You Want Zombie-Proof? I'll Give You Zombie-Proof!

It Seems To Be A Bit Of A Niche

At least on Youtube, where there are various videos putting forward rhetorical questions about what the best large-scale environment would be for surviving the Zombie Apocalypse.  For example - Art!

Courtesy Zombie Survival Labs

     Are they?  Well, if it's an up-market hotel then your accommodation will be high quality.  If we presume that the power stays on, then you have all the food that would normally feed hundreds of people divided amongst the half-dozen of your surviving group.  No fresh food after a couple of weeks, so lots of tinned, dried and frozen to resort to.  The entrance and lobby would be a weak point; you'd have to barricade it off to severely restrict access.  Art!

Might want to remove a few lightbulbs, too

     Or just block it completely and use a fire exit for ingress and egress.

     It's not just hotels.  The same question has been raised about universities.  Art!

Conrad suspects not.  All the problems of an hotel multiplied by all the buildings on campus, and with a much larger perimeter to secure, maintain and patrol.  The up-side would be that there would be science labs where you could cook up either a cure or an accelerated version of the Zombie Virus that rots them to their bones in a few days.

     Then there is this one.  Art!

     That's a question with elastic boundaries, because it very much depends on the island in question.  The one above has been graced with a Vauban-style nineteenth century fort, which would keep any floaters Zeds at bay.  However, does it have a source of fresh water?  Is there enough land to grow crops or accommodate livestock?  No it doesn't!  So you'd face a dangerous commute to the mainland to try and stock up, say every six months.
     Now we come to what this Intro is really about.  You have doubtless seen photos on teh Interwebz with titles like "World's Loneliest House", such as this.  Art!

     Your first question is probably going to be 'Is it real?' and the answer is most definitely in the affirmative.  However - a word you knew was going to turn up - the photo is usually cropped or Photoshopped, because the whole island is a lot larger than the inevitable shot you see above.  Art!

Do you feel cheated?

     This is the island of Elliday, which is not quite how the Icelanders spell it, but I don't have the correct symbol for the 'd'.  It's part of an archipelago - the Vestmannaeyjar Islands - which are situated to the south of Iceland.  Art!

     It was settled by families in the eighteenth century, who were able to sustain themselves by fishing, raising livestock on the 0.45 hectares of land, and hunting puffins, the only (very) abundant wildlife on the island.  However, life there was extremely hard and the last permanent inhabitants left in 1935.

     Twenty years later the Elliday Hunting Society decided that nothing would do for them but the taste of freshly-roasted puffin, so they constructed the lodge 'Boi' which is the building you see on the island above.  Conrad is pretttttty sure they helicoptered in all the construction materials, because <drum roll> there is no landing place on Elliday.  Those original settlers had to bring everything in by hand by jumping onto coastal rocks from a boat, which remains to this day an insanely dangerous method of access.

     Totally Zombie-Proof, though.  Art!

     This is where you jumps ashore.  There is a steel cable anchored into the rocks to help you climb up, and that's it.  You can't imagine any of the walking dead getting up the cliffs here.

A Pithy Tale 

You know the old saying, 'Blood is thicker than water'?  Rather a silly one, Conrad feels.  OF COURSE - OBVIOUSLY! - blood is thicker than water.  The two bear no resemblance to each other.  Must have been a saying invented by Shakespoke the Barf Of Avon.

     ANYWAY it means that familial links are stronger than anything, including, it seems, common sense, profits, business sustainability and all things legal.  Art!

    Drugs are bad, okay?  And very expensive to boot.

     ANYWAY, over on Quora one Original Poster was telling how they arrived at a small family-run business subsidiary and helped it to move into the black to the tune of $5 million.

     The only buzzing arthropod in the ointment was the manager, who was a coke fiend and no we're not talking processed coal.  He was the son of the owner, which gave him both plausible deniability and access to $$$, seemingly without any audit or accountability oversight.  The example that OP gave was an office desk ordered for $30,000, where $29,000 of that was promptly spent on cocaine.  (See above).  Art!

     OP rang the owner and dropped Mr. Coke Bloke right in it.  Next day the company's lawyer dropped in to see OP, and the next day -

     - he was fired for 'incompetence'.

