Thunderball

For Lo! We Are Back On The Subject Of Demolition

As done correctly and safely, rather than cheaply, quickly and oh-so-often fatally.  Sorry if this dents your fantasies of being able to knock down that derelict end terrace by going at the ground-level walls with a sledgehammer.  

     We have touched on controlled demolition using explosives, which takes an awful lot of pre-planning, and a lot of preparation, because mistakes with this method can be prettttty final.  Art?

That, or embarrassing 

     A second method is by using simple kinetic energy and mass, which we know better as a demolition ball.  The principle is as basic as it gets: you have a whacking massive iron ball dangling from a crane, which you pull back and let rip.  Art?

     
     This picture shows to good effect the length of a demolition crane jib, which is needed to get enough 'swing' to generate sufficient ball velocity.  It also ensures that the vehicle is placed well away from the structure, should there be any unplanned collapses.  Art?

Example 2

     You can imagine just how dangerous these things are, with a ton of metal whizzing around at twenty miles per hour, not making a great deal of noise either (that is, until they hit something, in which case EAR PROTECTORS because it will be thunderous).
     There are practical limitations with a wrecking ball in terms of how high a structure you can safely tackle, not to mention site access for a large caterpillar crane, and room to swing your cat ball.
     Now, there cannot possibly be a James Bond film that strains the bounds of coincidence and calls itself "The Wrecking Ball", can there?

No! Not the same!

     Ha <snaps fingers, breaks a nail, sobs quietly> told you so.  Why, as if anyone could come up with - what?  There was an Ian Fleming short story?  O.  This might not end as I'd wished it.  Let me startle Art into consciousness with the elephant-prod -

Ah.  Foo.

     A wild coincidence, and one any Humble Artisan might make whilst creating bespoke scrivel.  It's not as if these things are crawling out of the woodwork, is it?

Go away now.

     Okay, Motley, motor-bike helmets on and then we'll head-butt each other until the weaker blacks out!

Make Like A Cat And -

Conrad is now 18% of the way through "Bleak House", thank you for asking, and is beginning to have a hazy sense of what's going on in the background, thanks to Nemo's facility with handwriting, and Lady Dedlock's receipt of -

     But that would be telling.

     Anyway, as with Stephen King, Charles Dickens throws things into the text that would have made perfect sense to his readers of the time (mid-nineteenth century) yet which need a bit of checking nowadays.  

     Today's word is "Pounce", and to give you some context, it was mentioned in a long list of the appurtenances sold at Snagsby's legal stationery shop.  Art?

     Conrad, of course, cannot leave things well alone and had to look it up in his Collins Concise.  'Pounce' is a finely ground powder, usually made from cuttlefish bone, that was used to dry ink.  We are talking, after all, of the era when everybody used a quill pen and dipped it in an inkwell.  Blots and smearing were a constant risk, which you leavened by using - Pounce.  Art?

Pooch pounce pot

     There you go, another precious factoid you didn't know five minutes ago.

Blimey!

Conrad is listening to an automatically-generated playlist on Spotify (might as well use the #!8$@¬ thing whilst we've got it), which has come to a long, very intense track by The Plastic People Of The Universe, titled <deep breath> "Bema pamieci zalobny rapsod".  Let's see what translating that does - "Bema remembers a bad rhapsody".  Indeed.  That doesn't really help with the lyrics, does it?  For all I know they could be singing about washing the dishes and how awful it is when you've only got cold water and no washing-up liquid (welcome back to Czechoslovakia circa 1975!).

Very sombre, very serious, very Slav

This One Goes Around The Houses A Tad

You may recall, back in the somewhat laughably titled British "summer", that Conrad came back from Cheadle with a bag groaning under the weight of books it contained, one of which was about "Gunships".  No!  Not in the old-fashioned nineteenth-century meaning of a small naval vessel, quite the opposite, these were aircraft.  Art?

An aerial arsenal

    These things stooged around over the battlefields for hours and hours at a time, and the opposition either went home or got killed extremely dead, for they were not to be messed with.  That's a story for another day, mind.

     Now, given that Your Humble Scribe's mind is a positive midden of mildewed mental manure, another book entitled "Gunships" popped into his head, that being from the Eighties.  Art?

The edition I had
(Note distinctly non-gunship helicopters all reproduced from a single image)

     Conrad's mind being what it is, the author's name stuck in my mind, all the more as I suspected was not the name his parents gifted him with at birth.  And do you know what?  I was write right*.  "Jack Hamilton Teed" was merely one of the many pseudonyms used by Chris Lowder, a fact I discovered thanks to the diligent research of Paul Bishop -

( http://www.paulbishopbooks.com/2019/01/gunships.html )

     Chris is getting on a bit now (75 circuits round the sun) but has an impressive roster of comics work that he's written for in the past, not to mention the creator of something called "Deadlands" that we may go into some other day.  O go on then.  Art?

      Now, back to the serious stuff, the comics**.  Chris worked on "2000AD" back in it's early days, when 2000 was a few decades into the future (ha!), on Dredd, of course, as well as "Invasion", "Dan Dare", "Time Twisters" and "Tharg's Future Shocks".  Of course, if you are as up on your 2000AD pre-issue 1,000 as Conrad, then "Invasion" and "Dan Dare" will by default define his contributions as of that era.  Art!

"Invasion!":  Bill Savage thought as little of the Russ - er - "Volgs" as did TPPOTU

     More appositely, Chris created "Adam Eterno", a character doomed to travel time and space and whom could only be killed by a weapon made of gold.  We've covered him before, it was an excellent series with gritty, suspenseful artwork by Eric Bradbury.  And the comic was - 

     Which is where we came in*** ... 

*  Sorry.

** NO, this is not ironic, Vulnavia.

*** Are we having a ball yet?