No! Nothing To Do With The South Canadian Marine Corps
A force, you may be interested to know, that is larger than the entire armed forces of numerous other nations, and which can call upon the services, or be used in the service of, no fewer than nineteen aircraft carriers. If Dimya is reading this he will be alternating between sneering dismissal and rage, because the Ruffians have only one aircraft carrier, that has been sitting in harbour for two years and which they can't afford to replace.
ANYWAY of course - obviously! - that's not what this Intro is about. Foolish reader! as if we ever start off in a logical progression, except when we do*.
CAUTION! Do not attempt in real life as the R.S.P.C.A. will sue
No, what Conrad refers to are those hideous mechanical monstrosities as invented by Boston Dynamics, which SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT featured as a murder weapon in "Elementary", that very excellent series starring Johnny Lee Miller and the delicious Lucy Liu. Art!
Er - which tangent has taken us somewhat off-course. All Lucy's fault, of course, for being too distracting. 
You lucky dog.
ANYWAY Boston Dynamics creature feature -
I don't know if it's coming or going, it's kind of hard to tell with these things since they lack a waggable tail. The reason we bring this ambling artefact to your attention is because Conrad was watching, with amused interest, a Youtube presentation by a Professor of Robotics at Carnegie-Mellon (a university despite sounding like a species of fruit). He was commenting generally on robotics in films and television, and focussed on one particular clip in "Rising Sun", starring the now-deceased Sean Connery and imprisoned tax criminal Wesley Snipes. Art!
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
Bizarre. So, this hopping absurdity turned into a mechanical military mule made of metal? Who knew**.
No input from the motley tonight, it's still struggling to re-align the aerials on the roof. Yes yes yes I know it's night-time; we sent it up there with a box of matches.
Sorry!
Conrad realises he might have misled readers of a certain age <old farts! - the hideous truth courtesy Mister Hand> about today's earlier title, because that was also the title of a BBC sitcom back in the Eighties. Art!
It was an amiable and inoffensive sitcom of it's time - but that was thirty years ago and I'm sure there's something about it one can find to be outraged about nowadays - that ran for seven years. So some of you out there
It's The Gory Little Details ...
That add verisimilitude. Time for your daily dose of "Le Mort D'Arthur", you lucky varlets. We are back at the court of Kowardly King Mark of Kornwall, whom is confronted by four knights stricken in the field in defence of his kingdom. <ahem>
" - and one of them his neck was nigh broken in twain. Another had his arm stricken away, the third was bourne through with a spear, the fourth had his teeth stricken in twain."
Good gratuitous gory embellishment, because Sir Tom usually avoids such sanguine prose, merely going on about helms being stricken or spears being broken. Art!
It isn't clear exactly how Knight #1 has his neck almost broken in two yet manages to drag himself to Tintagil Castle. A major contusion of the vertebrae? If he's made it that far, it's likely he will survive. His three mates? Not so lucky. If shock and blood loss doesn't finish them off, infection surely will. These are the Middle Ages, when clinical sterility was many centuries away, and septicemia or gangrene was just around the corner.
I do hope that hasn't put you off your dinner.
How to lose unwanted weight the Medieval way!
Pillbox Spalling
That sounds like a backwoods hamlet in deepest Arkansas, doesn't it? One can picture the sign at the edge of town "Welc me to Pillb x Spalling P p. 167" (the letter "O" has been shot out in each case), with one main street, a general store, a petrol station gas station and a newsagents that doubles as an off-licence liquor store. Art!
WRONG!
Rush hour in Pillbox Spalling
Sorry to burst your bubble, since the real meaning of that title is as far as you can get from a bucolic backwater. Because we are talking about pillboxes, bunkers, blockhouses and other substantial concrete fortifications of the Western Front during the First Unpleasantness. You must be familiar with these things. Art!
The photos we usually have of these fortifications normally have them looking rather battered, as they are mostly Teuton structures that have been subject to the very close attentions of Allied artillery. Here's one before being deluged with high explosive. Art!
Take notice of that roof, because that's how thick the reinforced concrete was. These things could only be destroyed by a direct hit from a large-calibre shell, an eight incher or upwards. Conrad's query to the Great War Forum last night was: did these ever suffer explosive spalling when hit by a shell not big enough to crack the walls or roof?
You remember explosive spalling, don't you? Where the energy expended on an outer surface is transmitted through the body of whatever medium that consists of, to cause large bits of the inner surface to fly off and whang about at high speed. It's one way to destroy TANK.
I was recommended a couple of books, which may make their way onto my Abebooks shopping basket, and also informed that the Teutons used to leave up the wooden formwork used to shape and contain the concrete for pillboxes, on the inside at least. This, they hoped, would prevent explosive spalling.
A home away from home
If those books do arrive, we may come back to this topic.
Finally -
Conrad hopes to get this done and posted as soon as possible, as there is remaindered food in the fridge crying out to be eaten, and pretty soon it will be evolving legs and walking out telling us to eat it. Are we at count? Yes! Kitchen here we come!
* I don't care if this doesn't make sense. Get used to it.
** Not me. That's why I posted this here.
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