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Sunday, 28 February 2021

The Return Of The Hair-Splitting Pedant

Whom You All Know And Love

Me! in case you were in any doubt.  Or, perhaps, "Don't hate quite as much as you hate unshelled pistachios", which break your fingernails when you try to prise them open.  The little swine.

     You see, as happens on many other days, an idea popped into Conrad's fervid and fervent mind, about that little-known cult series "Star Trek" and one of the earlier episodes, one of my favourites that you may never have heard of: "What Are Little Girls Made Of?". This episode concerns a bonkers scientist with plans to take over the galaxy - you can never accuse ST of being predictable or conventional - by creating a race of androids.  Art!

That's an android, you disgusting perverts.  Go take a cold shower.  

     That above is Andrea - nope, nothing conventional about that name - and her <ahem> uniform made out of gaffer tape, and Ruk.  They are about to enact Phase One of the evil mad scientist's plan, which is where ladies across the world had their heartbeats speed up.  Art?


     Here we see Captain Kirk, and his android double BUT WHICH IS WHICH O MY LORD THE CONFUSION! and so on.  

     Yes.  Well.  Conrad likes to crunch numbers on occasion (everyone needs a hobby) and his take on this transformation scene is that it takes about 30 seconds.  You and I will have to take that on trust, Conrad ain't gonna go off, buy a DVD and replay it just to check.  30 seconds.  This doesn't count the time it takes to load up an android 'blank' on the conversion table, because they're quite soggy and floppy and awkward to handle.  We are never privy to exactly how Captain Kirk loses his clothes -* <ahem>Art!


   For the whole process, I think we can assign the value of one minute to it, as a decent approximation.  Therefore, to take over merely the Enterprise with it's 430 person - sorry, forgot the redshirts Ruk disposed of - 428 person crew would take over seven hours.  And that presumes that they're all quietly queued up in a long, pacific chain merely waiting to be converted.  In reality** they'd need to be beamed down in batches to be processed, because we never see Doctor Corby (the mad scientist in question this week) use more than a single conversion table.  Then they need to be beamed back up in batches.  The whole process would take at least a whole day, IF the whole Enterprise crew co-operates in a slavish and obedient way totally at odds with human nature, their ethos and training, and if you've got them that mindlessly enthralled, why bother turning them into androids?

What are little girls made of?  Raw cabbage, apparently.

     The whole process is so clunky, time-consuming and pre-industrial that Conrad doubts Doctor Corby has actually sat down to do a proper time-and-motion study about his plans for Galactic Dominance, which is one of the first things an apprentice Dictator has to do.  Why, if we assume he managed to export his Sekrit Layr to another more populous planet, one that we may assume has the same population as contemporary South Canada, then it would merely take him 627 years to convert the population into androids.  By which time the secret might well be out.

     Of course, I may be overthinking this a little ...


Still With Space Opera

Conrad knocks about on the Space Opera Facebook group because it's an interesting place to read about - er - Space Opera.  Not only that, they ferociously administer the "NO real world politics" rule, as well as the "NO self promotion except on the second Monday".  He was delighted to see that a member had spent their lockdown time fruitfully.  Art!


     All bespoke work, this is inspired by Chris Foss (yes that Chris Foss) and Peter Elson (who?).  The creation of one James Brindley, Jim is new enough and naive enough not to boast about how many bricks it has, nor how long it took to build.  "Lots and lots" we imagine.  Well done James***!


Greedy For 3D

If you have been keeping up with BOOJUM! then you ought to realise that 3D-printed tanks are a thing.  If you have not been keeping up with BOOJUM! then your great-great grandchildren are going straight to the uranium mines. 

     I mean, of course - obviously! - Historical Miniature Replicas, not the full-size real thing, although <ponders in a musing way> because over on yet another Facebook group that Conrad is a member of, they have a positive outpouring of 3D printed tanks, if you join their Kickstarter.  Art!


     This, since you won't have the slightest idea, is a South Canadian M551 Sheridan tank in a large scale.  Yes, the earth in Vietnam really was that red; yes, the Sheridan did have all the paraphernalia of a gypsy caravan attached to it.  They often had 'personalised' crew decorations added, which not infrequently referenced bad wicked naughty things like sex or drugs.  Bad crews!  Naughty crews!  No biscuit for you!  Because it's a large-scale model, you can barely tell that it's a 3D printer version; the clue is in the graduated 'steps' on the front glacis, where you can see how the layers were deposited.  But, one has to say, a very fine 3D model.


Brazil, Meet India

Conrad is minded of a song that exists, "They Grow An Awful Lot Of Coffee In Brazil".  I am sure they do.  They also grow an enormous amount of tea in India, which is a lot more important to the British, despite that loathsome South Canadian import "Startrekbucks" or somesuch.  Art!


    Here we see Indian cricket fans during the current <insert technical cricket-y term for ongoing matches> against England and one has to salute that fan in the body paint, because he's not plumping for one side or another, simply giving both of them equal <snickers> coverage.  One feels that Indians take cricket very, very seriously.  Fair enough.  As long as they don't beat us at it - Conrad finds it hard to take that we the Bri - excuse me - We The British - introduce all these games to the colonies, and they proceed to get better at them and beat us.


Finally -

I am on the early shift next week, hurrah!  And still working from home, which means I can delay getting out of bed until 07:00, have a shower, get breakfast, re-pimp the blog, catch the news headlines and still be at work for 08:00.


Chin chin!


*  "Captain, Andrea would like to hot tub with you" is a possibility.

**  Sorry for using this word and concept

***  We realise there are no puny humans for scale.  Use your imagination.

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