Tomorrow - The World!
Well actually I shan't be taking over tomorrow, this World Domination thing is complicated and tricky and requires a lot of backup from my idle star-faring compatriots, who are still 127 years distant, the lazy beggars.
ANYWAY I wanted to bring in a "Times Radio" Youtube channel - no, it doesn't make sense to me, either - vlog that featured one of my favourite pundits, Professor Justin Bronk, whom we have mentioned previously. If you read today's title out loud you may have realised another truism about this Intro. Art!
The Bronx is a somewhat rough neighbourhood of New York, with high levels of violent crime, drug abuse and distinctly rough housing. On the other hand it features such cultural icons as Yankee Stadium, where sports teams play the South Canadian version of rounders; it begins with "B" and there's a "Ball" in it, the rest escapes me. There is the Bronx Zoo, and the New York Botanical Garden, which I'd never heard of before. Art!
How very splendid!
<excuse me, got to go take that clootie dumpling off the boil>
For those of you who wonder, "The Bronx" comes from the surname of a Dutch immigrant, Jonas Bronk, who settled in the colony of Nieu Netherland, as New York was originally named. We are talking early seventeenth century here, just to be clear.
Jumping ahead several centuries, we now reap the rewards of Conrad having a mind like a skip. Art!
My 'skip' would have several hundred tons capacity.
Meet Detlev Bronk! Conrad read his name in connection with a South Canadian political administration, and it stuck in my mind because it's an unusual name. Art!
Detlev Wulf Bronk
The surname can be taken to mean 'One who struts or flaunts' and the first name 'Detlev' means 'Descendant of the people'. Both of Dutch or Teuton origin.
Ol' Detty was a scientist and scholar, ending up as the Prez of John Hopkins University and, later on, Rockefeller University. He is credited with being the first person to put biophysics on the map as a distinct discipline.
Now we come to Prof Justin Bronk, whose name is of Old English origin and means 'Branch', though not necessarily that of a tree. Art!
One of the perks of being Senior Research Fellow for Airpower and Technology at the Royal United Services Institute.
Young Justin was holding forth on TR about current drone warfare between Ukraine and Mordor's Hellfire And Brimstone Export Service, and he cannily observed that the Ukes had been hit by over 8,500 ballistic and cruise missiles - and they're still fighting. Conrad needs to point out, though, that the Mordor Murder Missile Makers have been generally plastering the entire country, not focussing on anything especially military. Art!
Young Justin explained that the Tatarstan drone strikes were carried out by a converted ultra-light aircraft, an airframe that allowed the drone to be bigger, bomb-ier and longer-ranged. Using a propeller engine meant it was slow, which turned out to be a positive aspect. Radar systems, you see, used 'Doppler gates' to filter out objects travelling below a certain speed, so they don't pick up birds, clouds, dust, leaves, newspapers, carrier bags and so on. Thus a low, slow Uke drone may well slip past them undetected. Widening the gates to pick up sneaky stealthy drones means, yes you guessed it, an enormous increase in the number of false-positives. Art!
Catch the pigeon.
Another tweak in drone design is that GPS, used to determine location of drones in relation to the target, can be jammed, thus rendering a drone blind and useless. However - a word that you were expecting, nicht wahr? - inertial navigation systems cannot be jammed, so we may be seeing drones mounting both systems as a literal work-around. Art!
This is one of the Ruffian's Shahed drones previously supplied by Iran, now being made in that factory in Tatarstan, or they were until it got droned. Young Justin said the cost of these very basic UAVs is between $40,000 to $80,000 per unit. Various smart aleks on teh Interwebz have been suggesting that they get cameras installed, with remote control systems, too, making them extra-specially deadly -
Which Young Justin pointed out would raise their cost to $280,000 to $300,000 per unit, totally defeating the reason for having a cheap and nasty UAV in the first place. You might as well just build a missile instead. Art!
The Bronk brought up Mathias Rust as an example of a light aircraft penetrating Sinister airspace and travelling all the way from the border to Red Square, undetected and unintercepted. Art!
Conrad prefers to go with the OPERATION BLACK BUCK scenario himself.
There you go, a tale of three Bronks.
Serendipity
Conrad, as we all know, is a dinosaur, for whom things only exist when written down. Thus, I have filled an entire notepad with scribblings and scrawlings to do with my daily work. Hence the need for a new one, and when I opened it - Art!
The subject matter of 18 months ago. The "Rain Bar" food was what Darling Daughter and I consumed before the Nick Cave gig. I note we haven't reviewed a film in the old style for ages and ages; get used to it, we do move on and evolve here.
Not sure what 'Kevin Tinsley's "Tank" is, I can't recall who he is nor what his Armoured Fighting Vehicle is, either. Art!
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| Penguin Panzer |
As the blurb has it, a refugee family is returning to their home in the town of Cheux, hopefully intact. The Teutons didn't mind or care how badly damaged France was as they fought over it, the utter bounders. Art!
You won't have heard of "Freddie" De Guingand but he was a very important chap, being Monty's Chief Of Staff. It was Freddie who liaised with other British, Polish, Canadian and South Canadian senior officers, and (unlike Monty) he could get on with other people, able to co-operate, collaborate and consult. If he was off sick, which happened too frequently since he drove himself hard, then it was down to unalloyed Monty to sort things out. Which always ended up with angry, dissatisfied subordinates, until Freddie returned to charm them. General Omar Bradley stated that he would never, ever work under Monty again, and one gets the feeling that he would have defected to the Teutons rather than do so.
"City In The Sky"
Ace is attempting to alert her compatriots to an unexpected visitor; one of the Nullarbor Plain's dingoes.
Pausing to pick up the
remains of a well-gnawed crocodile bone, Ace detoured around the party of
shooters and towards the dingo. The
animal danced forward and backward, plainly impatient yet not daring to venture
too close to the armed humans. This
reticence stopped when Ace threw it the bone; the dingo stopped dead, sniffed
closely then slunk forward to snap up the offered morsel before cracking it
between it’s teeth and slobbering over the marrow inside.
Ace backed up to the group
around the campfire.
‘Does anyone have a pet
dingo?’ she asked. A few puzzled glances
were shot her way before the group clustered back around the futuristic
weapons.
‘Because there’s one trying
to get our attention,’ continued Ace, to a lack of interest. She was about to announce the arrival of Lady
Godiva mounted naked on a Dilly to get their attention when an angry Mike
turned up. His burns were less fierce
than they had been but he still looked slightly kippered, although his
colouring might have been due to anger.
His first sentences consisted entirely of swearing, with Ace taking
careful note of the colourful argot, before he got down to business.
‘Which galah’s responsible
for smashing up the town even more!
People have to come back here to live, you know, and you woke me up with
your noise - ’
Ooops.
Wait, What?
I couldn't pass this one by. Art!
NO! you can't use them for soup, you utter ghouls.
It seems that human remains do occasionally wash up on this shoreline, possibly from interred bodies in coastal caves, or a battle fought two thousand years ago at this spot in Glamorgan. The most likely solution is that the bones come from the victims of shipwrecks off this coast, going back to the 16th Century.
Finally -
I may pop down to the kitchen to sample the Sunday Stew and carve a slab off the clootie dumpling.
Pip pip!
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