Rocket Cathedral

No!  Not The Be Bop Deluxe Song

Even if it is an arresting image.  Their opus is entitled "Rocket Cathedrals" thank you very much, and as I recall it's one of the only songs on "Axe Victim" with keyboards (probably played by Bill Nelson).  You can bet the lyrics were written by Bill, a Yorkshireman with a waspish wit.  How does it go?  "In a rocket cathedral pointed at the sky" and I shall, capricious as ever, use the cover picture from a completely different album, ha!  Art?

     Whilst we're off on this tangent, BBD kept ahead of trends and weathered the change from classic progressive rock into New Wave; this became a bit of an issue for Bill, since a lot of his audiences wanted his older Flashy Guitar Hero stuff, rather than the more ensemble work from "Drastic Plastic" onwards with more emphasis on electronics and keyboards.  One imagines Pete Townsend experienced similar tr

     ANYWAY once again we have gone down a completely different rabbit hole and in fact it looks rather like a mole's burrow.  What we are meant to be referring to are GIGANTIC SPACE ROCKETS FROM SOUTH CANADA!

     Conrad, given that he is interested in space vehicles and space travel, is quite cross that he missed this news from 06/08/2021.  Art!

     Photographs courtesy of SpaceX.  Here you see the Super Heavy booster sitting on a launch pad, and the Starship vehicle being lofted by probably the world's tallest crane, and the two finally being mated NO SNIGGERING AT THE BACK! for a test fitting to make sure they can integrate properly.  I apologise that I cannot find any pictures that truly show how enormous this thing is compared to puny humans, but be advised that it is 400 feet high.  When finally launched later this year (fingers crossed!) it will be able to loft 100 tons of payload into orbit.  Art!

     To Conrad's eyes the Starship component of this assembly has a distinct element of "Dan Dare" to it, which is no bad thing.  The overarching idea, as with SpaceX's Falcon rockets, is to make both parts of the system re-cyclable, in order to cut down long-term costs.  The thing that makes me wonder how I ever missed such a news article is because this is the largest rocket ever assembled, taller, more massive and with twice the thrust of the admittedly enormous Saturn V.  Art!

     Remember, too, that all this SpaceX stuff is being achieved via private enterprise thanks to Elon Musk (Jeff Bezos and his sulky throwing toys out of pram lawsuits permitting).  Somewhere the ghost of Robert Heinlein is looking down and laughing.

     We cannot deploy the motley in any meaningful manner to test ballistics or acceleration or how insanely fast a rocket sled can go, because it's on bed-rest at the moment.  Fell off the skateboard whilst trying to - er - emulate an emu.  Not only that, it broke the heel on one of it's stiletto shoes.  Don't worry, I gave it a real rocket.

Contra Mortui Viventes!

We've not revisited how a Roman legion would face off against a zombie horde for a while, so permit me to indulge in my flight of fantasy again.  We've dealt with the individual troops and weapons a legion could bring to the fray, and had one of their heavier missile weapons analysed versus the living dead.  What we've not done is look at defensive works.  

     You see, if a legion expected to be attacked in situ, they would erect NO SNIGGERING AT THE BACK THERE! assorted defensive works, which, if Art will put down his plate -

     This is over-egging the pudding, rather, since it displays all the defences Caesar created for his siege of Alesia.  A legion, in creating it's own defences would only have one or two of these variations.  Let us look at them from starboard inwards.  First you have iron spikes knocked into a log, itself hammered into the ground.  Any zombie that trod on this would rip it's foot apart when trying to get free, meaning it would fall over.  And it's witless compatriots would then fall over it, creating a huge mound of immobile writhing undead.

Spice Girl fans

     Then the zeds have to contend with an array of sharpened sticks, also embedded into the earth, nice and solidly.  Once again they would impale themselves, and their compatriots would then walk over them en masse and crush them to a fetid pulp.  

     All this is gaining time for the garrison, who would have been alerted and massing for a counter-attack, whilst the zeds are confused and delayed.  If our hypothetical legion has any experience in combatting zombies then they may well have strung lines between these obstacles, from which hang cans of stones, which will act as an early-warning system.  Zombies not big on caution, you see.

"ZATOICHI": Yet another word that popped up into my mind earlier today, for not good reason.  At first I thought it was one of those words that cropped up in Cyberpunk which might have been recalled to life <Robert Silverberg reference for you there> because I'm reading the immensely long "Redemption Ark" sci-fi novel.  I know, I know, They like to call it "speculative fiction" and Conrad will continue to use his phrase because it annoys Them.  Art!

O what hilarious post-modern irony!

     Hmmmm.  It would seem that it's actually a long-running Japanese film and television franchise, about a blind swordsman.  There were something like a total of seventeen films and one hundred television episodes. and the whole subject is so sprawling and has so many whiskers that I can't be bothered to chase it all up.  I have pizza to eat, after all!  Art!

     Hmmmm.  Conrad wonders if "Mythbusters" ever tested the feasibility of a sightless swordsman?

Finally -

Conrad has about seven newspapers with cryptic crosswords and codewords in each to tackle, so I had better get moving and reduce the number.  However, I also have an even bigger Book Mountain to tackle than usual, given that I bought another six today (don't tell Wonder Wifey!), although none will remain in The Mansion long-term, because once Your Humble Scribe has read a murder mystery, there it no use retaining it.  Retentive memory, you see.  Why, it's many, many decades since I read "Too Many Magicians", an absolutely delightful locked-room mystery set in an alternative universe where magic is an everyday utility - and yet I still recall the solution.  Art!

My old edition.
Staying small for obvious reasons

     Well, Vulnavia, I think we've covered all the bases we need to cover.  All we need to do now is call a scrap metal merchant to collect the remains of those steam locomotives the motley saw off with The Mansion's PIAT.

Toodle pip!