     Shortly after, Coke Bloke went up in smoke - that is, he was sent to prison.

     The whole business imploded and went toes up shortly afterwards.  But at least they'd shown how much thicker than water they were!

"City In The Sky"

Ace, her ever-present sense of curiosity to the fore in a manner that would put a cat to shame, is conversing with Alex, the young Arcology engineer.

     ‘Does everyone up here speak English?’ she asked, curious about the mix of nationalities.

     ‘Oh yes.  Some of the originals weren’t very good English speakers, but most crew came from Britain.  Now everyone speaks English and the other languages are a bit redundant.’

     ‘And you’ve got people from all over the world?’

     ‘Mostly from Britain but a fair amount – two thousand, I recall – from everywhere else, plus the ones from Eden.  I’ve been asked to take you EVA and inspect Dart Three.  So, we need to hike up to Preston and get suits.  You’re not claustrophobic, are you?’

     Preston - the “North End” in a bad football pun that made her groan - happened to be where the sphere’s interior allowed access to the exterior, where the curving walls met at an apex.  Farmland and structures stopped abruptly fifty metres from the giant well that constituted the sphere’s polar region.  To Ace, it felt as if they were moving downwards into a pit; her feet tingled and her head swam when they moved onto the bare metal decking.  Alex, at her elbow, tapped her on the shoulder.

     ‘You get funny feelings here.  The centripetal force, and speed of rotation.  You adapt after a while.’

      Or suffer the screaming ab-dabs. 

SHUT UP!

Conrad is angrier than usual.  Art!

     I DO NOT WANT TO HEAR IT!

     When I take over, you'd better believe that Shakespeare in the school's curriculum is going to be replaced by both Thomas Pychon and Philip K. Dick.

Talking Of Big Bangs -

The James Webb Space Telescope continues to provide astronomical gold, this latest photograph being that of a supernova in the Magellanic Clouds, a couple of small satellite galaxies abutting the Milky Way galaxy.  Art!

SN1987A

     Don't carp about the resolution; it's 170,000 light years away, so the image is actually very impressive.

     Astronomers are puzzled by this supernova, as the progenitor star was a blue supergiant (about 20 times as big as our Sun), a class of stars that are not, in a properly-regulated Galaxy, supposed to go out as a supernova.  Parts of the 'ring' structures here are also obscure of explanation, as they are so rarely seen in such detail.

     What's hypothesised is that this structure, about 3 light years across, shrouds a tiny neutron star in the very centre, perhaps only 50 kilometres across and thus a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the supernova's remnants.

     Keep watching this space.

Finally -

No photographs for you, but Conrad is wearing a suit for the first time since mid-April.  It is very sombre, though offset somewhat by the Christmas present tie adorned with fountain pens.

Real Life 1 Art 0

Greetings, Gentle Readers!

As you should surely know by now, Your Humble Scribe's mind greatly resembles a gigantic skip full of rubbish, where the ferocious fermentation factor continually hurls material to the surface in an utterly unpredictable fashion.  Or, if you will, imagine a mud volcano composed of dirty data.

     How else can you explain the inexplicable popping up in my mind late last night, of "Garrison's Gorrilas"?  Art!

     Here a disclaimer: I have never seen it.  Moreover, I don't think it's been broadcast in the UK since the late Sixties or early Seventies, when Parental Control Of The Television at the time meant there was 0% chance of Young Conrad casting his eyeballs o'er it.

     It was pretty obviously inspired by that film "The Dirty Dozen", since both entities had prisoners being recruited from South Canadian  prisons to carry out desperate missions behind enemy lines.  Now, TDD I have seen, quite often.  Conrad remembers one critic described it as "A caper film loaded with violence", which is pretty accurate.  Art!

     You couldn't assemble a cast like that nowadays*.
     ANYWAY since we seem to be going off at a tangent, let us explore it a little more comprehensively.  The film is based on a novel by E.M. Nathanson, which Your Humble Scribe has, of course - obviously! - read.  Art!

