Him And A Fleet Of Short Sunderlands
In which Conrad proves that he is, without doubt, a horrible person*. For this Intro refers to the latest storm to belabour This Sceptred Isle, the third in a week. This is altogether too much of a good thing and all of us here would be quite happy to donate our storms to another, preferably drought-stricken region, far far away. Art!
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| Exactly! |
I dragged Ol' Pete in here, in shockingly bad taste, because of his ballad "Here Comes The Flood" as found on his debut solo album, which has a wildly appropriate cover picture, too. What a prescient chap he was! Art!
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| Misery, depression and wet, wet, wet. |
"Yes, very allegorical and all that," I hear you say. "The Shout Sunderland?"
Pausing only to wonder if you genuinely know what an allegory is, let me point out that it's the SHORT Sunderland, a seaplane manufactured by Shorts in Ulster, for the confounding of other's naval strength. It's inappropriately named, since it was an enormous great beast of a bird, bristling with machine guns and depth charges and bombs. It's singular asset was being able to land or take off from bodies of water. Art!
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| Sunderland with puny humans for scale |
Further to the above, I have pimped my intellectual wares on teh Interwebz this afternoon with an hilarious reference to Manchester (very much Gomorrah-IN-the-Irwell this month) being 'Marineville" as various rivers traversing the city have burst their banks, the dirty curs. Citizens of East and West Didsbury have been evacuated. Art!
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| By day, by night, the waters a-fright |
Here an aside. You surely recall Marineville, from "Stingray", the headquarters of the misnomer "W.A.S.P" for "World Aqua Sea Patrol", which would more aptly been titled "Combat Hydrostatic Underwater Battlecraft" or even "Patrol Interceptor Killer Elite" which is, admittedly, perhaps a bit dark for a children's program. How about "S.H.A.R.K." which
Heck, even the vehicles get sent below. Art!
Conrad can't help but think they've sped this process up rather, given the mass of those buildings and their sheer size. Plus, when descending, gravity is on your side; when reversing the process it's going to be a whole lot harder and slower.Everything must go!
(under)
My point? Only that Marineville is a mere ten miles from the Californian coast. Imagine the farrago that would follow were Marineville to go to 'Battle Stations' when it turns out that the danger is from a -
- tsunami. Or a hurricane. Art!
Glub.
I realise we've come rather a ways from Peter Gabriel and soggy boggy Manchester. Still, a flood is a flood is a flood. That, matey, is how we roll. O I say Pete old chap, if the floodwaters do rise to "The Kraken Wakes" levels, you will allow us to come stay with you on Solsbury Hill, won't you?
Whilst Still On Watery Themes
Back to Underwater Photograph of the Year (they don't capitalise "of the" in case you were wondering), that free source of marine content that Conrad will exploit ruthlessly, as in this photograph. Art!
'Abandoned ship' courtesy Alex Dawson
This is the 'Tyrifjord', a Nork steamer that had the bad luck to encounter a passel of Allied bombers in late 1944, who made sure that everyone still alive abandoned it all right. Predictably, thanks to how it was sent to the bottom and the length of time it's been down there, it's in pretty ropey condition and dive sites inform that you need to be at advanced level to poke around it in scuba gear. Art!
About to do an involuntary Marineville
Let Us Now Return To Very Dry Land
You will recall, if you value both your skin, sanity and that of your descendants, that Conrad went off on a tangent about the Yerkes Observatory, which then inspired him to have a bit of a nosy at South Canadian astronomical observatories, and do you know there are dozens and dozens of 'em. You might well expect this, since there are 50 states in South Canada and each will have a state university, who are guaranteed to have an astronomy department and hence an observatory. One out in the Mojave Desert caught my eye and imagination. Art!
These are the dishes you will find at Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex, situated in the trackless
Dish with puny humans for scale
Goldstone is partnered with two other sites in Spain and Australia, meaning that at any moment in time, one site is always able to pick up signal data from their distant probes. Clever, that.
From The Scientific To The Supernatural
Yes, another extract from "Tormentor", which everyone must love love love because nobody's complained yet. If you recall, Luma was getting educated by the spirit of a nineteenth century gentleman with experience in education.
‘He can alter his appearance! Good lord preserve us, do you think I looked
like this in life? No! By an act of will I can look the way I do,
and Morgan can change his appearance at will.’
‘Could I google for him?’
‘Eh? Could you
do what?’
‘ “Google”.
Internet search engine. The
internet?’ tried Louis, to an exasperated shrug.
‘Electrical equipment, Mister McMahon, electrical
equipment. Television, stereograms, and
computers – spirits have great trouble dealing with them.’
Belatedly he recalled what Jen said about the stereo.
‘Fine, fine.
You’ve given me a warning, and about a week’s worth of worrying in a
single night, so I think your job for tonight is done. What are you called, by the way?’
‘You can call me “Professor”,’ replied the spirit,
vanishing.
Sunday, the day of rest. Or not. Louis decided that he was damn well going to go out and see more of the world today.
“Okay sorry bout mess can you
leave a broad-tip felt tip and paper” read the message scrawled on the bathroom
mirror in the morning, making him tut in annoyance and hunt down a set of
felt-tip pens and ancient fan-fold printer paper. He left them on the lounge floor, a reminder
that he needed to buy another table.
Being a Sunday the bus services
were pretty abysmal, so Louis walked up to the supermarket. The services from there were a lot more
frequent than those on the main road by his home. He caught a bus into the main station, then
another that travelled out to Rawtenstall.
From there he walked back along the high moorland, enjoying the bright
sunshine.
‘I must do this in summer,’ he
told the scenery. It was the furthest
he’d been from home in two years.
‘And what do we have here,’ he
mused, coming across the entry road of a large pub, set well back from the main
road. In fact “large” didn’t cover the
place, “huge” seemed better. Converted
from a chapel, he calculated. What time
was it? Half twelve. Dinnertime!
Good timing. Good dining,
too. A three-course meal, utterly
different from his normal slapdash cooking or resorting to frozen convenience
foods. Nor did the food make him doze off,
since he had to walk for another half hour to reach a bus stop in service on
Sundays.
Getting home in mid-afternoon,
Louis spent an unproductive hour trying to search down any details that might
exist on the internet about “Morgan”. He
got hits about Morgana Le Fay, Cliff Morgan and Morgan Freeman, but nothing to
do with the Thirty Years War.
"Morgana's cooking was a little - eccentric"
Ooops! Gone over the Compositional Ton a trifle. Let me finish off -
Finally -
Conrad's actinic rage, the Remote Nuclear Detonator and a scarcity of Codeword compilers have meant less for him to rant and tant about of late, until he came across one solution at the weekend, which can be looked at in two ways. The solution was AQUAPLANE which you must admit isn't very commonly used in everyday language. It means the tendency of a tire to ride on a layer of water instead of securely against the road surface. Art!
Of course, if you muck about with language quite as much as I do, you could also say it refers to the Short Sunderland -
Which is where we came in ...
* Do keep up, we've known this for ages.
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