Brain-Panning

As They May Have Said In The Olden Days

The really olden days, back in the fifteenth century, for Lo! we are back on the subject of "Le Mort D'Arthur" again, and Conrad is now up to page 275, so only 525 left to go!

     No! I am not referring to the ancient and rather dubious practice of 'trepanning', where a hole is cut into some unfortunate's skull, to either relieve pressure from a hematoma, or to let the evil spirits out.  Art!

     If the skull has rounded edges around the rim of the incised skull, then the patient survived, because that indicates healing.  You'd have to wear a hat all the time, mind, to stop hair or rain or passing insects from intruding into your brains.

     O typical BOOJUM! going on about a completely different subject matter to real Intro.  It's how we oscillate.

     Now, we are in Book Seven of LMDA, and in this one we hear at length about Sir Tristram, the son of King Meliodas, who is a mighty knight indeed (despite coming from Cornwall).  Art!

Sir T getting knighted

     You wouldn't expect a fifteenth century work of literature to go into forensic analysis of murder weapons, would you?

     WRONG!  Because Sir T was knighted in order to take on in mortal combat Sir Marhaus, champion of King Anguish of Ireland, and a Knight of the Round Table.  Nobody else is at all keen to take him on, hence Sir T.  They have a long scuffle, at the end of which Sir T hits Marhaus so hard that his helmet splits, the sword cracks his skull and part of the blade breaks off in his 'brain pan', as Ol' Tommo puts it.  Understandably, Sir M flees the field of battle, mortally wounded, getting back to Ireland and promptly dying there.  Your Humble Scribe is surprised he got that far; having a mighty metal meat-mauler mallet your skull usually results in - well, immediate death.

     Later on in Book Seven, Sir T has to go to Ireland, as the lance Sir M had used to injure him was POISONED!! (I know, I know, two exclamation marks yet such a dastardly act deserves them) and he can only be healed at King Anguish's court.  Sir M's sister, who had picked that bit of metal out of her brother's brains, later discovers Sir T's sword whilst he's having a bath and - O what's this?  A piece of the blade is missing - which just happens to be an exact fit for the piece she (rather morbidly, one feels) kept, having extracted it.

     Predictably, she is not happy.  In fact she takes the sword and tries to kill Sir T in the bath, which would have been a strange and early ending for Book Seven, had his squire not stepped in to disarm her.  Sir T had cunningly disguised himself on arriving in Ireland, since killing the King's champion might not go down very well with the locals, by calling himself "Sir Tramtrist".  It worked, so the locals can't have been that sharp.

(They have gotten smarter)

     Unlike his sword!  Conrad is also rather unsure about a king called "Anguish", which he feels is probably a Francophone version of a Gaelic name, or he had very cruel parents.

The Fourth Called Forth

Conrad discovered a website run by Professor Dave Clarke, whom has had a career in journalism, which investigates some supposed 'paranormal' events, like the one put about in 1965 by three New Sealand sappers who had served at Gallipoli in the First Unpleasantness.

https://drdavidclarke.co.uk/

      Therein the link to his pages, should you wish to peruse further.

    The sappers claimed to have seen the 'regiment' the First/Fourth Norfolks walk into a giant brown cloud at ground level, which then arose and blew away, and the Norfolks were never seen again.  Brad Steiger, author and also apparently unprincipled and unscrupulous, claimed that 22 other eye-witnesses came forward and that the Official History repeats claims about the Norfolks marching into an eerie fog and vanishing.

CAUTION! Do not challenge about Official History facts

     Mr. BS* clearly made this up, as Conrad got out his Military Operations: Gallipoli Volume 2, because FACTS and THE TRUTH.  To quote: "On the right a portion of the 1/5 Norfolk continued to press forward; but this party, consisting of 15 officers and 250 men, was not supported, and was never seen again."

     Conrad doesn't know if any of the 22 other supposed witnesses are named, and rather doubts it.  What Mr. BS leaves out is that the 1/5 (NOT 1/4!) was part of 163 Brigade, of whom over 800 were left at the end of the day.  None of their officers or men reported any strange brown clouds.

     We may come back to this, for there is more to tell.

Low-Budget Sci-Fi Flicks: "Saturn 3"

Back to that list I made from a Youtube channel.  Conrad thinks he's seen this one, and is certain that he's seen various scenes, or how else would be know that Harvey Keitel is in it?  And the big robot gets knocked over by a door that opens  horizontally.  Plus Kirk Douglas' character gets a great big socket inserted into the back of his neck, and doesn't he sacrifice himself for the sake of Farrah Fawcett?  Art!