     Tut tut, cover artist.  If you hold your M3 'Grease Gun' by the magazine like that, you'll cause a jam, sin

     ANYWAY Conrad has to say that the film is a lot more entertaining than the novel, which goes into exhaustive background as regards the criminal GIs recruited to do or die (preferably the latter), and the crimes that put them in a military prison, and the extensive training they undergo, etcetera etcetera.  It basically ends " - and then they carried out the mission and most of them died, The End".  Art!

O dearie me.  I've found a free full version in English on Youtube.  I guess that determines what I'll be watching Friday evening.

     Nathanson, an editor involved in magazine publishing, had heard a whisper that there had been a real-life Dirty Dozen yet he never managed to find a source for the rumour, despite two years of digging.  Conrad, on the other hand, is convinced that he read a psychologist's preçis on the subject, whom stated that his analysis proved that recruiting Dirties by the Dozen made for poor soldiers. Art!

     We, living in Nathanson's future, are only too well acquainted with prisoners being recruited to carry out desperate missions in enemy territory.  Priggy, when he was still breathing, sent prisoners by the tens of thousands to their death in order to conquer Bakhmut, after recruiting them straight out of penal colonies.  Believe me, the most modern of Ruffian prisons makes the worst Victorian incarceries look like models of decorum and sweetness.

     ANYWAY let us swerve back onto Garrison and his Gorillas.  Rather than an unlucky thirteen (because Lee Marvin's character made it to that number), they numbered five: Lieutenant Garrison himself; Actor, Chief, Casino and Goniff.  Art!

     Actor was the smooth-talking con man, Casino was their safe-cracking mechanic, Goniff was a cat burglar and Chief was capital if you wanted to slice or stab someone into the Underworld.  They occasionally brought in special 'talent' for specific jobs.

     What Conrad found most interesting was that the episodes were supposedly set in different years as the Second Unpleasantness progressed: 1941, 1942, 1943 and 1944.  They couldn't have gotten up to much in 1941, as South Canada only got into the war with 23 days of the year left.  Perhaps it was an 'origins' episode that also dealt with their recruitment?  They might also have been able, if they flew, to arrive in North Africa during the British winter offensive there.

     Of course, I could be over-thinking this ...

Cockroach, Meet My 500 Watt Bulb

Conrad, busily scoffing his porridge this morning before work, came across a clip from Times Radio on Youtube, which does sound like an oxymoron I admit, yet bear with me.  Art!

     This is Robert 'Bob' Weiner, a South Canadian political worker at the White House over several decades, serving both Republican and Democrat administrations.  He was giving a short interview on Times Radio, O I say, he was feisty!  None of the subdued, understated British politician's approach to the media.  He made no secret that he believes Donald Buck to be a veritable blot on the escutcheon of South Canadian political life, which, taken out of the realms of flowery euphemisms, means that he detests DJ Tango.  Art!

     "Ah," I hear you say.  "A courthouse. Yes.  And?"

     As Ol' Bob pointed out, Citizen Trump is due to be tried in a Georgia state court, and he is wriggling like an electrocuted eel in trying to get the trial switched to the above, a Federal courthouse.

     Why is this?

     BECAUSE THERE ARE NO CAMERAS IN A FEDERAL COURTHOUSE TRIAL.

     For all his desperate desire to be on television, appearing in a court on trial for potentially weeks and weeks has a very bad optic to it.

     Watch this space.

Let's Just Rub A Little More Salt And Lemon Juice Into That Wound

Because who doesn't want to rub the failure of Luna-25 into Bloaty Gas Tout's face like an grapefruit, just as Jimmy Cagney does in that memorable scene.  Art!

I wonder how many takes it needed?

     Okay, let us prod Art into a state of semi-sentience with this handy boar-spear 

     Altogether now: A WHOLE LOT MORE THAN LUNA-25!

     Less flippantly, that picture above is the Chandrayaan-3 probe, taken by Pragyaan, the Indian rover unit.  The rover itself has been busy analysing the lunar regolith and discovered the following elements: sulphur, aluminium, calcium, iron, chromium, manganese, silicon, oxygen -"

     And titanium, which is excellent news for the Arcology lunar miners of -

"City In The Sky"

Ace is about to meet one of the Arcology's engineers, and is feeling a little apprehensive.

