Then I Know What Your Filthy Minds Would IMMEDIATELY Presume
One does not need a DARPA prototype Telepathy Helmet - which I did return, honestly - to predict what your fervid imaginations would conjure up. Art!
About the most SFW I could find
It is, by all accounts, a uniquely terrible film, which Your Humble Scribe has no intention of ever watching. In fact, if you've ever seen "Casablanca" then you've already seen "Barb Wire".
None of which has anything to do with Mister Glidden's Meisterwerk: barbed wire. He invented this stuff in the later nineteenth century, where it became a cheap and very effective way to stop cattle a-wandering. Art!
Moo-ve along, now
It was also seized upon by armed forces around the world and had been used extensively prior to the First Unpleasantness, which is where it really came into it's own. It would be used on removable frames, in coils, or strung between poles, or both. Art!
The Teutons, constitutionally on the defensive, used enormous amounts of this stuff during the years of trench warfare, with belts defending their Hindenburg Line being up to fifty yards deep. 'Twere well for attacking troops to avoid any tidy gaps in barbed wire defences, as they tended to channel towards pre-sited machine guns or pre-laid artillery. Once up against uncut wire, it was a case of wire-cutters out and hack away, before you got picked off by the defenders, or the whole attack would bog down - which happened quite frequently. Art!
There had to be paths through the metal maze in order for patrols to get in and out of their trenches, which would be watched with all the attention of a mother hawk looking after her chicks. If stretches of wire were damaged or destroyed then teams of soldiers got the unlovely job of re-wiring at night, knowing that the slightest sound would bring flares and gunfire. Initially rubber mallets were used to knock posts into the earth, until Bright Spark Himself came up with the idea of screw-piquets, which - you may be ahead of me here - merely screwed silently into the ground, removing need for hammering. Art!
It was still dodgy work, as the opponents were known to lay machine-guns on damaged sectors of wire, reasoning that a working party would very probably be out there to repair it at night.
One solution to barbed wire was the French graze-fuse, known in Perfidious Albion service as the "106" fuse, which resembled a cat with anxiety problems, in that it would go off at the slightest touch, regardless of where it was. This meant shells would blast the wire apart into little pieces, instead of shovelling great mats of it atop other wire or coming to rest on the same spot as launched from.
This is only a quick description of the subject. We might come back to it again, as there's a lot of incremental detail omitted*.
Motley! Do you want a barbed-wire tattoo? Tough luck, too expensive. I've got a cheaper alternative for you - grit your teethly appendages ...
On The Horns Of A Triceratops
I thought that was appropriately abstruse <sits back feeling clever>. As you should surely know by now, Conrad is never happier than when ranting furiously at the latest Codeword and how they continually push the envelope of fairness outwards in all directions. Art!
Those compilers may be a collection of chiselling weevils whom I doubt sleep soundly at night, you'll get no disagreement from me about that. Er - on the other hand, as with the Codeword I completed last night, which was as innocuous as milk - there was nothing to complain about. No blog content generated! Except this item, you could argue. Well, yes, but I can only write it once.
Back To "2001: A Space Odyssey"
Yes, AGAIN! This is partly to test how my new laptop processes the 'Snip' function.
Okay, so you remember the transition from falling bone to falling spaceship? One of the most famous smash-cuts in cinema IF you don't know what I'm talking about. The explanation about all the various satellites being orbital weapons platforms isn't explicit in the film (though it is in the novel), so I thought I'd examine a little closer. Art!
If I had to guess, I'd say this was a C3 (Command, Control and Communications) base, just going by the size of the aerials. Next!
Missile silo in space, I reckon. Note the command capsule attached, which certainly didn't get into orbit in that position. Probably launched atop the silo as it's final stage, then redeployed once in orbit. Manned or un-manned? Hard to say. Also, I suspect that's a lasing-rod for target acquisition, not an aerial; it is aligned along the silo, towards where it would be launching it's missiles, after all. Next!
Conrad unsure about this one as you don't see it very clearly. Again, note the command capsule, and that the platform has two distinct halves. Manned orbital missile silo? Next!
Those are radial cooling fins, so my best estimate is that this puppy is a variety of laser or charged-particle beam weapon, powered by a nuclear reactor, and it needs those fins to dump waste heat. The 'flower' arrangement appears to be a protective screen, preventing any reflection of the beam.
There you go, 49 seconds of film analysed for you, thanks to a question nobody asked. We'll be coming back to this scene's later images, so don't go away now. And the Snip function seems to work perfectly well; which is good news for all you gentle readers, since I don't have to take photographs that feature reflections and light pollution.
Finally -
Today, unusually, is my day off since I'm working Saturday <hack spit>. For untold aeons - okay, okay, for three and a half years - my day off has been Thursday if I'm working Saturday. Why the sudden change? Do they know something I don't? Conrad is suspicious. Or, I should clarify, more suspicious than usual.
O and don't expect two posts today, as there is every possibility I'll be doing the weekly shop tonight. It being Wednesday. Did I mention that already?
* And I can click-bait with Pamela Anderson again.
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