Blooming Marvellous

Note How I Do Not Swear

For we are still SFW here, and I can always throw in a few Dog Buns! if the urge takes me.

     For yes, I am still angry, and about the self-same subject, Codewords as published by Puzzler.  Clearly the newspaper compilers have found a new niche and are now trying to stretch the envelope of what is acceptable.

     IT WILL NOT DO!

     <short pause to allow blood pressure to subside>

     Art!

     No, I've no idea what it is or what it does, either, just that it looks intriguing, which is what matters.  Possibly a rotary-action piece of c

     ANYWAY let me get back to the exercise of my Frothing Nitric Ire.  As an example -

     "DAHLIA": Yes yes yes, it's a flower, even I recognise that AFTER IT GOT SOLVED.  The word itself is an unholy mish-mash of Scandinavian and Latino, as the Collins Concise puts it: "Any herbaceous perennial plant of the Mexican genus Dahlia, having showy flowers and tuberous roots; after Anders Dahl, 18th century Swedish botanist."  ARE WE SUDDENLY ALL GREEN-FINGERED NOW?  Art!!

"JONQUIL": Say what?  To Conrad this sounds like the name given to a medieval court jester, who could get away with cutting satire because of the "O he's just a silly fool" convention.

     But no.  NOT AT ALL!  Re. the CC:"A Eurasian variety of narcissus with long fragrant yellow or white short-tubed flowers."

     The 'fragrant' part would be utterly lost on Conrad, who has no sense of smell, quite apart from never having heard of this wretched bloom before in any of my 62 years.  Art!

     Yes, it does look very much like a daffodil, except, unlike daffodils, it won't repel deer.  This is a shocking shortcoming and when I take over we'll get rid of jonquils immediately after getting shot of Alan Carr and that Brand plonker.

     "GAZANIA": Honestly, I'm not making these up.  "Any of a genus of South African plants of the composite family having large showy flowers.  After Theodore of Gaza, who translated the botanical works of Theophrastus into Latin."  Well, at least we have the name of whom to blame here.  Theodore is rather beyond the reach of legal retribution - or even illegal retribution - since he skipped off this mortal coil in 1478.  Art!

Yeah, look pretty why don't you.  You'll get yours in the end.

     It isn't just flowers, mind.  Take "PUISSANCE" as another example.  According to the CC, its: "A competition in showjumping that tests a horse's ability to jump large obstacles" or (Archaic) "Power".  YOU WHAT!  Suddenly we're all equestrian experts, are we?  Or familiar with medieval French?  Art!

     That's a 155mm GPF artillery piece, or 'Grande Puissance Filloux" which translates as "High-Power Filloux", Ol' Fil being the M8 artillery officer who designed it.

     I think I'll stop there before I keel over and collapse on the keyboard from untrammelled anger, especially since I will hammer the keys into bits with my giant Sausage Fingers Of Rage.  BECAUSE I AM NOWHERE NEAR DONE!

Thunder And Lightning Part 3

Or, if you like, the Saga Of Storm Shadow.  In the previous two parts, I've explained that the Ruffians got their hands on parts of a Stormzy that crash-landed in Zaporizhzhia, principally the rear fuselage and the BROACH warheads.  Art!

     You can see here what makes Stormzy so effective; it has a shaped-charge warhead (the orange thing) that blows a hole in whatever it hits, which allows the main charge (the khaki thing) to enter through said hole and bring a happy hello to whomever it hits.

     What the Ruffians will have really wanted to get hold of is the sensor package in the nose, to understand how it works and how to spoof or stop it.  There were no photographs of this part, one suspects because it hit the ground first and now needs reconstructing from 100,000 broken bits.  Art!

    What is known about the sensor suite <smugly grins as this makes it sound as if he knows what he's talking about> is that it incorporates both GPS and INS (Inertial Navigation System) and an Infra-Red Imaging Seeker that picks out the target in Stormzy's final approach.  The whole package enables accuracy that allows the missile to not just hit a target, but also to select where on the target it hits.  Given it's low-radar cross-section, speed and ground-hugging approach, this makes them very difficult to detect, let alone shoot down. 

    You'd imagine that the Ruffians would put everything into researching the carcass they got, the sum total of which seems to be "Goes fast, makes boom".  It's not beyond the bounds of possibility that MI6 have been putting some bribes around -

Rubbing Lemon Juice And Salt Into The Wound

I do have an annotated analysis of Joe Blogs about the woeful state of the Ruffian economy, which I shall save for a later date, because it gets a little dull when you pick at the low-hanging fruit constantly.  All I shall say on the subject is this - Art!

     Oooopsies.  It had been hovering at the 96.00 level for a couple of weeks and now seems to be heading for 100.00 again, at which point Peter The Average will throw his toys out of the pram, some advisers out of a window and the Ministry Of Finance will raise interest rates again.

     Watch this space.

"City In The Sky"

We are currently looking at things from the viewpoint of the Lithoi, the alien 'squatters' the Doctor mentioned to his Arcology audience.

     Thus, blindly following their engineered programming, the faithful workers began and persisted in isolating fall-out residuum, concealing it in a lattice of boron and transporting it onward to intermediate collection points, where other microbots would carry it further to specific sites for disposal.  Arcology One would have been immensely impressed by the technology involved, not to mention relieved at the explanation for background radioactivity declining so rapidly.

     Once or twice, decades past, scattered human communities that managed to survive and thrive in the post-apocalyptic wastelands had discovered the existence of the collecting robots.  Harken 23, as head of the Lithoi’s Physics wing, had ordered flying eyes to destroy the human habitations as a matter of course.  The danger was that they’d communicate their discovery elsewhere, since the alien’s restrictive practice of keeping human technology limited to steam and coal didn’t run in the North (too labour intensive). 

    Harken 23, as head of Physics, had felt worried for a long time that humans might rediscover the nanobots again.  In which case things would get tricky; of the original six flying eyes the Lithoi had brought to Earth, only two remained functional.  Of the missing, one, they knew, had inadvertently flown into the flight path of a human HOTOL jet.  Neither survived the impact.  Another had vanished over the Pacific when on a mission to destroy a Micronesian island colony.  Two more simply disappeared from the monitors, quite possibly as a result of overwork, fatigue and general wear – they had been used to burn up at least five hundred thousand humans, after all.  Building more flying eyes meant petitioning Arkan about them, with reasons, in detail, a long and labourious process not guaranteed to succeed.

     Ah, the subtlety of a Conrad info-dump.

Day 1

Conrad is going Sober For October, which will benefit his wallet in addition to his liver and kidneys.  That's it so far, nothing else to report, I just like to keep you in the loop.  As you were, as you were.

Finally -

The incessant rains have cessed, for the moment at least.  This is good because I need to get my steps up and a visit to Lesser Sodom beckons.  Conrad thinks he can dare to do it in his comfortable Skechers, which have absolutely no traction on a slippery surface like the Co-Op floors.  Better go scrape the whiskers, too.