Zoned!

Not To Be Confused With 'Zond'

I know, I know, it sounds like one of Superman's Kryptonian opponents, when it was actually a rather cursed range of Sinister space probes.  We may come back to that, it depends how I feel.  Of course, having invoked Kel-Al, I can now put up a picture of him getting into fisticuffs with General Zoid (sp?).  Art!

Supes versus General Zorg (sp?)

     No, this Intro is all about the Red Zone, which sounds rather forbidding, because it is.  You are doubtless sucking your teeth at this point, recalling that BOOJUM! has brought forward various other 'Zones' in the past and wondering which one it's going to be.  Art!

      The idea behind this Cold War military fantasy is that war has broken out in Europe between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, resulting in an attritional stalemate across The Zone, where everything short of battlefield nukes has been employed.  The Warsaw Pact and Sinister Union both had mere years to live when this series started, and it lasted longer than either.  The Zone itself is extremely dangerous terrain, contaminated with fall-out and nerve gas and not the kind of place for an evening stroll.  However, it's not what we're focussing on today.  Art!

     This is the forbiddingly named 'Death Zone' on Gallifrey, the home planet of everyone's favourite Time Lord.  Earlier in their history the Time Lords were a little - shall we say 'but lightly endowed with morals' - and contrived to play the Game Of Rassilon.  This consisted of traversing the DZ and trying to get out, whilst either fleeing from, hiding from or, as a last resort, fighting various alien menaces that the Time Lords had dropped into the Death Zone.  To make things a little more challenging, doncha know.

     Still not the focus of the Intro.  Art!

"Stalker"

     In this film aliens landed and had what the authors described as a 'roadside picnic', leaving various bits of garbage behind.  The thing is, their presence has permanently and radically affected the landscape and even the rules of nature; an armed response to their incursion ended disastrously, to judge by the wrecked military hardware lying around.  There is a Hollywood blockbuster just aching to be made from the source novel, "Roadside Picnic".

     Nay, still not our Red Zone.  Art!

     Here we are!  This map shows the aftermath of the First Unpleasantness in north-west France and Flanders, mainly due to the millions of shell fired.  The ground was not only contaminated with explosive residues but also poison gases (chlorine, arsenic and nitrogen mustard amongst others) and the remains of humans and animals.  One problem is that a certain proportion of shells failed to explode thanks to faulty fuses, and are now lying underground in desperately dangerous states.  The decomposition of high explosive can produce horribly unstable by-products that simply itch to detonate.

  "Slightly Affected Zone"

     The land has been affected by war, not to the extent that it's either uncultivable nor uninhabitable.  By 2023 this land is perfectly fine.

 "Without damage"  

     Able to be re-occupied immediately after hostilities ceased.

 "Significant damage"

     The land had to be left alone for decades to permit reforestation to take place, after being de-mined as thoroughly as possible.  Some villages were rebuilt

 "Completely devastated/Red Zone"

     The cost and risk of de-mining - by which I mean locating and salving the millions of unexploded munitions, including poison-filled shells - was too great and the land has been allowed to lie fallow and reforest.  This will not be forever, just a very long time.  The most optimistic estimate is that it will take another 300 years to remove all the ordnance lying underground in the Red Zone.  In the meantime this land is very much out of bounds.  Art!

     It was once thought that Verdun, one of the most intensely-fought over places in human history, was so poisoned and polluted by ten months of warfare that it would never green again.  Nature, wearing a gardener's smock instead of being all red-tooth and claw-y, has brought the verdure back again.  Hope springs, hmmm?

    I would like to thank Steve, my memory, for bringing this subject to my attention at 07:20 this morning.

     <goes off to heat the oven and unbox a pizza> 

Small Beautiful Things

Are what life is all about, for some people.  I almost feel as if I'd heard that said as a quote.

     ANYWAY Wonder Wifey picked up a jolly good idea from that Martin Lewis chap, you know, the intellectual one from "The Professionals", about how to kill with a flexi-straw and a teaspoon of jam financial bod, about fuel poverty and how to stay warm.  Art!

     These mittens have a heating element built in.  You plug them into a device (my laptop in this instance) and they gently warm your hands, charging up as they do so.  I've already used them three times, once to test that they worked and twice when the old shovels were feeling a trifle icy.  They can expect further gainful employment as autumn wears into winter.

I KEEP WARNING YOU ABOUT THIS!

Not out of altriusm.  Don't get any snivelling notions about the intrinsic value of human life, I just want to take over without having to compete against Skynet.  Art!

     Courtesy of "The Daily Beast".  Conrad was unaware that this market existed at all, and a quick Google reveals a horrifying array of these mechanical upstarts that go for as little as £400.  Art!

     One assumes that the technology is similar to that of a Roomba, except with the addition of rotary cutting blades.  I wonder if you have to empty it, or do the more expensive models do that themselves?

     The thin end of the wedge, I tell 'ee, the thin end of the wedge.  Next thing you know it'll be SKYNET!

"City In The Sky"

Young Alex, used to a life aboard an orbital arcology, is still getting used to things like the ocean and a horizon.

No.  Only the Doctor emerged, looking around and taking lungfuls of sea air, holding Alex’s tool box.

     ‘Thank you for remaining reticent in the Mayor’s office, Alex,’ he murmured.  ‘Time for a little chat before our watcher catches up with us.’  He cast a careful look behind and noticed a man heading directly for their dune.

     Pointing with his umbrella, he directed Alex’s gaze beyond the scrubland and dunes, to where the sea sparkled and glittered lazily in the sunlight.

     ‘A stroll in that direction, I think, to show you the seashore.’

     They set off, sliding down the loose sand in giant footsteps.

     ‘That stuff Don the Mayor spouted about “Death-sats” is all nonsense,’ began Alex.  ‘There simply aren’t any.’

     He got an encouraging nod.

     ‘I mean, there actually was one, a single American one, and it did destroy a Pakistani nuclear missile fired at the Arcipelago.  That was a solo satellite sixty years ago.  Everyone on Arc One knows that much.’

     They followed a well-trodden path worn free of sand, passing between the narrow screen of low trees that hid the beach from view, and Alex saw the seashore for the first time.

         Yes, Alex, but New Eucla is most definitely not Arc One.

Envy Of Some Sort 

I just had to post this photograph, put up on Twitter by one Michael Warwick, who was lamenting the obsolescence of the old big-gun battleships of yore.  Art!

     From port to starboard these are: an armour-piercing 18" shell; a puny human for scale; an 18" high-explosive shell; the cases of propellant needed to fire either shell.  An 18" gun was a monster weapon, probably the zenith of big-gun development, and this short item will inevitably lead to another about battleships.  I recall that there was a whole page of text about firing the guns of a big warship in "The War Illustrated" with all the electromechanical calculations required and a huge array of crew required to serve a multi-gun turret.  Hmmmm I perhaps should have avoided mentioning that, it implies I'm going to go look it up.

Finally -

The rest of The Mansion's complement are off in Barcelona tonight, prefatory to embarking on a cruise tomorrow, so it's Conrad and Edna against the world.  I've been so diligently domestic today - swept the back steps and defrosted the small freezer.  Get me.