Flying High

NO!  This Is Nothing To Do With Drugs

Drugs are bad.  BAD!  If PKD's rendition of JJ180 didn't scare the living daylights out of you, then 'Substance D' from "A Scanner Darkly" ought to.  Also known as 'Slow Death' or simply 'Death', it causes severe neurological damage where the brain's two hemispheres do not function properly, but rather operate antagonistically, against each other.  Having said that, we can now add-in a picture from the rather good film animation of said novel.  Art!

     Of course - obviously! - this wouldn't be an Intro if we didn't start with subject matter that had absolutely nothing to do with what I meant to talk about.  Art!

     The chap at top is Jonathan Swift, and the chap at bottom is James Blish.  You can tell from each portrait that neither lived during the lifetime of the other.

     So what connects them?  Because you can bet a ramekin of (rapidly devaluing) rubles that they wouldn't be here if there wasn't a connection, Conrad being like that.  Also like this, but mostly like that.

     You are doubtless familiar with Swift's Gulliver and his adventures in Lilliput and Brobdingnag - we shall come back to this - yet far fewer are aware of his encounter with Laputa.  Art!

     Yes, a flying city.  Swift, being of a satirical bent, cannot help but poke fun at the scientific inhabitants of said township.  Sadly, all Conrad can remember is them using a bellows in order to cure wind, the details of which I leave to your imagination.

     Two and a half centuries elapse.  Then! along comes James Blish, who seems to never have been called 'Jimmy', and he has an idea he later described as 'Wagnerian' - in the sense of the operatic works, not mercenaries for hire.  It begins with the Dillon-Wagoner Gravity Polarity Generator, a device that effectively delivers faster-than-light travel combined with meteor screen.  The thing about what is dubbed the 'spindizzy' is that it becomes more efficient with increasing mass.  So, rather than have fleets of spaceships, Jimmy has entire cities become effective spaceships.  Art!

     Rather than cruise around aimlessly in Earth's atmosphere a la Laputa, these cities take off and cruise the galaxy, looking for work, there already being a web of Hom. Sap.-settled systems ranging far out there.  Some of these are at the ox-and-plough level, so getting access to thirtieth-century technology in return for, O say a couple million tons of shale petroleum - bargain!

     "Earthman, Come Home" is definitely the pearl in this collection, and the lead character, Mayor John Amalfi, is tailor-made for Danny De Vito.  When I take over he'll get an offer he can't refuse.

     ANYWAY I also realised that there's another connection between Swift and Blish.  You remember Lemuel Gulliver, surgeon and ship's captain?  Of course you do, I mentioned him only a few minutes ago.  Art!

     Here Swift directly inspired "Land Of The Giants" with his visit to Brobdingnag, where he was miniscule compared to the locals, and was indeed mistaken for a 'splacknuk' at one point.

     What's my point?  Merely that Jimmy came up with the concept of 'Pantropy' or complete genetic engineering of the human species in order to adapt to alien environments.  Art!

     One story is set on a world of shallow pools and ponds, where one of the pioneering pantropy starships has crash-landed, with no hope of either escape or rescue.  What do they do?  Why, they pantropy together microscopic humans who can populate the watery landscape, of course.  Much smaller than Lemmy, mind you - the key word here is 'microscopic'.

     Yes yes yes, I know what you're thinking.  No!  Sky City from 'Flash Gordon' is NOT a flying city, it's merely a floating one, which remains static in one place.  Art!

     Note the trebled force-beams keeping it aloft, because a system like this needs redundancy.  Yes yes yes, 'Cloud City' in Starry Trex's "The Cloud Minders" is also a floating city, which I have analysed into exhaustion already.  Hang on -

BOOJUM!: If I Were To Say "City In The Sky" - (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

     There's the link for you.

PIZZA SUCCESS!

When I made that pizza dough last week, it said to use half for a pizza base.  In fact, given that the base was so soft I think it could have been cut into thirds with no problem.  Art!

     This time I rolled out the thawed dough directly on the pizza mesh, so no nonsense about lifting it from one place to another.

     Conrad cannot simply leave it there, forefend.  I note that pizzas are dirt cheap to make: flour, yeast, sugar and water for the dough; a tin of chopped tomatoes, a dab of puree, a fried onion and garlic, some herbs and a blender and you've got your topping.  Then mushroom, chorizo and grated cheese on top.  The total is probably less than £1.00 yet you'd pay £10 for an 'artisanal hand-crafted' one of these at the shops.

     Conrad 1: Pizza 0

"City In The Sky"

The stunned and shocked inhabitants of Arcology One (a.k.a. 'The Branson Mansion') are observers of what might politely called 'a nuclear exchange' going on in the Middle East.

     Kouroush and Dovid got together with their Tabs and began measuring and estimating.  An awed hush sat on the rest of the room’s inhabitants.

     ‘About five megatonnes,’ said Dovid, quietly.  ‘A blast radius of approximately twenty kilometres.  Those villages visible on the geo database are all gone.’  More quietly still he added “This is why I left physics for botany.’

     ‘About a thousand dead,’ detailed Kuoroush. 

     ‘Still nothing on the Iranian official station,’ reported Davy, scanning.  ‘No radio or television broadcasts.’

     Another lauch from the Negev was detected, a second Israeli anti-missile barrage.  Before any interception occurred, the surviving Iranian missile split into fifteen separate warheads.  Fourteen of these winked out one after the other on the virtual screens as hunting Israeli missiles found their targets.  The last one developed problematic yaw, which later analysis deduced might be due to interception damage.  It missed Tel Aviv but hit squarely on the waterfront of Jaffa and detonated.

     Visibly pale, both Dovid and Kouroush worked their calculations again.

     ‘About – about a hundred and fifty kilotonnes,’  rasped Dovid.  ‘Effectively the whole port has gone.  At least fifty thousand dead.’

     Within fifty minutes Screen Seventeen flashed up it’s warning again.  This time Kouroush guessed the target before the geographical data appeared.

     ‘Natanz’

     Conrad did his research here: Natanz is indeed the heart of Iran's nuclear weapons program, a cautionary thought.

"I Married A Pole"

That was the response on Quora from someone accused of being a Ruffian troll.  Conrad, whilst not exactly sober, had the wit to refrain from posting his riposte:"So what, I married a column.  I adoric her."

And Whilst On That Subject ...

Let us wheel on another couple of Polish film posters, proof that the Slavic mind does work differently from the rest of Europe.  I'm not saying 'work' in the sense of good or bad.  Just different.  Art!

     Obviously inspired by the works of M. C. Escher.  Of course.  Art!

     That's 'Romancing The Stone' because of course it is.  Looks more like that chap from the 'Halloween' franchise.

Finally -

I shall wrap it up here, since - that Polish theme again - I need to take a constitutional stroll into Lesser Sodom and get a cabbage, to make up Bigos, or at least my version of Polish Hunter's Stew.

Chin chin!