     If by “engineer” Ace expected to encounter a boiler-suited, oily-handed man clutching a spanner in one hand, a welding torch in the other and misogynistic rererences to gender and Page Three, she was to be disappointed.  The engineer who arrived at Lichfield was male, no older than herself, had a miniature Walkman glued into his ears and boasted freckles and ginger hair.  He looked her up and down in frank astonishment before remembering his voice.

     ‘Helloo there!’ he beamed at her.  ‘Yer new here, aren’t ye?  Dinna worry, gel, yer in good hands.  Ah’m Alex.’

     ‘Ace.’

     ‘Aye, that A’yam.  Whit’s yer name?’

     ‘Ace.’

     ‘Oh!’ he exclaimed, all trace of the Scottish accent gone.  ‘Oh.  Sorry, I put my foot into it, didn’t I?’

     ‘Size Ten, Rubber Sole,’ deadpanned the young woman.  ‘What’s with the fake accent?’

     Alex ran a hand through his hair and grinned before answering.

     ‘You’re something absolutely unhear of - a new face!  Someone to impress with my background.  I am from Edinburgh, you know, and they bray on endlessly about being Scottish and retaining the heritage.  And if they don’t, then Dundee will.’

     It took a second or two for Ace to realise that he referred to Arcology One’s miniature townships or villages, whatever they were called, and definitely not the real cities.

     It's all about the perspective.

Did Someone Say "Zombie"?

Art!

     This is the Prime Minister of Perfidious Albion, apparently being instructed in the best way to defend against an attack by the walking dead, with Zombie Knives.  Obviously - of course! - these are excellent for close-in work (the Chief would approve) because they are silent, have no moving parts, do not need electrical power cable or batteries, don't need ammunition and can be used to whittle if things have gone quiet.

     Of course, I could be over-thinking this ...

Finally -

Today will be an odd day.  I can't get time off to attend a funeral but will be raising a glass in remembrance later in the evening.  Hurry on sundown.

*  Wait for the Hollywood all-female 're-imagining'!

Big Wig Bang

As You Should Surely Know By Now -

Conrad never got over the giddy schoolboy stage of taking a morbid delight in things that explode, the bigger the explosion the better, and all the more so if there were more explosions after the first one.  Of course, the realllllly big bangs were ushered in with the Atomic Age at Trinity, New Mexico, when the 'gadget' was detonated and things have never been the same since.  Art!

The Gadget with puny humans for scale

The 'after' shot

     This was a humble 18 kiloton device; imagine 18 long trainloads of HE bundled up in that single sphere and you can see how space-saving nuclear weapons are.

     ANYWAY ever since 1945, the entertainment industry has tried to replicate the characteristics of nuclear explosions, with varying degrees of success.  Art!
     

     This is from "The Day After" in 1983, which was a relatively low-budget made-for-television film.  The nuclear explosions here are actually inverted film of dye being dropped into a tank of water, and you can't complain too much given that they were done on a budget of $20.67.

     Abruptly switching track, we now have nuclear physicist Greg Spriggs, who has a Ph D in Nuclear Engineering, and whom works at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory.  There, he writes arcane code to model nuclear explosions, so they don't have to be done for real all that often.  Art!

     Greg has also been involved with the analysis and assaying of many of the 10,000 films that were shot of above-ground nuclear testing between 1945 and 1963 in South Canada.

     In short, he knows his nukes.

     So, when he was asked by Insider to do an expert's breakdown of various nuclear detonations in cinema, and had it presented on Youtube, guess which ghoul was there in the corner with a bucket of popcorn and his tongue hanging out?  Art!

"2012"

     Greg gives it the thumbs-up.  It had the right 'glow-time' which is what we nuclear experts call the duration of the fireball's ascent, neither too quick or too slow.  The reason it's not fast is because ground zero is a long way from Gotham.

     That the fireball can be seen, even at such a distance, is quite credible, because explosions of this magnitude can reach a mile high.  Greg did criticise how soon the blast wave reached the bridge spectators, which is forgivable as you don't want to have the audience waiting thirty seconds for the other shoe to drop.  Call it poetic licence, Greg.

