BOOJUM!: All Our Yesteryons

Which, To Those Unfamiliar

Can be interpreted as 'All Our Yesterdays', a line from Shakespeare <hack spit> where he witters on about the past being another country, and which was the title of a British documentary television series that I remember from a good forty years ago. Art!

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh - Yes. Indeed.
LOOK AT THOSE STALAGMITES AND STALACTITES!

Er, yes, the young lady you see before you is the actress Mariette Hartley, whom does totally rock the Fur Bikini look now that you mention it, despite it being an <thinks> enormous thespian challenge. She was one of the featured actors in the Starry Trex episode 'All Our Yesterdays' which is where today's Intro title comes into play. Art!

Go on, which of the two above would make you divert to enquire? Yeah me too.

ANYWAY the plot of AOY has it that the planet Sarpeidon is about to be destroyed thanks to it's local sun going supernova, which is always a problem with local suns, they super and they novae at the drop of a hat. Our Crucial Three, Captain James 'Salacious' Kirk, Mister 'Icy' Spock and Doctor '~~Three Pints Of Southern Comfort Please~~' McCoy all beam down, only to be whizzed off to different periods of Sarpeidon's past. Art!

O I say, someone seems a little smug

The thing is, the entire population of Sarpeidon, which can surely be measured in the tens of millions, has been back-projected into their historical past in order to avoid imminent death at the supernova.

Conrad espies a plot hole. Nay, more a plot chasm. These millions of people are being sent into the past, WITH NO OUTCOME?!?! The two time periods we witness are from circa three hundred and five thousand years hence, in which either time-frame an intervention would have impacted the future. Art!

There have been a couple of execrable adaptations of this Ray Bradbury short story, where the tromping of a butterfly in the Cretaceous leads to terrible political consequences in the modern day. Yet Sarpeidon suffers none of these problems. How come? Because the offspring of a Sarpeidonian and a Vulcan, with a twenty-first century doctor in attendance as a midwife, are surely going to change things up a bit. Given that a Vulcan can punch holes in armour plate, Zarabeth's pregnancy is going to be a thing of interest. Art!

Dog Buns, I can appreciate Art getting a crush here. Sh

<ahem>

Yes, well, I can only posit that the Atavachron disperses the Sarpeidon population across geography, so that their chronometrical impact is dissipated and they don't suture the future. Millions of people not working to a common goal and all that. Others have picked up on this plot flaw:

Star Trek: The City on the Edge of Forever established that the presence of one man can change the future; Star Trek: Tomorrow Is Yesterday established that the absence of one man can do the same. While the exact or even approximate population of Sarpeidon is never stated, there was obviously far more than one person sent back into the past, and each one had the potential to contaminate the planet's timeline. No character ever raises this problem on screen."

Of course, I could be overthinking this ...

"Featuring Brian Inglis"

The Suicide Club, Elaborated

Allow me to point out that 'The Suicide Club' was a nickname for members of the Machine Gun Corps in the First Unpleasantness, because their duties were so dangerous to the opposition that they were guaranteed to be the first on the list of Enemy Units To Be Destroyed. A single well-placed machine gun could halt a battalion attack in it's tracks. Art!

Note use of the clinometer for indirect fire, that straining condenser hose and the emergency tripod underslung the barrel.

This variety of machine gun, the Vickers, was expensively and time-consumingly manufactured from precision-engineered components. One of them, as a test, was fired non-stop for a week with no stoppages or other problems.

I bring this topic up because I've just finished the volume below. Art!

One of the more interesting parts was the Allied experience in Mesopotamia, which we know better today as 'Iraq'. I shall probably come back to this.

Ohhhhh No. Oh Nooooooo.

Back about thirty years ago Your Humble Scribe could pass for British American musician and actor Robbie Robertson. Art!

Seriously. I do not have any web presence thanks to age, but Maurice, the cleaner in our offices 20 years ago, could not tell the difference between Robbie R and Your Humble Scribe on a wall poster. I have seen him perform in "Carny" and it's beyond weird to see yourself talking in a Canuckistanian accent.

So what?

Well, John Bolton is now in the spotlight. You know, Republican hawk, used to be in the Trump administration, NUKE ENEMY FIRST kind of attitude, and is now akin to Your Humble Scribe in demeanour. Art!

How to strangle cats the John Bolton way!

If I travel on the bus, someone is going to mistake me for him. I guarantee you.

"The Sea Of Sand"

The Doctor is still stirring things up in bio-vore society. A true agent of chaos!

He looked out over the bio-vores, who looked back with a hungry intensity that bespoke a desire to hear The Answer.

‘I’m afraid that my colleague here spoke the truth. To be safe from an attack by outside agencies, we need to prosecute a vigorous attack against those very same agencies.’

In behaviour completely different from that displayed during Imgelissa’s tenure, the waiting bio-vore audience accorded the Doctor a serried wave of applause.

For a moment that seemed to last whole minutes, the Doctor paused to think. Finally, having ensured that the maximum number of people would pay attention now (and in the future), he continued.

‘We do indeed need to capture the trans-mat platform. If we have that platform then the old order is ham-strung. Already the aristocrats of the coast are panicking about the Farmers taking matters into their own hands, trying to reverse history, undercutting progress.’

That was a guess, but a well-informed guess nevertheless. With any advanced communication system the leaders would be finding out what was happening across their world, before the man at the bottom level found out himself.

What the Doctor couldn’t ignore or bypass was the fact that the revolt amongst Warriors and Farmers was taking place in a single city-state. There were dozens of other such polities across this world, which might or might not choose to join in the revolt.

What often irks Your Humble Scribe is how an event only ever takes place in a single location. Problem hopefully addressed here.

Radial Gate Dam Clears Log Jam

This one is quite Zen. Conrad, again with no clue how he got there, found a short clip on Youtube where a radial gate dame was being cleared of a huge jam consisting mostly of branches. Here's an example of a RGD. Art!

As you can see, the whole thing can pivot on an axis to aid or retard water flow. Now let's see the dam as it was. Art!

You can get a sense of scale from the shadows of the watchers, plus an idea of how much wooden flotsam there is up against the barrier. Art!

The dam has been moved a little, as you can tell by comparing this shot with the one above against the measurements on the concrete wall. As yet the water is flowing but the wooden debris is proving reluctant to move. Art!