Yes Indeed, Mister Steed!
I shall have to explain my little pop culture divertissement, shan't I? because I very definitely doubt any of you watched "The Avengers" first time round as you were either 1) not born or 2) were born but had no concept of what quality television was. Art!
Britishness personified
John Steed was the only constant in the series from it's beginning to - ah - the "New Avengers", which was new, to give it credit, but not very Avenger-y*. I could go on a lot more (and probably will, later in the year) about Major The Honourable John Wickham Gascoyne Beresford Steed, but suffice to say that Patrick played him as he'd seen his senior officers behave in the Royal Navy during the Second Unpleasantness - " - life as seen through the bottom of a whisky glass" if you want more detail.
Then and before then
ANYWAY let us carry on with this facile fulminating farrago. As mentioned in yesteryon's blog, Conrad is a big fan of things exploding, because there are few things in life that cannot be improved by the addition of explosions. Unless it was an explosion in the first instance, in which case it was probably as awesome as it was going to get. Art!
This, gentle reader, is Eggborough Power Station in the hinterlands of wildest Yorkshire,
Well, regardless of what plans they had, there were eight gigantic cooling towers and an enormous chimney on site that had to be taken care of, which is technical-speak for 'demolished'. The simplest way to do this would be having a steeplejack atop each tower, smacking the component bricks down into the interior as they gradually work their way lower. Sadly, the suits running this operation decided that waiting until 2047 for this demolition method to finish wasn't efficient enough. So - EXPLOSIONS AHOY! Art?
It's a sobering thought that each of those towers flexing like damp tea-towels is actually composed of eleven thousand tons of reinforced concrete. The idea, lest you be confused, is to collapse each cooling tower into it's own 'footprint' so that there's no collateral damage to other structures or the crowds of people who simply had to attend - public hangings having gone out of style a couple of centuries ago. Art!
Flimsy as yoghurt pots
This means that each structure has to fall horizontally; not perfectly because we are dealing with real life, just as completely as possible. This is also probably why they only demolished four towers at once; any more and you risk the structures experiencing compound shock waves from neighbouring detonations, making an already fraught process a lot more dangerous.
Would you like to see the end result? Of course you would. Art!
This is what the demolition company wants to see - a neat, tidy collapse of the structures vertically without damaging anything beyond the exclusion zone.
Conrad predicts that the second tranche of cooling tower demolitions will be pretty much the same as these. What he looks forward to is the 220 yards tall chimney being demoed, because that's a far harder proposition!
I say, motley, would you like some gin and strawberries?
Conrad Conquers Crossword
If you have been following BOOJUM! of late then congratulations! you have just prevented your descendants from either uranium mine slavery or being dissected for spare parts. Also, you will have noticed that I have been wrestling in mortal combat with a particularly stubborn jigsaw puzzle.
Late-breaking news: the jigsaw has been bested. Art?
What now follows is solving the crossword itself. I shall let you know how that goes**.
Stop The Cavalry
The Arme Blanche, as cavalry of the time liked to think of themselves, found the First Unpleasantness rather a trial. For one thing, infantry armed with magazine-fed breech-loading rifles could fire sufficiently fast and at such a distance as to severely discomfit a cavalry charge, quite beside having machine guns as well. To which you could add barbed wire (we may come back to this) and trenches, both of which severely hampered cavalry action. Then you can add in artillery fire and gas.
However! Art?
There were occasions when cavalry happened to be in the right place at the right time, as above. Our protagonist has not yet painted his British Horse, so Conrad waits with interest to see what becomes of them.
As an aside, memoirs written at the time and later about the British retreat before the Teuton's 'Kaiserschlacht' offensive of March 1918 mention that they'd have been completely cream-crackered IF the Teutons had possessed cavalry. Which they didn't, it being deemed a profligate luxury. There are legs in this subject, yet we may avoid it for a while. You the gentle reader can only take so much.
Hmmm, the motley appears to have passed out. Clearly unable to cope with strawberries.
No Love For Vincent Buglioso
Ha! Only kidding, Conrad cannot help but bow to a man who took on the Kennedy Conspiracy Industry and gave it a severe thrashing. Since payday has now been and gone, one wonders if it's apposite to order a copy of his JFK magnum opus - one for later, I feel <wallet squeaks in anguish>.
ANYWAY if you look at Vincent's academic career, his further education began at the University of Miami, an institution he entered under a -
Tennis scholarship?
Hmmmmm. There was an eight-year gap between this event in 1956 and his graduating as a law student, top of his class no less in 1964. So there was a gap of at least four years between ending his racketeering days and beginning his legal ones. <sigh> okay, so we may need to invest in a bibliography of Vinnie as well as his various legal opii***.
Finally -
I just wanted to make you aware of sci-fi author Bob Shaw, who hailed from the entirely unfashionable environs of Northern Ireland way back in the late Sixties. Northern Ireland was, in sci-fi terms, further adrift than the Fastnet lighthouse. I got his autograph on a paperback in the early Eighties, I'll have you know - lost decades ago. Anyway - Art!
Bob, droll as dithyrambs
We shall be coming back to Bob, O yes indeed Mister Steed.
Which is where we came in.
* Except for that one about the poisoned projectile patches, that was pretty good.
** O how I shall let you know.
*** That is the plural of "Opus" isn't it?
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