     Perhaps I was reading a book, and the book was more interesting than the film?  Or - I was baking, and had to keep going to check on how it was rising?  I dunno.  Nor does Your Humble Scribe feel that he's missed all that much and that there's a "Saturn 3"-shaped hole in his life.

     Low-budget because that's the cast right there, so they don't have a big salary bill.

Finally -

Yes, it is the last day of 2020.  No, we shall not be going over the past year, because that's what everyone else will be doing, and one feels a little more creativity is needed to herald the end of one year and the start of another.  In that spirit, have a picture of Krak De Chevaliers.  Art!

     And, yes, Art, you can add in a picture of Mara Corday.

Sultry!

* O what appropriate initials

Conrad Is Cross!

VERY Cross!

But not angry.  This contradiction in terms is explicable, though you will have to put up with Your Humble Scribe painting a picture in words, and pontificating, and generally beating about the bush.  Since this is 99% of BOOJUM! anyway, it ought not to be a problem.

     Okay, cast your minds back to the Seventies, when Tom Baker played The Doctor, "Star Wars" was still only a future re-imagining of "The Hidden Fortress" and reality television was (thankfully) not yet a thing.  Conrad hated musicals even at that age, so some things remain constant.  And then there was the Airfix Catalogue.  ART!

     For your erudition, Airfix made a vast range of scale plastic construction kits: tanks, aircraft, naval vessels, human skeletons and other odds and ends.  The best thing about the annually-produced catalogue and the kit boxes was the cover artwork, which was never static or dull.  Art!

Conrad not sure the hull machine-gunner could contort to fire like that

     More!  More!

Wrong paint scheme, but we'll overlook that

     This artwork was by the artist Roy Cross - hence today's title - who had trouble painting anything at all fuddy-duddy.  Today's Airfix kit covers are dull and stilted by comparison, probably because a collection of lawyers got together and bleated "You can't sell it like that, you can't sell it like that" in chorus until they were paid to go away.  Art!

"Kondor heading one-seventy to starboard, outer port engine aflame ..."

     That's a Short Sunderland "Flying Porcupine" as it was known, a beast of a flying boat and since it mounted up to sixteen forward-firing machine-guns, any Teuton aircraft would give it a wide berth.  You can smell the briny tang and diesel smoke in that picture.  Arrrr, Jim lad! <recovers from Pirate Speaking Syndrome> Mister Cross ought to have been well-compensated for his artwork, since it was what sold the kit.   Go on, more TANK!

     That's the later-model Mark IV Panzer, and there was an alternate turret you could build without the storage box at the back and the short 75 m.m. gun (forgive me for using the metric system here).
     Motley!  Bring me my toolkit, for I wish to check for 1/16th inch drill bits.

How Do You Get Any Work Done?

The metaphorical "You", no need to explicate yourself.  Well, you can if you will, it's just I'm not going to pay any attention*.  For Lo! we are back on the subject of Sir Thomas Malory and Aircraft Carriers "Le Mort D'Arthur".  Back on the subject of Sir Gareth, in fact, that enormous young knight who was mightily skilled in combat, and whom doesn't appear to have lost a single combat that I recall (and we're at page 247).  He is maundering about, looking for 'adventure', which mostly means challenging other knights he comes across to joust with him.  Is there a bridge?  Then there's a knight owning it who needs jousting.  Is there a mountain pass?  Then there's a knight owning it who needs jousting.  Is there a castle with divers damosels held captive?  Then there's a knight owning it who needs jousting.  Is there a Yellow Three-Leaved Bog-Asphodel in the middle of a field of corn?  You guessed it, there's a knight owning it who needs jousting.

"Foul churl!  It was a Yellow FOUR-Leaved Bog-Asphodel!"

     As the item title wonders and ponders, how on earth does Sir Gareth get anything done?

     ANYWAY he does come across Sir Bendelaine, there's a challenge and a joust and Sir Bendelaine rapidly joins the angels, at which point his assorted minions decide that twenty-to-one is better odds and attack Sir G.

     Fools.

     A while later the four (!) survivors flee, leaving Sir G. with his own horse dead (that was their cunning tactic) but sixteen spares to choose from.  Conrad is curious; what happens to the fifteen left over?

