I'm Flagging

Yes! Another Ambiguous Title!

Because we are dealing with BOOJUM! here, and we sneer at logic, common sense and passing the port to the port.  Also musicals, but more of that later.

     Okay, what public protests of late are you, gentle reader, aware of?

     There are a number of South Canadian students objecting on their academic campuses, where they might get a gentle slap on the wrist, or even an un-gentle slap on the wrist, for obstruction, littering and passing the port to starboard.  Art!

     I think that's Ward Bond facing the camera second from port.  This is when John Ford shot "They Were Expendable", which is rather a shocking title when you think of it, about how things were not, originally, going well for the South Canadians in the Pacific theatre.  This, gentle reader, is what malicious martial mayhem looks like, even if it is through a cinematic lens.  No, it doesn't have anything much to do with today's title - do you have a problem with that on top of not paying to read this scrivel?

     Where are we leading with this amalgam of contumely?  O I'm so glad you asked!  Because, a considerable distance away from quiet palm-fringed university campuses, there are protesters who risk enduring truncheons, riot shields, tear gas, water cannon and rubber bullets.  Art!

     This is a protest in Tbilisi, Georgia, and by "Georgia" I mean that independent nation in the Trans-Caucasus, not one of the palm-fringed locales in South Canada.  Nor that British protectorate in the South Atlantic.  Art!

     This is the Georgian national flag, which you might mistake for an English patriot's extremist vision.  But no: this is the Georgian flag, which came into existence in medieval times, and which was cruelly suppressed in the nineteenth century when Ruffia invaded and occupied the country - a phrase encountered frequently in the nineteenth century.

     Conrad is not going to try and explain the millennia-old history of Georgia, where grapevines and wine were deemed national symbols of resistance against their Ottoman oppressors, who - one can only stand back in gob-smacked amazement at this - deemed wine to be counter-revolutionary and evillll and blasphemous.  Art!

     This is the Georgian alphabet, which we have mentioned on a couple of other occasions.  Yes, it looks like a language out of Tolkein, and you cannot directly relate it to English, as it has 33 characters as opposed to 26.  Nevertheless, this is the language and alphabet that protesters in Tbilisi and Batumi are using to express their distinct dislike (I may be understating their actinic hatred a tad) of recent parliamentary measures in the Georgian parliament.  Their government, you see, is trying to pass a law that favours Mordor about 'foreign agents' and would mean Sam and Frodo get thrown into prison as agents of Gondor.  Or close to that.  Art!

     This is a consistent theme at protests: the Georgian flag alongside the EU flag, because these people want as little to do with Ruffia as possible.  Conrad wonders if they got themselves into that horrid musical imbroglio known as "Eurovision", because that would really put the rabid cheetah amongst the vampire chickens.

     Remember, პუდინგები  , that the flag of Saint George implies a common heritage, be it ever so distant, and the orcs wielding power in Tbilisi need to keep an eye over their shoulders from now on.  A 'Dragon', after all, can be an institutional one as much as any four-footed one that breathes fire.  Art!

     There have been a couple of occasions where the Georgian police and riot police have drawn back from naked confrontation with protestors, so we shall see if their motivation is flagging or not.

     Which is where we came in!

Intelligent Does Not Mean Clever

Conrad, for example, has an officially-recorded IQ of 187, and yet was defeated by a card slot and barrier at Man Fly Place a couple of weeks ago.  Art!

     Yes, that only goes to prove my point.

     ANYWAY I came across an article on Quora, where an engineer had contracted with a lawyer, who came highly recommended and whom performed excellently in the legal arena.  Eventually she bit the bullet and asked if Matey McGuffin could check out her laptop, as it was running really slooooooooowly when she tried to open Microsoft Word <cue 101 insults about Word>.

     So he did.

     What did he find?  Art!

   

     4,000 pages of text.  Madam had not bothered to ever create a new document, just added a page break at the end of whatever Original Number One Document she'd been working on and then beginning a new page.  This, to put it in perspective, is the equivalent of a full-length novel.
     Once again for the hard of reading: intelligent does not mean clever.

"The War Illustrated Edition 187"

We now skip to the middle pages of this issue, where the editors usually placed a montage in a different monochrome, and today we have what I believe is called a 'doozy'.  Art!

     This, as you may not be aware, is a Teuton merchant marine convoy off the southern coastline of Norway, and it has come unstuck in desperate fashion.  The aircraft in question and in a couple of pictures, are RAF Beaufighters, which were armed with at least four 20 mm cannon.  One shell from such a weapon will make a fist-sized hole in whatever it hits; now look at the intersecting trails of gunfire playing over this convoy.  By the time these birds of bullet had left ,one of the ships had been sunk, another was sinking and a third was on fire.  Art!

     This one is packing a torpedo.  Meaning someone is in for a very, very bad hair day.

"City In The Sky"

The Doctor, somewhat reluctantly, is preparing to beard the dragon in it's lair, metaphorically speaking.

‘So – you intend to fly this thing into the alien’s base?’ enquired Captain Oswald.  He had been the wearer of that first American spacesuit and curiosity, not to mention standing orders concerning Doctor John Smith, led him to track the small man down.

     Sphere residents – he didn’t know if they were “crew” or “passengers” or simply “tenants” – had pointed him to a township overhead called Broughton.  There were at least a hundred people hard at work when he got there, all trying to sort out exactly what to do in order to de-orbit Arcology One, he guessed.  A stand had been erected on a makeshift podium of tables, supporting a big display monitor that currently showed “61.53%”.  The diminutive Doctor Smith sat off in a corner, with a few spectators briefly hanging around to see what he was doing.

     Running a flight-simulator on a laptop.  No  -  wait, that inset view was of Earth from orbit.  At that point the officer had asked plainly what Doctor Smith was doing.

     ‘I am just unlocking the docking clamps that keep Dart Three secured to Arc One.’  Amongst the display clutter on the screen, a small green rectangle blinked red repeatedly before disappearing.  ‘Excellent.  After which I am going to pilot it to an interception of the Lithoi’s base.’

     And the captain had made his statement.  He had years of experience flying M3’s MEV.

     I would like to point out that this is a good 10 years before drones were a thing.

Finally -

Rathlin Island's sole business and shop has been exonerated from a phishing attack that emptied their accounts, which is all the more appreciated since Rathlin Island is a speck in the ocean off the north coast of Northern Island.  Art!

     Phew!