Swingers

First Of All -

WASH OUT YOUR FILTHY MINDS YOU DISGUSTING REPROBATES!  Let's get that out of the way first, just to be clear.  No! we are not covering the lifestyle of people who wish to conduct carnal relations with all sorts of other people who wish to conduct carnal relations.

     Nor are we dealing with the seminal film, which was the breakout role for both Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn, and deservedly so.  Art!

NO IT IS NOT A 'PORN STAR MARTINI'!

     It's a witty and knowing take on the life of actors struggling to eke a bare living in Hollywoodland, on the fringes of success.  You may not be aware, but this is the situation that David Niven found himself in when he 'arrived' in Hollywood.  

     For Your Information, "Swingers" cost $200,000 to make, with more being spent on music licencing than the film itself, and it came back as a critical and commercial success, garnering $4.5 million or x22 the original.

     What horrifies Conrad is that it's 27 years old.

     ANYWAY what I really wanted to talk about here is the strange case of Irish MP Maria Bailey, or 'TD' as they call their political representatives - the profundities of Gaelic pronunciation are sufficient to constitute an entire blog on their own, so we will skate gently o'er them here.  Art!

     Maria, bless her corrupted politician's soul, made a compensation claim against an Irish hotel, the Dean, because she fell off a swing seat there.  She alleged that the hotel was at fault because there were no instructions on how to use the swing seat (!), and that she had been crippled for months afterwards.

     She chose exactly the wrong time to manifest this legal case, as there was a drive in the Republic to clamp down on the amount of compensation claims being made at the time, many of which were seen as 'well-dodgy' <let me know if the technical terms get too complicated>.  Art!

     No, that's not Maria.  Yes, it is an Irish citizen dressed up at Halloween, mocking her.  You see - 

     She managed to fall off the swing thanks to both hands being occupied, one with a glass full of wine, and the other clutching the wine bottle.  She was also photographed on social media at a music festival the next week.  Not only that, she ran a 10 kilometre race in under an hour, only three weeks after the <ahem> fall.

     T'would appear that the Irish voting public are hugely unimpressed by their politicians trying to swindle money out of the system, which is why you get photographs like that above.  Shortly afterwards she withdrew her compensation suit, and was also de-selected as a Teachta Dala ("MP"), and will probably only live down 'Swing-gate' by late 2057.

     Yes yes yes, it has nothing of the epic sweep of Watergate or the Sork witch-advisor case, but it does seem peculiarly appropriate in it's Irishness.  Art!

"Starship 'Enterprise' bridge circa 1784"

     If you are quibbling at the fact we only had one person falling from the swing, kindly imagine another two people flanking her.

The Non-Pocket Rocket

We have mentioned the 'Sea Dragon' rocket concept in the past, it being a mighty missile that can be far larger than conventional ground-launched lunar missions because it is towed out to sea and launched from there, removing a lot of the usual support structures and mass restrictions.  For this illustration, we are using HazeGrayArt's depiction on Youtube, because we've not used any of their imagery for months and they deserve a shout-out.  Art!

     Yes, the sea state does need to be calm.

     With puny tug for scale.

     And then we have lift-off.  Art!

     There is no denying that this thing is a BEAST, capable of lofting an enormous payload into orbit, probably second only to what an Orion could do.  Which makes one wonder, could a Project Orion ship launch from the ocean?  I'll probably have to get back to you on that.

Answers In The Comments, Please

Another Mystery McGuffin from the pages of "The Daily Beast", just when I wasn't looking for one.  Art!

     Obviously whatever this gadget does involves temperature, and from the unhelpful graphic above the temperature - which might be in Farenheit or Centigrade, no way to tell here - it might include illumination or spraying or a four-antenna aerial.  Or a digital hedgehog*.  No!I am not going to click on it and find out, where's the mystery in that?

Another Killing Joke

No!  Nothing to do with the band, I refer, of course - obviously! - to that hilarious cartoon caricature of Putin On The Fritz's inner circle.  Art!

     For Your Information, the one crossed out is Priggy, or, as others have dubbed him, the "Angry Human Testicle".  To his left the girning dwarf is Kadyrov, Putin's puppet in Chechnya and the most hated man in that kingdom.  The grey-haired gimboid in a tank is Shoigu, who has absolutely no military utility at all but is outstanding at embezzling state funds.  The dipso in the blue suit is Medvedev, who tends to post on social media only after having necked a couple of bottles of cognac.  All three are busily trying to drop the other two in it, so that when the shoe drops, they alone will survive.  The punchline is that all three of them can be replaced in a heartbeat, so they'd better demonstrate added-value; like being able to juggle or make balloon animals.

     Stay away from windows, pots of tea - and now mushrooms, chaps.

"City In The Sky"

Ace and her 'native guide' Alex are prepping to go EVA and have donned their spacesuits.

B15 and H9, the suits selected as theirs, were old workhorses used, patched, repaired and re-used for decades.  Ace didn’t complain – in the industrial wardrobe where space-suits were stored she’d seen Ares suits that must be nearly a century old.  Like the ones she’d tried out in the Tardis, they smelt of sweat, metal and plastic; oddly, too, of lavender – a tiny pouch of the fragrant flower buds hung inside the suit, making her recall memories of visit’s to her aunt – memories that vanished as she and Alex helped each other  put the cumbersome suits on, checking their seals.

     I’m not here to dither, she told herself.  Check one: suit integrity.  All three columns in the green.  Check two: oxygen.  Three hundred minutes worth.  Check three: communications.  The external wrist pad on her left arm looked different to that which she’d practiced on; she figured out the suit-to-suit radio button thanks to the graphic and pressed it.

     ‘Hello Alex, can you hear me?’ she said, the words resounding strangely in her helmet, flat and dull.  Alex gave her a thumb-up before trying his radio out.

     ‘You got sorted out quicker than me!  I’m impressed.’

     She gave him a reciprocal thumbs-up, then checked for tethers and ties.  The suit’s restraining cable had been built into an attached reel, with a magnetic clamp, a safety grip and a length of loose cable left hanging.  Two lights built into the helmet came on when she tested the wrist panel.

     Quick on the uptake, that gel.

Finally -

Conrad seems to have stumbled on a collection of free films on Youtube, having seen "The Dirty Dozen" and subjected you to more analysis of it than you were aware existed, and am now watching "Virus", which is a well-made, excellently-cast and very, very bleak apocalyptic thriller from Japan circa 1980, and am into the last 30 minutes of "The Big Parade".  This is a South Canadian film about the First Unpleasantness, made in 1925 and thus silent, but pretty good for all that.  Rest assured, you will hear more about it.  Art!

Jim desperately sought for the bratwurst

*  Or porcupine.