You Know Conrad By Now
OR AT LEAST YOU OUGHT TO because only being a reader of BOOJUM! will save you from the uranium mines and organ repositories when I take over <eyes glaze over as plans to ban ballfoot and musicals dance around>
ANYWAY you know what a pedantic hair-splitter I am, which concept seems to have appeared in the 16th century. Art!
Er - well, is it 'hard-boiled' or 'thick-eared'? There's your hair-splitting right there. Don't worry, we'll come back to this one.
ANYWAY I was pondering about what this Intro might turn out to involve, as I've not done any research on the fusion engine designs of "The Expanse" yet, and have been acquiring still more depressing economic data about Barad-Duh and Modern-day Mordor. Art!
It's raining. This happens a lot in This Sceptred Isle, yet we never get accustomed to being mildewed and wet. Perhaps because Hom. Sap. is an optimistic species and anticipates the morrow being bright and sunny.
Well, my thoughts then ran along the lines of "It's Raining Men", which we hilariously referenced on the blog when describing Modern-day Mordor's manpower shortage, as "It's Draining Men". It made me laugh. Art!
Actually, this song made me laugh, which, for a poisonous old rocker, is quite a feat. Note that the ladies involved are not today's bulimic primped, preened and autotuned sylphs, and more power to their elbows.
HOWEVER! and we all knew that word was coming, I want to explain how their entertaining fantasy would be terrible in real life.
First of all, from what height are these men falling? In an aside, I take it that none of them are under 18 as they are described as 'men' not 'boys', which probably gets around some potential problems thanks to laws about drinking. Art!
This is Durdle Door in Dorset, where the Death Divers Do Dangerous Deeds. It's about 200 feet high, for your information, and even though people jump into nice soft yielding water, they're doing it from over 30 feet, which is where the risks of fatal injury start to increase. An impact from this height can kill.
Okay! Now imagine that a panoply of men are being dropped from height; I don't think the Weather Girls bothered to estimate how low their cloudbase was, but we can assume 200 feet. Art!
Art! Get it right!
There are several questions about the mean distribution density of cloud-delivered males, and I don't think that there are any mathematical models dealing with what is, after all, a pretty niche area. Guesstimating the average 'area' occupied by a male upon landing as being two square metres, and that there are 1,000,000 square metres in a square kilometre, we can see that you need 500,000 males to rain upon a square kilometre to cover it completely. Or, in the words of the song, to get 'absolutely soaking wet'. One doubts that they meant with blood. Art!
Right, to completely cover the entire USA with rained men, because you don't know where you're going to need to get absolutely soaking wet, you would need 4,920,000,000,000 men, which is over 1,200 times the male population of Earth. Personally I think the Girls need to be a lot less ambitious. The state of Rhode Island might be more acceptable, as it would only need 1.5 billion men to cover it.
The smaller the area the more sustainable this concept of rained men becomes. If the Weather Girls confined their Wet Men Effect to Providence, the capital of Rhode Island, they'd only need 26,500,000 men to create a carpet. In fact, over time this 'carpet' would climb high enough that men falling upon it would merely be injured, not die.
Of course, I could be overthinking this .....
Learning 'Hard-Boiled'
Yes, Conrad is working away at "Farewell My Lovely" where we've only had 2 murders so far. The night is young.
So, I found a need to make notes about what Ol' Ray wrote so easily and succinctly about, since it may have made sense in 1940 yet not so much today 84 years later and an ocean away. Art!
This is what Marlowe calls 'Majolica'. Never heard it called that before. It's an Italian name for what we in This Sceptred Isle call 'Delft', being earthenware glazed with tin. Now we both know. Art!
This curious contrivance is an 'Electrolier', which Marlowe mentions in passing as he and his client drive down a street beginning to fall into seediness. One presumes it's a portmanteau version of 'Chandelier' and 'Electro'. Art!
They might not look it, but these are 'sandhogs'. Another slang term, this time for miners or construction workers going about their employment in The Big City.
So far there have been two cases for Marlowe, neither of which seems to be connected to each other - SO FAR1 because I bet Ol' Ray has their links intertwining all too soon.
"City In The Sky"
Things have gone very badly wrong for the evilllll alien Lithoi, who might now be regretting taking on that contract from an un-named third party.
However, whereas the virus could do nothing when pitted against metals
or ceramics, thermite could. And did. It
burnt a fist-sized hole into the very bottom of the baseships final bulkhead,
and then cascaded onto the propulsion units below, causing a slow
cascade-failure of the electromagnetic baffles that kept anti-matter granules
safely distant from normal matter. If
any of the Lithoi Bridge crew had remained alive, they might have been able to
institute an emergency engine de-coupling.
Over an hour after his escape, the Doctor’s thermite finally caused the
Lithoi base-ship’s propulsion units to explode, disintegrating everything that
remained inside the shell of the hull: structures, Lithoi, virus. The incredibly robust bases-hip’s exterior
didn’t suffer a single fracture.
Kirwin watched in what she recognised was described in literature as “horrified fascination”.
Arcology One had dangled lower and lower, until
her binoculars began to pick up ground data from terrain in the foreground and
she’d gone over to the Mark One Human Eyeball. Not long after that she’d
been dazzled when the Lithoi fired a weapon at practically point-blank range at
the sphere, repeatedly, destroying part of the braking parachute.
That caused the whole sphere to lurch and drop,
with a clash that echoed across the plains, sending debris cascading from the
shuddering arcology. A gigantic collar of water spumed up around the
lower column of the Lithoi ship, sent flying by transmitted shock – and,
amazingly, the whole structure began to subside, throwing up big muddy flurries
where hull merged into water.
Like a hammer and a nail.
The Fools! The Meddling Fools!
As though their ape brains could contain the secrets of the Krell!
No - wait - that's "Forbidden Planet", isn't it? Sorry, that's when the uncontrite Morbius is a bit preachy about the death of Doc Ostrow. I get real life and FP mixed up on occasion. Easily done. I don't suppose you'd like to read my 5,000 word monograph on how it - no? You're rather pour liquid glass over your eyeballs whilst drinking thallium lemonade? Art!
You mark my words. Do you want Sauron? BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU GET SAURON!
Doom, Gloom And The Elefant In The Room
Your Humble Scribe has been scribbling madly of late, annotating the vlogs from both "Joe Blogs" and "Inside Russia" as well as making notes of the mighty "Prune60"'s Tweets concerning the Ruffian economy. You may be ahead of me here, but the news is all bad, and getting worse, by the admission of Ol' Elvira herself. Art!
For your information, these are the Teuton 'Elefant' tank destroyers in their original design layout. They had an enormous gun, very thick armour, horribly unreliable engines and - no hull machine gun. This meant snide Sinister anti-tank squads of infantry could get up close with impunity and tackle them with Molotov cocktails or mines. Ooops.
I think the elefant in the room for the Ruffians is that they are now in the position of the Teuton tank destroyer, on a national scale as their oil refineries and depots get turned into the world's biggest barbecues. Art!
Look at that and weep, Putinpot - $100,000* per minute going up in smoke. Tee hee!
Finally -
Just come across a Twitter user with the handle "Himarsed" and statistics on Ruffian tank totals. With a name like that it would be rude to not read his Tweet. O sută de ani de sănătate bună**!
* No idea what the real total is, but the whole place stored $millions of fuel.
** Yes it's Romanian no I'm not telling you what it means.
No comments:
Post a Comment