We Have Covered Roman Chariots
And so we shall again today, except not in the way you were expecting. For Lo! these chariots travel not upon the land but in the briny depths, and used horsepower, except in mechanical form rather than a collection of Dobbins. This is a referral to the Decima Flottiglia MAS, an Italian - sorry, still not come up with a nickname for them yet - naval special forces unit of the Second Unpleasantness. Art!
As you can see from the lines of this engine of destruction, this thing is based around a torpedo. You know, one of those self-propelled underwater explosive devices, with a warhead with over half a ton of explosive. This one had two crew who sat upon it, and who sailed towards their target, before locking a course in at said target and - you can't bail out from an underwater vehicle, can you? - debouch from the vehicle and swam away.
The after-effects
A dangerous occupation, being part of the Decima Flotigglia's human torpedo team. Point your steel steed and part company too soon, and there's every chance your errant engine will miss completely. Leave it too late and you will end up being turned to jelly by the resultant explosion. Even if you were successful, you still had to get away from where things were popping, back to a mothership hanging around to pick up either survivors of the attack force or <ahem> their sad scattered remnants.
There you go. Chariots of pyre?
Motley! Put down that mass of torpedoes! Gently now.
Thank You Darling Daughter
Conrad has become familiar with a bus poster that goes past every so often, trailing the coat for a betting game or company or app or whatnot - clearly not that effective if I cannot recall anything about it - which used the abbreviation "MVP". Conrad has no idea what this is or means, but mentioned it in passing to DD. Art!
DD informed her aging dotard dad that this means "Most Valuable Player" and belongs to games and sports, which explains why I've never come across it. Truly, you learn something new every day.
More Astronomy!
Yes, we've still not run out of this selection, so from the baser end of human activities to more elevated activities, let us proceed. First picture -
NGC 3981 by Bernard Miller
You may guess that this is a spiral galaxy, because of it's spiral shape, and you'd be correct. It is NGC 3981, located a mere 62 million lightyears from Earth, and you must admit that the image above is pretty spiffy for a picture taken when we were still in the Palogene Period on our pretty blue planet. It is a part of the Virgo Supercluster, if you need to know.
Virgo SC dead centre
Shall we have another? Yeah, go on, why not. Art!
This one is a bit prosy so I can't describe it properly in a caption, so here we go: "Path of the Full Moon Over the Sleeping City" by Remi Leblanc-Messenger, who is from France. The 'Sleeping City' in this case is Paris, and the bright white track above it the full Moon, escorted by whisps of starlight also in long exposure. Whether or not the figure on the rooftops has been added in or was paid to be an extra on the landscape is unclear. Perhaps we'll never know*.
A Disturbance In The Force
Welllllll if we can define "The Force" as "A change to Conrad's normal routine where he remains in his Sekrit Layr all day drinking tea and doing codewords" because as of Friday evening Darling Daughter came to visit, and of course requires beer and pizza as is her right as a guest. Also we've been watching what she chooses on Netflix, so last night we caught up on "Fear Street 1994" and "Fear Street 1978" but have to wait until July 16th for the third iteration. Art!
There she is, squeaking and squawking with the animals. We took Edna for a trot together, managing to choose a gap between deluges from the heavens - in fact we've only had one such so far but the heavens have been threatening all day long and it's good practice to dogwalk when it's dry.
What follows from this? Only that, since Your Modest Artisan has access to the metal-box-on-wheels-that-moves-by-magic, we travelled into Babylon-lite and went around the charity shops, and here is my haul:
The box with a pair of aircraft is another Richard Tredigian jigsaw puzzle which Colin can look forward to once Conrad has finished with it (oddly enough he's not taken charge of "Road To Dunkirk" yet, strange, that), the oddly-patterned cylinder is another jigsaw, which creates a crossword puzzle when completed - double-whammy hmmmm? - and Conrad felt like acquiring "Farscape" for nostalgic reasons, as I seem to remember watching episodes of the first season a very long time ago. Decades, even! There was something about New Zealand, I seem to remember, although given the deficiencies of my memory and time elapsed, this could be wrong**. "My Life In MI5" is a sequel memoir to "Soldier Spy" which I have also read, and you can't tell because the jigsaw cylinder blocks it, but "Hyperdreamer" is by that muso from the Seventies and Eighties, Bill Nelson. I grabbed it at random as the nice lady at the counter said they were offering a Buy One Get One Free. Art!
Bill is the one fiddling with his TV-watch
Finally -
Gosh, it feels as if I've been working on this particular blog for ages, and in fact I have, because I have very unwisely been typing all these words of wit, wisdom, whimsy and a woebegone Weltanschung whilst watching a convoluted Netflix documentary about murder. Then, following that, we are now onto "Love, Death & Robots" which is novel to both of us. It appears to be an animated anthology of cartoons with <ahem> 'adult' themes, and which certainly involves copious swearing. Some involve death, lots involve robots, little present in the way of love - so far.
And with that we are done!
* Conrad not especially bothered.
** Or right. There is that possibility.
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