That Sounds Quite Biblical, Does It Not?
WELL IT ISN'T! For you should know BOOJUM! well enough by now to know that we avoid Politics, Religion and Current Affairs, unless we think there's traffic in it, in which case all bets are off. Yes yes yes, venal and duplicitous, that's us to a tee.
ANYWAY what I wanted to cover here was a Cold War artefact that had the Kremlin's Sinister occupants wetting their pants in terror: the Titan II Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile. We have mentioned this Giant Flying Mallet To End All Mallets before, chiefly about the absolutely terrifying launch sequence, which is the end product of a process that had begun in 1960. Art!
Conrad, you see, has come across a series of Youtube videos that detail the Titan II program from inception to conclusion. Firstly, 54 missile sites were selected in South Canada, at least eight miles apart to prevent a single Sinister warhead from taking out more than one at a time. Then they began the construction process. Art!
This is the 'bathtub', where the ground was excavated to allow the underground structures to be built; the level bottom here is 40 feet below ground level, and you can just see the circular area blocked off for the actual missile silo. There would be three principal structures built here; the silo, the access portal and the control centre, and if Art will put down his bowl of coal -
The access portal is the middle building, because having that as a separate entity made the launch control site more secure. The fewer ingress points you have means fewer points of weakness that are susceptible to overpressure or blast caused by a Sinister warhead impact nearby; those South Canadians always planned for the Worst Case Scenario.
Once they had removed 14,000 tons of earth from the silo chamber, the silo proper was built. I shan't go into a lot of detail here, because it gets fatiguing reeling off a lot of numbers and statistics. Suffice to say a giant concrete cylinder of reinforced concrete housed and shielded the Titan, with an additional forty feet that would accommodate a gigantic horizontal 'door'. Art!
You can see here that the top of the silo is approximating the original ground level, even before all the construction is complete. Once the silo had been finished the crews turned to the launch centre and access portal. Art!
That domed structure at near port is the launch centre, and the big rectangular structure at mid-starboard is the access portal. In the background you can see the silo. Once all these buildings had been finished it was time to fill in the 'bathtub' and thus cover these structures with a protective layer of earth. Art!
That's all which remained visible from above, apart from the bill, as the accountant could tell you with teary eyes (£9 million per complex at the time). Before you start clucking, let me remind you that this was carried out in 1960, long before the Sinisters had satellites capable of spying, as we were only three years into the Space Race era. So they had no idea what Giant Mallets were lying in wait, and probably feared the worst, which in a nuclear MAD environment is the best way to be.
I hope you enjoyed this visit to the bad old days of the Cold War, as our next visitation will involve scads of that cool Sixties electro-mechanical hardware that has been replaced by soul-less digital buttons on a touch screen <pouts>.
Hmmmmmmmm.
Conrad Is Still Pretty Seethy
Is that a word? It is now! I've been so busy setting the world to rights and tweaking Dimya's tail that I've neglected my regular ranting about Codewords, so let us slip back into our regular excoriation.
'SUCTORIAL': Thank heavens I didn't go for FACTORIAL as that would have blown at least a dozen other solutions. Go on, admit it, you've never heard of it either, have you? Collins Concise, come to our rescue! "Specialised for sucking, relating to or possessing suckers". Ah. I see. Art?
A factorial of suctorial*.
"HYRAX": What, again? Yes, Codeword compilers, we've had this one before, possibly twice. As Conrad recalls, it's a small rodent-like creature that lives in Africa and devours humans whole with it's massive mandibles - hang on, have I turned over two pages at once? Art!
Ooo-err, Matron, Mister Hyrax looks a little ticked-off. Best send him a gift-box of fruit and soap.
"AIOLI": You what? Once again a reference needs to be made to the CC.
<crickets and tumbleweed>
Okay, then it's teh interwebz -
It seems to be a variety of very, very garlicky mayonnaise, found along the shores of the southern Mediterranean, which makes it most definitely a niche gustatorial element and thus Conrad is going to deploy the Remote Nuclear Detonator. I mean - a five-letter word with only one consonant?
Pretty Pretty Things
That almost sounds like a band name from the Sixties, doesn't it? Let me guess, they were a one-hit wonder from Liverpool whose producer used flanging to make them seem cool and trendy before they split in order to become the new Beatles, and their lead singer is now a bus conductor in the Wirral? Art!
Well - er - no. No. This is another from the Sony World Photography series, and you need to understand what's going on here to make visual sense, because Your Humble Scribe was pretty bamboozled upon looking at this first time round. What you are looking at is a band of elephants being scrub-a-dub-dubbed in Bangladesh, because out there you have to look after your meat-and-muscle tractors, or they will not perform. Or - they will back your wagon into the channel alongside the ditch that you stopped alongside**.
Bring On The Evil Spirits!
Hmmmm well perhaps wait an hour or two, until our reluctant hero Luma has risen from his slumbers and cast aside any spirits, hostile or otherwise, waiting to greet him. For yes, we are now on the next instalment of "Tormentor".
When
Louis finally stretched and rolled out of bed at
The long scratches on his arms
were merely pale white lines, completely healed overnight.
Must remember to thank Yvonne.
‘Chingley Hall!’ he suddenly
recalled, from that newspaper article back on the bus. Ah.
Yes, that might deter him, the Sunday bus services.
Seeing that as a challenge, not a
problem, he found sufficient bits and pieces to make sandwiches and a flask of
coffee, and hunted down a camera after much rooting through stored junk to look
the tourist all the better. The pistol
went in an outside jacket pocket where he could reach it easily.
The Spirits-That-Write had left
concerned messages about the attack of yesterday, with the unwelcome news that
the Professor still remained out of contact, which they felt was a matter of
concern.
“Off to Chingley Hall” he wrote
for their information.
The Hall stood in a
well-maintained garden, in a well-to-do leafy
On top of all that, after
tramping all around the house and grounds, he didn’t find the slightest bit of
supernatural activity. The Tudor pile
was interesting and evocative, with gardens that must look good in summer, but
Louis found nothing to suggest spirits.
Nor even ghosts.
“Remember to ask about ghosts”
he noted in his book on the top floor of the final bus ride back home.
Finally -
Here we bang on about what's happening in the Ukrainian 'Special' Military Operation, as Dimya would have it, because his army does indeed seem to need special measures to manage to move from A to A1, let on to B. Art!
That's the Sarcophagus at Chernobyl, built to keep their reactor assemblies from contaminating the rest of the world, which you would expect to resound across the entire northern hemisphere, unless, of course - obviously! - you happen to invade said area with ignorant 18 year-old levies. Who go out and dig trenches in The Most Dangerously Radioactive Soil ON THE PLANET.
Several hundred Ruffians are now being treated for acute radiation sickness in Belarus, thanks to having been hanging around whilst tanks crossed the radioactive terrain, stirring up radioactive dusts and having being busy little diggers down there already.
* This will only make sense to mathematicians, who are all perverts anyway, and thus beyond all hope or help.
** Horses will do this, let alone elephants.
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