Overweening Ambition

Go On, Admit It-

This is the first time in 2023 you've read the word 'Overweening' because, let's face it, nobody else bar Conrad is going to use archaic language like that.  For your information, it means to be overwhelmingly ambitious or pretentious, and is derived from the Old English 'Ween', meaning 'To think'.  I now have to come up with a picture that embodies this <thinks> Art!

     Close enough.

     What am I wittering on about?  A project I began many years ago, that plodded along desultorily (another word you never expected to see today) for years, languishing untouched and forgotten until recently.  Your Humble Scribe, you see, wanted to create a hex-and-counter boardgame.  He's a bit of a dilettante with these, collecting many yet never actually playing them.  Art!

An example

     You would think that it's best to start small and simple with this idea, say perhaps gaming Mons, which has the appropriately small British Expeditionary Force up against a single Teuton army (in the First Unpleasantness, just to be clear).

     Not Conrad.  No, he decided that it was going to be the Third Ypres campaign, the legendarily awful Passchendaele battles of mid- to late-1917, with fifty or sixty divisions per side.  Nothing small scale here!  Art!

     Nor was it only going to be about the frontline warfare; O no, nothing simple here!  No, it was going to factor in logistics, that is to say, how the armies got supplied.  It would include things like the air forces used by either side, observation balloons for artillery spotting, super-heavy artillery allocated to Army level headquarters - what game designers call 'chrome'.  Then there'd be morale as well.  O and weather, too.  Art!

     It might come as a surprise to you that there were problems with water supplies in the middle of this ghastly campaign, when the weather abruptly dried up and created problems for watering horses, and dust raised on roads attracted enemy artillery fire.

"Is there a point to this?" I hear you ruefully chorus.  "You see, 'Police Interceptors' is on in a minute."

     Well, sort of.  I cannot now find the Word documents that detailed the armies Order Of Battle, which were pages long and went into numbing detail.  Art!

     I do have hard copies, which <groans> might have to be typed up again from scratch.  There was a breakdown, as I recall, of how the divisions were going to be represented with counters - so many counters! - and whether to have numbered counters to represent unit strength, and crucial stuff like what the ground scale was going to be, and how long a turn represented.  This may still be on my old PC - but I doubt it.  All Word files have been copied over and I couldn't find anything to do with this albatross in old documents.

     Now, rather than admit defeat and give up on this, Conrad is going to go digging through old PC files and also any handy-dandy lever-arch folders and files full of paper that happen to be hanging around the Sekrit Layr.  I shall probably also have to dig out all the MilHist books I have that cover Third Ypres, which is no great hardship.  Art!

Cloth Hall, Ypres

     This is all splendid practice for when I take over the world, of course - obviously! - because every dictator needs a sound grounding in administration and logistics.  I can think of one Miniature Machiavellian Moron who neglected the latter to his extreme discomfiture.  One suspects that Emperor Ming, whilst he might very well have been Merciless, was a lot less grounded in proper staff work*.

Trapped By Dog!

Not in the way you're thinking, you slavering ghouls.  Actually that reminds me of the novel where Biggles and Co. are stooging around in Cornwall about something nefarious, which - hang on - Art!

     Definitely this one, I remember Algy making a crack about the titular aircraft crashing into the 'Cornish Alps', which are giant spoil heaps associated with the china industry.  Art!

CAUTION! Picturesque flight hazard

     ANYWAY at one point Biggles is forced to take refuge up a tree, being forced there by a ferocious Alsatian dog, which I remember him describing as having too much of the wolf in it as a breed.

     That's the kind of TBD you were thinking of, isn't it?  WRONG.  Art?

     This is an unusual honour, lest ye be unaware.  Edna did resort to my lap on Saturday, thanks to the numerous fireworks going off outside.  What you see here is her condescending to utilise the Human Shaped Cushion, for a good thirty minutes.  Just to prove she can bend humans to her will, one suspects.

First Bus Take Note

Another pithy tale from Quora, and told by an Original Poster who was a senior member of staff at a bus company in South Canada, who actually ran the depot and had done so for 25 years.  Lots of experience, in other words.  Art!

     The depot was typically 'gifted' with a new General Manager once every 18 months to 2 years.  One who had the shortest tenure turned up in A Very Shouty Mood, belabouring OP with how inefficient and unprofitable the bus routes were, things were a shambles, how could the operate so poorly, why had the cost of pistachios skyrocketed when the harvest in Sanji Pazar had been at record levels, all that sort of guff.

     OP pushed the office door open, pointed out the four other drivers present in the office having a brew, and explained that between himself and these people, there were nearly 200 man-years of experience knocking around.  Not only that, his depot was the most profitable one in the city.

     Ooops.  Art!

     

     OP was a bit cruel in pointing out GM's unsuccessful background as a holiday rep.  Mind you, it came in useful six months later when Shouty GM quite to go be an entertainments manager on a cruise ship.  Well, I mean, it's still travel, isn't it?

"City In The Sky"

Ace and Alex are the cynosure of all eyes aboard Arcology One, after returning from "Downstairs" in Australia.

     ‘The only people in radio contact now are the Americans in Texas,’ added the Warden, whom Ace now recognised as the one called Barclay from her previous encounter when here with the Doctor.

     ‘What!  Radio?’ exclaimed Terry.  ‘What – what about the death-sats?’

     ‘The Ozzies are convinced laser satellites are sitting in orbit shooting anyone who tries to use electrical devices,’ explained Ace, to the astonishment of their audience.

     ‘Ah – why is that?’ asked another man, hitherto silent.  His quick, intelligent eyes darted between Ace and Terry.

     ‘It’s what they do.  Mayor Kenneally explained it, how if you try to build anything electrical, the death-sats destroy it.  It’s true, I’ve seen the Vicker’s workshops at Barralonga.’

     The man took a pair of glasses from an inner pocket of his worksuit and put them on, slowly, clearly thinking over his reply.

     ‘Okay, Terry.  I don’t doubt that a force of some kind destroyed electrical systems Downstairs.  I am equally  certain that it wasn’t a laser satellite in orbit.’

     ‘Why?’

     ‘Because there are no satellites left in orbit any longer.  None.’

     This bald statement of fact only threw the engineer off for a second.

     ‘You’re still up here.’

     I think that 'None' is using a bit of poetic licence.  But what do I know!

Colour Conrad Confused

I was watching a couple of different clips about "The Walking Dead" that seem to contradict each other.  Allow me to elucidate.  Art!

     In this scene where we, the audience, don't get to hear what Doctor Jenner is saying, Rick lets on later that the secret is - everyone is already infected by what has to be an airborne pathogen.

     Yet in another clip from a different channel, they were going on about who was Patient Zero.  Art!

     Surely, if everyone is already infected, then the first person to die anywhere globally after said pathogen goes airborne is Patient Zero - if you can even have the concept of a Patient Zero, because they are not the principal means of the disease being spread?  Or am I going to have to watch EVERY SINGLE EPISODE of both TWD and FTWD to get this resolved?

     Of course, I might be overthinking this ....

Finally -

The weather has cleared up remarkably well from this morning, when it was Uniform Grey Layer skies, a nasty bitter wind and endless puddles.  Doubtless when it gets closer to Walkies the grey clouds will roil back in and I shall be walking a wet pet (it's what happened yesteryon).  Well, we shall see.

*  We may come back to this.