No! This Is Not A Weird Inversion Of That Television Show
Although Conrad is pretty certain that Sheldon is a role model for the ages, and it's a pleasant change to see a series where people are clever and show it, for all that they're nerds to the third power. Art!
It went on for 12 seasons, a long time for a sit-com, and the risk is that a series like this moves into drama, at which point it has officially Jumped The Shark and should be mercifully put out of it's misery. Conrad's seen it in bits and pieces so that's enough for me to sit in judgement and I do
ANYWAY what I wanted to change subject to was Bernard Ireland's "Battle Of The Atlantic", which I finished reading yesteryon. Art!
Now, there are some people and nations that think the British at war will wage it as they play the game of cricket. Not true. A blend of chess and rugby is more apt. Bernard writes "By the Royal Navy, the U-boat was loathed, and there was fierce determination that it should not survive in any form," and from May 1945, when the Second Unpleasantness in Europe ended, they forced their point. The RN's stated purpose was "We at this time intend that no vestige of the German Navy either in respect of it's personnel, it's material, it's dockyards, it's manufacturing, it's establishments, it's schools, it's depots, it's barracks, or anything which might assist in keeping alive any form of German naval esprit de corps ... or permit the revival of the German Navy, will be allowed to remain."
Thus 174 U-boats that had been surrendered, of which 30 would be retained for testing, usually to destruction, whilst the rest were unceremoniously towed out to sea and sunk. A definite sense of "Ha! Take that!" prevailed. Art!
No, Art - just no.
Rigourous searching and collection of post-war Germany had the RN accumulate a staggering 86,000 tons of naval munitions. All of this had to be disposed of, SAFELY, with a majority of the weapons being dumped at sea directly, or loaded onto condemned freighters and sunk.
Here enters Heligoland. Don't worry if you've never heard of it before; it's a small island off the north German coast, and if Art will put a bit of salve on his pitchfork prods -
Given it's strategic situation, it was heavily fortified in both the First and Second Unpleasantnesses, with bunkers and casemates and guns. It made a pretty formidable island fortress. Art!
None of this was missed by the beady eyes of the RN, who had actually occupied the island in the Napoleonic Unpleasantness. After being able to physically land on the island post-war, they found, rather perturbingly, that the island's defences had withstood aerial bombardment quite handily.
"We can't have that," was the general consensus.
Thus was Operation Big Bang begun. Conrad doesn't know how he managed to avoid ever hearing about this operation, because it was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever made. A total of 6,700 tons of explosive ordnance from that 85,000 were laid across the island, the yield of a small atomic warhead. Don't worry, the citizens of the island were evacuated to the mainland during wartime and Perfidious Albion hadn't let them back. Art!
That explosion covered the entire island. A column of smoke five miles high rose into the heavens, and the blast could be heard and felt a hundred miles away in Hamburg. Only one structure survived, the 'Flakturm' anti-aircraft tower. Art!
Now a much more pacific lighthouse
The inhabitants returned in the mid-Fifties and the little island is a tourist attraction that gets 300,000 visitors per year.
Moral of the story: don't tick off the Royal Navy.
A Soupcon Of Derision
Yes, it's back to the Have Your Say Commentary about the ballfoot game between The Manchester United and New Castle Rovers (I think), where we have a few more pearls of poison wit. Note that the BBC remove comments with overt swearing, so people have to be creative if the venom is being spat out.
From what I've gathered in other Comments, this is what he does if things are going badly for his side, perhaps hoping for an Oscar out of sympathy.
A sly dig at The Manchester United fans, who like to call their stadium the "Theatre Of Dreams". Not to sports-hating Conrad it's not!
A Compact Act
It's a little-known fact amongst the shopping public that supermarkets generate a great deal of plastic and cardboard waste, which are periodically gathered in roll-cages, then taken into the back and compressed into handy-sized bundles thanks to the compactor. Art!
Darwin Award Winner right there
These things are DANGEROUS, which is why sensible management trains staff not to get anywhere near their interior, because hydraulically-powered mechanisms will turn a human being into a squishy mass of blood and broken bones. At Sainsbos, if anyone like the idiot above was caught inside a compactor, that's an immediate Dismissal Gross Misconduct.
So, an Original Poster on Youtube stated that she caught 'Mr. Idiot' rummaging around inside the compactor, only his legs being visible. Shrieking in alarm, as she'd just sat through a compactor safety session, she caused MI to fall out of the compactor, smelly, dirty and highly offended. Art!
He told her to call her manager, which OP did. Manager, a little spitfire of a lady, couldn't believe the stupidity of MI. His initial smug expression rapidly faded, and after a little head-to-head with his manager, within 30 minutes he was carrying his possessions out of the building in a cardboard box. Which wasn't compacted, before you ask.
"The Sea Of Sand"
The Doctor, let loose on Wastelandworld, has accumulated an audience consisting of thousands of rebellious Farmer bio-vores and he's relishing the chance to stoke up the revolt even further.
The discussion died when a
stranger came into view, a Warrior to judge by the amount of equipment dangling
from it’s utility belt.
The
massed Farmers noticed the Warrior and didn’t seem disposed to treat him
leniently. Several dozen brandished
their improvised weapons, and began to close on the solo bio-vore. The Warrior did not stop or slow down, but
did make that strange backwards bow that the Doctor had seen elsewhere.
Oh! I see! he realised. A gesture of submission. That’s why the listeners were so impressed
when I bowed to them.
‘Stay
your hands! Let him speak!’ boomed the
Doctor in the best music hall baritone he could muster. This created sufficient confusion to allow
the lone Warrior to speak. Firstly he
crossed both hands over his proboscis, another gesture the Doctor realised was
meant to be conciliatory.
‘I
will not fight for the Overseers, or the Seniors, nor the Detachment Leaders
any longer,’ intoned the Warrior. ‘And
most of all I will not fight for the aristocrats, the Lords and Excellencies.’
Most
impressive! Breaking free from the class and culture classification of ages,
analysed the Doctor.
‘Why
is that?’ he asked, curious as ever.
The
Warrior threw off his armour and web harness.
Things not looking good for the aristocrats.
Finally -
You cannot have failed to appreciate that yesterday was the day Citizen Trump got arrested in New York, where a modest crowd of his supporters kept to the right side of the law. We also got photos of Darth Marmalade as the charges were read out, which is probably when he realised keeping his mouth shut, as so surely advised by his legal team, was the best way of not compounding things. Art!
Not very chirpy, is he?
The judged warned him not to indulge in inflammatory rhetoric, which is a big ask for Citizen Trump. We'll see.
Buckets of popcorn at the ready!
