If I Were To Say "Talus"

You Might Well Be Forgiven For Mistaking It For This Nightmare Fuel -

A little preamble doesn't do any harm, so let me set the scene.  You are one of a ship's crew, going to do a little exploring on an apparently deserted island with your brawny friend, and you come across an eerie sight: colossal sculptures.  A whole valley of them.  What you are looking at, did you but know it, are the early essays in metalcraft and casting by the Greek god Hephaestus.  Ol' Heph was not too nimble on his pins, but My! he knew his Hom. Sap. because he placed both a warning and a curse upon his creations.  And you and your friend ignore both.

     Ooops. Art!

    When that head turns, to the accompaniment of metallic creaking and groaning, it is one of cinema's more terrifying moments.  All because Hercules simply had to loot a brooch pin.  Art!

"Mine!"

    Here an aside.  Conrad, as we all know, likes to ponder on minor philosophical points, which may not make sense in the first place.  To this end, once Ol' Talos had begun his squeaking and creaking, what would have happened if a conscience-stricken Hercules had replaced the brooch pin?  Would he have gotten away with a written warning and a stern lecture?  Or was Talos implacable once he came to life?  I guess we'll never know.

     ANYWAY that's not what this Intro is about, because 'Talus' is emphatically not 'Talos'.  Art!

     This the castle at Rocca Calascio, an Italian fortress in Abruzzo.  It came up as a screensaver on my laptop, and I decided to capture it in a photo, which has come out rather badly, even if the original had a darker-hued top than it ought to have.

     You see the towers at each corner?  Note that each has a fortified 'skirt' that extends a considerable distance from the upper cylindrical portion of the castle.  This, gentle reader, is a 'Talus', defined in my Collins Concise as 'the sloping base of a wall', which is a bit bare-bones.  Inevitably it derives from Latin <hack spit> and the word 'Talutium', which means 'Slope'.  Art!

     The principle behind a talus is to make things as awkward as possible for anyone trying to lay siege or attack the castle.  Thanks to it's slope, it's not possible to push a siege tower up against the walls or towers, meaning any storming party needs to cross a narrow drawbridge under fire and with the risk of fatal injury should they fall off.  Raising a ladder against it would also be tricky, and likely to slide off or break under horizontal loading.  Art!

     Being circular in design, there is no weak point to attack with picks and bars, as there would be with a square tower or base.  And, look at how thick the talus is.  It would take engineers working under protective cover with hammers and rams and picks an age to force an entry.
     Don't confuse either Talos or Talus with Telos, because that unlovely place is one of the  Cybermen's prime locations, where they hide beneath the surface like evil fish fingers.  Art!

"A bit of a fixer-upper, as long as you don't mind problematic neighbours"

"The Big Parade"

Okay, time for me to post some of the article I knocked out a couple of nights ago, because Dog Buns! if I had to sweat over it, you can, too.

THE BIG PARADE  (1925)

Director: King Vidor

Starring: John Gilbert, Renee Adoree

Your Humble Scribe was impressed enough on his first perusal of this film to decide to do a combination of digging and speculating.  In case you are unaware, it was one of MGM’s biggest silent successes, globally, making $22 million for the studio.  Not only that, it was highly regarded for it’s accuracy and dischewing cheap gaudy Hollywood heroism.

     Part of the realism was thanks to the US War Department (back in the day when governments were more honest about what they did), who loaned Vidor 200 trucks, 4,000 servicemen and 100 aircraft.  This meant he was able to create a scene that impressed Conrad.  Art!

     Of course – obviously! – this was generations before CGI, and there’s no matte work on it either; what you see is 4,000 soldiers being moved in 200 trucks.  Certain trucks were given a fake Army registration, to show that they were from the 42^nd ‘Rainbow’ Division.  Art!

     That's enough for Part 1.

O My Badness!

Just out of spite, Your Humble Scribe went and Googled at what the dollar to ruble exchange rate is.  O my.  You remember that it was ₽97.79 late yesteryon?  It's now down to ₽98.40.  Art!

     It really is credible that it will hit 100 to the dollar by this weekend, triggering another fit of pique from Puffy Petroleum Pimp and increased interest rates.  Is he still insisting this is all part of his master plan?  There are some pundits, Jake Broe amongst them, who maintain that Ukraine doesn't need to win militarily on the battlefield; all they have to do is not lose, and Ruffia's economic collapse will also implode their army.  It would be popcorn-worthy if it didn't involve rivers of blood.

"City In The Sky"

Ace and Alex are having a forensic nosy around Arc One's sole surviving shuttlecraft, trying to find out why one of it's brethren would explode in the atmosphere.

     He indicated the floor.

     ‘The steam chamber is right under here.  About the size of both your fists together.’

     That excluded steam as a cause of mid-air explosion.  Ace was intimately familiar with the properties of explosives and understood a boiler that small couldn’t destroy a craft this big.  Design flaw?

     ‘Okay, if your second glider didn’t blow up from within, could it have fallen apart?  Welds coming apart, lack of complete seals, panels coming unseated, windows breaking?’

     The engineer shook his head.  He hunted around in the dark for a while before coming back with a bizarre contraption that seemed part binocular, part torch. 

     ‘Inspection microscope.  The mechanics went over every millimetre of welding, seven times over, with these.  Those “windows” are made of spare Lexan sheets from original construction and they’re practically indestructible.’

     That seemed to be that.  Not an accident or a design flaw.  What, then?

     Alex indicated that they needed to suit up again, and once more Ace stood stationary outside, looking at the whirling heavens.  Alex joined her and pointed out to a distant silver spark.

     ‘California.  They can’t go back to Earth, ever, whether they want to or not.’

     He explained as they clumped slowly back to the air-lock.  Decades ago the second American sphere had lost rotation.  The crew survived, mostly, and adapted to micro-gravity, which meant none of their spindly selves could survive at the bottom of Earth’s gravity well.  Ace sucked her teeth at this.

    Hmmm, I wonder how they managed their water resources?  Or it may have been a slow loss of rotation, giving them time to extemporise a solution.

"The War Illustrated"

Yes, we are onto a new edition.  Art!

     Behold a British sentry of the RAF Regiment, standing guard on one of the Azore Islands.  This is a neat trick, because the Azores belonged to Portugal, and Portugal was officially neutral.  However, they were one of the 'Neutral But Not Really' nations that definitely leaned toward the Allies, and especially This Sceptred Isle.  The Azores were of immense strategic importance, and had been since the sixteenth century, and the Allies want want wanted air and naval bases on them from early in the Second Unpleasantness.

     The Portuguese dictator, Salazar, had to tread a cautious tightrope, not wanting to offend the Allies, but not wanting to alienate the Axis.  Eventually, in 1943, he gracefully acceded to a 'request' from Winnie, under the terms of an ancient Anglo-Portuguese alliance treaty.  Thus were the air and naval bases set up, requiring our stalwart sentry above.  Art!

Finally -

Edna went under the dentist's drill and the surgeon's knife today, to sort out a desperately wonky tooth.  Consequently she is on short rations, and blank ones at that, which is why she's been hovering in the Sekrit Layr three times tonight.  NO, EDNA!  NO SCROUNGING!

     Try tomorrow.