"Dinner on the hoof, Conrad."

     Ah.  I see.  Thanks for the insight, Sir G.


Triumph Of The Spirit

No, not a recut version of "Triumph Of The Will" as Conrad is not interested in Teuton propaganda films about Herr Schickelgruber.  No, I refer, of course - obviously! - to that recently-discovered splendid resource/time-wasting monster blog "The Horrors Of It All" which looks at South Canadian comics before they were somewhat neutered by the Comics Code.  Art!

WASH OUT YOUR SEWER-LIKE MINDS!

     For this comic dates from 1953, thus the title "Crack" certainly has nothing to do with where your septic sump of speculative smuttiness is going.  Conrad has a pretty fair working knowledge of superheroes, yet Captain Triumph is not one he's ever come across before.  Art?

     I'm so glad we cleared that one up.  In the story above, Captain Triumph, or Lance, with his friends Biff and Kim, stumbles across a town ravaged by a -

     Werewolf.  Yup, not gangsters or coyotes or renegade Indians or monolith monsters; a werewolf.  Nice to see the importation of some European customs continues, hmmmmm?

     I shan't spoil the ending, QUITE, just to let you know that the werewolf, when slain, reverts back to it's human form.  Our trio of heroes decide to leave town undeclared, as they fear trying to convince the locals would only result in a triple necktie-party.

Interesting.  But nobody looks hard in jodhpurs.

     One also feels the good Captain could have put more effort into his, ah, 'costume' or 'uniform', as it is about the worsetest I have seen.  Except maybe for 'Calendar Man', although he was possibly the lamest supervillain ever.

Finally -

You may wish to skip this bit as it concerns matters military, and mud.  For Lo! we are back on the memoirs of Lt.Col. Neil Fraser-Tytler, "Field Guns In France" and he is back with the rest of his artillery battery at the wagon lines.  He describes the November rain and resulting mud at Montauban, and how it took two teams of ten horses to drag the forage and supply wagons on a 15 hour journey to get provisions, when in dry weather a team of two and another of four could manage perfectly well.  Art!

Excellent going.  Yes, really.

     He also mentions that delayed-action shells are the worst kind of bother, as they go off only after penetrating the ground to a depth of many feet, creating an underground cavern.  If a horse-drawn wagon crosses one of these and is heavily loaded, the 'roof' collapses and wagon, horses and driver end up at the bottom of a deep dirty hole.
     We have met this concept before, which is how the "Grand Slam" monster ten-ton bombs of Perfidious Albion operated in the Second Unpleasantness.  They would destroy a target by penetrating the earth for dozens of yards before exploding, creating a 'camouflet' or underground cavern.  Everything above for hundreds of yards around would collapse into it, the end.  Great for destroying hard-to-hit targets like railway bridges.  Art!

Like a bridge over troubled craters.

     I think that counts as being done, Vulnavia.  Tot siens!

*  Yes, I am horrid that way.

Absolutely Nothing To Do With Aircraft Carriers

Honestly

I think we've just about mined-out that theme, although I reserve the right to come back to it in future if i) I feel like it or ii) an interesting item of Aircraft Carrier News comes to light.  Your Humble Scribe cannot recall any interesting stories being set aboard aircraft carriers, because they are essentially a fair-sized township at sea, rather than a small, tight-knit community a-swill with drama (like a corvette or destroyer).  If you dare to bring up "Battlestar Galactica" I will detonate you by Remote Thermonuclear Death-Button.

How to scare cats the Fascist Captain Kirk way!

    He gave me the idea.

    Okay, enough about - hmmmmm - actually that above gives me an idea. I take it you are familiar with that splendid "Star Trek" episode "Mirror Mirror"?  Wherein our familiar feely-touchy fine familial Federation folks are transmitted to an alternative universe when the Empire is a rapacious, domineering, brutal <add lots of cool invective here> pass-the-port-to-the-right kind of organisation.  What if the Empire is the norm and the Federation the freak?  Hmmmm yeah you never expected to read that of a Tuesday, did you?

"I see you got most of your shirt off.  Captain.*"

     Pausing only to note that William Shatner is a British American, and that Jean-Luc Picard is portrayed by a BRITISH actor, and - 

Shall I shut up now?

     Sorry, I've just taken my medicine and am feeling all better now.  Let us move on, whilst avoiding aircraft carriers.  Motley!  We are going to play Whack-a-Mole, where the moles have been dining on a nitroglycerine diet ...

