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.
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