A Lot Device

NO! That Isn't A Typo

In fact you'd better tread carefully, I've already Remote Nuclear Detonated three people before lunch out of sheer pique.  Perhaps I'll be more mellow after a meal of sauerkraut and pilchards.  Perhaps not.

     ANYWAY our title today is about a device now widely used in sci-fi yet which was quite ground-breaking at the time: the 'transporter' as introduced in "Star Trek", an obscure South Canadian television series from the Sixties that you may have heard of.  Art!

   The concept behind this technology is quite straightforward: you stand on the coil, get turned into energy by a weird noise, get beamed to your destination (usually a planet) and get reassembled into yourself again.  Conrad was never quite sold on the bit about turning up on a planet without a transporter coil to re-assemble you.  In the interests of brevity we'll ignore that bit.  Art!

The mixing deck

     This system is said to have an operating range of 25,000 miles but the Enterprise crew don't seem to use it over 19,000, implying that you might not get put back together properly when operating at extreme range.  In one of the endless sequel series that is set in an earlier time, the transporter is used only when there's no other option, implying again that it wasn't entirely to be trusted.

     So, the transporter is a convenient and rapid method of getting from A to Z without having to go through the rest of the alphabet.  It's also a convenient way to generate plot points When Something Goes Horribly Wrong because whilst this kit is usually reliable, it's not totally reliable.  Art!

"Mirror, Mirror"

     This is easily one of the best episodes of the series and it all revolves around a transporter malfunction.  The four protagonists above are beaming back to the Enterprise, but choose to do so during an ion storm - which possibly makes Uhura another Ion Maiden* - and step out of the transporter to a radically different reality.  In this parallel universe there is no Foundation - instead the ISS Enterprise is busy committing war crimes in the service of it's parent Empire.  Promotion is by assassination, mistakes are punished with 'agonisers' and big mistakes put you in the Agony Booth, which will kill you.  Moreover, in this reality Kirk has the Tantalus Field, a device that kills remotely at a distance; Conrad wonders if this is what impelled him to get JPL to construct his own Remote Nuclear Detonator ...  Art!

"I told you, it's MY t.v. remote and I'm not giving it up!"

     So, convenient travel method and plot device.  The real reason the transporter was created and used came down to cost.  Originally the Enterprise would have physically landed on the surface of planets, which would call for expensive special effects shot, models, mattes and so on, which meant spending $$$.  There was the shuttlecraft, yes indeed - but it hadn't been completed by the time shooting began, so transporters it was.  Thus we have today's title.

     Motley, I am feeling both idle and hungry.  Transport me to the kitchen.

Another BBC Photography Exhibition

As you should surely know by now, Conrad loves to post these pictures and pontificate about them, because it minimises the creative effort required.  So - Art!

"Snowy Red" by James Officer

     The theme for the photographs is "Wild and Free" and will be on the front of the BBC's "Countryfile" calendar, so quite a bit of kudos to the winner.  Pretty obviously that above is a squirrel dusted with snow on a branch.  Yes, except it's a RED squirrel, not one of the indigent upstart grey ones that infest Tandle Hill Park.

More Of Post-Apocalypse Entertainment

Conrad cannot recall how he came up with a website called "Culture Vulture", nor exactly how he got onto a webpage titled "25 Post-Apocalyptic Films You Have to Watch", yet he did.  And do you know what?  It's not a bad list.  Having said that I have seen 18 of the films present, so yeah I probably would think it good.  I won't go through the whole list, just the ones I've not seen.  Art!

25: "Bird Box"

     That's the one where invisible monsters make you commit suicide if you look at them.  Or something.  So the protagonists have to wear a blindfold all the time.  Quite what this has to do with a box of birds is anyone's guess.  Conrad hasn't seen it and doesn't feel he's missing anything.  Perhaps if it pops up on Netflix as I'm not going to hunt it down.

From Wet To Sweat

Yes, our next instalment of "The Sea Of Sand", with our three humans - well, two humans and one Time Lord - watching alien machines slowly removing an overburden of sand from a complex of buildings.

Gradually the black glass building those machines came from emerged into daylight, a long structure that curved round in a semi-circle with one end open to the elements.  Periodically one of the machines would return there, only to re-emerge a few minutes later.  To the east of that structure, directly north of the Dias, sat a squat cuboidal building.  Diametrically opposite, on the south side of the Dias, a row of three smaller cuboids were slowly exposed to view.  At the eastern cardinal point of the compass, if the Dias were viewed as central to the Complex, a jagged black stump ten feet high showed where a damaged building had stood.  When the excavation neared it's end, the remains of the missing part could be seen: a two hundred-yard long needle that lay shattered in pieces, pointing to the south-east like a stuck compass.

     This toppled monolith had smashed open a domed building when it fell, but two more similar domes lay north and south of the smashed one.

     "Do you know what those buildings are for, Doctor Smith?" asked Templeman, humbly, probably the first time in his life he'd ever been so abject.

     Things are about to get even more interesting, and definitely alarming.

Artemis Foul

NO!  No relation to the series of books about the child mastermind which Darling Daughter used to enjoy when younger, and which has been made into a film, I believe.  One wonders how they get around the fact that Artemis is an amoral criminal

     ANYWAY that's not what we're here about.  No, Conrad is referring to the delayed launch of the Artemis rocket, due to execute an un-manned circum-lunar orbit as a test for a manned return to the Moon.  Art!

     There were problems with an engine so the lift-off was cancelled.  No word on when the launch will be on again <sad face> but it WILL happen <happy face>.  Back on the Moon by 2025!  Art!

    
     <sounds of Tazer being charged up>

Finally -

Don't need much to hit the Adjusted Compositional Ton.  What can I wibble witlessly about for less than a hundred words?  Aha!  "FLABBERGASTED", an English word which means 'To be utterly amazed' just in case those unlucky enough to not live in This Sceptred Isle are not familiar with it.  In fact I think I've used it recently, which is why it sprang to mind.

     The thing is, nobody knows where it comes from, only that it first popped up in the 18th Century.  Nothing about origin in either my Brewer's or Collins Concise, not even on teh Interwebz.  My challenge to you is to come up with a suggestion for it's origin.  

And with that, Vulnavia, we are done and over the Ton.  Pip pip!

*  Sorry.  Couldn't resist.