Yes, Your Over-The-Counter Composition
As created by Conrad, the word-physician. Or something like that, it was a struggle to get another word that rhymed.
What am I referring to today? O I thought you'd never ask!
The concept of swords being beaten into ploughshares, is what. For your information, this saying is taken from the Bible, Isiah to be specific. Thus: "They shall beat their swords into ploughshares", and the irony meter hits 97% because - Art!
I had to get the right angle to remain SFW here
This sculpture, cast in 1959, is entitled "Let Us Beat Our Swords Into Ploughshares" and was created by Evgeny Vuchetich. It stands in the UN Garden in New York. The caustic irony is that it was presented by the Sinister Union, who had busily employed swords three years before to crush the Hungarian regime of Imre Nagy, and who would go on to crush the Prague Spring of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Besides supplying weapons to any nation or 'freedom-fighters' who professed a left-leaning agenda.
And, of course, causing the Cuban Missile Crisis with plenty of enormous great city-busting swords in 1963. Art!
ANYWAY I would like to move on to the Atlas IRBM, which had been created as a giant
That's the Atlas, with the Mercury capsule being lifted to mate with it WASH OUT YOUR FILTHY MINDS, and from the various puny humans standing around you can clearly see that the Mercury capsule was quite small. Conrad would have great difficulty getting into one, and would probably be unable to egress afterwards if he managed. Art!
That red tube atop the capsule is an emergency escape rocket, which would lift the capsule and astronaut clear in the event of a launchpad emergency. The capsule sits in the position formerly occupied by a W38 nuclear warhead, just to be clear. They performed four successful orbital missions between between 1962 and 1963, so not bad for an adaptation of an off-the-shelf missile that had never been designed with the intent to carry live Hom. Sap. into space. Art!
I just thought you needed to be aware of what we're talking about here. Conrad is unaware of exactly how your average sword could be beaten into a ploughshare, probably by heating in a furnace halfway down the blade and bending it into a 90ยบ angle. Art!
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| Yes - exactly! |
One imagines that a few weeks of using this to break up a field of dried clays would dull the edges and snap off the tip, to the point that you can't simply revive the sword if you neighbour tries to encroach on your property. Might make an improvised boomerang, mind.
ANYWAY what I was going to say was that the successful use of Atlas missiles to loft the Mercury capsules into orbit paved the way for the next program up: Gemini. These capsules were designed to accommodate a crew of two and to carry out more complex manoeuvres than Mercury's relatively simple sub-orbital and orbital flights. Art!
However, you're going to have to wait until tomorrow to read all about Project Gemini as it's already 00:19 and I need my beauty sleep.
When In A Hole
'Tis best to stop digging. Also, some record-breakers would dearly like not to have broken a particular record - Kevin McCarthy comes to mind, tee hee!
ANYWAY, earlier this year there was publicity for a forthcoming television series on Canuckistanian television that called itself "Robyn Hood".
Hmmmm. Carry on.
Apparently the creative genius behind this work, 'Director X', decided that plain old Robin Hood wasn't good enough - sorry, 'enuff' - so she was going to be a female version, and black, and she was part of a rap group called 'The Hood' and they would take on the eeeeevil Sherrif of 'New Nottingham', that being a Canadian town, and the local billionaire, and there was a street sign that had 'Sherwood' and 'Forest'. Art!
The masks? No idea.
It is, as those who have watched it vociferously assert, hot flaming dumpster garbage in televisual form. So cheap it resembles a CW show - ouch, that one hurts! and so silly it more resembles a lame-bottom comedy than what they were aiming for, which would be a species of gritty urban thriller? Yeah, in your dreams, X.
Then there were the IMDB Ratings. These are an aggregate of the scores that people give a show, and you have to be an IMDB Pro member to vote.
To say these were bad is to understate wildly. Art!
Yes, but not a very good one
Seeing how his heap of ocular offal was getting trashed and roasted ('troashed'?) on IMDB, X decid - hang on, sorry, Director X - decided to whine piteously about it. He might well moan, 1.6 out of 10 is pretty awful.
However.
What his rending of garments and gnashing of teeth got him was a wider audience, who were now aware of RH, and whom promptly beat it down further on the Ratings. Art!
I think this is after only 2 episodes, possibly 3. There well may be people dog-piling on to give bad reviews, but equally so there may well be people dog-piling on to give good reviews. There cannot be many television programs that can proudly boast of a 1.0 star rating on IMDB and if Director X had only kept his pie-hole shut then he wouldn't be dreaming of how 1.6 stars is a good thing. Art!
Rated 7.9. Read it and seep, Mr. X
Egad
Your Humble Scribe thinks the tracking algorithm on Blogger has reset itself into Sane Mode, meaning October is the first for many months to reflect how popular - or unpopular - BOOJUM! is in real life, instead of my fond imaginings. Art!
Hah! And Also Aha!
Conrad has undertaken the long-term plan of cross-checking his Book Mountain with the old 'Book Barn' list that hasn't been updated properly since earlier this year, perhaps longer. This means I've added in dozens of books that weren't on the original list, and we now stand at over 850. There are only 4 bookcases to manage, before tackling the Cave Of Book. Art!
I knew it was in the Sekrit Layr somewhere, and now I've dug it up. Why is this of interest? Why, because it contains a chapter on Missiles, including pages of data on our old friends Atlas, Titan and Snark. Aso a very brief mention of the Boojum missile. Honest, I'm not making this up! Art?
Back-bomber-balanced-Boojum, big bombing beyond
"City In The Sky"
Not so much in the sky as on the ground. Or, the Doctor, Ace and Alex are. And who have they fallen foul of but a policeman? Clearly evidence that civilisation still exists in some form.
‘Oh yeah? That’s the umpteenth
time I’ve heard that excuse. “We don’t
know anything about trespassing or stealing or Government Property”. Buncha numpties!”
‘It’s true!’ blurted Alex, all injured
sincerity.
‘Right. Get turned around and
head back to the Gardens. If you try
running, I’ll shoot yer feet off,’ and he tapped the solid metal barrel of his
gun as he took the saddle again.
He had to dismount again when they reached the straggling brambles
outside the Botanic Gardens, tethering the horse and patting it’s nose
reassuringly. A couple of wrong turns in
the denser parts of the jungle cost them a few minutes, until they came
abruptly across the Tardis, standing backed against a giant spray of
heliotropes.
‘Go on, open it up!’ snapped the big man. ‘Bloody cheek, calling it “Police”! What, did you think we’d not look inside?’
Predictably, the Timelord bristled at any criticism of his timeship, all
the more so since he now realised what
their captor meant by “cupboard”.
Predictably, the big man’s jaw dropped and his face paled when the doors
were opened. He leant to one side and
checked how big the cupboard was on the outside as compared to the inside, then
took his hat off and wafted it to cool his suddenly sweaty brow.
Yes, Mister Plod, you've just had a paradigm shift happen in your head, haven't you?
Finally -
Definitely weather for stew. I'd better go devour a kilo or two of the one I made on Sunday, which looks set to last until next year thanks to the amount of it.
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