As With Most Things In This Life
'Dangerous' can be a matter of degree, in that too much of a good thing can kill you most extremely dead. Take water as a prime example. It may be an intermittent nuisance as it drips from a leaky tap, or falls upon you from the heavens every day for three solid months as in This Sc
ANYWAY that same H₂0 is going to cause destruction and mayhem on a massive scale as a tsunami or part of the component of a hurricane. Art!
We did mention this film before, as it was based on a real life incident where a freighter loaded with 264,000 bottles of whisky ran aground and partly sank in war-scoured Perfidious Albion. This film is set in 1943, not the real 1941, and features 660,000 bottles of whisky. The ship is dubbed the 'SS Cabinet Minister' rather than the real 'SS Politician', but the doughty conflict between the local islanders and HM Customs and Excise is reflected accurately. Art!
You might be forgiven for thinking that the whisky is the dangerous liquid in this case, and you'd be half right, as it's not something Conrad cares to drink himself. I prefer fluids that won't strip paint or run an engine. No, the dangerous liquid in this case is the sea, which in the waters off the Hebrides is not to be taken lightly, and (like whisky) frequently has rocks in it. Art!
For your information, the wreck of the SS Politician is still visible and diveable to in the waters off Barra. Just so we're clear, any bottles of whisky you find will be unfit for human consumption - another dangerous liquid. Art!
Yes, this is potentially a dangerous liquid if you spill it when fresh out of the tap or geyser or probe or whatever they call the dispensing spigot (you can tell Conrad is a stranger to coffee shops).
However - we are returning to Fiscally Faithless Friend of yesteryon's Intro, the manager trying to make life miserable for her employee who earned considerably more than her - SIN (Sardonically Indigent Narrator, I think). SIN, as you remember, could decide their own work hours. Art!
SIN got into the habit of collecting a glass of fruit juice en route to his cubicle of a morning, which FFF spotted and decided to spitefully spit on the spot. Thus there came a management edict "LIQUIDS ARE DANGEROUS" and forbade them from being brought into the office.
This became cutting FFF's throat to spite her neck, because SIN pointed out that FFF got three bespoke coffees delivered to her desk daily. Since "LIQUIDS ARE DANGEROUS" with no exceptions for management, FFF had to take unpaid leave totalling an hour per day to get her caffeine fixes. Over the 11 months SIN was in position this totalled 220 hours unpaid leave for FFF.
Remember SIN's being able to sort out their own work hours? They simply sat in the food court, sipped their glass of fruit juice and started thirty minutes later. "LIQUIDS ARE DANGEROUS" especially to idiots in manglement positions. Art!
This photograph gives you an idea of how wide the Rhine was, it being one of the major water barriers in the European theatre of war, and which the Teutons hoped to hide behind, given that they didn't have the ability to construct defences miles-deep any longer. The Varsity airborne 'lift' got over the problem of a dangerous opposed river crossing by going over the dangerous liquid in question, rather than upon it or beneath it or in it. Art!
The BBC article laments that relatively few people know of Operation Varsity (or Operation Plunder, the amphibious assault across the Rhine) because it came so close to the end of the Second Unpleasantness; just six weeks after it, the war in Europe was over, with the British, Americans, Canadians, French and Poles having won it, with a minor assist from the Sinisters*. O and the Romans and Yugoslavs.
Genuinely Sad News
It's taken a verrrrrry long time for the artists who bedeck the covers of sci-fi books to get acknowledgement, even if some of us nerds were able to recognise and distinguish a Chris Foss from a Bruce Pennington early in our mis-spent youth.
So, now we here on the blog acknowledge the passing of Chris Moore, a British artist of immediately distinctive style. Art
 |
| Chris, totally rocking the Gandalf look |
Let me just Google and see what we can see. Art!
Yessss! I've got this knocking around in my bookcases somewhere. Notice how Chris works in the ziggurat from "Blade Runner" in the background, and the rather ambiguous young 'lady' in the foreground - is that a helmet or her head? Art!
Gully Foyle in all his tigerish splendour. You may wonder why Chris didn't focus on jaunting or the war between the Inner and Outer Planets, but all artists who are commissioned for TSMD end up doing Gully's face, it's an irresistible challenge for artists. Art!
This one is sitting in Bookcase Six not three feet from where I'm typing this. Art!
An incongruously bright and cheery cover for one of the most downbeat and iconoclastic sci-fi works ever, and Chris must have known this if he's got down accurate technical details of spaceship design as described in the text.
Bucking The Trend
Amongst all the horror stories about relationships and people and marriages on Youtube's Reddit compilations, it's a welcome relief to come across one that ends on a positive note. Art!
The brother of a poster was on an enormous salary in his early twenties (good job in IT), owned his own house and car and was single and looking. Enter the prospective wifey, who had dropped out of education at 16 and already had a child. Brother worried about the kind of vibes as seen above.
However, the marriage is stable and long-lasting, and both Wonder Wifey and child turned out to be jolly decent people, more interested in a relationship than $$$.
THINGS EXPLODING!!
I'm not going to apologise for wheeling out two exclamation marks, we need to make a point here about high explosive and making a bigger bang. Art!
The trick here is to collapse the buildings into their own 'footprint' so there is no collateral damage. Their supporting infrastructure will have been whittled away progressively over time to make the collapse a certainty, and Conrad suspects the intermediate charges going off at different heights are to prevent the whole structure settling relatively intact and possibly toppling. Not what you want! Why drop them separately? Perhaps to limit the amount of debris kicked up, as that middle block would take rather a pounding as the two alongside crumple like egg cartons.
Conrad Chefs It
Your Modest Artisan has long had a tub of tahini in the cupboard, which he got more in the spirit of curiosity than cuisine, but which he remembered about yesteryon. What about making some hummus? I asked myself, and the answer came back "Why not?" as it turned out we had all the ingredients. Art!
The secret is apparently in the order ingredients are processed in, which I stuck to and the end result is quite pleasing. Now all I need are pitta breads to eat it with. I wonder - do we have a bakery recipe for them? Or is that going slightly over the top? Conrad only remembers baking pittas once, and they weren't a great success. Like profiteroles, they are much better bought than created.
Finally -
A resounding BAH! as it appears Tesla stocks have rebounded again, which I can't be bothered depicting with a picture. However - that word again again! - I do have a couple of other torrid tales of Tesla trauma, which I shall wheel out perhaps tomorrow, as in the case of making Elong Tusk cry, less is more. Or perhaps lots and lots isn't enough. We shall see.
* It was actually a major assist, I just like to annoy their lineal descendants the Ruffians.
No comments:
Post a Comment