Do Not Presume You Know What This Is About
Conrad can guess that you were expecting some witless nonsense about music, with a combination of tracks that someone else chose from their teenage years, back when they were least irrelevant.
Here an aside: who are the target audience for those execrable collections of songs from the Fifties onwards? It is sixty years since the Sixties; move on and listen to some contemporary sounds, you navel-gazing cemetery fodder!
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| Liable to get lethal blisters |
No, you over-expectant pikers, I am talking about "Pillboxes On The Western Front" thank you very much. Peter Oldham - the author, not someone I picked at random, do keep up! - points out that the Teutons, in their quest to transform every square inch of occupied Belgium and France into a fortification, used hundreds of thousands of tons of reinforced concrete, necessitating the use of very large industrial plant. Art!
In the upper picture you can see a row of houses, which have reinforced concrete bunkers concealed within themselves, allowing guns and crews to safely hide whilst being able to fire from behind cover. The lower picture shows curious British soldiers having a nosy in the bunker itself, after the position had been captured.
If you are wondering where the motley is today - it is having a lie down, because it didn't dodge anywhere near fast enough on the gladiator training machine. Concussion and badly-bruised shins, thanks for asking.
Possibly motley shin. Possibly not.
NASA Versus The Porch Pirates
Hopefully you remember Conrad's mention Mark Rober, the ex-NASA engineer who, having had a parcel stolen by 'porch pirates', decided to create the incredibly over-kill 'Glitterbomb' to catch other thieves out. In fact he teamed up with the softly-spoken Irishman Jim Browning, computer whiz and expert in scamming the scammers, to track down the whole criminal network. Art!
Mark, masked. In fact, a masked avenger. Yes, really.
No pictures of Jim; he needs to operate in secret.
The whole scam begins with a fake call centre in India calling elderly South Canadians, taking over their computer and bamboozling them about getting a refund from Amazon or where ever. They ask the victim to type out how much they are being refunded, then over-ride this and add a couple of zeros. In the case of one victim Jim was too late to help, this had gone from $200 to $20,000. She was distraught, thinking that she'd miskeyed.
No, madam, the shameless swindler at the other end of that phone call did the dirty deed.
So, in order to level things out, the scammer tells their victim to just Fed Ex the balance in cash - $19,800 - to an address. They want cash because it's much harder to track the movement of cash, and the address is an Air B'n'B rented for one day.
However, it's not the scammer doing the renting. They hire 'money mules' to make the rentals, go to the address and collect the Fed Ex'd package of money. Art!
This one left empty-handed. A victory for justice!
Fortunately Jim and Mark got through to Fed Ex and requested that the package not be delivered, so the mule got stung this time. And a second later in the picture above she looked right at the camera, so now the police know what she looks like.
By this point both Homeland Security and the FBI are beginning to twitch their whiskers, but I don't want this post to be all about one topic, so we shall come back to this one.
What's That Smell? It's Chesley Bonestell!
A gift of a surname if ever there was one. Let us have a look at what our science fiction artist liked to imagine the future would look like. Art!
This is cheating a little, since it's actually a matte painting done for the final scene of "When Worlds Collide", that epic bundle of entertaining nonsense from the Fifties. This is Lyra, sole planet of the rogue sun Bellus, which by this time has destroyed Earth (Booh!); conveniently enough, Lyra is just perfect for human beings to survive upon. What a coincidence. Never saw that one coming, did you?
ANYWAY there are a couple of hints that Lyra either has or had it's own civilisation (which is explicit in the sequel novel "After Worlds Collide"). Look in the distance and you'll see two suspiciously symmetrical pyramids, and just at centre port is what looks like an artificial structure. Subtly done, Mister Bonestell.
A Bit More Small Town South Canada
Yesteryon we introduced the 'found photography' of Daniel Freeman, a native of Perfidious Albion, whom has travelled something like 25,000 miles across the continent of South Canada recently, taking photographs of small towns after dark, and without any humans being present. He finds this allows viewers to establish their own ambience. Let's have another one. Art!
You can work out when he took this one, at least, in terms of the year. He has also caught the rather charming birthday wishes being offered to a couple of folks. The only clue to this being shot at night is the darker facade above the billboarding, because that cinema is going to let everyone know it exists. Good job there's no domestic residences alongside; they'd never get to sleep.
Finally -
Well, Your Humble Scribe finally sat down today and examined his works notebook (purchased with MY money), going all the way back to late August, and then made a tally of what work he did. Biggest of all was Phones, coming in at 59 days allocation, and then Reports, coming in at 39 days allocated. Which I had suspected yet never bothered to work out. Not riveting stuff, I know, yet that which does not kill us makes us stronger. Although Nietzsche definitely never had to deal with a hangover after a bucket of gin the night before. Art!
Gin for the win
With that, gentle readers, we are most definitely done!
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