

     Okay, that's tropical plants and heavy military plant.  Let's call a halt there until tomorrow.

A Ghoulish Sense Of Humour

Your Humble Scribe is reading another military history book recently acquired: "Field Guns In France" by Lt. Colonel Fraser-Tytler, being a collection of letters he sent from France to his father (never so familiar as to be "Dad").  Art?

     Being written for family perusal, they are fairly breezy in nature, not remotely precious, literary or mannered.  What they do reveal is a horrid sense of humour, which may have been put on, or contrarily may have been quite genuine, given the environment and experiences.  A particular example occurs in the Spring of 1916 - the squeamish amongst you may skip to the next bit - where a Teuton plane is brought down in flames from about 4,000 feet up.  "The observer of the first one evidently felt uncomfortable and got out,"; this being a two-man plane, the pilot was probably already dead.  The observer, as one can confidently predict, did not survive a fall from that height.

     You might well imagine the state of the body after falling from such a height, and onto a mass of old rusty barbed wire in the middle of No Man's Land.  F-T then relates how the Teutons suddenly feared that the dead man's body might conceal important papers, and so shelled it " - to try and break it up" and partially-succeeded, which again I shall leave to your imagination.  The next morning F-T and another officer crawled out to plot a route to the body, which was later recovered and found to be completely free from papers of any sort, important or not.  One imagines what was left of the unfortunate observer - "the remains", as F-T puts it in matter-of-fact style, was shovelled into a bucket for disposal and buries in a shoebox.

     Ooooh that was grim.  Quick, bring on the dancing horses!

Sorry, couldn't afford horses

"The Boys"

Conrad is currently watching the last episode of Season Two, and nobody appears to have asked about the elephant in the room.  Art?

     Namely, where did all these super-terrorists get Compound V from?  Because they didn't acquire it overnight; they were dosed with it as children, possibly decades ago.  Did it get stolen?  Sold?  Given away on street corners with a free newspaper as well?  Because if any of the above, then Vought have been concealing criminal negligence.  

     Then again, a courtroom battle that takes five years to resolve with two million pages of documents and teams of lawyers in the dozens would be interminably dull stuff.

"I object."***

Finally -

Mixing tenses and times here is a little tricky on BOOJUM! as temporal flow in the Sekrit Layr clearly does not follow the normal rules of the space-time continuum (one of the rare words with a double "U" not to be confused with a "W").  Of late I have been crafting most, if not all of, the next day's post the night before, so I don't have to work against the clock before clocking on for work.  Just so you appreciate some of the effort that goes into this pile of steaming scrivel blog.  Hang on, has that treacherous appendage Mister Hand been up to his tricks again? - I swear, if he wasn't attached at the wrist ...

Mister Hand, being cheeky

*  Ships where whole generations are born and die before the craft makes planetfall, centuries after launching.

**  Yes it's a bit thin.  Try doing this at speed and against the clock

***  Devin Stone, Youtube's 'Legal Eagle'