From Musket To Megaton

That's Quite An Opener, Hmmmmm?

Conrad is going to have to drop one of his major conceits, pretending that the <wince> American Revolution never happened or that 'America' ever developed afterwards, for which I will need a good few dozen snifters of gin once finished here.  

     You see, one of the treacherous colonial ingrates' practices was that of a militia force able to respond within - supposedly - a minute, that being all the time needed to seize their musket, powder horn, lead shot, handkerchief and visiting card, before sallying forth to deal with the opposition.  If it became necessary to don a shirt and breeches because the alarm came at 03:26 one presumes they became minutesmen.  Art!

Minuteman modelling musket machismo

     You would be correct in thinking that this opening has nothing to do with the rest of the Intro, because - well, you ought to be used to us going off on wild tangents by now.  Art!

     Meet today's Minuteman LGM-30G, a.k.a. the Minuteman III, a beast that carries three 335 kiloton MIRVed warheads that can hit a 50 pence piece at 5,000 miles.  This missile began service in 1962 and has been updated and modernised so that today's version wouldn't recognise great-grandad.

     Now, with the kind of screeching that accompanies a stylus skipping over the grooves on an LP, let us abruptly switch to "Damnation Alley" again, because Your Humble Scribe hasn't finished with this film yet.  No way.  Art!

     This is where Conrad's inner pedant comes out.  You see, there never was an SMW at Tipton.  Not only that, this location is in California, when the real SMWs were located in the Big Empty states - Montana, South Dakota, Wyoming and North Dakota.  Out there the missileers had plenty of room to spread about in, and if there was a Sinister pre-emptive or reactive strike, then there weren't a whole lot of people to get sizzled.  Art!

     Hopefully this montage conveys the sequence of our two heroes descending into the bowels of the earth beneath Tipton, to end up in their Minuteman control centre.  Conrad rather doubts that this is realistic; SAC, being professionally paranoid, would ensure nobody can turn corners or be out of direct line of sight at all in an underground missile control centre adjunct.

     NO!  This is not how Strategic Air Command missile wings or squadrons are organised or work, then and now.  You have a central 'hub' Headquarters with the actual missile fields located very far away, having very little above-ground facilities on-site.  Art!

     Here you see the central HQ at Ellsworth, with the 66th, 67th and 68th missile squadrons located up to 75 miles away.  You might, perhaps, argue that this is poetic licence, and having our heroes need to spend an hour returning to HQ would make the film lag, rather.  In that case, why bother having them in a control centre at all?  Art!

Deja vu, hmmmm?

     There is also the very minor matter of base security.  All we see here is a booth with a barrier.  No armed guards at the entrance?  In fact no sentries at all?

     You might, again, try to argue this away by saying that Tipton has security, just at a marked distance from the HQ building.  You know, fences, dogs, patrols, helicopters, sentries, ground sensors, all a mile away.  HOWEVER - a word you surely knew was coming - none of this is ever seen when Tanner is off on his motorbike, nor when the Landmasters leave the base, nor is anything visible from atop the tower.  Art!

     Conrad is not enthused about that display screen here.  You can barely make out that there's an outline of <wince> North America, and heaven only knows what the squiggly bright lines are.  Talking of 'bright', why is it so dark in the Operations Room?  Gloom like this invites the risk of hitting the wrong button in the dark.  Come to think about it, that may be the reason this whole situation kicks off.  Art!

     This is how the world ends, hmmmm?  The only warning sounded in the Ops Room is a muted beeping tone, instead of a FREAKING 150 DECIBEL SIREN as would surely happen in real life.  The idea that a Sinister inbound missile attack is represented by a lot of blurry dots is also peculiar, as it's so imprecise and vague as to be near useless.  Art!

     What about Hawaii and Alaska?  In a real Ops Room those display maps would be a lot less geographical and a lot more abstract/diagrammatic/schematic.  Kind of like the smaller ones at individual work stations.  Art!

     Like this, whatever it is.  It m

     Er - yes, well, I was going to pontificate even further but we're well over half-way through the blog and I think it best to move on.

Talking Of Radioactive City-Destroying Horrors -

There's a film out at the moment which has been doing very well at the box office, primarily via word of mouth rather than with an enormous advertising and promotional campaign.  Art!

     Even The Critical Drinker likes it, and he normally hates everything.

     What's the secret of it's success?  A relatively small budget, tightly controlled, which means little to no interference from the studio suits, thus not getting the script blanded-out in hopes of appealing to everyone.  Art!

     If we go by the 50/50 rule in money going back to the studio, this means $21,815,650 picked up by Toho.  Since the film only cost $14 million, they are already $6 million in profit with just over a week on release, with the box office take remaining over $1 million per diem.

     This repeats the pattern of "Sound Of Freedom" and "Five Nights At Freddy's" that we've already seen this year: relatively low-budget films that don't have to try too hard to succeed thanks to not having risked the bank on a hit.  Notice Conrad coyly avoids mentioning anything about quality here.  Art!

And it's in Japanese with subtitles

Construction Constriction

Conrad doesn't travel by bus as often as he used to, thanks to working from home.  I did go into Gomorrah-in-the-Irwell last week, and ventured into Babylon-Lite ('Oldham' if we're being formal) today, and - they're still mucking about with Oldham Bus Station.  Art!

     Quite what is going on here is open to conjecture*.  There used to be a long slope from the entrance at port, with steps, that seems to have now gone missing.  The green cone?  There to indicate an entrance to the construction people, and an extensive pain in the bottom to pedestrians and passengers.

"City In The Sky"

It would appear that the Doctor, as is his wont, has managed to get himself into trouble of a most serious nature.

     ‘No, no – the beds were like that this morning!  The Doctor and I slept in a different room - ’ began Alex, to thin air, as Mike was off and running, the soft padding of his tyre-cut sandals fading quickly.

     With less haste and a more sure and certain belief in his companion’s innocence, Alex looked at the corpse with fear and curiosity. 

     Okay, he was a mechanic, not a doctor or nurse; he had an engineering background, not a medical one.  Still, the laws of physics applied to human anatomy and this corpse looked – odd.  For one thing, all the internal organs were gone.  No heart or lungs or liver.  No blood, either, not on the body or even in the body – he peered into the empty chest cavity to make sure – and not even on the supposed murder weapon.

     Hang on – that chest cavity has been broken from the inside! he understood, seeing the flesh and bone bent outwards.

     A quick look over the room didn’t reveal either any blood or the missing internal organs.

     ‘This is impossible,’ he mused to himself.  ‘Unless - ’ and he bent to press the old man’s skin.  Cold, inflexible and unyielding.  Just like plastic, in fact.  The Euclans might not be familiar with plastics but he, as a child of the Arcology, certainly was.  He opened his toolkit, took out a pair of pliers and tapped the body’s exposed sternum, which chipped, revealing a shiny interior to the supposed bone.  Adopting a trick of his father’s, he nibbled the piece broken off.

     All is not as it may seem.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

Hearken ye to this photo as put up on the BBC News website.  Art!

     Nope, I'm not going to tell you.  Tee hee!

Finally -

That's quite enough for today, I think.  In fact, that's quite enough for today, I know.  Laterz!

*  Mission Statement: "Annoy and inconvenience as many passengers (and pedestrians) for as much as possible as long as possible."