This Is UNBELIEVABLY Gruesome

Seriously, if your lunch is only being held down with difficulty, then you will want to avoid this.  Or imbibe strong anti-emetics.
 

     To what does Conrad refer?  Why, aerial combat of the First Unpleasantness, of course.  You remember, when armed combat in the skies developed from chaps throwing bricks at each other's aircraft, to synchronised machine-guns firing fifteen incendiary rounds per second**?

"Take that, you dirty cur!"

     There were no effective aircraft parachutes until late 1918, when the Teutons introduced ones that were so dangerous you would only use them if it was a case of either being burnt alive or falling in bits***.  

     So.  As observed in "Biggles", whose stories of the First Unpleasantness are a whole lot grimmer when you read between the lines, if you were a pilot or observer in a kite that caught fire, it was quicker and more painless if you jumped when your bird was alight.  Conrad has been reading Richard Van Emden's "The Road To Passchendaele" of late, bought 3 years ago and not perused until now <hangs head in shame>, and a South Canadian doctor attached to a Royal Artillery unit details the consequences for Teuton aircrew when their aircraft power-dived into the ground.  "The pilot was flung clear.  He was, one could almost say, a bag of broken bones: lower limbs wrenched from hip joints, feet twisted around his neck, and had not his uniform held him contained he would have been, as to human shape, pretty well amorphous."
     

A luckier chap

     There are photographs to go with this hideous scene, which we won't post here.  Hopefully this item rather punctures the vapid and dishonest "Knights of the air!" nonsense that was abroad at the time and since.  

Wowsers, that was a downer and no mistake.  Let us have light-hearted nonsense that has nothing to do with aircraft carriers!

Incidental Detail

As you should surely know by now, Conrad has a few many frackin' loads of guilty pleasures that he watches over on Youtube, one of which is a South Canadian Marine Corps boot watching videos of the armed forces of Perfidious Albion in action, and expostulating at how different their slang/weapons/tactics are.

     Welcome to the concept of "Cultural Contamination".  Art?

     What's that visible over his right shoulder?  Why none other - no, no, we'll come back to Finland and the 1939/1940 war with the Sinisters - none other than YORKSHIRE TEA! which, as a proud Lancastrian ("Greater Manchester" be damned) practically leaped off the shelves and smacked me around the chops.  What is a South Canadian, a nation practically nursed in coffee as the amniotic fluid, doing with BRITISH tea on his shelves?  

     Anyone who mentions 'Boston^' will be detonated by Remote Thermonuclear Death-Button, as Boston is in Lincolnshire, not Yorkshire.

Yorkshire

Conrad Is CROSS!

More than his incandescently irate irruptions, I'll have you know.  No, our resident Cryptic Crossword and Codeword Connoisseur (spelled correctly first time!) is, once again, annoyed at what the Codeword compilers have seen fit to include.

     "SCHLEP" which I suspected yet did not confirm until late in the game.  It's NOT in my Collins Concise.  Thanks to working with Steve back at Connexions in Harpurhey, I know that this is Yiddish.  

     "A considerable distance to travel" is the more literal translation.  How on earth is it fair to start including European dialects into your Codewords? and what chance they have with North-Western UK slang in there shortly, hmmmm?  Yeah, hang your head in shame, I thought so.

Worker's Playtime

Apologies, not sure if that should have been apostrophised or not.  I shall leave it to the grammar Nazis amongst you to work it out.

     Anyway!  Once again we have some idiots undertaking demolition work that they should never had approached with a barge pole attached to a barge pole.  Art!

     We have looked at demolition work like this before, and the salient fact is that there is NO WAY to predict where the building will collapse, which the plant operator(?)  must be aware of, or they wouldn't be working with such a long extension.  Fnurrrr-fnurrrr.

     Ah yes the old "demolished artefact moves beyond what you thought it's ground footprint would be thanks to gravity, inertia and structural integrity" and the demolished building not only moves further than you expected, it hits the operator of said construction plant as not intended in any way whatsoever.  In this way the artefact has been carriered -

 - gosh how narrowly did we avoid aircraft carriers there!  It's almost as if someone was trying to manipulate the English language into a cocked hat and thus craft it into an airy-

 

  I think that's quite enough for today.  Tot siens!

*  "Galaxy Quest" in-joke for you there.

**  True in both regards

***  Seriously.  They had a failure rate of about 50% when used.

^  The UK location, not the band.  Nor the South Canadian city.

