As You Should Surely Know By Now
Conrad, Your Humble Scribe, ends up in peculiar places on the internet at times, with no clear recollection of how he got there, just that many of these digital rabbit holes lead to other rabbit holes. Thus I encountered Marty T on Youtube, and his exploits with a digger.
"Excellent!" I thought in light of his Antipodean accent. "A Digger with a digger!" Art!
According to my "Brewer's" the nickname comes from pre-1850 Australian gold-rush days. However, Marty locates himself in the town of Nelson, which, again given his accent, cannot be the town near Conrad. Art!
Nelson, Lancs
A little more digging (ha!) revealed that Nelson is a town on South Island, New Zealand, and if Art will put down his bowl of coal -
Okay, so he's one of the Polite Australians, not the Ockers. Window of punportunity vanishes. O well.
ANYWAY Marty was experiencing the once-in-a-century flooding that hit his area in autumn of last year, when up to a yard of rain fell over a period of five days. This created what you might normally call 'flooding' but here would call 'Biblical inundation'. Art!
Nice weather for trout. Marty lives somewhat off the beaten track, with a long trail that only the polite would call a 'road' to get to his domicile, and the flooding affected that, too. Art!
Greeted with a wry chuckle from Marty
A curious Marty gets out of his 4x4 in order to have a nosy at a stretch of embankment that is oozing water at numerous points. Conrad is no soil mechanic, but to me that means the soil is dangerously saturated and liable to collapse in a mudslide. Several people in the Comments also pointed this out. Luckily it never happened. Art!
DANGER WILL ROBINSON! Also Marty.
Further up the - ah - 'driveway', Marty spots another potential problem. There is a culvert that leads deep under the road, and which channels a stream beneath it. There is obviously a blockage in the culvert and it's flooding, threatening to overflow and wash away the road. Art!
CAUTION! Not suitable for swimming
Being a practical sort of chap, Marty decides to sort out the blockage before the flooding worsens and undermines or washes the road away completely. He points out that the new 'pond' is about ten feet deep in the middle " - which is a bit of a problem". Nice to see that the Polite Australians have inherited their mother country's gift for understatement. Art!
To get there in his ancient and battered Hitachi digger, he had to negotiate a trail - definitely a trail, not a road - that was barely wide enough, and which looked prone to mudslides. By the time he got to the culvert the monsoon had slackened and the water level had fallen, which lessened the difficulty of the job. Nevertheless, that job had to be done as more rains were due. Art!
This is pretty tricky work, as the digger is both on a slope and at an angle, since the landscape wasn't designed to accommodate heavy industrial plant. Another Commenter pointed this out, saying that Marty made it look easy. After dredging out a couple of tons of rocks and branches, the water level dropped enough that the culvert itself could be seen. Art!
Marty 1 Flood 0
Marty checks it again the next morning after another 10" of rain overnight and the culvert coped quite well. He then decides to see if he can get into town as things there were 'pretty bad', which implies earthquakes and volcanoes on top of flooding, with land-mobile sharks preying on the townsfolk an
ANYWAY
Passable Impassable
This mudslide is over a yard deep, and is soft and treacherous, so there's no way the 4x4 will go over it without bogging down. Marty himself has trouble negotiating it because it's so spongy, and on the other side - Art!
(1) Digger clears blocked culvert to save road during 100 year Nelson Flood - YouTube
The link, should you ache to see the whole thing.
Small Man Syndrome
I must be able to get another nickname for Dimya out of this ...
You may not be aware, as Conrad wasn't, that Peter The Average has a thing about how short he is, at 5' 6", and that his body double, when doing Spontaneous Scheduled Vetted Photo Ops, has to be pictured alongside people either the same height as he, or, preferably, smaller. Or, perhaps, further away. This might be why he uses ridiculously long tables - he doesn't want anyone near him so his small stature isn't obvious. Art!
And yes, his shoes are modified to give him a couple of inches extra height. Peter The Foot Fiddler? The Blurt With An Insert? The Sole Stealer? Mister Rogue Brogue?
More Roel!
Yes, I avoid trying to spell his surname because it's complicated and Dutch.
ANYWAY let's have him scrutineering another film. Art!
Roel immediately pours cold water on the film's concept of Viking berserkers, saying that in reality they wore clothes and armour, carried shields and operated as a unit. The myth comes from centuries later, with people more interested in narrating a story than telling the truth. Art!
They got the spear-throwing correct, apparently. Ah, that's Roel for you, damning with faint praise. Art!
This would only work if everyone inside is asleep or already dead. Also, if all you have are one-handed axes, you immediately lose against an opponent with spears. Art!
Oooh. Harsh.
"The Sea Of Sand"
The Doctor is working out devious ways and means with his bio-vore allies, the Farmers, who need to storm the trans-mat platform held by loyalists.
‘What I’d like you to make for me
are triangular glass sheets, capable of sustaining a weight suspended
beneath. I want poles, lightweight
poles, in half-metre and two metre lengths.’
The
attentive audience in Lord Url’s castle listened carefully, whispered amongst
each other and made chopping gestures of agreement. Yes, it could be done.
‘Let’s
see – fifty glass triangles, fifty long poles, one hundred short poles.’ He’d calculated that the triangles must be
fifty square metres in area, judging by the average mass of a bio-vore.
Bio-vores
set-to amongst the machines of the textile hall and in the artificer’s
workshop, diligently creating the strange items requested by Thedoctor.
Nurbonissa,
now in charge at the castle, dared to ask questions.
‘Thedoctor,
what are these objects for? Are they
shields?’
Grinning,
the Time Lord shook his head.
‘Not
at all. No, Nurbonissa, these articles,
if properly assembled, will give you a dimensional advantage over your enemies
at the trans-mat platform.’
Can you guess what they are yet?
"White House Down"
Your Humble Scribe watched this last night, and I reallllly shouldn't complain about a DVD that cost all of £0.33.
However - and you knew that word was coming - I just wouldn't be Conrad if I sat back with a beer and a bucket of popcorn, would I?
I think I shall have to re-watch it and make notes. O - one thing - as soon as I saw James Woods, I knew he was the villain. And that can hardly come as a Spoiler, so don't whinge. Art!
Yes yes yes, that's the Capitol in the background. BE PATIENT!
Finally -
I had better get my Crocs on and take Edna for a trot, that sunshine didn't last long and I'm pretty confident it'll rain later.
Ta ta!
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