     What Greg also pointed out, in a tweak only us nuclear experts know of, is that a white fireball like this one will produce very little fallout.  What you have to look out for are the dirty grey or outright black detonations, because those have vapourised thousands of tons of dirt, which will become dangerous fallout in large amounts.  Art!

     So, what does Greg think?  Art!

     Not bad, considering that the detonation only takes up a couple of minutes at the end of the film and it needn't have been accorded any great import.  But then again, we are dealing with Christopher Nolan, who likes accuracy.

Berefth Of The Meth

NO!  This is nothing to do with illegal drugs, especially not Pervitin, the Nazi wonder-drug that turned their soldiers into raging homicidal psychopaths as likely to kill each other as the enemy.  And which must have been a gift to stand-up comedians in the Allied nations, be

     ANYWAY there I was last night, pondering as to when Methylated Spirits were invented.  Art!

     Do you know, I couldn't find any trace of a date for it's inception.  The purple dye added to warn that it ought not to be drunk was invented by a Mister Perkins in 1856, so it had been around before then.

     Let me explain.  Ethanol, a.k.a. grain alcohol, makes a good solvent, cleaner and fuel source, and is typically cheap.  This last factor appeals VERY STRONGLY to all the alkies out there, because as an industrial agent, it isn't taxed as a spirit drink of similar strength would be.  You're probably ahead of me here.  Art!

     

Necking a litre of whisky and with a gun.  What could possibly go wrong?

     So all sorts of stuff was added to it, most especially methyl alcohol, because this will kill you if you drink it, which is rather a buzzkill.  Okay, where does methyl alcohol come from?  It's alternate name, 'wood alcohol' might give you a clue.  It was created in 1660 by the English scientist Robert Boyle, distilled from boxwood and initially called 'Pyrolitic spirits' and one can see why; one sip and you'd be transported to the spirit world yourself.  Art!

Robert Boyle.  Another big wig!

     So I can do no more than say Methylated Spirits were invented after 1660 and before 1856.

Up In Smoke Makes Kremlin Broke

Ladies and Gentlemen and those undecided, allow me to introduce the mighty Ruffian Predel-e Over-the-Horizon radar system, valued at $200,000,000 dollars thanks to being absolutely stuffed with expensive, complex, expensive, state-of-the-art, expensive computer technology.  Art!

     This thing is brand new, it only went into service in June 2023 and it's both so novel and secret that there are no photographs of it's interior.  Art!

     Ooops.  It was destroyed by one of these, which come in at $165,000.  Art!

Happy Harry HIMARS went hop! hop! hop!
Russian radar now needs lots of workshop!

     The final irony is that the HIMARS 'Gimmler' was directed to target by a drone costing $2,000.  Art!

     For $200,000,000 they could have built Luna-26.

"City In The Sky"

The Doctor is about to surprise a rather lax young lady who had been sitting on a boring stretch of duty, monitoring Downstairs.

     ‘Oh!  Goodness!  Doctor Haritanian!’ she gasped in surprise and embarrassment, switching off the device. 

     ‘Don’t worry, Devi,’ replied the older man, drily.  ‘This is Doctor John Smith.  Yes, you heard correctly, that Doctor John Smith.  He wants to review a set of – well, rather depressing logs of what happened before you were born.  Is anything unusual happening Downstairs?’

     The young woman, who seemed to be Indian, swallowed.

     ‘No, Doctor.  Oh! I’m sorry – Davy.  No.  Nothing unusual.  A lot of the normal low-level radio communication, strictly line-of-sight.  Nobody trying to contact Upstairs, except the usual from Carslbad Crew, and they moved into radio-shadow half an hour ago.’

     ‘Very well.  Please allow Doctor Smith – excuse me? Oh, I do apologise.  Please allow the Doctor to utilise all the screens to display data stored on these disks.  Doctor.’

     With a bow Davros was gone, leaving the Doctor to ruminate reflectively on the hiliarious irony inherent in a name.  Rubbing his hands together, he beamed with childish verve at Devi, who blushed and looked away.

     ‘Splendid!  Let’s get down to business, shall we?  You can call me “The Doctor”.  I’m a visiting genius, problem-solver and all-round expert in everything.  Plus, I can do this - ’ and he trilled “Also Sprach Zarathustra”’s opening movement in birdsong.

