If I Were To Mention Huge Ants And The Desert -

I Know Exactly What You'd Be Thinking

Simply because I'm so smart, I returned the Telepathy Helmet to DARPA a while ago, before they realised I'd - er - 'borrowed' it, so that omniscience is all down to me being a cunning rascal.

     Yes, you were thinking of "Them!", weren't you?  Entirely justifiable and entirely WRONG.  Sorry!  Mind you, it is a classic of the genre and well worth a watch, especially to witness the attitudes and mores of mid-Fifties South Canada: women wore nylons, men took care of the heavy lifting and post-atomic testing had dire consequences.  Art?

Not what you expect to meet on a casual desert stroll

     Of course - obviously! - you couldn't get away with machine-gunning, exploding or flamethrowering giant ants nowadays, the RSPCA would have a fit (or would it be the RSPCI?) and declare them an endangered species, with a Special Reservation they'd be coralled into, with electric fencing to keep them safely inside*, and a reality television series about them, where felons on murder charges could volunteer for combat -

What the well-dressed exterminator wore in the Atomic Era

     I do apologise, we've gone and done it again: what the blog's not about. Art?
     

A Guy ANT Quad

      This model belonged to the New Zealand Division, present during the unpleasantness in North Africa.  It was nicknamed a "Quad" because it had four-wheel drive and is a horsey reference to the old towing teams made up of Dobbin and Co.  The "ANT" bit is a dating convention (remember "DUKW"?) rather than an entomological description.  As Tobin put it on "We Have Ways -" this beast was home to seven men, and was powered by a boat engine.  Not especially fast, yet powerful and reliable, which was a feature of Guy's manufacture.  NOT to be confused with the Morris Quad, of course!

The completely different Morris Quad

     This segues nicely into -

More Of TANK

And The Chieftain's look at Italian armour in the early part of the Second Unpleasantness.  Don't forget, he was looking at desert armour up to mid-1941, when doctrine was being tested and either refined or discarded as it either worked out or not.  Today we look at the Next Model Up, the M13/40, which means - you may be ahead of me here - that it weighed 13 tons and was introduced in 1940.  Art?

     A quantum improvement on the M11/39, this tank had a two-man turret, which was not ideal yet a lot better than the commander having to load, fire and command as well.  The 47 m.m. gun was better than the British 2 pounder because it could also fire HE ammunition.  In 1941 it was a reasonably effective tank, which is where we came in.

"John Was Trying To Contact Aliens"

O he was. was he?  Has John ever stopped to consider that the aliens might not want to talk to him?  Aliens, you know; so very - er - alien.  

     Allow me to explicate a little.  Art?

     This is John, and I don't want you mocking him for his obsessive hobby, which is very South Canadian in nature.  Look at all that technology behind him; if he hailed from This Sceptred Isle then he would have a room entirely dedicated to a scale replica of the City of London made out of lolly sticks, nicht wahr?  Art!

John in his younger days

     What John has been trying to do is that the old CETI project tried for ages, without success, way back when it was optimistically titled "Communication with Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence", rather than the older and wiser "Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence".  One supposes that the likelihood of managing a chat with little purple androgynes** is a function of the Drake Equation, which itself has so many imponderable present that you can't come up with a hard and fast probability.

"Hello?  Hello, this is John speaking.  Can you hear me?"

     Just be careful what you say, John. And, please, don't try to explain the rules of cricket, or you risk an interstellar war.

One Of Conrad's Guilty Secrets

Not so much "guilty" as "Zen", perhaps.  As you know, Conrad likes to go checking out random Youtube videos, and a year ago he came across one from "post 10" where the poster drained an overflowing lake with only his trusty rake.  It was peculiarly satisfying watching the ten-foot grate appear, after post 10 and his mighty rake cleared it of branches, twigs, leaves, mould and mud.  Here's a link if you want something meditative to watch -

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsCNU-ptlze2tqAJSDeVGNQ

     Anyway, he ventures out in stormy weather to clear blocked drains in his neighbourhood, filming same with a shoulder-mounted camera, and no, he doesn't get paid for it (though his channel has adverts).  Art?

     This is the kind of behaviour drivers consider acceptable at the flooded part of the road; post 10 was soaked already thanks to the constant downpour, so he couldn't get any wetter, but not for the motorist's lack of trying.  He found one piece of debris at the roadside, which if Art will put down his bowl of coal -

     Yes, that's someone's bumper, which they lost by DRIVING TOO FAST! in the flood water.  Next -

     These are more bits of car, knocked off by once again DRIVING TOO FAST! as post 10 points out, which have only blocked up the storm drains even further.  Also, as he points out, they are plastic, which will not decompose and thus remain to block the drain.

     post 10 - the kind of chap who can tell the difference between an oak leaf and a maple leaf.  We citizens salute you, sir!

Finally -

Conrad hasn't complained about a Cryptic Crossword or a Codeword for a while, and you might be forgiven for thinking that nothing had crossed my eyesight that was remotely controversial or pedantic.  Well, guess again, because yesteryon I was struggling with a Codeword that took me 31 minutes to complete - yes, really!  The word that really puzzled me turned out to be "EGEST", which is a slightly euphemistic way of saying "Excrete" and I'd never heard of it before.  Have you?  NO!  So it's no wonder I took so long - er - although I was also watching the 18/09/2020 episode of "The Boys", which may have had something to do with it.

The worst kind of patient

*  Because it worked so well for dinosaurs, who can't even fly.

**  "Little green men" is so cliche, don't you think?