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Sunday 11 September 2022

Thalia Is ANGRY!

But I Care Not

Conrad isn't going to snap his fingers as this tends to end up with him straining his joints and weeping a little, so imagine him snapping his fingers at Thalia.  There.  That's it.

     Of course, you are now going to ask who Thalia is, and then pester about why she is angry, and what is my inside leg measurement.  PATIENCE!

     Let us now abruptly change subjects and refer back to earlier this morning when I took Edna for a walk.  Normally Your Humble Scribe uses this as 'Thinking Time' to come up with items for BOOJUM! except not today.  O no.  Art!

Orcs!

     Instead I was ruminating upon what happening in Ukraine, and I have discovered that you can't have that in the blog.  Unless you bring in Patron t

     ANYWAY I therefore sat down in the Sekrit Layr with no idea what to write about.  O - yes, Thalia.  She is one of the Muses, responsible for Comedy (and Pastoral Poetry, no idea what that is and no wish to find out).  She is supposed to help inspire artists struggling to create blog content but was singularly lacking today.      

     Conrad, on the other hand, has his trusty "Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable".  Art!

Best fiver ever spent

     I have resorted to this once or twice before by picking a page at random and coming across interesting stuff, which is precisely what I did today, so Thalia is off in a sulk and not speaking to me.  Suit yourself, Thalia, because Brewer's is 1,523 pages long and there's always your sisters Urania, who does Astronomy, and Clio, who does History.

     Okay, enough preamble.  The word I chose today is "ORRERY" which you may not have heard of by name but have probably seen in demonstration.  Art!


     This is Fulton's Orrery, held at the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow.  As is obvious, it is a fiendishly complex bit of clockwork kit three yards across.  Here's a link to a Youtube channel showing it in motion:

(1) Fulton's Orrery - YouTube

     The device itself was invented in 1700 by George Graham and was intended to display the relative motion of the Solar System's planets and major moons with respect to each other.  The name comes from Charles Boyle, the 3rd Earl of Orrery, who had a copy of the original made for him.  Art!

Version One

     Fulton's Orrery was constructed in 1800, so he had more astronomical data to go on than Mister Graham, and probably better metallurgy and precision engineering, too.  No representation for Pluto, mind.  Art!


     The Earth and Moon rotating around the Sun - which is not to scale.  Just thought I'd get that out in the open.  Conrad strongly recommends you go visit that link and watch the whole thing going like whiz, and then admire how clever Mister Fulton was.

     Motley!  You can be Mars, and I'll be a meteor shower using water balloons.  And tell Thalia that if she doesn't stop being such a mardy-bottom she'll get meteored, too.


Back To Bucolic

It means 'Rural' and 'Pastoral'.  Yes, we could have just put that, but since when did BOOJUM! ever look to keep the word count down? or be straightforward.  So, another entry for the BBC's "Countryfile" calendar cover competition.  Art!

"Running Free" by Toby Girt

     I think you can tell which direction the wind predominantly blows here, wherever 'here' is as it's not specified.  Looks to be flat heathland with no protection or cover from the winds.  Pretty extreme trees, gotta admit.  Don't try to remedy their shape by trimming or chopping - remember Tree Law!


"The Sea Of Sand"

As you should surely recall, the Doctor had remained behind at the alien Infiltration Complex, keeping a weather eye on their activities.  I know you're all loving this stuff because nobody has made a negative Comment, which is the same as making a positive Comment (in my head at least) so these extracts will continue.  That is all.

The Doctor remained in the Temple, watching aliens below stump around inspecting different buildings, aliens with helmets directing aliens without helmets, aliens re-opening buildings, aliens shooing the excavating robots back into the building they had emerged from.

     At one point a pair of aliens came to puzzle over the wooden staircase that led up into the Temple's interior, making the Time Lord worry about having to hide behind a pillar.  In the end he didn't need to resort to anything so undignified, since the aliens went off in different directions.

     He tried to extrapolate from what he'd seen so far.  These aliens were waking from a considerable period in cryogenic suspension, then make sense of the world around them.  How long had they been "asleep"?

     "Several thousand years, at least," he muttered to himself.  During which time enormous changes had taken place on Planet Earth.  These aliens would need to acclimatise themselves in terms of arrival in the twentieth Century, when they had arrived  hereabouts around Year Zero, and even that was giving them the benefit of a thousand years.

     He caught sight of a commotion taking place outside the curved factory building.  An alien with helmet - in fact the one that seemed in command - was gesturing at another.  Their voices were raised, and got louder.

     See?  Not everything goes according to plan.  In fact things may 'gang aft aglay' as the knowledgable Rabby Burns once said.  Probably not with an alien invasion in mind, I grant you.


More Post-Apocalyptic Film Nods

Yesterday we briefly glanced over a tranche of PA films that I'd already seen, with a precis of what Conrad thought of them.  Now let's have the next unseen film.  Art!

No. 14: "The Battery" 2012

     Never even heard of this one.  Apparently these two characters are all each other has, and they're not that fond of each other.  Yet they have to stick together against the ravening undead hordes.  The Cultured Vultures say it's as much a character study as horror film, done on a shoestring budget (the two leads are the director and producer), so it seems to make a strength of it's limits.  One to watch out for.


"The War Illustrated"

Yes, back to the days when Operational Security was helped by the laborious process of sending film negatives back to the UK in order to get them developed before being printed - you see how easy digital photography makes everything for the consumer?  Art!


     This first picture is one of the montages that TWI always includes, so we'll have a look at each photograph in turn.


     Here a couple of British, or Commonwealth, soldiers are patrolling the railway station at Sferro, which has been somewhat battered by artillery before it's capture.  The piles of wire reels at port probably belong to the British, too, as they would need to establish communication links once the town had been occupied, and you'd expect the Axis to have already arranged their comms rather than leaving signals kit lying about making the place look untidy.


Finally -

A little under the normal word count, but I need to get cracking in order to get into Royton, do the shopping and be in time to catch the 15:12 bus back home.

O!  actually up to 1,204 words.  So not bad.  Pip pip!







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