Metal

Although -

It's taken so long to get to this point that it's probably rusted by now.  You see, I booted up the laptop and then went to get lunch, and by the time I got back it was doing that Dog Buns! disk-check, which you can't stop and which takes 45 minutes to run.  I have been using the time constructively, mind, by re-reading "Every Empire Falls", a trade paperback about Mega-City One's time of troubles.  I know, I know, MC1 is always in trouble.  Poetic licence.  And artist Henry Flint is definitely inspired by Carlos Ezquerra.  Art!

You cannot doubt my assertion

     Right!  I don't think we've got enough to make a whole blog post about metal, so I'll put all the relevant items here in the Intro.

     First off, that metal monolith in Utah.  Art!

     First things first: it's not a monolith.  "Mono-" for 'one' and "-lith" for 'stone', and you can see my pedantic hair-splitting point here.  The BBC should know better as it's a "Monometallum", thank you very much.  This particular piece of art was put up at least four years ago and was only discovered by accident when a helicopter crew were out counting sheep.  Quite.  We even have picture proof of same, so - Art?

     Pictures courtesy Google Earth (so they don't sue us).  Of course lots of people immediately compared it with the <ahem> monolith from "2001", when what they ought to be comparing it with is from "Full Metal Jacket" instead and if Art will put down his plate of coal -

     Then we shall jump in time, space and subject matter to the Western Front during the First Unpleasantness, where motor vehicle and horsed transport is mentioned, though not in as much details as the TRAINS, in "Transportation On The Western Front 1914 - 1918".

     I can hear your question from here: "What has that to do with metal?"

     So glad you asked!  For much supply dealt with and because of, 'road metal'.  This is a misnomer as it's not metal at all, it's stone, usually crushed into a fine gravel and used to make roads with.

     Why is this important?  Because the ceaseless usage of the roads in France and Flanders, in all weathers, caused them to break up, hence they needed re-metalling frequently.  TOTWF quotes a total of 3,370 tons daily for December 1915.  This is a lot; the total required in summer would be considerably less as there wouldn't be the rain/snow to erode the roads, nor the sub-zero temperatures to break them up.  It's an awful lot of metal, you must admit, and is one reason light railways were used so extensively; their 'permanent way' didn't get ground down and destroyed by use.

     Jumping back to art in the wild, mention was made in the Beeb's article about the Monometallum of another so-called 'famous' installation that Your Modest Artisan had never heard of: The Lightning Field.  Art?

     This event is rare, which we have to take as given since the site's location is a secret, it's only open for 6 months of the year, no campers are allowed nor can you take photographs (so where did the one above come from?).  It consists of 400 steel poles set up in a grid pattern over a square mile, the end.  Well, not quite the end, as TLF was created or installed or inflicted, whatever term you want to use, in 1977.  It's still there, unsurprisingly, since you'd need an 80 mile round trip to get there and back to the nearest town and those steel poles are secured in buried concrete blocks.

Walter de Maria's work

     Please note the complete lack of bad puns here.

     Motley!  We're going to track this storm, and you can do it wearing our special  De Maria helmet; you'll need to stick your head out of the car window, that helmet won't fit in the back with all those steel spines we welded to it. 

Talking Of Comics ...

This may come as news to you, as you surely lack Conrad's age and knowledge about comics.  Back in 1954 a South Canadian psychiatrist called Fred Wertham published "Seduction Of The Innocent", which was an horrific expose of how comics caused juvenile crime and delinquency.  Art?

     The South Canadian comics industry had to immediately instigate a voluntary code for comics, with a list of what they couldn't publish.  You had to stick to the Code and get a seal of approval or no distributor would touch you, nor would anyone stock your comics.  Art?

     This is why the underground comics of the Sixties sold: they were long on sex, swearing, violence and nudity, frequently all four simultaneously.

     The thing is ... (and I bet you were expecting this) Ol' Fred's book was essentially a collection of lies with a binding.  He didn't hesitate to fake evidence, make anecdotes up, deliberately distort his subject groups and probably passed port to the left.  The CCA is long defunct now and was on it's way out by the Eighties.  And how can you have any respect for an authority that censors comics but allows Disney to publish the unfunniest cartoons ever?

     Somewhere in his comic archive Conrad has some pre-code reprints done under the "Mister Monster" heading - which is a story for another day.

A couple of delinquents in training

"Gutta Percha"

Conrad has encountered this word in <thinks> murder mysteries set in the Thirties, and maybe the works of P.G. Wodehouse.  I've never bothered to look it up until now, and what do I find?

     Nope, not rubber: gutta percha being harvested from the Palaquium tree.  It's an inert rubber-like substance that was used before the widespread use of plastics and is still in use in dentistry, of all things.  Oh, it was used for the core of golf balls, which may be the Wodehouse connection as I had a short-story collection of his all about golf.

     Nope, that's a walking stick not a golf club.

Finally -

We only need a tickle to hit the Compositional Ton, Vulnavia.  Oh, I know - for the first time in 211 pages I've come across mention in TOTWF of "Mechanically-worked foreways", which I think is the closest the text has come to of Telpherage systems.  It's mentioned in passing and is proof by omission that these carriage mechanisms were used on a very small scale.  I shall keep my eyes peeled for more such mentions, though I'm not very hopeful.  Art!

The closest I could find.

     With that we are done!