YES THAT'S HOW IT'S PRONOUNCED
None of that South Canadian nonsense here. Although it is almost a quote from one of their films.
Okay, we know by now that Conrad's mind goes down some very strange rabbit holes, made all the odder the next day when I come across an acronym or name in my Book Of Notes and have no idea what I was thinking, or where I ended up on teh Interwebz.
Like yesteryon. There I was, plotting on the punishments to be meted out when I take over, when I decided to look an entry up in "Brewer's". Art!
Zebedee
Say hello to Zebedee, of "The Magic Roundabout", a children's program that was very peculiar, and which featured very little of a magic roundabout. It did have a gigantic snail, a hippy rabbit and a snippy dog.
Don't ask me what calamity befell Zebedee that him transformed into the world's cheapest cyborg, you just have to nod and accept that sort of thing on TMR.
Well well Kelvin Gosnell, there wasn't an entry in "Brewer's" for Zebedee, at least not under "Z". Ah. But there is an entry for "Magic Roundabout, The".
Of course this Intro doesn't end there, or it would be un-naturally short. Art!
An unusually restrained Eddie
Don't knock his dress sense or makeup until you, too, run 31 marathons on consecutive days*. Why is he here? Because Conrad is looking at Page 1,518 in his "Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable", which is where all the entries that start with "Z" begin. What was the old English for 'Zed'? Why, none other than 'Izzard'.
Whilst on the tail-end of the alphabet, there's also one of Conrad's favourite The Mars Volta tracks - "A Zed And Two Naughts", where the drummer pounds the ever-loving life out of his kit. Art!
Conrad, as his musings tend to, wandered onto other subject matter beginning with "Z" and recalled this work, which I think I've read, probably a library edition: "Z For Zachariah". Art!
It's supposedly aimed at Young Adults, and matey must have hated Young Adults, because it's miserably bleak. Why the title? Because "Z" is the last letter of the alphabet, and Zachariah is an applicably Biblical name for the narrator, who considers herself the last surviving member of Hom. Sap. Nuclear war, fallout, radiation and nerve gas have seen off all the other prior inhabitants of her neighbourhood. Then, one day, a stranger in a survival-suit enters the valley -
Let us now pick one of the stranger items on Page 1,518 -
"ZADKIEL": which is described as being from 'Rabbinical Angelology', which is a phrase I bet you never expected to hear today (me neither). Ol' Daddy Zaddy is the angel of the planet Jupiter. Art!
But hist! for there is more according to BDOPAF as Zadkiel was adopted as a pseudonym by the naval officer Richard Morrison when he published a book on astrology - the "Herald Of Astrology" in 1831 - I'm not making this up, honest - which was published in later years as "Zadkiel's Almanack".
Another work of fiction beginning with "Z"
There is mention on Page 1,519 of four different philosophers named "Zeno", and if we prod Art with the red-hot end of this pair of coal tongs -
This is the chap who was found guilty of conspiring against the tyrant Nearchus, which earned him a torture sentence. To spite the tyrant, Ol' Zen bit off the end of his tongue and spat it into the tyrant's face, which is shockingly unhygienic and the kind of stunt one can only perform once. Art!
Another Zeno, this time out of print. The last time I checked on Amazon it was in stock at £80.
That's enough of izzard for today.
More Of Project Icarus
If you recall, this was a contemporary version of the old 'Project Daedalus', where a list of updated criteria were given for the design of an unmanned interstellar probe. One of the updated criteria was the ability of the probe to decelerate shortly before arriving at the target star, enabling it to linger longer and acquire more data - the old PD design had the probe storming through Proxima Centauri at a significant fraction of c. Art!
This is the Starship 'Pegasus' design. There's no itemised breakdown, so Conrad is guessing that we're looking at it from the bow downwards to the stern, on account of there being four engine bells at the back, and what seems to be merely one at top. Not sure where the instrument packages are, unless they're those spherical objects? The big orange sheets are radiator fins, to get rid of excess heat, which is a design principle going back all the way to Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick's designs for 'Discovery'.
I was going to yark on about how there's no sense of scale here, until I came across the following. Art!
That's a big bird
"The War Illustrated Edition 188"
If you recall, this edition has a publication date of September, whilst the images contained within are from July, which is a longer delay that usual. By September the Teutons, or what was left of them, had abandoned France bar a few ports of no great import. Art!
There's an awful lot of romancing going on here, because the cold hard statistics acquired after the battles showed that Typhoon rockets were extremely inaccurate and destroyed very few tanks. Tanks, after all, are big metal boxes designed to take a lot of punishment. On the other hand, the Teuton trucks, half-tracks, cars, armoured cars, tankers and artillery were all very vulnerable, far more so than tanks. Not only that, the Teuton army depended largely on horsed transport, and Dobbin is neither bomb- nor bullet-proof. Nor were the Teuton stubble-hoppers. What tended to happen was that terrified Teuton tank crews would abandon their vehicles when Allied air attack threatened, which is still a loss if a passing squadron of Shermans then took over ownership.
"City In The Sky"
Arcology One is about to undergo 'de-orbiting', which sounds simple yet isn't. In fact it's a highly perilous undertaking which the Bernal sphere was never designed for, and the crew have to trust that the Doctor's calculations are as good as he claims.
Three hours
later the sphere suffered it’s first non-designed Inertial Input when MEV fired
up it’s gigantic interplanetary fusion motor, an engine intended to put a
one-thousand tonne spacecraft into Mars orbit.
At first the sphere’s denizens experienced a slight tremor, which slowly
grew to become a perceptible vibration, that also generated a dull, buzzing
roar. Loose objects rattled and fell. Not many, since nearly everything loose had
been glued into immobility. Vast creaks
and groans were heard and felt as the sphere flexed, a giant metallic beast
unused to motion, coaxed into a gradually descending orbit.
Earth grew
slowly bigger. More resonating sounds,
like those of a hammer tuning a bell, came echoing across the inner spaces of
the sphere. The ever-present tissue of
clouds interfering with vision between North End and South End slowly
disappeared. In fact, the vapours that
fell onto the giant tetrahedral structure supporting the sphere were destroyed
instantly thanks to the heat generated by the flexing girder structure.
Gravity, to
begin with, followed by friction and heating, sought to crush the sphere. The overall design fought back, aided by the
Doctor’s erected metal truss and the newly installed reinforcing girders that
redistributed stresses and shear forces, at the cost of straining the outer
walls. Alongside the roaring and tolling
came hideous squeals and shrieks as metal suffered.
A turbulent ride indeed.
Trouble At T'Mill
As the saying goes. You know, up until now it was perfectly acceptable for Ruffian generals to abuse their positions to accumulate bribes, embezzle funds and steal anything valuable not welded down with an armed guard over it. However, Putinpot seems to have gotten fed up with his incompetent thieves in uniform. Art!
Next year's Victory Parade tank
Finally -
Conrad is back in his big cardie today; it's been rather chilly and verrrrrry damp.
* Actually he missed one day due to illness so did 2 the next day.
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