One Step Beyond Beyond

No!  Nothing To Do With Madness

The band.  Some of you out there may well shake your head and mutter that BOOJUM! is little more than a minor miasma of madness made manifest, and you'd not be far wrong.

     I know what you're thinking AND NO I DO NOT STILL HAVE D.A.R.P.A'S TELEPATHY HELMET because you're painfully predictable, so let's get the divergent tangent over with right off.  Art!

     There you go.  Conrad always had a soft spot for Madness, especially "My Name Is Michael Caine"*, because he's pretty awesome, and he gave up his belief in Socialism after seeing what the Norks and Populous Dictatorship troops were like in the Korean War wh

     ANYWAY we mentioned Lysander earlier today, didn't we?  ANSWER YES AS YOU SHOULD ALREADY KNOW, and of course - obviously! - Art brought up a picture of a Westland Lysander, an ugly-looking brute of an aircraft.  Art!

     They were intended to operate as army-liaison aircraft and artillery spotters, a role in which they were obsolete by 1940, which is unfortunate, because that's when they went into action over France.  The Luftwaffe was very grateful to have such easy pickings.  However, come the creation of the Special Operations Executive, the Lysander got a new lease of life, thanks to it's outstanding short-take-off and landing ability.  It could land in very small fields, and easily take off from same, which was great when taking SOE agents into France to commit military mischief, or retrieving those whose time was up, or bringing back Allied aircrew whose mounts had come to a sticky end.  Art!

     Painted starless and bible black to blend in with the night.  Rather incredibly, one method of dropping off the SOE saboteurs was to fit them with a special suit - Art!

Possibly like this?

      - because so clad, they could jump off the airplane's permanently-fixed ladder while it was still in flight, thus avoiding the dangerous bit of landing and taking off again, especially if there were Teutons about.  Conrad just looked up the stalling speed of a 'Lizzie' as they were nicknamed, and it's 65 m.p.h. so that's the slowest you'd hit the ground in your SOE Splatter-Suit.  Hence today's title.  No word on how successful - or unsuccessful - this technique was, still seems you'd need a touch of madness to use one - which is where we came in.

Back To 1943

Yes, continuing the theme of the Second World 'Special' Military Operation, and certain photographs I've taken from "The War Illustrated" for April 1943.  What you have to remember about these pictures and the articles that go with them is that they are being published weeks after the events depicted, in order to avoid having the opposition glean anything useful or time-critical from them.  With that, let me motivate Art with a cattle-prod -

     I know, I know, one bit of desert looks much the same as any other.  This is Tunisia, for your information, usually a lot greener, hillier and considerably less traversable than the Western Desert.  Here you see the Bren Carrier in action, what you might call the British tracked-Jeep, and the most numerous armoured vehicle of the Unpleasantness at 85,000 produced.  Art!

     An interesting juxtaposition of TANK.  Here you see the Sherman at top, and the Churchill at bottom, both designs that came into service only several years into the Unpleasantness and influenced by experiences to date.  The inset shows a Panzer Mark III, mainstay of the Wehrmacht, and a pre-war design that had been up-gunned and up-armoured as much as it could be.  End of the line, old chap.  Outclassed on the battlefield by mid-1943, it would end up being converted to assault guns, where they took the turret off and installed a fixed, larger gun.

     Mention is made in the text about Kasserine, where the keen as mustard but green as grass South Canadians took a proper shoeing, before the Teutons withdrew as the Eighth Army was still advancing.

Bring On The Blue

Nothing wild or yonder-y about this blue, we refer to the BBC's photography exhibition on the theme of 'Into The Blue'.  So far we've had dogs, a bin and sunglasses.  Bring it on Art!

Courtesy Eliza Dutton

     This is from the upper Michigan peninsula, wherever that might be.  Note the confluence of blue water and the sinister blue storm clouds.  Why, the weather looks so forbidding it might be in This Sceptred Isle!  Art!

     There we are, now everyone knows where the Upper Michigan Peninsula is.

Back To 'Tormentor'

If you recall AND YOU BETTER HAD we left Luma, unable to get into his own office as it was full of gossiping women, settling down in an empty classroom with considerable bad grace, and being shocked upright when the door gets abruptly slammed open ...

Two students came into the classroom, both Goth wannabees wearing lots of black, accessorised with dangling chains, piercings and makeup.

               ‘I’ll go,’ began Louis, before he began to pay closer attention.  Each Goth sported a bizarre and startling halo of iridescent spikes around their head, a technicolour display that grew and shrank and changed colour with each second.

               ‘Devil!  You are the devil!’ shouted one Goth, pointing at Louis.  ‘The Devil is you!’

                ‘The voices told me what to do,’ continued the other.  ‘They told me to seek you out and destroy you.  Seek and destroy.  Those voices telling me.’

               This might have been amusing if the first student hadn’t produced a kitchen knife over a foot long.  The second student then pulled a tack hammer out of his (or her) baggy trousers.

               ‘Say hello to my little friend,’ riposted Louis, re-discovering his weapon in a jacket pocket. A film quote, but appropriate.  Two long squirts later the traumatised Goth students were both wet and baffled.

               ‘Why am I soaked?’ asked one.

               ‘You wet yourself,’ explained Louis.

               ‘Is this the woodwork class?’ asked the other, waving the tack hammer in front of their face.

               ‘Get along to the Technology Block.’

     Hair-raising stuff, hmmmm?  I wonder if this artefact is the very same that Luma ordered from Germany?

Finally -

As ever, Conrad is using this item to yark and bark and - yes! - even sark about the 'Special' Military Operation taking place in Ukraine.  I know Dimya reads BOOJUM! to try and stay up to date with the world, and that he froths with rage when we poke fun at him (dictators notably have NO sense of humour when it comes to themselves), so we're not going to stop now**.  Art!

     Folks, meet Konstantin, who vlogs under the Youtube handle 'Inside Russia'.  As you might have already guessed, he lives in Ruffia, and as a result has to be VERY circumspect about how he describes the SMO, which he slyly informs is known as a much shorter word in other countries.  He had an illuminating observation or two about the SMO, as he was due to fly back to Rostov, in southern Ruffia - except the airport there was closed down when the SMO began.  Art!

"Rostov-na-Doni"

     When he rang the airport, they confirmed they were closed - ' - but if you ring back on March 2nd everything will be back to normal" and if a telephone conversation could have <wink wink> expressed verbally, it would have.  Clearly they were expecting, or had been told, that the SMO would have finished by then.  Er no.  Konstantin has been ringing back and - yes, they are still closed.  Every week the closure is extended for another week, after which <repeat on a loop>.  As he interjects, clearly Something Is Not Going To Plan.  Ruffians who were previously toeing the party line are now getting 1)  Curious and 2)  Annoyed bordering on Angry.

     Okay, I think I need to go make some Dog-in-the-manger Noodles.  What ho!

*  And yes, that really is Michael Caine doing himself.

**  Tee hee!