This Is Going Back A Bit
For some reason I cannot remember, Your Humble Scribe sought to do a commentary on "The Towering Inferno" several years ago, apparently because I'd bought the DVD cheap at a charity shop and wanted to practice my Film Critic chops on it. Perhaps. The thing is, I could only play it on my rather dated and semi-decrepit laptop, which meant all sorts of problems with reflections and glare. Now I have my stand-alone DVD drive playing through the Unfeasibly Large Monitor, there may be less reflection problems and, more certainly, a larger screen to work with. Art!
I see, looking back, that the film above was mentioned because I was having trouble with that ridiculously difficult 3D jigsaw puzzle, the one with lots of pieces missing and a useless construction guide. Before I got the DVD I'd never seen the film to completion, which is why (I think) it was getting the benefit of a BOOJUM! review.
ANYWAY of course - obviously! - this has nothing to do with either the puzzle or the film, and rather more about that time Perfidious Albion was worried that the M8s across the Channel weren't being very matey. Thus a Martello-model fort was built at Grain at the entrance to the River Medway. Art!
Try as I might, there doesn't seem to be any image of the Grain Battery Fort in it's initial unsullied form, because it was subsequently added to in the First and Second Unpleasantnesses, resulting in the current unlovely barnacle. Art!
The fort is actually on a tidal island in the estuary, and you can walk out to it if you're daft enough to try and race tides. I don't think we featured it in our long series of items on This Sceptred Isle's tidal islands, so accept this as a late update.
I've just found a very old sketch or lithograph from 1870 that shows the dumpy little tower in it's original form. Art!
Not very impressive, is it? Let me try a little snipping and we'll see what can be done to show it as it once was. Art?
The terror of the French
The reason I bring this particular item of architecture up is that it is now for sale, again, and for the princely sum of £500,000 (I think bids have to start at a minimum of £150,000 as I understand auctions) it can be yours. Be aware that it's a Grade II Listed Building that has been trespassed upon and vandalised, and subjected to wind, weather, storm and tide for over a hundred and fifty years, meaning it's definitely a 'Fixer-Upper'.
The reason we have "Part 2" in today's title is because I used this title all those years ago, and I am nothing if not scrupulously honest*.
I believe that Grain Battery Fort is also the last such fort constructed along the lines of the Martello Tower, which type of fortification we may come back to.
Fly The Fiendly Skies!
Conrad watched a most interesting vlog put out by Konstantin of "Inside Russia" last night, dealing with the current dire situation of Ruffian aviation inside that unlovely country. There's rather a lot to just info-dump it on you, so I shall parcel it out in bits. Art!
Big K. Because he is.
Big K put out a rather eye-opening statistic; the odds of dying in an aircraft crash are one in ELEVEN MILLION; those of dying in a car crash are one in five thousand. Bear that in mind.
He then worked forward from the disintegration of the Sinister Union, where their airliners were horribly unseemly, if not downright ugly, yet very safe. Once the free market opened, the Ilyushins and Tupolevs went on the scrapheap and it was all bright shiny new Boeings and Airbuses. Art
Ta ta Tu
WHAM! international sanctions are instantly imposed and Ruffia is suddenly cast adrift.
As Big K explains, this is very serious indeed. Ruffia cannot even build a decent car engine, let alone engines for jets. The supposedly 'Ruffian' SP-400 Superjet not only had <coughcough> Italian navigation systems, it's engines were French.
Ooops.
Not only that, since Ruffia basically stole all of it's 800 leased Boeings and Airbuses, it cannot fly these outside Ruffia, or they will be instantly seized and returned to the lessor. Since these business entities have essentially reduced Ruffia to depending on either Boeing or Airbus airframes for the foreseeable future, you might call them the lessor of two evils <ducks and puts on helmet>.
We shall come back to this!
"City In The Sky"
Ace is being féted by the inhabitants of 'Edinburgh', one of miniature townships of Arcology One, and we might get to see her actually eating something this time.
This artificial dusk view was more
evocative than in full daylight, the internal illumination hinting at the
sphere’s sheer size, and the now permanent clouds at dead centre making the
vista look hidden and mysterious. This
wasn’t a real night, merely the idea of one, an idea that had to be sustained
to allow human minds and organic rhythms to remain in harmony with their eons
old, inherited history of day and night on Earth.
The team of mechanics returned from their trip to Stores, accompanied by
a Warden carrying a slung horn who chatted to Manny and exchanged electronic
notes. Gina, a hefty young female
fitter, diverted to Ace and Alex.
‘Feel like joining a communal meal?
We’re getting the makings together.’
Ace nodded, happy to keep encountering novel experiences. This common room contained a series of
benches, where partially completed or dismantled machines sat silent and
still. What looked like space-age
construction kits sat in more wicker baskets piled up in a corner, and a couple
of young children were erecting fantastic vehicles from the pieces. The arriving mechanics pushed tables
together, found fabric covers for them, shooed the playing children away and
vanished again, leaving Ace to sit and wait: Alex refused her help and told her
to sit and bide a while.
Hmmm well she can probably see the food, right?
I Don't Usually Give These Cyborg Zombies The Time Of Day
However, it would be an interesting exercise to count how many wrinkles they have between them. Conrad reckons we could run a sweepstake, with the winner being the person who guesses the closest hundred. Art!
It's remarkable what a diet of human brains and a circulatory system made up of bleach and vodka can do to sustain 'life', isn't it?
"The Big Parade"
Let's have a bit more of Conrad Pretending To Be Clever, because if I wrote it, you are most certainly going to read it!
No stuntmen were killed in the making of this film, so it
must have all been balsa wood and straw, nicht wahr? Thrown about by air-rams. There’s none of the operatic hamminess about the
doughboys getting killed here, they simply flop down dead, devoid of any
romantic glamourous throwing their arms up and giving a Shakespearean
soliloquy.
Then we see
the South Canadian gunners, also using French 75s, except this is what they did
in real life, as they had no native artillery of their own and bought French
stuff. Art!
Dad does a
fist-pump, then collapses a bit as mom gives him a warning glare.
The 75, with a good crew, could fire as fast as a rifleman could fire his rifle, and absolutely saturate a target with shells, which is what the gunners here are doing. Vidor conjures up an effective vision of what the Teutons called “Trommelfeur” or ‘Drumfire’, where the shells landed with such frequency that they just blended into one giant, incessant roar.
I think that's enough Clever for one blog.
Finally -
Edna is riding high on the vet's description of her as 'adorable' after her back-up check this afternoon. Try maintaining that view when she barks the house awake early Saturday morning when the postie dares to cross the perimeter of her ordained territory. Badorable is closer to it.
* A pernicious lie! <the horrid truth courtesy Mister Hand>
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