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Monday 13 September 2021

A Hard Pain's Gonna Fall

Don't Worry, Bob, We're Not Picking On You*

No, we're reserving our malicious deconstruction for another target at present.  Which is not to say we won't ever direct a little musical critique the way of Mister Zimmer one day.  Tread softly and carry a box of hankies is my advice.

     ANYWAY I wanted to use a pun that had "Hard" in the title, and which also reflected pain, anguish, remorse, fear and passing port the wrong way around the table.  So here we are, all agog for a delicious dish of roast schadenfreude (which has no calories but which is bad for one's eternal soul).  Art!

It cuts rock

     No, this has no connection with the Intro, I just wanted a cool and brutalist piece of kit to impress readers with, because the true piece of kit involved isn't that rad.

     I shall condense the story a little, for brevity's sake, as it occupied many pages over on a Youtube Reddit channel. Okay, our hero is Harry, who was an on-call trouble-shooter employed to provide 24/7 service to clients, which in this case was a major banking institution.  Harry was an IT engineer who could usually resolve 9 out of 10 call; not in this case, when he was rung at the unholy hour of 02:00.  He talked the technician calling through the usual suspects to get a disk drive working again, to no avail.  Eventually he drives to the location, where he's allowed in and instructed to 'follow the noise'.  Okayyyyyyy.


     Harry finds a loud, drunken party going on, with lots of revellers revelling.  One of whom, the project manager, directs Harry to the IT room, after which she staggers back to the party.

     The disk drive refuses to work as Harry goes through his routine.  So he swaps out the controller card for a new one.  Nothing.  He swaps that one out for a second spare he's brought along.  Still nothing.  He tests the original card; all green across the board.  On a whim, he extracts the disk platter - Art!

A similar platter

     An O Dear moment occurs.  The spindle or shaft that supports the disk readers had broken in two, causing the disk readers to impact the disks at speed, ruining them. Art!

Hopefully you get the idea

     This is not damage that can be ameliorated; it is final and complete.  Harry goes back to the party and locates the highly-unsober project manager, to inform them that the disk is a complete write-off and will never work again -

     PM abruptly sobers up and proceeds to shriek at Harry to fix this instantly.

     'I can be back with a new disk platter tomorrow and you can refill it with your backup!' explains Harry helpfully.  'You know, your tape backup.  The backup you run at least once per month.  Your - er - backup?' he finishes since the PM now looks not only sober but haunted.

     She had never run a single backup in the 18 months her project - worth millions of pounds - had been running.  The party had been in celebration of completing the whole financial project, which would have been signed off the next morning.  Harry, feeling like a real buzz-kill, left the party.  The whole project team were sued to such effect that they ceased to exist.

     And there, gentle readers, you have today's title.

You know, this doesn't look good

Conrad Is, Once Again, SEETHING WITH ANGER!

I should say so.  Those Dog Buns codeword compilers have been at it again you know.  Just let me run a few of these iniquities by you and you cannot fail to agree with me**.

"FARRAGO": Really, who uses language like this!  O - hang on.  I do.  Which is probably the only reason I got it in the first place.  It means a ridiculous muddle and derives (says my Collins Concise) from the Latin for a mash fed to cattle.  Which is what I'd like to turn the compilers into.  Art!

"Police say no clues in mysterious disappearance of codeword compilers"

"GLITZ": Conrad regards this word with a great deal of suspicion, as it seemingly derives from Yiddish and is therefore either Eastern European or South Canadian in origin AND IS ONCE AGAIN NOT ENGLISH!  It means to be vulgarly showy and flashy. 
Yeah, quite apt

"HAUTEUR": WHAT IS IT WITH CODEWORD COMPILERS AND FOREIGN LANGUAGES!  This one comes from the French for 'Pride' and explains my prejudice against it.  A resoundingly loud Bah! is in order here.


More Miller

Walter M. Miller Junior, that is, esteemed sci-fi author, who served in the South Canadian Air Force during the Second Unpleasantness, and partook in the bombing raids that turned the Abbey at Monte Cassino into a large pile of rubble.  That must have sat badly with his Catholic conscience.  Art!

Very, very much the 'After' picture

     Also of note is that after winning the Hugo Award for "A Canticle For Leibowitz", one of the two highest awards there are in sci-fi, he never wrote again, and indeed became a reclusive hermit.  The press of success, perhaps, which may explain why he took his own life in 1976.


     I say, we have been a bit dark and dismal, haven't we?  Your Humble Scribe was going to do an item about Nigel Kneale and the BBC's production of "1984" way back in 1954, except that's a dark and dismal as it ever gets.  Light and fluffy, Conrad, light and fluffy!


Chopper Chicks And Missile Mayhem

No, no, really, this is light and fluffy, I promise!  Is this the face of a deceitful man? <girns horribly into camera, which cracks>.

     Righto, back to Vernice Armour, she of the combat helicopter piloting, and her take on how accurate a film is.  Art!

"Hobbs and Shaw"

     Not very.  As Ol' Ver points out, missiles and rockets launched from a helicopter have to travel a minimum distance before they arm themselves, and until that happens they are merely inert lumps of metal and plastic.  If they really did explode as close to the firing helicopter as we see above, it would likely be damaged by it's own spall, and potentially downed.  Art!

Another no

     Ol' Ver explains that a helicopter can only lift so much weight, and will already be at or near the limit thanks to having so much ordnance loaded.  It would definitely NOT be able to lift another ton of vehicles as we see above.  There's a cable, which is hard to see.


     And with that we are most surely done.  Done done done!

*  Today

**  Also, don't forget the Remote Nuclear Detonator

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