Only Foals And Horses

Just Think

For 6,000 years the principal motive power for land transport, terrestrial travel and charging into battle waving something sharp and edgy was the domesticated horse.  Yes indeedy Ally Sheedy; if you wanted to haul wagon-loads of goods from Camelodunum to Lutetia, then you required faithful old Dobbin.  The same if you felt like a day trip to the seaside and didn't feel like rubbing shoulders with the rabble - they had to give way to a quarter-ton of meat moving at fifteen miles per hour or be trampled flat.

CAUTION! These men are trained professionals.  You are not.

     Ah yes entertainment.  That, too.

     SUDDENLY!  TRAINS!  TRAINS ARRIVE! TRAINS ARRIVE ALL OVER!
     

     This doesn't mean Dobbin and his/her foals immediately become items of French haute cuisine, although by the time the internal combustion engine also appears on the scene, Dobbin must be getting a tad worried.

     CARS ARRIVE!  JUST NOT VERY QUICKLY.  SORRY.  NOT AS EXCITING AS TRAINS!

     Let's have a picture of the relevant vehicles, hmmmm Art?

British and French archaeologists uncover a fossilised train

     By the time the First Unpleasantness breaks out, there are thousands of miles of railways across Europe, ridden by thousands of locomotives and tens of thousands of trucks, because this is how you move strategically: by rail.  Only rail transport gives you the ability to move enormous tonnages of supplies and men and weapons, done to all sorts of complicated timetables.  Once supplies reach a railhead they are offloaded, and Dobbin takes over.

     For the moment.  As time went on more and more motor vehicles were accumulated by the combatant armies as they didn't die if out of petrol or hit by a bullet or shell splinter or two, and it takes less time to train Private Smythe to drive a truck than to ride a horse. Plus if they broke down you could strip them for salvage; a dead horse needed an immense grave dug for it before it went rotten (a little-known factoid for you there).
     So between 1841 and 1914 military transport on land had moved from using only foals and horses to trucks and trains*.

     Also, trucks and trains lacked the personality of Old Dobbin, who could be an evil wretch if he chose to be.
     So there you have today's title origins, which I think is an adequate intro - sorry?  People might confuse it with "Only Fools And Horses"?  Pshaw!  You're making it up!  IF there is any such program WHICH I MOST SINCERELY DOUBT then it's not MY fault they chose a title that so closely parallels mine.  Apprentice world dictators think along similar lines, that's the only explanation.

     Motley!  How fast can you climb trees?  O just asking.  That loud growling noise?  No idea, sorry.

Conrad: Provisionally Angry

You know me, it doesn't take much.  As it so very often is, this complaint is about the Collins Crossword book, which I've completed and binned, ha-ha! and it's only taken me a year and three months, which is a bit misleading as Your Modest Artisan didn't start in earnest until lockdown, when there were no more Metro Cryptic Crosswords to be done <sad face>.

     "Tell us, tell us, O White-Haired Wit!" I hear you clamour.  "What what what?"

     "POLLEX (5)" was the clue.  That's a clue?  So I looked it up in my Collins Concise Dictionary - fighting fire with fire you might say - and the answer is - Art?

'Thumb'

     WHAT!!  Have you ever heard of "Pollex" ever before?  Neither had I.  Then came "Japanese art of flower arranging (7)".  There was no way Conrad was ever going to get that, so I looked up the answer, which was "IKEBANA".  ART!

Can you eat it?  No.  Then Conrad is not interested.

     Then to ice the cake of confusion, we had "A region of France (6)", and because I'd already got a few letters, this had to be "ALSACE".  O my, has there ever been bad blood between the Teutons and the M8s over this province!  In  wars over past centuries it has flitted between belonging to one state and then the other and I think by default it has now been awarded to the M8s in perpetuity.

Alsace

     We might come back to this, not least because of Morhange-Sarrebourg**.


Here's A Question For You

With an answer, if not maybe the answer that those who asked expected or wanted - no, no, nothing to do with counting bikers eaten to bits in "Dawn Of The Dead" - 

Art!  What - what have you been smoking!

     Let us pause whilst Art goes through a rapid detox program <sounds of Tazers in background with inhuman shrieking> Okay.  Let's try again.

     From Mars, of course - obviously!  Where else?  Let's add in some astronomy, in order to fulfil that claim on Facebook about our charter.  Art?  O stop whinging and put a plaster on it.

     There you go.  "Phobos" which means "Fear", and "Deimos" which means "Lightly sauteed mushrooms and shallots" which means "Dread".  These two micro-moons orbit Mars rather closely, Phobos so closely in fact that it orbits three times a day, which seems a bit greedy compared to Deimos, which tootles along in a relatively slack 30 hour orbit.  They are so irregular that there are suspicions that both are captured asteroids.

     It is, also of course - how can it not be! - the Solar System's biggest Star Trooper base in 2000AD's outstanding "The V.C.s", one of the best future war stories they ever did - and - er - we appear to have gotten a bit off track.

     Oooops.  All this talk of trains and tracks - I can hear the distant sound of evil steam locomotives, thinking they can intrude into BOOJUM!  Vulnavia!  Prepare to release the Metal-Eating Bats and make sure you point them in the right direction, the insurance people won't pay for new neighbour's cars again.

"Cold iron!" their battlecry

Finally -

Hmmmm.  Currently listening to The Dickies, whom I had a couple of albums back in the days of vinyl, plus their novelty single "The Banana Splits Song" which came out on yellow plastic.  Their gimmick was that they played punkish covers of classic tracks at breakneck speed, courtesy of the master tapes being sped up by at least 25% (an old recording trick).  Amusing initially, and they developed later on, moving beyond making "the fastest bands in the land look like human snails on downers" which is probably some kind of sleazy drug reference, so let's quickly change the subject to "Gigantor The Space-Age Robot".

So I lied.  Sue me.

     And with a leap and a bound we are done.

*  Telpherage, too.  Which is another story from a different kitchen.

**  Nope.  Not telling you yet.