How Did I Miss This?

You Ought To Know, By Now

That Conrad has an interest/obsession/worrying familiarity <delete where applicable> with things that go BANG, and the bigger the explosion the more interest there is.  Obviously, when you get to thermonuclear weapons there's no upper limit to how big the bang, which palls a little.

     Non-nuclear explosions of near-nuclear magnitude?  Now there's an interesting and thinly-populated field.  Which is why Your Humble Scribe was intrigued by a mention on the BBC's website about the Swiss hamlet of Mitholz, and the 'sinister lurking terror in the background'.  At first this sounded like the real-life equivalent of "The Trollenberg Terror" - Art!

The suspenseful climax!

     Here an aside.  Your Humble Scribe has only seen the film, which is based on a very low-budget television series.  It's a pretty good film, with Warren Mitchell in a serious role for once, alongside Forrest Tucker as the obligatory South Canadian lead.  Art!

Forrie and Warrie

     Where were we?

     O yes.  You see, there was a Swiss army munitions storage site at Mitholz, carved out of the mountainside, which contained seven thousand tons of ordnance.  We might run to a diagram here, if Art can put down his plate of coal -

     As you can guess, there was an explosion on-site on December 19 1947, one of a series that only ended on December 28.  Nine people were killed and eleven injured, which is getting off very lightly when you consider that three thousand tons of explosives and ordnance detonated or burned.  Art!

Before and after

     The village was almost completely demolished; reconstruction was problematic because of the bombs and shells that had been hurled across the valley and which lay covered by snow.  Art?

Ordnance mimicking Conrad: both being old and cranky

     That was 1947.  The lurking problem today in 2021?  Well, as already mentioned, there were seven thousand tons of ordnance in store when the explosion happened.  A couple of hundred tons are believed to lie in the cone of debris and rubble, with over three thousand tons still remaining in the collapsed tunnels under the mountains.  The Swiss government, feeling a bit antsy about this potential arsenal going BANG, has decided to remove the bang-creating stuff but not until 2031, as things have to presumably move very, very slowly.  Explosives left alone for 85 years tend to degrade and decompose into very, very sensitive compounds.  Art!

Picturesque - for now

     The Swiss authorities, being quite Teutonic and thorough, have placed dozens and dozens of sensors and cameras within the tunnels lest anything happen, so the village residents will get a warning, at least.  This will give them time to get clothes and boots on, unlike 1947, and perhaps gain their car, if the snow's not too deep.

     Still, a three-thousand ton explosion.  Again, how did I miss this one?

     Motley!  Get the extension lead out, we're going to see what happens when an aerosol can gets microwaved*!

Back To Being Sublime And Shizzle

Yes, we are back on that "Under The Stars" theme that the BBC was hosting on it's website.  A lot of these photographs have featured the Milky Way, our home galaxy, probably because it's dramatic and impressive in photographed form, and you can't deny that there's a whole lot of stars involved; whereas picking out a single star or constellation is, by comparison, a lot less impressive.  Art!

     This one is by Arpan Uzir, and is of the Milky Way arching over the town of Leh in the Ladakh region of India.  He states that it's a panorama of 11 separate shots, not that I can see any seams.  This particular region is a hotspot claimed by three different countries; do the stars seem bothered?

     Let's have another - Art!

     This one is by Roy Howarth (note his signature) and is of both the Milky Way (again!) and an art installation called the " Scallop".  He had to wait for a window where both would be visible, at Aldeburgh of This Sceptred Isle, meaning he was there at the unearthly hour of 2 ante meridian.  

Yes, About That Scallop

There's no sense of scale in the photograph above, mostly because the Scallop is on the beach at Aldeburgh and there's nothing to therefore show how large it really is.  The blurb is that it stands four yards high and if Art will put down his plate of anthracite - 

     There you go.  It is dedicated to the composer Sir Benjamin Britten, who lived at Aldeburgh, and if you're curious enough I'll bet that inscription is detailed somewhere via Google.  Sir BB was one of this nation's most prominent composers of the twentieth century, go and Youtube his name if you're unclear about what proper music is, you with your bleep-bleep dance music**.

What A Combination

A yes, back to the motorcycle-sidecar combinations of the Second Unpleasantness.  Conrad has never sat down and pondered why these were a thing in the Teuton and Sinister armies of that era; certainly Perfidious Albion (and her Commonwealth and Dominions) and the South Canadians never went in for them in any but a very minor way.  Art!

" Heinz!  Doctor Goebbels is not going to be happy with you!"

     I popped the question "Why?" on the SOTCW Facebook pages and got replies about substituting steel for steeds, about speediness and it also being a cheap way to motorise troops.  All perfectly valid.  I can also add that it gave the speed, acceleration and manoeuvrability of a motorbike, but with a light machine-gun added to give it teeth.  After all, you can't exactly ride a motorbike alone and wield a weapon, can you?

 After all, you can't exactly ride a motorbike alone and wield a weapon, IN REAL LIFE, can you?

Finally -

Your Humble Artisan is making headway with the jigsaw-puzzle crossword and only has about 70 pieces left to place.  These are, of course, the most anonymous and difficult to match against the master picture, which is inconveniently tiny.  However, it doesn't look as if I've made much progress, so I shall put off posting any pictures until further completed.  After that comes the crossword; I think I'll just do it in fibre-tip and see if it clears away afterwards and if not then bin it is.  That's me all over.  Ruthless.

*   I shouldn't have to say this but DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!

**  You know, like Royksopp, whom I like a lot***.

***  Contradictory?  Yep, that's us.  Do keep up!