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Tuesday 29 December 2020

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.

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