Chop And Change

A Saying Which Might Baffle Some

That would be the unfortunate some who are unlucky enough not to live upon This Sceptred Isle, poor swine.  Today's title means 'to muck about with things' and the implication is that you're doing the mucking about with insufficient reason.  

     For Lo! we are back on "Le Mort D'Arthur" again.  Yes, you may well face-palm, I'm only on page 230 of 800, so this subject matter is going to crop up again, whether you like it or not <tweaks moustache ends like a verminous Victorian vaudeville villain, verily>.  Art!

     Yes yes yes, a smashed piano has no relevance here, we're just seeking to add a little frisson to the blog.  Do you really want - O you do.  Go on then, though I doubt we can find any pictures of Sir Gareth.  Art!

Well, I'll be swornhoggled

     There you go.  Book Seven of LMDA is mostly about Sir Gareth, who is an unusually large young man, who gets made a knight by Sir Launcelot.  For some reason not yet explained, Sir G keeps himself anonymous at all times, instead of letting King Arthur know that he's the son of King Lot of Orkney.  Must be a bet (or a dare).

     Anyway, one of his adventures concerns raising the siege of the Castle Perilous, which name gave Conrad pause.  Who would call their castle "Perilous"?  Is it a poorly-designed fire-trap with bad ventilation and an infestation of giant rabid were-rats?  Or does it sit atop a mountain, accessible only via a single narrow bridge with no side walls over a hundred-foot drop?  Is the local countryside haunted by man-eating giants who have been running rampant for seven weeks/months/years <delete where applicable>?

CAUTION! Liable to be haunted by Goths

     ANYWAY

     The siege is lifted when Sir G - whom is as good a knight in combat as Sir Launcelot, which is pretty phenomenal - beats the Red Knight of the Red Launds, and - O what's this but a most attractive damosel within the castle!  The Lady Lionesse (nothing to do with Edgar Allan Poe), with whom Sir G. instantly falls in love with, salted with a fair bit of lust; and the feeling(s) are reciprocated.
     Here things take a turn for the maddest.  Sir G had been sent to raise the siege at behest of Linet, sister of Lionesse, who for weeks does nothing but insult Sir G, until she finally repents and admits that he's a good knight.  Here also enters a touch of the green-eyed monster, Conrad cynically determines, as Linet decides to prevent Gareth from sleeping with her sister before they are married.

Sir Gareth gets the horn*

     That's Linet above, where you can judge her true feelings thanks to ignoring inter-personal spacing.  Well, to stop Sir G <ahem> 'getting jiggy with it', she conjures up a knight who attacks Sir G when the jiggy is about to commence.  The fight is short as the attacker is knocked flat, un-helmeted and decapitated in the space of a few minutes; Sir G not a chap to get on the wrong side of (I did warn you).  Not remotely abashed, Linet produces an ointment that she spreads on the severed head and the neck, reattaching the two and leading the now very much alive knight off to her quarters.

     WITCH ALERT!  WITCH ALERT!

     Yeah.  Sir G tries the premature-jiggy manoeuvre the next night, only for the undead zombie revenant knight to do the attacking thing again.  This time Sir G not only hews his head off, he chops it into a hundred pieces and throws the pieces out of a window into the moat.

     Guess who shows up, again, with her Magic Zombie Ointment, and all one hundred 'gobbets' of head?  Why, WITCHY Linet, and you can bet she was able to float on the moat to recover all those bits.  Blech.  She does the reanimation slather with her MZO and -

     That's how today's blog got it's title.

CAUTION! Repeated decapitation can be harmful

     Wow, that went on a bit, hmmm?  Don't worry, next up we have AIRCRAFT CARRIERS! for your delectation.

Aircraft Carriers

These monstrous marine <thinks> mastodons (?) came of age in the Second Unpleasantness, where they were used to conduct offensive operations, notably in the Pacific (ironic name, hmmm?), and also as a protective measure for convoys, especially in the Atlantic (can't think of ironic joke about this, sorry).  You can get an idea of South Canada's sheer industrial muscle by looking at the chart below.

     Although Perfidious Albion managed pretty well (preens).  Look at those two combined: 182 aircraft carriers.  That's NINE TIMES the total of the next largest, the Imperial Japanese Navy.  Forget the Teutons, they never managed to get anything in service and if they had it would have been sunk quick smart.

