Who?

No!  Sit Back Down

This is nothing to do with everyone's favourite Gallifreyan, as you immediately thought, didn't you?  Because my goodness the BBC has been banging on about their premier dramamentary of late, which is howlingly ironic when you consider how much the various heads of that institution looked down upon and despised it when it began.  However, when it looked as if there was a market for it being re-released on 'video cassettes' (as we knew them many decades ago) and the sound of coin could be heard, O how they changed their minds!  Art?

"It's from the BBC Controller.  We're going to be listed as 'Receivables'."

     ANYWAY of course that's not what this Intro is about, because that would be logical and we cordially detest all forms of logic*.

     Conrad's grey cells are bestirring themselves a bit here, dredging up a distant memory from the late Sixties or early Seventies.  A spoof of "Doctor Who", if I recall correctly.  Now, what was it called?

     <brainstorming session and obscurantist Googling follows for ten minutes>

     

     As you can see from the caricature, this chap appears to be based on the William Hartnell iteration of the Doctor.  Conrad is not sure how his elongated and fragile neck supported the weight of his mighty cranium.  It was a comedy strip, as you can tell from his grinning maw and the bad pun, which was the first of many to come.

     Wowsers, got even more off-track than intended there.  Back to the Intro we go!

     Neither is it about Algis Budrys' most famous sci-fi novel, which, if Art will stop mooning about his Mara Corday calendar -

     In it, the Sinisters return a supposedly badly-injured South Canadian scientist, who now has an artificial skull, face and left arm.  The question is - who, exactly, is he?  Said scientist?  An infiltrating spy?  A robot wearing a human body?  Conrad has never read the novel and has only seen snippets of the film but it comes highly recommended by those who have.

     No, what we are on about here is the beloved character of Kenny Who?, from the pages of "2000AD".  If Art will do the honou STOP MOONING OVER MARA!

     I shall fill in a little background for you.  Kenny lived in the 'Cal-Hab Zone', which was the only part of a devastated Scotland that was fit for life, and just barely at that.  Whilst he toiled alongside his family on the farm, Kenny's dream was to become -

     A COMIC STRIP ARTIST!

     Don't laugh or mock, every man needs a dream.  Kenny sent his artwork to various publishers and ended up in The Big Meg (Mega-City One to you, perp) with his family, where he rapidly fell foul of the law.

     You can see where this is going, can't you?  Art!

     Yup, he got mixed up with Ol' Stony Face.

     In a twist on the usual events of Dredd pounding a perp into the floorboards before sentencing them to twenty years in the iso-cubes, Kenny managed to get away scot-free (Ha! do you see wha - O you do).  The reading audience was so positive about him that he came back twice, managing to escape incarceration each time, much to the disgust of The Chin.  The stories are genuinely amusing and mix in a lot of Scottish slang - the artist is one Cam Kennedy, a name that may hint why.

     You can bet that we've not heard the last of Kenny Who?

Further To Fusion-Boosting

I mentioned the niche occupation of 'Hobby Tunnelling' recently, and do you know what else is a niche area?

     Nuclear warhead design, that's what.  Conrad is unsure if you decide that you want to create Big Bang Bombs first and then find a course that's relevant, or if you do a course such as mechanical or electrical engineering and then apply.  Here's a hint: DON'T uses phrases such as "I like explosions" and "Vapourising cities is cool", as these will get you a psychiatric evaluation before rejection, and probably an entry near the top of the FBI's "Ones To Watch" list.  Art!

'Atomic Annie' sends love and kisses

     Yesteryon I explained how using tritium gas as a booster at the centre of a nuclear weapon increased the yield by as much as twice, IF the thing was designed efficiently.  This means that you can use half the fissile material in a pure fission design and get the same yield, so you can have a smaller and more compact warhead.  Or you can keep the same amount of uranium or plutonium and have a much bigger bang.  The miniaturisation process is normally the way to go.  Art!

     Tritium is used in various artefacts because of it's luminescent qualities, with the proviso that it's one of the most expensive substances out there, coming in at about £500,000 per ounce.  Not only that, it has a limited half-lifespan of 12 years and as the neutron source for a nuke, it needs regular maintenance.  Art!

     This leads to some interesting speculations about Ruffian nuclear weapons.  After all, if they're never intended to be used, and tritium goes for such huge sums, might a few itchy-fingered Strategic Rocket Force officers not have mysteriously acquired yachts and Italian mansions?  And how much of that essential maintenance has been conducted over the past 30 years?  These ponderings mean an unsourced speculation I read that only 16% of Ruffia's nukes will actually successfully launch - well, it may not be as far-fetched as it seems**.

     Hmmm, there's a lot of text up there.  More picture less prose!

Kitchen Kitsch

Your Humble Scribe did say he'd call out this list of items when he felt they were wrong, and here's just one example.  Art!

     We used to have one of these in The Mansion's kitchen, except ours was a cheap plastic one, so more probably £2 than £10.  Conrad loved the way the claws came out and laid a sinister hold on the cringing innocent pickle, wrenching it away from the company of it's fellows.  You could use it on jalapenos and pickled mushrooms, not just gherkins.

"City In The Sky"

The Doctor has been using young Alex as a variety of human guinea pig, in his own inscrutable and not-to-be-challenged way

     It took Alex a long time afterwards to assemble the facts and events into a sensible order.  He realised later that the illness had begun to affect him at the end of his first day on Planet Earth, and that it wasn’t anything caused by an incredibly distant horizon or psychosomatic symptoms.  His temperature had gone up and stayed up, rendering him weak and fearful of light, as dizzy as someone oxygen-deprived, giving him fearful, forgotten nightmares in that unfamiliar hotel room.  When he saw their original room in the light of day, his fever made it seem like an assault in an asylum.  The Doctor plied him with water, giving him a whole jug of the stuff, water that still had a taste unlike the insipid version filtered and recycled half a billion times aboard Arc One.

     Then they’d been the target of a rugby scrum in the hostel lobby, and he felt stupidly and inordinately proud to remember how the Australians loved rugby before being dragged outside into the cooler air of morning, where his rubber knees and cotton-wool head felt slightly better.

     Then they’d run into a gang of strangers, whom Mike had rescued them from – or had he already been there?  And then, the Doctor burst out laughing when Mike worried that he’d brought some deadly disease down from Arc One.

     Gallows humour, Doctor, gallows humour.

I Just Remembered

Going on about 'Mushroom Men', there was a horror novel by <thinks> Harry Adam Knight about a fungal outbreak that infects mainland UK, and a desperately unwilling author living in Ulster is 'recruited' to go and get the cure, from his ex-wife if I recall correctly.  Art!

     I won't enlarge it or you'll be put off your dinner.  It transpires that 'Harry Adam Knight' was a pseudonym used by the Ocker author John Brosnan, probably because it's a sleazy but fun potboiler.

     Incidentally, Brosnan also wrote "Knight Zero" for "2000AD", in one story of which there are - you may be ahead of me here - mushroom men mutated into monstrousness by fungal infection.  I can't provide a picture as there simply aren't any on teh Interwebz.

Finally -

O boy did we have fun with the internet today.  News at ten!

*  Today.  Tomorrow we may differ.

**  CAUTION! Not to be tested.