The Scooby Factor

Let There Be No Doubt About It

Scooby Doo, the preternaturally intelligent and vocal Great Dane of the cartoon "Scooby Doo Where Are You" is a character for the ages.  Quite belying the stature of his species, he is a massive coward, a trait that resonates well with Conrad.  Art!

     There is an interesting theory about the various adventures the gang have, in that there has been a huge recession in South Canada, because all the backgrounds and settings are very down-at-heel, not to mention abandoned or creepy, wh

     ANYWAY by the end of each episode the supernatural threat has been revealed as a crook in disguise.  These chaps - I think they're universally male - are inevitably deprived of their mask and must all have been to the same Villain Apprenticeship Scheme, because they all pronounce -

"if it weren't for those meddling kids"

     Well well well, let us abruptly shift back to "The Aeneid", because if I've been making notes about it, you are jolly well get to hear about it, and no arguing.

     What is the connection between a South Canadian cartoon and the epic poem by the Roman poet Virgil?

     Meddling!

     I did inform you, way back earlier in the summer, that in this work there are activities going on at two levels: the affairs of mortal man, and the incessant interference with mortal affairs by the gods of Olympus - what you or I would call 'meddling'.  Art!

The meddlers Gods of Olympus

     Those are the gods, and there are also a whole host of other divine beings living it up on Olympus.

     So, when last we left them, the Trojans were undergoing a siege by the Rutulians, who had come to destroy this amphibious incursion, prompted by Juno, who is one of the arch-meddlers in this story.  For a goddess she could be extraordinarily petty and snippy.  Art!

     Here an aside.  Virgil describes the Rutulians attacking the Trojan ramparts with a 'tortoise' formation, which you can see above.  This, frankly, is an anachronism, because I'm positive the armies of 750 BC didn't have the shield type nor training to be able to manage this.  Art!

     Try making a turtle out of that.

     I shall gloss over lightly the gory details that Virgil goes into about the siege, presumably because his audience liked plenty of blood and thunder - well, apart from one item.  Bitias, a Trojan, is felled by "an artillery spear with an iron head a cubit long and a ball of lead in it's butt".

     Again, Conrad is pretty sure this is another anac

     ANYWAY AGAIN, the chief Latin captain, Turnus, gets inside the Trojan encampment amongst a throng of Trojans, and proceeds to kill everyone he comes across.  When he is the target of Trojan javelins, who but Juno steps in to deflect them? the meddlesome viper.  Art!

Turnus a.k.a. 'Chipmunk Cheeks'

     Here is where Apollo also intervenes, to counsel Ascanius (the son of Aeneas) to keep out of danger and preserve himself, except he appears in the person of Butes, an elderly and trusted retainer.  Then he vanishes, just to underline the point of his divine meddling.

     Jupiter has, by now, become aware of this battle taking place, and also that certain gods and goddesses are trying to fiddle with the outcome, so he places a moratorium on meddling.  This is bad for Turnus, who is now abandoned by Juno in the middle of the Trojan camp.  He has to take a header into the river that forms one flank of the encampment to escape.  Art!

Aeneas and Venus

     Venus, mother of Aeneas, cannot resist a little meddling to cause hostile spears and javelins to merely scrape her son, rather than turning him into a pincushion.

     For yes, Aeneas and his new allies turn up in the nick of time - which is a story for another day.

Hot Rails To Hell

Why, yes, this is a track by Blue Öyster Cult on their seminal "Tyranny And Mutation", but, as ever, that's not what this item is about.  Still - Art!

     No, you see mighty, mighty Prune60 over on Twitter has been posting another of her epic number-crunching Tweet threads, and this one is about a matter of peculiar import to Modern-day Mordor.  We have recently been whanging on about logistics, and this is where Ruffia and that subject intersect.  You see, Prune60 has been using the Ruffians own rail tonnage data to construct a comparative graph.  Art!

     This is incontrovertible proof that the Ruffian railway's ability to move freight is shrinking, and has been over the past six years.  Prune believes the rot set in from 2013 onwards, when the railway companies stopped doing their own engine maintenance and instead outsourced it.  This seems to be code in Ruffia for "embezzle the funds and ignore the problem" and it has come back to bite them in a major way.  A lot of these locos are over 20 years old, and are being run to excess.  Not only that, I understand that their actual power plant comes in large part from Siemens or General Electric, so any spare parts are now sanctioned.  Art!

     Another critical component: high-quality heavy-duty ball bearings, which are used in rolling stock ("wagons" to you and I).  Problem is, the only plant that produced same was Swedish-owned and immediately closed down post-Special Idiotic Operation.  Conrad remembers reading about this as being a minor problem in 2022; it has now become a major problem.

     There are intimations that the whole thing has gotten much, much worse just recently, so we may come back to this.

     Bring on the wheelie-bins of popcorn!

Further Proof That Sharks Are Our Friends

Yes, Conrad is still ploughing his lonely furrow.  Lonely, yet not solo.  O noes.  Art!

     This artist chap goes by the moniker of 'Fin Bowron', which might be taken as either a pun or proof his parents were awful.  Art

     It does look pretty cool, if you ask me, although your mileage might vary if you happened to be swimming or surfing and you saw this approaching at high speed.

Egadolinium!

Another random word that popped up in my head this morning, which I took the bother of writing down before forgetting it during the working day.  Art!

     There you have ₆₄Gd, one of the rare-earth elements.  It has strange magnetic properties associated with whatever temperature it's at.  Discovered in 1880 by canny Frenchman Jean-Charles de Marignac, it was named after the mineral 'Gadolinite' which was itself named after a Finn, chemist Johan Gadolin.

     Of interest is that, when in metallic form, it will absorb neutrons, so it is occasionally used as shielding in reactors or medical radiography equipment.

     The obvious question is, of course - obviously! - why on earth it popped into my mind as I popped out of bed.

A Record-Breaker

I haven't been commenting a great deal over Ukraine's drone campaign against oil infrastructure in Ruffia, mostly because it's been going on since January and there are strikes all the time.  However - first use today! - this one deserves a little fanfare.  Art!

     This must make Putinpot and his minions miserable.  Being able to effectively hit a target 1,600 miles away from launch means nothing, not even infrastructure in the east of Siberia, is safe.  It also means the list of potential targets that need defending has just increased, and that the Ruffian air defences seem to have more holes than a colander.  Art!

     They must have diverted around Moscow, given all the SAMs and radar and AA-guns and aircraft and electronic warfare kit there - mustn't they?  I mean - they can't have just sailed over Modern-day Mordor's capital, can they?

     Whoever should have stopped this from ever happening would do well to stay away from windows, and only drink bottled water after boiling it.