     As of today, the South Canadians number TEN nuclear-powered monster aircraft carriers, with another 9 smaller vessels that they quibble "are not realllllly aircraft carriers".  They are.  How's that refurbishment of the "Admiral Kuznetsov" coming along, Dimya?  If the world's unluckiest ship ever gets back into service, then the Ruffians will have a whole ONE aircraft carrier.  Although they will then go red in the face bloviating how "aircraft carriers are obsolete" and "we don't care"**.

O Dearie Me

Conrad is not sure exactly how he came across it, but he has.  A blog called "The Horrors Of It All", which deals with South Canadian comics before the Comics Code came into being - you remember, thanks partly to all the bias and lies peddled in "Seduction of the Innocent".

     ANOTHER drain on my precious time.  Be strong, Conrad, avoid clicking on - 

     Too late.  See you in three hours.

Finally -

For the past 6 hours Your Humble Scribe and five others have been playing a wargame at a remove.  Phil and I are the Teuton players, Andy and Richard are the French players, and neither team can see the actual wargames table.  We have a map, we issue orders to our units, and have reports back about what is or isn't happening, except of course it's not quite that simple, because units don't always receive their orders, or receive them and are then forgotten about, or they encounter the enemy where no enemy should be.  Not to mention real life intervening, as when my laptop crashed, or when Edna came to take station on my lap.  It all reflects what happens in real life and how frustrating it can be.  Richard - the runner and umpire, not the French player - has been taking photos of the gaming table as events occur, which will be very interesting to compare with the orders issued and reports given.  You will UNDOUBTEDLY get to hear more of this!

"Paging doctor Freud -"

     And that's us for today.  Toodle pip!

*  WASH OUT YOUR FILTHY FILTHY MINDS!

**  Possibly also resorting to taking their football home and thus ending the game

Looking Back In Anger

I Anticipate Somewhat

For tomorrow, various members of the SOTCW are going to engage in a wargame played via Discord.  The whole thing has been arranged by Richard - the one who lives in Storrs, not Spain - who will be the one actually moving men and machines around the battlefield/wargames table.  Myself and Phil will be playing the Germans of May 1940, as we invade France, and "Atomic Renegade" will be one of the French players.  Not sure if this is Andy or Jamie in real life.  We shall have to issue detailed orders to our units BUT WE CANNOT SEE THEM! as in real life, rather than the '600 Foot General' looming over a wargames table.  This means every possibility of making enormous boo-boos, again as in real life: you forget to issue orders to a crucial unit; you send the wrong orders to the wrong unit; you don't inform your superiors what you're doing; you lose track of the opposition; you broadcast orders in clear that the enemy immediately detect - you get the idea.

     So let us draw up the retrospective!

2019

https://comsatangel2002.blogspot.com/2019/12/them-crazy-greeks.html

2018

https://comsatangel2002.blogspot.com/2018/12/back-with-bang.html

2017

https://comsatangel2002.blogspot.com/2018/12/back-with-bang.html

2016

https://comsatangel2002.blogspot.com/2016/12/taste-blood-of-dracula.html

2015

https://comsatangel2002.blogspot.com/2015/12/pierogi-pussycat-and-poland-again.html

2014

https://comsatangel2002.blogspot.com/2014/12/nebuchadnezzer.html

2013

https://comsatangel2002.blogspot.com/2013/12/omnivorous-and-oblivious.html

Cat-apult

Just Not How You Imagined One

No! We are not talking about the R.E.M. song either, mostly because REM (can't be bothered with the full stops) are a bunch of old fuddy-duddies now, though they were pretty hot stuff back in the day, and Your Humble Scribe still remembers being impressed with them on "The Tube" when they did "South Central Rain". And you'll see why the first three letters have a hyphen.

     But I digress.  An occupational hazard here on the blog, get used to it.  Art!

     That's Mars, as it used to be imagined back in the Fifties, to judge by the spaceship designs, at a time when the romantic Thirties nonsense about canals had been firmly quashed, yet detailed knowledge of the surface was lacking.  You can contrast the gleaming gamboge (not a word you ever expected to see today, hmmm?) sands with the rusty reality, if Art has finished with his bowl of coal -

     Mars in real life looks rather similar to Arizona, hmmm?  Except if you took your helmet off you would die in hideous yet interesting ways.

     "Why Mars?" you ask, "because I thought this was about catapults?"

     Did you not read the warning above as regards digressions?

