Conrad Is Angry

Yes, Again!

You may have missed my splenetic invective about Codeword compilers of late, because I've been working through a book of them, rather than the rancour-inducing ones in the "Manchester Evening News", which has been good for my blood pressure if not for blog content.

ANYWAY I have been saving a picture until I could to justice to it, and as a preface I want to include another picture, tangentially related.  Art!

     Operation Sealion or "Unternehmen Seelowe" in Teuton, was a 'planned' Teuton invasion of This Sceptred Isle in the Second Unpleasantness.  I use quotation marks because it was barely planned in any meaningful way, with the Kriegsmarine and Wehrmacht completely at odds about it, neither of whom wanted anything to do with the Luftwaffe.  The Wehrmacht thought an amphibious invasion against a defended shore would be just like a river crossing, just a bit wider.  The Kriegsmarine considered it to be a suicide mission for them, as they were heavily outnumbered by just the light Royal Navy forces along the south coast.  The Luftwaffe went into action with all the confidence of a drunk.

     It did not end well.  You may have guessed this as Conrad is not typing in German.  So, what am I angry about today?  O I thought you'd never ask!  Art?

This is where cunning old Philip K. Dick avoided getting bogged down, as he just drops the reader squarely into the end result in "The Man In The High Castle".

     Conrad's response to the question above?  Uncontrollable laughter.  The Germans couldn't get across the English Channel, which is only 26 miles wide.  And some bumbletuck thinks they could have crossed the Atlantic and invaded South Canada?  In the words of the inimitable Marcus Aurelius, dream on, sunshine.  Art!

Plankton.  Not to be mistaken for another diminutive dictator.

     I bet that episode of "Spongebob Squarepants" won't get aired whilst a certain Special Idiotic Operation is ongoing.

     ANYWAY the Teutons did have a 'Plan Z' as of 1939, which was to create an enormous navy that would be able to take on the Royal Navy.  which was the biggest navy in the world.  The plan would have taken until 1948 to achieve, which timeline has flaws you may already detect.  The whole plan was scuppered in 1939, when Herr Schickelgruber declared war on everyone, instead of waiting, as he'd swore he would do to the Kriegsmarine.

     Imagine that, a totalitarian dictator lying to his minions - who would believe it!

This would earn me five years in the Gulag in Ruffia

     ANYWAY that question, "What If Germany Crossed The Atlantic" presupposes so many criteria that it would be science fiction.  Art!

     These things are aircraft carriers.  They take years to construct and the Teutons had one still under construction in 1945 when the Second Unpleasantness ended.  How would they and a fleet of surface ships manage to escape the beady eye of the RN?  Don't forget, barring the singular and exceptional case of the 'Hood', whenever the Kriegsmarine came up against Perfidious Albion's capital ships, they lost and lost badly.

     NO!  The Teutons couldn't have 'just captured' the French fleet and used that.  When they tried this in mid-1943, the French fleet did an outstanding job of scuttling it's ships by explosive demolition.  NO! they can't just send the Italian Regia Nautica out into the Atlantic, because it was entirely bottled-up in the Med by the RN and geography.

     THERE IS NO WAY THIS WORKS, unless you bring in Gandalf and Harry Potter.

     Which is why I'm venting my Frothing Nitric Ire, as it needs an outing every so often.  Art!

Extra-specially cross

The Bricks, They Do Tricks

Or at least they do if present in sufficient numbers and with an ingenious designer behind them.  Art!

     This is the Lego House that James May and over 1,000 volunteers constructed out of 3,300,000 bricks.  Scaffolding.  This is serious.  Nor was it merely a hollow shell, it had a complete interior.  Art!

Looks a bit Bauhaus

Unfortunately they couldn't afford to have it transported to a permanent location and so it was dismantled <sad face> Art!

     Conrad wonders how they could have moved it from A to B, because I strongly suspect it would have come apart at the seams if lifted to mount on a low-loader; that or they'd have to take it apart brick by brick and transport all three million bricks and re-assemble it.  Which would be a bit of a pain.

Great Balls Of Lego

Whilst on the subject of the sharp-edged objects that hurt if you step on them, allow me to add a bit of background to that Giant Ball Of Lego that Mythbusters created.

     They constructed their beast in response to a viral video that claimed to have used 5 million bricks to make their Great Ball Of Lego.  Art!

     The MB team busted this one immediately, because they only needed 1 million bricks.  Which is a sentence I didn't think I'd ever be typing.  When they set their ball a-rolling, it left a trail of loose pieces behind immediately.  Art!

     Curiously absent from the Great Ball Of Lego video.  Conrad suspects that, at the heart of the viral vid, there's a very large inflatable ball, to which the Lego has been superglued - if it's even Lego and not just big blocks of coloured plastic.  Yeah, yeah, call me cynical.

"City In The Sky"

Hunting Spiders, meet the hypo-metabolic alien Lithoi.

     - and he slowly raised his torso upwards to look directly overhead and check for rainclouds.  This surprised the five hunting spiders; they hadn’t detected the smell of anything recognisably edible on the wind.  Still, their rudimentary eyes told them that the thing in the ditch was moving, that it emitted heat and four of them gamely squared up to the long, leathery creature.

     Three of them abruptly exploded into gouts of hair, chitin and sloppy innards, burst by the lasers that Mirkan’s computer directed at them before his sluggish mind managed to grasp that they were a threat.  The two remaining spiders danced away into dry weeds alongside the road to be seen no more.  Mirkan 93’s computer tracked them as they went, then determined that they were no longer a threat, directing the sensor net forward again, all in the time it took the Lithoi to swivel his head to follow the spiders retreat.

     Slowly, achingly so by the standards of terrestrial life, the alien creature lowered itself down into the ditch again, and began to crawl intently forward.  It’s average speed was less than a mile per hour.  Mirkan 93calculated he would take five hours to reach the flying eye rendezvous, a time that gradually wound down to four hours.  By then the ditch and road were no more than a beaten path barely discernible from the rolling countryside and he could move a little faster at the cost of being more visible.

     Australian wildlife has not finished with him yet.  O noes.

"Shall We Beat Him Orban Him?"

Ha!  Sometimes I amuse even myself.  As for those wondering about BOOJUM!s flirtation with Politics, this is less about politics than tit-for-tat, and carrying a bigger stick than your opponent.  Art!

     You see, Viktor Orban, elected Dictator Of Hungary And Peter The Average's Best Mate, had been blocking this aid package, because Charlie Chipmunk Cheeks told him to.

     The other EU powers, getting mightily fed up with him, then blocked €20 billion of funds for Hungary, at which the were-toad realised he was going to get really stiffed and his Best Mate couldn't afford to bank roll him enough money to purchase a roll of toilet paper.  Suddenly the stonewalling stopped. Art!

     He wasn't the victor in this one, and he may be recalculating his position vis-a-vis Harry Hamster Head, who can only offer personal bribes and not funding for the whole country.  Tee hee!

Finally -

I am only recently back from walking Edna, thus earning 500 Brownie Points, and noticed that here we were at 16:30 and it was still quite light.  Nastily cold, mind, with a damp edge to the windchill.

  C Ya Fokes!