I Keep Finding More Items About Steel
How wonderful it is to have a head full of miscellaneous memories, that all jostle together and generate blog content. The downside to this is never getting a second's peace from my imagination, which keeps working even when asleep.
ANYWAY I'd better move on before I start describing my dreams, which would be - an experience. Possibly not a good one. Art!
This is by way of a semi-tangent, introducing H₂O into a close conjunction with steel, even if it is in frozen form. Before you ask, yes, Conrad does have this work, and has read it, but only the once when it's so large a second reading is almost de jure.
Now, we have been going on recently about steel mills and iron foundries, where you have enormous masses of red-hot or white-hot molten metal being hoiked around like a wheelbarrow of spare parts. There is always the potential for disaster in such an environment, and Your Humble Scribe came across a Youtube vlog detailing lots and lots of such events. Which is great for me, if much less so for those on the factory floor. Art!
No, Dougal, it's not a small bucket nearby and a small man a long way off. It's a giant travelling pot with a puny human nearby for scale. The pot carries tons of scrap metal, which is going to be dumped into the smelting furnace, which is that ocean of orange intensity. Neither the narrator nor the vlog details unimportant inconsequential things like location or date, so you'll have to imagine those in yourself. Go on, a little gentle mental exercise won't hurt you. Art!
The pot prepares to pour
What happens next is known as a 'wet charge', because scrap metal is quite likely to have been left outside, accumulating snow or rainwater, before it gets melted into ingots for future use. Art!
You can't tell thanks to the contrast and narrow focus, but the canny-yet-puny human in the foreground got into his protective booth before this occurred, not bothering to move beyond an amble, so either he anticipated this explosion or it was SOP.
What happened is that the water present in the load of scrap metal came into contact with molten steel at a temperature of 1,500º Centigrade. You just know from a number that large that bad things will follow. The water instantly turns into super-heated steam and expands to about 10,000 times it's original volume, creating an explosion as you see above. Art!
Rather than a effulgence of sparks - which are bad enough since they fly around at 1,500º C - this is a real explosion, which is large enough to knock the camera around. By the time it comes back onto station and into focus, the pot is very much the worse for wear. Art!
I did find a Reddit thread about this video clip, which is 7 years old and still didn't identify where or when this happened, only that the bucket (not 'pot') was destroyed in the accident. Not very surprising! One ex-foundry worker noticed that the puny human was only wearing secondary-protective gear, which would partially (a terrifying caveat) protect from overall burning as well as the head and eyes. Art!
Another ex-steelmill employee said matey would need to be wearing the above to be safe: a full aluminium suit with tanked oxygen to protect against toxic gasses.
You know, I think the Mordor Tourist Board now have their target audience for recruitment into the Wasteland Workforce. Or would that be "Worcforce"?
Conrad is not sure if it's possible to refine and locate where this accident occurred, bar searching for "Electric Arc Furnace Wet Charge". That's the problem with a video clip, you can't reverse-image search it and see where it was purloined from, because people do steel*.
Further Iron-y
This is very old news, so you young ragamuffins and whoppersnappers (like whippersnappers but larger) may not be aware that the Ruffians, back when they were the Sinister Union, loved loved loved Margaret Thatcher, whom they called "Nasha Masha", or "Our Maggie". Art!
Further to our current trends with metallurgy, she was known in This Sceptred Isle as the "Iron Lady", which is probably what attracted the Ruffians to her - traditionally they enjoy being dominated by a 'Big Man', known as a "Vozhd" - so her mindset, personality and behaviour had them fainting in coils. Let us depict her with a caricature. Art!
BOOJUM! can go one better. Art!
No, it's not a minimalistic Gerald Scarfe cartoon. It does have a connection with Ruffia, and their current Malyi Vozhd - Art!
Sorry, I couldn't resist. Mag The Hag, as Conrad christened her, for he loathed her with a passion, detested the Sinister Union quite as much as I. Looking at this chart of the anaemic ruble bleeding out, she'd have been positively gleeful. The thing is, since the Ruffian Central Bank stopped purchasing foreign currency as of 28/11/2024, the ruble's value SHOULD have stabilised.
Well, it hasn't. This is it going into freefall, as of 8th December 2024.
Gosh, what other event happened on 8th December 2024? <racks brains>.
Ruble to hit 150 to the dollar by 1/01/2025?
"The War Illustrated Edition 199 2nd February 1945"
The milieu seems to have been one of snow and ice and water, as the unpleasant winter of 1945 ground on. Although things seem unprecedently grim, grey and soggy in the European theatre, this is partly due to enormous numbers of people being forced to spend time outdoors at the worst time of the year. Art!
Gay Paree. Ah, the innocent headlines of an earlier age.
Our Sojourn With Mister Wrightson
I got fed up with the original item title, so here we are. For Your Information, I did due diligence and #45 The Barbarian is not available to view on teh Interwebz, so we shall go instead with #46 Spellbound. Art!
What we seem to have here is a wizard summoning a demon, which is pretty much par for the course when it comes to wizards and demons. The demon here, however - that word again! - seems to be rather in a testy mood, and not inclined to serve the wishes of Mister Roy. Given that Mister D. Mon has a lot of muscles and plenty of talons, Roy had better be on his toes about observance and magic circles.
"Delilah"
Because of the lyric "WHY WHY WHY!" Art!
It seems there is another "Lord Of The Rings" in the offing, due for release next year, which Conrad is not looking kindly upon. In answer to the "WHY WHY WHY?" I can surely come up with another response. Art!
Finally -
Off to bed before my blood pressure spikes dangerously high. Once again, BAH!
* Ouch.
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