Not Sure How Long This Will Take To Deal With
Firstly, let us go back to yesteryon's Intro, where we finally ended up describing how Winston Churchill, war correspondent for the "Morning Post", was taken prisoner by the Boers when the passenger train he was travelling on was ambushed and wrecked. He did not take well to captivity, it has to be said; about as well as this lot. Art!
CAUTION! Hand-held dentistry drills are not to be used for torture
Yes, that was a shallow and scheming attempt to bait in the passers-by - excuse me whilst I tweak my moustache ends. You cannot deny that none of the three Hom. Saps. are enjoying durance vile, can you? Same with Winnie. Art!
That's Winnie over to starboard. And yes, he does look rather martial for a civilian correspondent.
Predictably, he escaped from the prison camp he was being held at, and proceeded to wander over a lot of South Africa, since he had no map, no food and no water. A friendly pro-British settler helped him with refuge and food - also whisky and cigars - and got him to safety on a train, from which he leaped once far distant, eventually making his way to safety. Art!
We now leap ahead 17 years, after Winnie had left Parliament and pulled a few strings to get a command, with the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers. Yes, that's him rocking a glengarry cap right in the middle and looking very very serious. He was a bit of a hard sell to the battalion, who were looking upon him as an ex-politician, when he had bags of experience of warfare, all the more so when he wasn't supposed to. He got stuck in with no slacking, frequently being in the front line trenches or out on patrol in No Man's Land - both of which he should most definitely NOT have been doing. Art!
Of course he had to wear a French Adrian casque.
"There is a constant spice of danger. Daily shells, some very near; and a certain amount of risk in moving about by day and night. I have also had my tiny dog hole where I sleep in the line smashed up by a shell which had it detonated perfectly would have been the end of my chequered fortunes."
ANYWAY this is all by way of a preamble, because what Conrad wanted to look at were the trench systems of No Man's Land in 1916, running up to and after the Battle of the Somme. Art!
Here you see one of the major problems about mounting an attack across No Man's Land against the enemy; the ground was open and lacked cover, meaning you stood out on the landscape and were an excellent target for the enemy's artillery and machine guns. Smoke screens were ephemeral and attacking at night was very difficult. How else could one attack in force without leaving concealment?
Enter the "Russian Sap". Art!
That above is quite unique as Russian saps were usually converted into communication trenches and it's impossible to tell them from the conventionally-dug ones.
The reason for this divergence back into the history of a hundred years ago is that a suggestion about tunnelling across open ground has been made in the case of one of the current conflicts now being waged. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Art!
Well, that was an Intro I never expected to write. Let us crack on.
The Haul
For yes, I've been into Lesser Sodom as of this morning, when the weather had thankfully improved from yesterday. Art!
I've seen both "Interstellar" and "Daybreakers" at the cinema, they're just here to be completist. The Crichton work was plucked off a shelf in haste as I was informed that it was a 2-for-1 as regards books. The Richard Osman - yes, that' Richard Osman of "Pointless" novel I was curious about. Art!
I know, I know - Latin! <hack spit>. It will mean I don't have to trawl through Brewer's or teh Interwebz when looking to clarify a phrase.
O and yes, seven packets of sugar-free sweets. The bare minimum.
Pushing The Pizzalope
Conrad had never heard of either Cici's Pizza nor Tick Tock shock jock 'Madison' before following a sidebar article. Art!
Cici's (however you pronounce that) have an All You Can Eat offer for $8.49, which Madison took advantage of - O how she did! - arriving at 11:00 when they opened. The idea, Conrad guesses, is that people might stuff themselves silly for an hour on cheap pizza, BUT will also spend on drinks and side dishes, which is where the business makes it's profit. Then, bloated and happy, they waddle off thinking that they got a bargain, when they've blown another $15 on the extras. Art!
By 19:00 the restaurant had finally gotten fed up with her grazing and kicked her out, having just brought in a rule that you could only stay for a maximum of two hours. I'm not sure who is the bottomhole here, only that if I travel to South Canada, Cici's is getting hit.
"City In The Sky"
Order must be maintained and you simply have to have a properly-minuted meeting when encountering visitors from near space.
He turned and gave an encouraging flick of the eyebrows to Alex, who
sighed.
‘It’s true. Everything aboard Arc
One is running short, breaking down, wearing out or gone already. That’s why we sent down the Dart gliders, to
try and establish if we could land our people.’
Don leaned his chair back on two legs and chewed his lip.
‘ “Dart”, eh? You were unlucky,
then. Your spaceship got caught in a
bush fire at Forrest. Wiped out the
whole town as well as them, two hundred souls gone.’
This came as news to all three travellers, of course. Alex didn’t understand the concept of a fire
that could be allowed to rage unchecked and struggled visibly to assimilate the
information.
‘We – we wondered if perhaps the people at Forrest might have attacked
our glider crew,’ he ventured.
Don, Lenny and Doris all looked instantly and equally aghast.
‘Young man!’ snapped
‘What do you people up there think of us!’ gasped Don. ‘Attack fellow humans!’
Lenny narrowed his eyes disdainfully.
‘Bleeding Starmen. What, you
think us grubby Ockers kill strangers on a whim!’
Hmmmm probably sincere.
Big K Holds Out Hope
Or, Konstantin Samoilov, to give him his full name. He really is big, like the stereotypical Ruffians who look like part of the landscape just got up and started walking on two legs. His Youtube channel, "Inside Russia" has to broadcast from outside Ruffia, for he is now in exile. But still well-connected and up-to-date on matters back in Moscow. Art!
One minor yet interesting fact he brought up was the amount of Ruffian federal police there are on strength, which should be 771,000.
Big K explained that, in Ruffia, the police are federal employees and work to serve and protect the government, most especially not the people. All their orders come from the Ministry Of Federal Police in Moscow, as does their salary ("Russian police is nightmare in America!" he extolled).
Well, there is currently a shortfall of 100,000 police, which the authorities are blaming on 'low wages'. Big K is more sanguine; the older police left or retired when the Special Idiotic Operation began, and there is a dearth of young people who are willing to go protect the government at the expense of their fellow citizens.
He might have a touch of the rose-coloured glasses. Be nice if he was right, mind. Art!
Finally -
Tomorrow's schedule is a little different, as I am heading across the Pennines to go wargame with Richard, for the first time in ages. So, I shall be gone all afternoon.
PROVIDING the car does not blow up, melt down, fall apart or otherwise suffer hideous mechanical malfunction.
We shall see.
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