Cos I'm So Hair-Splittery
Yes but we knew that already. Conrad, as you should surely know by now, is a pedant of the very worst kind, always ready to leap in where there are spelling errors or mistakes of fact, especially in any obscure field he happens to be well-read in, particularly etymology*.
Also, TANK. Conrad had been forewarned by Richard (the jammy swine who's retired to Spain) about this issue, so my blood merely simmered fiercely rather than boiled. Art!
All credit to the people who shifted the mud covering this item, and the mud within it, as it has a cargo hold which held probably 4 tons of overburden. Art!
It's in particularly spry form for a vehicle buried in mud for 74 years and the expert eye would immediately identify it as an LVTP, or "Buffalo", and - here's the important point -
IT IS NOT A TANK
Now, how would the BBC like it if a correspondent from South Canada came across and reported about the next One Day International at Lords as "This wacky Limey baseball game!". Exactly.
To be a tank it needs to be fully tracked, have an enclosed hull (oops) and a fully rotating turret (oops again), plus if British it MUST have a 'boiling vessel' in order to make tea**. Art!
 |
| At Blackpool with the tide out |
They were used an awful lot in the Pacific, and on a limited scale in Europe during the Second Unpleasantness, from late 1944 onwards. They could load up with a cargo or a platoon of soldiers, drive from the road into the river, come out on the opposite bank and deposit their cargo. No bridge needed, and much, much faster than ferries. "Landing Vehicle Tracked Personnel" since you ask.
There. I think my ire has calmed, from positively volcanic to merely geser-y.
Binned
You will have to excuse the third-hand nature of this item, as it is transcribed from a British American Reddit poster who lived in Ontario. This location is important.
 |
| Oscillating Ontario |
He used to dump his rubbish in giant communal plastic rubbish bins that were located along a side road. Every week a drunken plonker coming back from the local pub/bar (not sure about British American terminology here) would deliberately hit these bins and damage them; in winter, with sub-sub zero temperatures, the plastic would become brittle and shatter on impact. The Ontario city authorities didn't bother trying to track the culprit down, they just replaced the bins. Art!
 |
| Something this big |
Well, someone got fed up of having to walk to distant, intact, rubbish bins, so they peevishly filled one of these bins with water. In Ontario, during winter, where it regularly reaches -3200C***.
The Original Poster was awoken in the small hours when police came to detain a drunken driver, whose 'Buick' was completely totalled, having hit the bin filled with ice whilst trying to damage it as per usual. The car is a write-off, thanks to hitting two and a half tons of solid ice. The bin was not harmed at all. However, nobody fancied trying to shift that much deadweight, so it remained there until spring, when it thawed.
 |
| Buick Intactus |
Talking Of Hair-Splitting
The jigsaw is coming along fairly well, thank you for asking. There are definitely 3 edge pieces missing, which naturally has Your Humble Scribe worrying that there are others absent as well. We shall see in a short while, one supposes. Art!
That's most of the centre close-up stuff added in. Conrad now has to decide what option to choose next, because there are scads of plain blue sky pieces to locate and place. #MyRockAndRollLifestyle.
Here In The Ear
As you may recall, Conrad has been of late listening to his i-pod via battery-powered headphones, which give a splendidly LOUD rendition of whatever is playing. Art!
The peculiar thing is, the input jack that attaches lead to headphones is a bit squirrely, and does not always connect properly. This lead to Conrad playing a Del Amitri track this afternoon and thinking "??? Del Amitri are not known for instrumental tracks", wiggling the lead and having the vocals suddenly re-appear (or re-hear). An odd occurrence and I may try to deliberately invoke it, just to hear instrumental versions of songs that are not instrumentals. For Your Humble Scribe, as well as being a pedantic hair-splitter, is also wilfully perverse.
Speaking Of Which
Conrad remembers hearing Mickey Rourke, bass player with The Smiths, playing a track called "Oscillate Wildly" on Revolution Radio (before that prat Steve Penk bought up the contract), pointing out that it was an instrumental, and that still, Morrisey was credited with co-writing it. Every word true. Art!
Nice work if you can get it.
Trepidation
Your Humble Scribe is off to the hospital this afternoon, to get his second dose of the magic anti-plague water, which fills him with apprehension. No, nothing to do with the dose and any side effects; rather, because I am a massive coward, the thought of having a horribly sharp needle poked into my arm is not encouraging. Not only that, it's been a real admin-loaded faff to get booked in. You need to follow a link from a Message, book the appointment with your NHS number, load an OQ code into your phone, have your NHS number at the vaccination, the vaccination certificate from last time - and an identity card.
 |
| Sinister NHS bureaucracy at work! |
I've also written down my shoe size and inside leg measurements, just in case.
Finally -
One of Conrad's Very Guilty Pleasures is in watching all those police shows which feature car chases and body-camera film footage, and "Police Interceptors" is both of those and on now - I can only type this because they've gone to the commercial break and I can now draw breath. Whilst it's on I am too busy shouting "RAM THEM OFF THE ROAD! RAM THEM! RAM RAM RAM!"
 |
| Once that helicopter is on you, your bottom is grass |
* NO! You are mistaking it for either entomology, the study of insects, or epistemology, which I don't think I'll define for you. Heh.
** This is in deadly earnest. We've covered it before. South Canadian tank crews are immensely envious of this innovation.
*** There may be a bit of poetic licence in there.
No comments:
Post a Comment