Not LITERALLY
For one thing, I strongly suspect that they are unaware of the existence of BOOJUM! which is quite handy, as then they won't know who to sue, if they decide to.
No, what I meant is that it's MY job to come up with the punnery round here. If only Nixon could go to China, then only Conrad is allowed to play stupid word games. Art!
That'll get the sci-fi fans queuing up to read.
ANYWAY consider Phlebas. NO! Sorry, hang on, consider Jupiter. You know, the gas giant that's the largest planet in the Solar System, with the famous Great Red Spot
Here an aside. It must be awfully confusing for South Canadians, being as their political parties are referenced by colour: the Wizard Lizard Gizzards are down as Blue (or perhaps Red) and the Ice Cream Bandits are down as Red (or perhaps Blue)*. What happened during the days of the Cold War, when there were panics about 'Reds Under The Bed'? and maps of the Sinister Union and their Warsaw Pact minions were all coloured in positively scarlet Red? Art!
Plus, what about Nina Simone? You know, creator singer and piano player on the world's saddest ever song, "Little Boy Blue"?
ANYWAY Jupiter. Art!
This planet is so massive that even at the dawn of the telescope age, it was clearly visible, and that was over four centuries ago. It also has a host of moons in orbit, some of which are large enough to be considered small planets in their own right. Three of these icy planetlets are of special interest to astronomers, namely Callisto, Ganeymede and Europa, because it is suspected that they may have deep oceans composed of water beneath their surfaces. Whilst you can turn on a tap and produce a stream of H2O if you wish, not thinking much of it, water is seen by astrobiologists (not a word you expected to see today) as a sine qua non for life to develop. Art!
Enter the JUpiter Icy Moons Explorer, and you can see how large it is thanks to the puny humans servicing it, which is where today's title originates. This probe was successfully launched into orbit a couple of days ago, and is then going to carry out a slingshot manoeuvre in the inner Solar System to acquire sufficient velocity to get to Jupiter by 2031.
Once it gets there it will carry out close observation of all three planetlets mentioned above, using cameras and radar and lasers to blow up the sinister alien bases closely monitor for signs of sub-crustal oceans. Art!
Giving it plenty of JUICE
The timetable is to have all three moons surveyed by 2034, which will enable ESA to plan further missions based on what JUICE discovers, so Your Humble Scribe may well see a robot lander on the surface of one of these moons, drilling beneath the crust to say "Hi, Europans! Greetings from Earth, and take me to your leader." Art!
I only hope that when JUICE arrives it doesn't deploy more pun-based nomenclature along the lines of "C.O.N.R.A.D." for "Carbon, Oxygen and Nitrogen RAdiometry Detector" or similar. Or even (I know, I know, reaching a bit) "Biological Organism Operant Joule Uptake Monitor". ESA, I'm watching you.
When The Money Isn't Funny
Not going to apologise for this quick look at the parlous Ruffian economy, where the ruble is now down to ₽82 to the dollar, where it had been trading at ₽70 up until a few weeks ago. Apparently the financial figures for March were massaged by a 'voluntary one-off' payment that business were voluntold to make to conceal how bad things are. Art!
Morning shift clocks in, all one of him
More bad news in terms of prices for Ruffian Urals oil, the standard they use to calculate profits and losses and overall revenue. It's currently at $47.85 per barrel, which is about ten dollars down from the price last time BOOJUM! checked on it. This is seriously bad news for Putin et al, because - with howling irony - the EU price-cap scheme had a price of $60 per barrel, which they refused to accept, and the $60 p.b. figure was chosen because it meant Ruffia made hardly any profit. Trading at $12 below this figure means they are losing money on sales. Art!
Altogether now " 'cos I'm as free as a bird now ..."
The kicker is that the Ruffian Ministry of Finance calculated their country's finances for 2023 on the basis of $70 p.b. so a drop of 32% is going to realllllly undermine things.
But don't worry - the Furtive Foot Fiddler says it's all going according to plan!
"The Sea Of Sand"
The gallant Free French, in their somewhat obsolete Blenheims, have rendered summary justice upon an attacking force of bio-vores, whom are completely unaware of exactly what 'aircraft' are.
The twenty surviving black tanks
rearranged their ranks, retreating to the depths of the desert towards Makin
Al-Jinni.
‘Chars
Italien?’ mused the pilot of Guynemer.
Those crawling black things didn’t look Italian. Still, if a Lysander had attacked them, they
must be the enemy.
‘L’allemagne,
peutetre?’ shrugged the co-pilot. He
grinned his nasty grin. ‘Peutetre, mon
capitain, chars Anglais.’
The
pilot wagged a cautionary finger.
The
three aircraft of the FAFL went back to the squadron at Sidi Rezegh, unaware of
the role they played in the preservation of the human race.
In the wadi, the human survivors
saw the flight of bombers alter course, swooping down and bombing the oncoming
bio-vores, then returning to spray the wreckage and survivors with a hurricane
of bullets.
‘Good
Lord. I think we just survived another
attempted attack by the monsters, unscathed,’ remarked Roger. ‘Truly a deus
ex machina moment, eh, Professor?’
Sarah
and the Professor both looked unhappy.
Templeman put his feelings into words.
‘The
aircraft with Albert and your private has not returned, Lieutenant
Llewellyn. It should have returned by now.
The dig isn’t far away, if that’s where they went.’
Roger’s
face fell. Of course. How could he have forgotten? He held onto faint hope that they might have
ditched the Lysander in the desert and be making their way back to Mersa
Martuba on foot. After hours of waiting,
he finally admitted to himself that the aircraft, with two men aboard it, was
not coming back.
I say, things keep getting worse for them, don't they? The author must be an utter cad!
Ouch
Last night, as I got into bed, I caught my left pinkie nail on the mattress and it HURT.
I know, I know, Your Humble Scribe is a huge coward and it might only be a bit of a -
POSSIBLY NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH**.
Nope, torn off with lots of blood. Art!
BLOOD I TELL YOU BLOOD!
"White House Down"
Never mind a coach and horses, you could drive a cavalry regiment through some of the plot holes in this film. Allow me to add in another layer of lunacy with the aid of pictures. Art!
Okay, pictures one and two show the hacker in the White House successfully remotely taking control of a Minuteman III ICBM in it's launch silo.
This is a staggeringly daft concept. That an outside source, with no direct, physical line of communication with a Minuteman Command Capsule, would be able to take over a missile is ludicrous. These things are not controlled by a single airman in a roomful of other people who liaises with his missile remotely; they are controlled by a team of two officers in an underground bunker at the missile complex itself. If Jake Broe ever watched this sequence he would either die laughing or have a rage-induced heart-attack. Art!
Jake. Former Nuclear Missile Operations Officer USAF.
The last picture shows the launched ICBM - ah - shooting down Air Force One.
This is wrong on so many levels. An ICBM uses a ballistic trajectory to launch missiles at a target on the other side of the world. They make lousy anti-aircraft missiles. For one thing, the location of AF1 would have to be known from second to second in order to shoot it down, and an ICBM is independent of ground control the second it launches. IT WOULD NOT WORK!!
NOT ONLY THAT! The Ruffians would pick up the launch signature, as would the Chinese. If this rogue ICBM was performing aerial acrobatics to shoot down an aircraft, this might well be interpreted as a First Launch by the Ruffians and/or the Chinese, and they go to Empty All Silos. Yeah, congratulations Walker you traitor, you got revenge for your son, and the end of civilisation as we know it.
Of course, I might be overthinking this ...
* Conrad being as non-committal as only he can.
** Possibly not, but I could stand to look at it.
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