We Were On The Subject Of Subs Yesterday
- and how the Royal Navy cheekily stole a Sinister passive sonar array from under the noses of it's mothership, tee hee! I bet that captain at least and probably the whole crew ended up in a Siberian gulag. One can only imagine the conversation when the captain discovered the loss.
CAPTAIN: GONE? What do you mean, 'gone'?
HAPLESS RATING: Er - something must have snuck up astern and - kinda chopped it off.
CAPTAIN: 'Something'? A whale with titanium teeth? You mean a NATO submarine!
HAPLESS RATING: Ah - probably, sir.
CAPTAIN: A NATO submarine that the sonar is DESIGNED TO DETECT!
HAPLESS RATING: Ah - it's a pretty dull job, sir, I may have dozed off for a minute or two.
Sinister submarines didn't have a brig, so they stick him in a torpedo tube. Art!
This, ladies and germs, is an Astute class submarine of the Royal Navy. These things are the latest in terms of submarines, and we are told that their sonar can pick up shipping entering and leaving New York Harbour. Whilst sitting in the English Channel. If the Ruffians Baltic Fleet were to make a sortie, one of these puppies would be shadowing it, and the Ruffians would know that, except they'd have no idea where it was hiding. Art!
This is a Ruffian submarine enduring a Russian tradition: it broke down. We finally discovered for certain what had long been suspected - that Sinister and Ruffian submarines were hastily-bodged together rust-buckets liable to kill their own crewmen with onboard fires. When one Ruffian ballistic missile submarine was decommissioned, in order to remove the nuclear missiles they had to use cutting torches (NOT A GOOD IDEA IN CLOSE PROXIMITY TO A NUCLEAR WARHEAD), grinding wheels and sledgehammers to get the tube hatches open. If they had tried a live-fire launch it would have blown the sub in two at the very least. 'At the very least' because if that nuke had detonated ...
O Delicious Schadenfreude!
Not only does it taste wonderful, it has no calorific value, so one can binge on it without fear of waistline expansion. I refer, gentle reader, to a recent ballfoot game where The Manchester United got an absolute stuffing from a team called 'Brent Ford' which sounds like a soap opera actor. The score was 4 - 0, and O my goodness did fans of other ballfoot teams tear into TMU on the BBC's Have Your Say. Now the Beeb have a whole long webpage dedicated to this trouncing and by now even TMU fans are having a go. Here's a few choice snippets:
Dean: It's fitting we chose a bright green kit as that's the face of every Man United fan watching. Sick to our stomachs.
Baron: Frenkie de Jong's chance of signing for United just went from 0% to 0%.
Barotta: Man U will get their first points before the World Cup break for sure.
I see what they mean
Conrad, of course - obviously! - has a cunning plan.
Another On That List Of Post-Apocalyptic Television Series
Because a good wallow in other people's misery is always so fulfilling, don't you find? Or - is it just me? Okay, it's just me. I'm a terrible person*.
ANYWAY here we have "Station Eleven" and if Art can be persuaded to lay down his bowl of coal -
The premise is that - again - civilisation collapses after a flu pandemic kills off most of society, and the series jumps around between the start of the outbreak and what's left of the world twenty years later. The people above are part of the Travelling Symphony who perform Shakespearean -
Okay, that's enough and all I need to know. It sounds worthy and DULL. Conrad not interested.
Chekhov's Gun
I refer to a saying attributed to the Ruffian author, who maintained that, if there was a gun on the wall in one scene of a play, it would inevitably be used by the end of the play. In much the same way we see the decrepit old A13 cruiser tank at Mersa Martuba coming into play in "The Sea Of Sand". Further to which -
Before leaving he tried one last gambit.
‘Those machines were built with a purpose in mind,
Captain. There is a rational intelligence
operating behind them, and I urge you to exercise caution.’
Captain Dobie smiled pityingly and handed over a set
of ignition keys for a Chevrolet 3 tonner.
Making his way to the ranks of parked trucks under
their shady camouflage netting, the Doctor decided on a small detour and
checked out the carcass of the first black tank to be destroyed. Solid glass outer casing, arrays of delicate
spokes, wheels and levers inside, all made from the same black glass, and a
smashed centrally-located metal box that must have been the vehicle’s
electronic brain. All the internal
components were unseated or smashed, telling him little he couldn’t already
deduce. The machine wasn’t a design he
recognised.
‘Which doesn’t mean a great deal,’ he sighed to
himself. ‘Now, to the dig.’
Heh. Just you wait young lady. Just you wait.
An A13 not feeling very well
Back To The Beeb's 'Barriers'
More of their themed photographic exhibition, and in fact because I don't look ahead in order to maintain my air of spontaneity, I have no idea if we've come to the end of them or not. Let's have a dekko.
Courtesy David Woodcock
The location is Greenham Common, where these cattle are allowed to roam free in order to keep the grass down, and this calf is having a determined scratch between these two saplings. One supposes that you have to make do with such if you don't have opposable digits <flexes his sausage-like fingers>.
More Than Meets The TWI
Ho ho! Do you see wha O you do. Yes, more matter from "The War Illustrated" as the invasion of Sicily nears it's end. Art!
 |
| Back then 'Gay' meant 'Effusive and happy' |
Here the stalwart troops of the Eighth Army swagger into Catania, where the Mayor formally surrendered the town. From the smiles on the faces of these Sicilian civilians - notice only old men and boys, everyone else male would have been conscripted - they seem to think they've been liberated, not occupied. At least they won't have to put up with the Brylcreem Boys unloading explosive ordnance upon them day and night. Art!
In fact, although the Allies had no way of knowing at the time, the Battle of the Atlantic had already been won by this point - early August of 1943. Closing the mid-Atlantic 'gap' by using very long-range B24 Liberator aircraft meant that U-boats could no longer lurk there to intercept convoys. Roving escort groups using weapons like Squid and Hedgehog went hunting U-boats rather than sticking to convoy escort. Sonar was being used to track the U-boats. Their loss rate multiplied to so great a rate that crews realised they might get through a single tour but they would never end a second one.
And with that we are done!
* But we knew that already.
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