I've Had To Phrase That Carefully
"When The Donkey Was Horny" could be misconstrued, as could "When The Ass Was Horny", because I know what fearsome perverts you lot are. Furthermore, if I were to clarify and explain that this was about "Buridan's Ass" there would undoubtedly be wrinkling of foreheads and expressions of puzzlement, and not a few of you would ask for pictures of her behind so you can make an informed judgement. Lechers. Art!
Put a pin in that, we'll come back to it. For your information, JOHN Buridan was a fourteenth-century philosopher and we have no reliable evidence about the pertness or otherwise of his posterior. What he came up with after a long weekend's drinking (perhaps) was the aphorism of a donkey situated equidistant between two equal-sized piles of hay. The donkey has no basis for choosing one over the other and so -
It starves to death.
Sorry about the rather grim ending. That's what happens when one gets impaled on the horns of a dilemma. Art!
It's not a situation that would ever exist in reality. Imagine a farmer going to the bother of weighing out hay with a gram scale, and measuring how far apart those piles were with a millimetre ruler. Then tethering the donkey at exactly half-way.
What would happen is that the donkey is either left- or right-handed, and would choose thus.
"Ah, but what if it's ambidextrous!" I hear you quibble. "Resolve that!"
Conrad seriously doubts there are ambidextrous asses in the world - but okay, challenge accepted. The donkey would get hungrier and hungrier as it swaps attention between both piles of hay, to the extent that it's hunger reaches a level where it just goes for the pile it's looking at in that very instant.
Your Humble Scribe also notes that this hay-baiting would need to be done indoors, to minimise the risk of wind blowing away hay from one pile and thus invalidating the experiment. Art!
To be on the safe side you'd also need overhead lighting, to ensure both piles are illuminated equally. Hmmmm this experiment is getting rather elaborate, isn't it?
ANYWAY you may be wondering about the "Starry Trex" picture we opened with. This is because Conrad awoke today with a song on his lips the word "Sarpeidon" on his lips.
'Sounds like a city of the ancient world, perhaps one of the satrapies of Persia or a Greek colony in Sicily" I mused. Art!
Sarpeidon: established 345 BC by Argive settlers
Ah - no. Sarpeidon is in fact the sole planet of the Beta Niobe system. Nothing to do with Greece or Persia. The UFP starship 'Enterprise' turns up at Sarpeidon to warn the inhabitants that Beta Niobe is about to pop, and pop in a mere matter of hours ('pop' being an astronomical term for 'turn supernova').
Conrad The Hair-Splitting Pedant narrowed his eyes at this plot development. We don't get a total for the population of Sarpeidon, just that it's an Earth-type class M world, which, if Art will put down his bowl of anthracite -
This planet can easily accommodate many millions of inhabitants. What was the Enterprise going to do, impart the bad news, wave a cheerful goodbye and vamoose? because it cannot evacuate them all.
No, this is not the horned donkey dilemma. KEEP READING!
Okay, the Titular Trio of Kirk, Spock and McCoy beam down to The Library, where they discover the planet's sole survivor, Mister Atoz, and the 'Atavachron', which is a variety of time-portal. This is where the plot convolutes somewhat, as it's explained that the entire population of Sarpeidon has been 'chronovacked' into the past. Art!
O my, Art has developed another crush
This is the very easy-on-the-eyes Mariette Hartley, playing 'Zarabeth'. Why on earth Sarpeidon she'd want to live in an ice age 5,000 years in the past is anyone's question, but it did give the costume designers an excuse for a fur bathing suit. Nor is that all. Art!
Well, locking him up makes sense, as the alternative is locking up all your women.
Now, can anyone see a problem with sending millions of people back centuries or even millennia in time, and keeping them there? Don't forget, a planetary population will increase over time, so you're going to be significantly increasing earlier populations. Anyone? Art!
Don't bother with the films. The short story this is based on is only a few pages long so most of the cinema version is Padding. SPOILER ALERT! In the story, a time-travelling hunter in prehistoric times accidentally steps off the time-neutral pathway and crushes a butterfly. When the party returns to their present, this minute event's ripples across millions of years have resulted in a political upheaval.
Multiply this effect by many millions and you begin to see what turmoil could be wrought by interfering with the past. There's every possibility that The Library might cease to exist, and - this is where things get whirly - the Atavachron might not have been invented. Art!
"Please, Captain Kirk - stop Conrad from analysing it!"
The Sarpeids don't have a choice here, according to the plot, as they lack any form of spaceflight and cannot thus evacuate that way. Therefore they have to take a chance on not mucking up the now, perhaps by whanging people into the past as quickly as possible, so any time-ripple effects don't have time to goose the works. THIS is the donkey's horned dilemma.
HOWEVER - there we go again - what if you, as a contemporary Sarpeid, don't want to give up your indoor toilets, central heating and double-glazing? What's to stop you getting sent back 10 years into the past, then turning up at The Library and getting sent back 10 years again?
Of course, I may be over-thinking this .....
Progress Is Being Made!
Conrad took advantage of the longer daylight hours yesteryon to carry on laying out the counters on my West European Map from "The Great War In Europe Deluxe". To make things a lot simpler I have completely ignored the Eastern European Map and won't be putting anything on the Italian Front part of the WEM. Art!
Brown are British, Blue are French. I've allocated 15 counters to the British 'Available Units' box, including all the Australian and Canadian counters. Next will be placing the German counters. Note the empty map at bottom - that's the Italian Front. This being the 1918 Scenario, the South Canadians are due in at some point, the date being a moveable feast.
"City In The Sky"
Ace and Captain Kirwin are attempting to stay out of trouble.
Kirwin looked impressed at the conjectural
leap, less so at the subsequent revelation.
‘Okay. A flying eye. That’s one of the stealth-enabled robot jets
these lizards use, right?’ She sucked
her lower lip, thinking. Behind her, and
in the murdered hamlet of Forrest, lay all the evidence she needed that these
alien craft were deadly. The enormous,
skinned, stinking carcass of the dead monster crocodile lying in the Euclan
streets proved how deadly a flying eye was: they could probably vapourise a
human being in less than a second.
‘Just one?’ she asked. Ace
nodded. Kirwin cast around with the
binoculars again, seeing if the flying eye was trying to sneak up on them. The baseship lay too far away to resolve,
only the gently undulating plains beyond their sentry post on the dunes outside
Eucla were visible all the way to the horizon.
False-colour digital landscape in strident primary tones spread out to
east and west, without anything moving; a vista in stasis.
‘I don’t think – AAHH!’ she yelped as the flying eye suddenly jumped
vertically into vision, a lenticular blue-white blur against the red and purple
of the terrain, close enough to touch.
Cringing back for a second in panic, Kirwin realised that the device was
actually at least five kilometres away.
‘What! What!’ hissed an excited
and nervy Ace. Kirwin gestured
frantically at the big green box that lay behind them.
‘Get the launcher out. Quickly!’
Oooops. I did say 'attempting'.
Conrad Is Unsure
NO! I still hate all musicals. That's not going to change, and if the blog ever says otherwise, you have my permission to vapourise the alien shape-shifter whom has usurped my position.
No, I mean this. Art!
Don't mention "Rocky"
At least he's not a Ruffian. That would be a bitter pill to swallow.
Finally -
Conrad has already made his Sunday Stew as of Saturday. I still intend to waltz lightly down to Lesser Sodom to see what's going cheap and to up my step count.
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