     Okay.  Catapults.  You are no doubt thinking along the lines of siege artillery from classical warfare involving Greeks or Romans, which is a fair guess.

     But WRONG!  

     For Lo! we are back on the subject of aircraft carriers again - don't wince, this is interesting stuff.  Right, you have your aircraft carrier, and there are practical limitations to how big these things can be built, because - target.  For one thing.  By the Second Unpleasantness, the aircraft being launched were considerably more massive than their string-and-canvas biplane predecessors.  Take the South Canadian's Dauntless SBD, a naval scout and dive bomber, which when loaded for combat weighed over 4 tons.  Art!

Delivering good news, or bad, depending on your viewpoint

     You have a limited length of flight deck to accelerate your crate to take-off speed, and consequently very little time to ensure you fly instead of swimming.  So, enter the hydropneumatic catapult. Art!

 The Type H, Mark 8 Catapult is a hydropneumatic, flush deck type catapult designed for launching an airplane from the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.

     No scale, so just imagine it's about a hundred yards long.  All you'd see on the deck would be the long slot and the catapult 'shuttle', just like a swan on the water.  The aircraft being launched would attach to the catapult and be hurled forward at considerable speed, instantly, rather than having to accelerate itself.

     The ol' hydropneumatic catapult was known to be very inefficient, so Her Brittanic Majesty's Royal Navy came up with the steam catapult in 1950, and this is the type of catapult most often used on aircraft carriers nowadays, which explains the plumes of what most people assume is smoke, issuing up through the flight deck.  Art!

0 - 120 in 3 seconds

     There is talk of replacing steam catapults with an electromagnetic system, which sounds very 22nd century, and we shall see if it comes in.

     Oh, and remember that antediluvian clunker that the Ruffians have, the 'Admiral Kuznetsov'?  Because it was built by the Sinisters, they built it cheap (and nasty!*) without a catapult.  So the aircraft it launches cannot be either heavily-armed, nor heavily-fuelled, as otherwise their pilots would become submariners in short order.  So they can either carry a lot of ordnance a very short distance, or travel a long way with with very few weapons.

The AK on fire a year ago.  This ship was surely launched on a Friday 13th.

     So there you go.  Catapults.

     Motley, I've got a bait catapult and a bag of steel ball-bearings.  Shall we try a distance and impact test?

Dance, motley, dance!

Still On That Theme -

Conrad is re-watching "Battlestar Galactica"'s first season and just finished the second episode, "Water".  Which is indeed about H2O, that stuff that you we all need to survive.  Cylon sleeper-agent sabotage has caused the Galactica to vent 60% of all her potable water, creating an instant rationing schedule.  Ironically, Helos and Boomer are back on Caprica, where they are drenched thanks to the non-stop rain.

Boomer and Helos

     I won't post any spoilers - this time.  Be warned that the whole series is 15 years old and I anticipate throwing spoilers in from time to time, because you SHOULD have seen it by now, no excuses.

     Why did I bring up this particular television program?  Because the central conceit, as explained by the show's creators, was to have the situation on Galactica mirror that of the South Canadian or British aircraft carriers of the Second Unpleasantness (and perhaps that business in the Falklands).  That's the DNA for anything to do with the battlestars, which may give you a different perspective on things.

The battling beast herself.

More Of Cats

I thought a change of pace from either sharks or hyenas would be welcome, so here we are.  Jenny had an early Christmas present in the shape of a new 'fur igloo' which replaces the unwieldy one that perched precariously atop the chest of drawers.  Art!

     She fits in very snugly, a quality cats are said to like about their lairs.

     Now, you know those humourless Ruffians, the ones who maintain a stony glare at all times, and who dream of nothing more than overthrowing the West, and who are happy to send grandma to the gulags if she so much as twitches an eyebrow when Tsar Putin comes on television?  Yeah, them.  Art!

     These humourless, stony-faced rascals saved a cat from going into the recycling machinery at a plant in Ulyanovsk, after the poor creature had been stuffed into a bag full of paper.  Having been rescued, it is now officially a mascot for the provincial government and (allegedly) has been appointed an assistant director.  Not what you'd expect from the Stony-Faced Gimboids, is it?

The Director is: IN

Finally -

I don't know how I missed this opportunity earlier, possibly Conrad was so ferociously focussed it escaped my attention, so let us repair that omission.  Art!

How to scare cats the Brickmaster way!

     And with that we are done!

*  There, there, Dimya, don't cry so