     I'd pay money to see a performer manage that in real life.

Move Along, Nothing To See Here

We have, recently, featured South Canadian wildlife demonstrating that it is wild, and why you need to keep at least 35 yards distance from bison, and 100 yards from bears or wolves.  One zoo-owning pundit explained that bison are especially unpredictable, in that they do not display any signs of being annoyed or upset or intent on goring you into a human colander, until suddenly you have a ton of meaty muscle dancing on your punctured carcass.  Art!

Note timestamp

Again, note timestamp

     The car sustained no apparent damage, probably because Mister B only had a yard of run up, if that.  I'd still get a mechanic to look under the bonnet if I were you, matey.  Also, consider that this bloke was merely idling in his car, not walking up to Mr & Mrs B and trying to sit on their back.  He didn't even lean on the horn.

Finally -

I shall have to go back through "The Annals Of Urquelomplangia" and see how the Royal Mage's chambers were accoutred, because I had in my mind's eye a medieval vista of stone-flagged floors and equally bare stone walls, when by the late seventeenth-century I bet panelling and wainscoting and vaulting in different woods had become the fashion of the day.  O noes, research, how sad, never mind.

Another In The Annals Of Very Bad Ideas

I Don't Wish To Impugn South Canadians

Or imply that they are more stupid than the inhabitants of any other nation upon this planet, it's just that they tend to publicise such failings more than most.  You might be wondering what else we can pull out of the grab-bag that bears the legend "Darwin Award Winners Of Our Time", and boy do we have one for you today.

     Yes, we do, it was a rhetorical question.  Art!

     This is part of the Santa Fe National Forest, a remote part of New Mexico that covers well over a million acres, or over one and a half thousand square miles.  It is sparsely inhabited, with tourists being the most significant presence, unless there is a fire risk, as there was in 2002, when it was closed to the public.

     Such trivial nonsense did not stop Joseph Lobato and his girlfriend, but mostly Mr. Lobato, driving into the park and off into the wild green yonder.  They drove around the forests until they came to a geographical feature known as 'Pankey's Crater' or 'Yo-Yo Pit'.  Art!

This is a stand-in

     Despite a thorough search, Your Humble Scribe has been unable to find any web trace of Pankey's Crater, nor it's nickname, 'Yo-Yo Pit', for reasons which will become clear.

     Mr. Lobato managed to drop his mobile phone into the depths of the cave, which is 130 feet deep, an example of clumsiness that did not bode well.  Plus, it was their only phone.  

     What would be the logical response to such a mishap?  Pretty obviously a shrug, a grimace and wondering if you'd kept any paper records of all those phone contacts.

     Not Joe! He wasn't going to be put off by a total inexperience of caving, no second phone, being miles from the nearest road, lacking equipment or lighting and being cack-handed enough to drop his phone in the first place.  Art!

     This is what he found in the boot ('Trunk' for our South Canadian readers) of his car.  He assembled the towrope and hempen rope together, threw them over the edge of the pit and began to let himself down with the rope coiled around him.  Feeling that this was too slow, he then went down hand-over-hand.

     You're probably ahead of me here.  He got halfway down, then fell, 85 feet to the pit floor, breaking his arm and fracturing both legs, also losing any feeling in his back and rapidly becoming unable to move.  His girlfriend, aware that he was in a very serious condition, had to go hunting for a payphone in the National Park.  There were no other tourists or Park Rangers around, thanks to the entire park being closed due to the fire risk, and it took her several hours to finally find a payphone.

     By the time the Search And Rescue team got to the bottom of the pit, having rappelled there properly with ropes and harnesses, the unfortunate Mr. Lobato was long expired.  Art!

Another stand-in

     Conrad strongly suspects that the reason there are no photographs of the cave, nor maps, nor trails, is because the Park Rangers don't want copy-cats trying to do one better than Mr. Lobato and ending up just like him.  Lobatotalled, you might say.  At any rate, there have been no more fatalities at Yo-Yo Pit.

     Nobody mentioned if they brought the cell-phone back up into daylight*.

