Twisted

No!  I Am Not Talking About The Del Amitri Album

Your Humble Scribe didn't know he had this until checking out his I-pod, and there it was.  The songs didn't sound familiar at all, so I may not have played it since purchase, whenever that was.  Art!

Twisted

     One's melon is twisted by the horrid fact that this record is 26 years old this year.  Erk.  I've got it playing in the background as I type this.

     No, what I refer to, of course - obviously! - is that Youtube 'Insider' video with the meteorologist casting an analytical eye over various disaster films, and standing in judgement on them.  Thus we come to "Twister" and today's title, pretty nifty, hmmmm?  Art!

     So.  Dave points out that this depiction of a tornado, which the South Canadians try to euphemise as a 'twister', is actually quite realistic.  This is important to those of us who don't live in South Canada, as our prospects of ever witnessing same are vanishingly remote.  This is a 'rope' variation, due to the thin dimensions of the 'funnel', and yes they do wander across the ground randomly within a footprint that tends to move from south-east to north-west.  This random, unpredictable gyration (not a word you ever expected to read today) is what makes storm-chasing tornadoes extremely dangerous.  You can see the debris being thrown up where the funnel touches ground, again realistic.  

Ignore the reflections!

     The barn getting ripped apart is, again, realistic.  That funnel has winds that move at hundreds of miles per hour.  Our heroes in the truck are actually being sensible here, seeking to get to the lowest point in the landscape; this is because the winds at ground level are the slowest thanks to friction, whereas higher up the funnel the speed increases.  David (the reviewer) did point out that the bass 'growling' of the approaching twister is unrealistic since those who have been closest and survived state it sounds more like a freight train.

"Where's my car - Oh.  Right'

     Half-realistic.  Yes, tornadoes can easily pick up and throw a half-ton car.  However, our heroes in the irrigation ditch mere feet away would also have been lofted into the atmosphere, because there's no razor-sharp delineation between tornado and placid atmosphere.

     Dave pointed out in both this film and "The Day After Tomorrow" that tornadoes are very fickle beasts and rely on a highly specific set of meteorological circumstances to occur.  If these change even slightly - poof! Twister gone.  This is why they only exist for short periods.  Thankfully!

     Okay, motley, now that the vole assassination squads have been placated by the despatch of your cloned double, we can play a game of - obviously! - Twister.

     Of course, some spots have been coated with tetrodotoxin*.

Icarus And Sunshine

Don't mention that horribly inaccurate myth to me, I don't intend to cover that.  No, we are back on the subject of what would be one of the most colossal engineering projects in human history; construction of the Icarus interstellar probe.  Quite besides it being so vast that orbital assembly alone would take decades, there's also the question of fuel.  Art!

Quite large

     Rather than chemical fuel, Icarus would use nuclear fusion (as found in the Sun) to create thrust, provided by electrically-detonating fuel pellets composed of deuterium (you remember, one of the isotopes of hydrogen) and Helium 3.  Trouble is, Helium 3 is pretty rare on Planet Earth.  Originally Project Daedalus had proposed an enormous H3 mining operation in the atmosphere of Jupiter; Icarus instead postulated the Moon as a source, which is considerably handier.  Art!

     Sheer quantity is another factor; the specs require 250 fuel pellets to be detonated every second, for years.  Conrad guessed each pellet weighed one gram <spits at metric nonsense> and came up with a total of about 25,000 tons fuel.  It turns out they need 50,000 tons of it, so each pellet can be confidently stated to mass 2 grams.  

     Glad we got that sorted out.

More Of Matte

Your Humble Scribe continues to promote the lost art of matte painting; you remember - where a painting on glass is used to fill in backgrounds that would be ridiculously expensive.  I came across a short clip from "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea" and got an illustrative photo.  Art!

     Here the submarine and sea are real; everything above that is a matte painting.  Which means the studio don't have to build a load of miniatures for a shot that lasts all of seconds.  Here's one left over from "The Day Of The Triffids".  Art!

     Conrad is pretty sure that the majority of that enormous mansion is a matte; the entrance at front and side are possibly sets, and that's it.  I cannot be positive because - gasp! - nobody seems to have done a breakdown of matte work in this film.

Finished!

Yes, my attacking the blog this afternoon was a little delayed because Your Obsessive Scribe had to finish the jigsaw or die trying.  Fortunately for my longevity, I finished it.  Art!

     Notice I did not say "completed", because there are two pieces missing.  For this puzzle Conrad did not drop the open box containing all the loose pieces on the floor, so I can say with certainty that those two pieces are absent.  The upper edge pieces proved to have been incorrectly fitted together, so my earlier bewailing was wrong.

     Now, having finished it, what to do with it next?

Finally -

We need only have a short item here to hit the Compositional Ton, so allow me to upload that photo of the errant Codeword.  Art!

"BLURB": Are you SERIOUS?  Another South Canadian slang import, and it IS South Canadian because my Collins Concise says so.  Invented by some wag back in the Forties.  ARE WE EXPERTS IN FOREIGN SLANG NOW?

"WILCO": <froths in purple apoplexy> REALLY?  In case you, gentle reader, are unaware, this is RAF slang from the Second Unpleasantness, and it's not even a proper word, it's a contraction of "Will Co-operate", usually preceded by "Roger".

"Wilcome and shoot you up"

"BOWYER": Apparently, back in the day, this was a person who made bows.  With the widespread introduction of gunpowder weapons, the bowyer became an artisan who makes sports equipment.  And I had to dig that up from Teh Interwebz, because it's SO OBSCURE IT'S NOT EVEN IN MY COLLINS CONCISE.  Bah!

"BRA":  Not even going to go there.

     And how we are done.

*  Or - have they?**

**  Yes they have.