The Sinister Susurrus Of Stacked Spelt

Don't Worry, All Will Become Clear

Unless it doesn't.  Okay, eventually we are going to be dealing with a dreadful doom that I'll bet you never considered before today, and it has nothing to do with lexicography or bees.  Art!

     'Spelt': as defined by my Collins Concise, "A species of wheat that was formerly much cultivated and was and was used to develop present day cultivated wheats."  So, we've got that sorted out.

     Ah, yes, "Susurrus".  It's a real word I'll have you know, as if I'd make words up <coughcough>.  "To make a whispering or rustling sound", and believe me, several hundred tons of spelt on the move will make a rustling sound.  Art!

     There's a television series of this name, which I haven't seen.  You may be interested to know that the lead heroine is taken directly from the novels, rather than being a casting director's inversion.  Conrad has read the trilogy of novels that this is based upon and can't remember that much about them.  Reasonably entertaining but I'm pretty sure you could have condensed them into a single one.

     ANYWAY I'm trying to introduce a concept here, that of a silo.  Art!

     There you go, old-fashioned farm grain silos, used for storing - grain.  These structures typically have ladder access to the dome, where there is a hatch to monitor the grain being stored.  At the base of the silo's interior there is an auger, which carries the stored grain outside for transport onward.  Art!

Free of spelt

     The grain is mechanically carried up to the top of the silo in an elevator and dumped inside, for which Farmer Brown gives thanks, as his grandfather used to have to do it by hand.  So, you might call all those hundreds of tons of grain 'stacked', if we use a little poetic licence.

     Where does the 'Sinister' part come in?  O I thought you'd never ask!

     You see, a farmer can't just dump five hundred tons of grain in a silo and leave it.  No, it needs inspection every so often to ensure it's in good condition, not full of insect vermin and also free from mould.  If it's put into the silo when damp, for example, you can get it binding together.

     THIS IS DANGEROUS!  Art?

     A 'crust' forms on the top of the stored grain which looks perfectly normal but which cannot support any weight, at all.  The hollow is formed when grain is removed from the bin, and as shown above, any trespass on bridged grain results in complete immersion in grain.

     Then there is the 'stacked' variant, where grain adheres to the side of a silo in a mass that cannot be extracted via the auger.  Attempting to remove this from inside the silo is - DANGEROUS!  Art?

Hit so hard his hat came off

     You may be wondering about the practicalities of being immersed in a body of spelt.  The first practicality is DON'T LET IT HAPPEN!  Grain is not water and you will not be buoyant in it.  It takes a matter of 4 seconds to become deep enough in grain that you cannot get out as it flows, and - Art!

     So it's not possible to 'swim', float, climb or walk out of a mass of speeding spelt, which practicality will probably be the last thing you ever think of, were it to happen to you.

     Not only that, there is also the danger of 'spinal gap' if you attempt to rescue a person from flowing grain if they are at waist level or lower in the grain.  This is due to the force needed to extract them, that being 400 lbs of pull, which is sufficient to separate their spinal column.

     There you go, I bet you never realised how DANGEROUSLY EXCITING being a farmer could be!

     One last thing.  When attempting to cut open a silo to rescue a person trapped under grain, always make two holes on opposite sides of the silo with your chainsaw or cutting torch, otherwise you risk the silo collapsing due to uneven shear stresses.  Art!

Back To "The Aeneid"

I will jump back in time a tad here, as Virgil goes off on a rather strange tangent to the main story in Book Nine, as the Rutulians have just established a siege line all around the Trojan's encampment.

     Let us introduce Euryalus and Nisus, two strapping Trojan youths who were <ahem> friends with benefits.  I'm not sure if there are any depictions of them.  Art?

Foreshadowing that it won't end well

     These two come up with the brilliant idea of sneaking out of the Trojan camp and running amok amidst the (mostly drunk) Latins.

     That's the plan.  There was no Plan B.  Heck, there's hardly even a Plan A.

     So, out they venture, and Virgil gets in plenty of gory descriptions of decapitations and black gore running on the ground as they quietly hack their way through the enemy lines.  They appear to have gotten rather far from the camp, because when they are suddenly surprised by a Rutulian horse patrol, they dodge into a nearby wood.  Had not Euryalus being wearing a burnished Rutulian helmet as a trophy, they might have got away - except that the cavalry see it reflecting and follow,

     Unfortunately for them, these Latins know the local woods intimately and hunt them down.  Both are killed, and they could hardly expect otherwise given the trail of bodies they left behind.  Art!

Wearing the fatal helmet and not much else

     What they could more usefully have done, rather than indulge in hack and slash, was make their way to Evander and Aeneas and inform of the Rutulian siege.  But, as I said, hardly even a Plan A.

"The War Illustrated Edition 190"

Let's see what Conrad can pontificate about this fortnight's issue.  Art!

          Yes, the fighting was bitter indeed, when there was no need for it to have been.  The South Canadian paratroop commander, General Gavin, decided not to capture the bridge in the very first immediate instance, but to instead go into action on the Groesbeek Heights, miles from the bridge itself, which gave the grateful and rather surprised Teutons time to reinforce their garrison before and on the bridge itself.  

     What you see here at upper port is a glider disgorging a Jeep cargo, with a fair bit of damage to the underside.  Then there's the Nijmegen Bridge itself post-capture, and at bottom a column of British armour covered with South Canadian paratroopers.

The Biter Bit

Conrad had never heard of the Australian telephone company Optus before yesteryon, and I'm willing to be none of you who don't hail from the Antipodes had heard of it, either.  Art!

     Or, "No", in this instance.  You see, Optus suffered a massive outage last year, when their routers went down under an avalanche of new routing data that they simply couldn't cope with.  

     Ooops.

     The problem could only be solved by engineers visiting each router in person to re-set them.  Given that Oz is a mighty big country, this took a long time.  Art!

     This is the ex-CEO of Optus, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin.  During the Parliamentary investigation and cross-examinations, it came out that she stayed in touch during the emergency because she habitually carried about SIM cards from rival telephone companies in order to overcome her own company's outages.

     This is why she is now the ex-CEO.

     

O Delicious Schadenfreude!

The only dish you can gorge on without ingesting calories as well.  I'm getting in more popcorn to scarf whilst annotating another 'Joe Blogs' vlog.  Art!

     In case you were on the Moon, the Ruffian Wealth Fund is the $600 billion rainy-day fund that Putinpot stupidly split between Ruffian and Western banking institutions, thus cutting it to $300 billion immediately.  It has been propping up the ruble, the monthly deficit and paying for special one-off strategic projects; exactly $0.00 will have gone to civilian infrastructure.  Art!

Like dams, for example

Finally -

Your Humble Scribe began to make a list of manufacturers whom build locomotive power plants, and the list rapidly reached 15, before I stopped.  Is teh Interwebz confusing the construction of locomotives with their engines? or are the two not mutually exclusive?

     We may come back to this.