Serendipity

Conrad, earlier this afternoon, allotted 60 minutes to do general domestic work, much of which was taken up with sorting out laundry, and seeing which shirts in that giant compost-pile in the cupboard still fitted me.

     However, in shifting a pile of papers and a clipboard, I did come across the following.  Art!

     This is all characters, themes and brief plot outlines for my silly satire "The Annals Of Urquelomplangia", which, it turns out, had been worked up on a page where the title was "NANOWRIMO".  This referred to 'National Novel Writing Month', which might still be a thing <checks internet> O!  It still is.  Briefly put, one had to crank out the first draft of a 50,000 word novel in the month of November.  If you cast your mind back to my serialising "Tormentor", that was a NANOWRIMO effort, though I cannot remember if I submitted it.  Art!

     Oddly enough, I've never had writer's block.  Conrad did discover that he began TAOU back in 2016, when BOOJUM! was but three years old.  Erk.

"The War Illustrated"

As you may have noticed, a lot of attention has been given to the Allied campaign in Italy by the 8th and 5th Armies, principally because this was the major commitment in terms of land warfare in Europe.  I do include some stills from India/Burma and the Pacific, which are not nearly as numerous.  Art!

      There's a bit to interpret here.  The USAF 8th Air Force had long given up on un-escorted attacks on Occupied Europe, as their casualties doing so had been horrendous, so they were escorted by swarms of Lightnings (the odd-looking twin-boom bit of kit seen at bottom), the sprightly Mustang and the monstrous Thunderbolt.  By this time, at the end of March, the bomber raids were less about inflicting damage on the Third Reich and more about luring up the Luftwaffe fighters, which would then be tackled by the massed escorts.  The Allied preponderance in fighters, especially South Canadian daylight fighters, was so great that, regardless of losses, they could maintain the pressure week after week after week.  The Luftwaffe, by contrast, could not.

"City In The Sky"

Ace is about to EVA onto the external surface of Arcology One, whilst the Doctor is going to have a forensic look at how the Big Crash began.

     Davros looked impressed.

     ‘You might be able to teach our engineers about space-walking!  Truth be told, we do very little now, not like the heyday of the Lunar Mine.’

     He called up an engineer on his Tab and asked them to come visit his suite, and to be ready for a guided tour of the last glider.  Ace felt she’d been deftly manipulated into doing what the Doctor wanted without him openly saying so – once again.

      Being an honoured guest – not stated by anyone overtly and he didn’t really know why the honour – the Doctor got Davros as an escort to the Communications building, which had contracted back to the original single small structure.  With the fall of civilisation on Earth, he reasoned, there wouldn’t be a lot of communication going on, nor a great deal to watch.  A small storage locker behind the building housed plastic boxes holding solid data-storage disks dating back decades, indicated by carefully handwritten signs on the boxes.  He descended on a set with “2065” on the front and pulled it from the stack with glee.  Davros escorted him into the dim interior of the Communications building, where three screens provided illumination and thirty-three stared outwards in neutral grey tones that indicated lack of power or input.  The light picked out the features of a small, lithe young woman in a grey coverall, hunched over the control panels and reading text from an electronic display no bigger than her palm.

     Doubtless playing Solitaire.

I Predict A Rot

Hmmm, Donald Buck, the grift that keeps on giving.  I can blather on about him ad nauseum, because, and it can't be stressed enough, HE'S NOT A POLITICIAN!   Art!

     So, with an 09:30 start in Georgia, DJ Tango is going to have to be up early in order to move his 'athlete's' body to that state.  Incidentally, the 11:45 defendant, Floyd, is actually in jail as he couldn't manage to arrange bail.  The 11:15 defendant, Cheseboro (pronounced "Chez-" not "Cheese") demanded a speedy trial as is his Constitutional right, and will be up in front of a judge in late October.  Citizen Trump is now probably worried about how far he's going to be thrown under the bus by Ol' Cheezy.  Tee hee!

Finally -

This will be Day 30 of being sober for August, for your information, meaning I can, at last, sink an Old Speckled Hen on Friday evening.  Phew!

     To be honest, I've not noticed any difference <wallet squeaks with glee> O yeah, apart from him.

Chin chin!

*  Yes yes yes, I'm a terrible person.