Premature Expostulation

Conrad Narrows His Eyes, Menacingly

I know what dirty minds you gutter-dwelling-snipes have, and NO! this is not a rude subject matter, despite what you pervy lechers might assume.  Mister Freud would doubtless have had a fine old time with the subject matter, because Lo! we are going back to "Field Guns In France" and the memoirs of a British artillery officer in the First Unpleasantness.  Art!

Major Fraser-Tytler, as he was then, makes mention several times in his letters home about "prematures" and Your Humble Scribe thinks you need to know more about this subject matter, because I'm informed on this and you aren't.

     Okay!  An artillery piece is the method of delivering a shell to it's target destination, where it explodes and wreaks havoc upon both the vicinity and anyone in that general area.  Or at least that is the plan; reality has occasion to intervene and thwart these intentions.  A shell that requires a fuse to detonate is therefore relying on a very complicated piece of technology - Art?

An excellent illustration of an artillery fuse, broken down

     These fuses needed to be machined to very fine tolerances, then put together with care and attention, and set carefully once the shell they form part of is about to be fired.  If standards back at the factory were sloppy, you get a shell that doesn't explode when it should, and which is quite likely to explode when it shouldn't - that is, shortly after leaving the barrel.  Or just doesn't explode at all; up to one-third of all British shells fired during the Somme campaign were duds, which is what makes the life of a Belgian or French Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer such an interesting one.

     NFT tells of one premature that exploded the instant it left the gun barrel, with the resultant 'splinters' killing one of his gunners and injuring another two.  Such lapses in quality control back in Blighty were a result of the armaments industry increasing enormously both in size and output; Conrad distinctly recalls one of the Official Histories for 1916 acknowledging that the British weapons of 1916 were noticeably of lesser quality than those of 1915.

     So.  A lot less risque than you expected, one feels.

     Motley!  Get ready for the Jellied-Eel-Eating-Against-The-Clock competition to start in - three - two - one - EAT!

Possibly not what I intended, but they are one of my favourite bands, so - no Tazer for Art.  Today.

Russia Is Another Country.  They Do Things Differently There

(with apologies to L. P. Hartley)  There is no debating that, whatever moniker it might be mustered under, Russia, and the Ruffians within, definitely do function differently to us here in the West.  Some might point to the lack of existence under the Roman empire, or the clash between rational Enlightenment and Slavic introspection, or European insularity and Scythian peripheralism*.  Or just a superabundance of vodka.

Conrad inclining toward the latter

     Also, given the hostility between Slavs and Teutons that goes back at least eight hundred years, you can believe that the Ruffians don't look at what they probably deem to be "The Anglo-Saxon Weltanschaung", or how the Teutons (and we the British to a large extent also, thanks to our ancestral heritage) deal with the world in a rational, logical and scientific manner.

     Thus we have this:

     The driver here is clearly the victim of another idiot tail-gating him.  Yet the engine, wheels and suspension clearly still work, so - if it's not illegal, why not simply carry on?  Way back when he still worked at Connexions, Conrad's colleague Dean had a car in a similar condition.  Yes, it looked messy.  No, it wasn't illegal.

     And this, gentle reader, is a band of soldiers or police (the dividing line in Russia can be vanishingly thin), bopping away to music along with that chap carrying a rocket-launcher like a boom-box.  Really!  One cannot imagine the SBS or Parachute Regiment Patrols Platoon carrying on like (cont. Page 96).

"Was King Arthur A Real Person?"

Asks some numpty on teh Interwebz.

     No, Vulnavia, King Arthur as dreamed up by that sower of the myth's seeds, Sir Thomas Malory, definitely did not exist.

     "But - but - but - it would be so cool!" I hear you splutter.  "And it would make the Ruffians so incredibly jealous," which is a major motivator - but no.  

     

How to strangle cats the Dimya way!

     Conrad bases part of this bold assertion on STM's "Le Mort D'Arthur", wherein an invasion of England's French vassal states by the Roman Emperor Lucius is thwarted (second time today for a word you never thought to see once) by King Arthur and his alliance army.  Apart from the numbers silliness where seven hundred of Kingy's knights defeat a Roman field army of twenty thousand, there is also Kingy's army marching south into Italy, then laying siege to whole cities and eventually him being crowned emperor in Rome.

     Historians of the time might have noticed something like this taking place under their very noses.  Guess what?  They didn't.

Wrong continent but you get the drift**

Erk! Real Life Imitates Art

Not the Art who works for BOOJUM! for he is a truculent Neanderthal whose primary interest and hobby is in devouring platefuls of coal, or the innards of nuclear fuel rods when allowed.  No, Your Humble Scribe refers, of course - obviously! - to that story over on the BBC, which if our resident Neanderthal can put down his Mara Corday calendar (another pash of his) -

     Here an aside.  Conrad HATES titles like this, where the clickbaity question is one that the article which follows should have already ANSWERED.  Lazy lazy journalism is what it is!  You'll be sorry when I take over and your internal organs are all assigned to the donation banks.

     You ought to be aware by now that one of our hilarious in-jokes here on BOOJUM! is a reversion to the subject matter "Lithium Wafer Battery Design" if there happens to be a lack of items to create.  And yet here it is, all out in the open as a news story, set in Cornwall, which you know is where LMD'A begins -

 - and we finish.  Pip pip!

*  I made some of these up.  Can you tell?

**  Ha!  "Continent" and "Drift" - tectonic plate in-joke for you there.