So what? It's not as if you need to pay to read this scrivel, is it*? Okay, let me tell you that moving Mother by train was a major undertaking, requiring special ramps and flat car wagons. Art!
<sighs and reaches for Tazer>
Art, we are talking about TANK here. I refer, of course - obviously! - to the armoured fighting vehicle of the First Unpleasantness NOT the Avengers character. Can we try again?
These things weighed in at 30 tons and were large, as you can see from above with puny humans for scale. They had to be loaded onto special low-slung wagons by ramps and arranged in order to unload when they got to the detraining station. Art! O stop whinging and put some cream on it.
This is probably being shipped from the factory as in France the sponsons were removed for rail transport due to width issues
Okay, back to "Wagon Train", which we dealt with briefly yesteryon. It was a television soap opera that began in 1957 and ran for 8 seasons and 284 episodes, so somebody out there liked it.
It wouldn't be an earth-shattering revelation to know that it was about <small drum roll> a train of wagons, heading from Missouri to California. Conrad feels it must have been an immense and immensely slow wagon train, since it took eight years to get there. I may do some number crunching on that.
And I have done. You may thank me later. Okay, the distance to travel is 1,847 miles**, and it took them 2,920 days to manage that. We shall be charitable and say that they had on average 12 hours per day to usefully travel, which means their journey took 35,000 hours. In other words they managed 2/3 of a mile per day at a speed of 0.005 miles per hour**. It would have been quicker to walk. Art!
The character above was one of John Wayne's best friends, I'll have you know: Ward Bond. He was just as right-wing as Ol' John, and he hated his WT co-star with a passion, in fact with just as much passion as he loved alcohol, since he was an alcoholic by any definition of the word. Despite being told he was seriously ill Ol' Ward didn't let that interfere with his drinking, no siree! and he was rewarded with a fatal heart attack in 1960. No explanation was ever offered on the show as to why a leading character had just vanished.
Ward and his hatee have a pointing competition
There is a saying "My word is my bond" and I think in this case Ward's word was indeed his Bond, and that word was "Drink". Now to answer that question from yesterday. Who pitched their telly series as "Wagon Train to the stars?" Why none other than Gene Roddenberry, who actually got something called "Starry Trek" off the ground with it.
Motley! go and help Art with his bandages.
More Crunching Of Numbers
No! I am not popping sleeping pills - sorry, cryptic crossword withdrawal symptoms. No, I refer instead to "La Morte D'Arthur" and really, Sir Thomas Malory (the author - do keep up!) was reaching considerably when he describes Arthur and a couple of his knights taking on an enemy host in North Wales. I say "host" because there were allegedly thirty thousand of them, and Art's Hot Jazz Combo - sorry, cryptic crossword withdrawal symptoms again - trio lay into them and -
Beat them!
Yeah. Right.
Wait, what? Were they wearing paper armour and carrying cucumber swords? Even if we apply the Divide By Ten rule for Ol' Tom's poetic licence that still means Art and Co, were outnumbered by a thousand to one. Conrad knows that, if you go hacking away at a horde, you're exhausted after slaying a hundred of them, never mind a thousand.
There is more - which is another music for a different kitchen.
Bowled Over
No, nothing to do with skittles. I refer, of course - obviously! - to the Arecibo radio telescope, which has recently stopped operating thanks to falling apart, in a major way. As you should already know, the ART was carved out of a hilltop in Puerto Rico as this particular location required the least jiggery-pokery to create a receiving bowl for radio astronomy. Art!
Before
It's had quite a long lifetime, 57 years, so the South Canadians have had their money's-worth out of it. All the recent media attention about it goes blathering on about how a James Bond film had scenes there, as if that were anything special. Conrad would rather remember an episode of "The X Files" that was set there, though that was quite a while ago.
During
What really put the kybosh on the whole - sorry, what's that? You want evidentiary proof that TXF ever had anything to do with Arecibo? Okay; let me just add that it was an episode from Season Two, when success had led to the program's budget being increased. Art!
I think we'll come back to this once Conrad has gotten a few pictures of the collapse of the telescope as well as the construction. Keep watching the skies, and also this space***.
Finally -
Gotta keep this short, I need to go put the oven on, sort out some laundry and take Edna for a trot whilst we still have daylight and sunshine, which is a pleasant contrast to yesteryon's snow and slush, and means I don't have to jog upstairs to put my shoes on as, absent rain or snow, my hole-filled Crocs are quite sufficient. I may still get told off by Wonder Wifey about that, as she fears my advancing years and incipient senility are not aided by having wet feet.
Art!
Conrad has decided to re-read the entire collection of "Invinvible", which is complete at twenty-five volumes and is going to take ages. Not a bad way to spend an hour or fifty. I'm about half-way through issue 1, so I should finish by about 2023. You may even get periodic reports on my progress. And the animation is described as "adult" which seems to guarantee it's going to be as gory and violent as the comics. Win-win all round!
* Add usual complaint about Comments
** None of that metric nonsense here.
*** No pun intended but you can read it as one if you feel like it.
No comments:
Post a Comment