Mything Balls

If That Wasn't A Proper Word Before, It Is Now

As before, if it ever turns up in a dictionary, Conrad wants royalties.  This Intro is another example of how Your Humble Scribe vanishes down the rabbit hole in search of content, because I'm so diligent and conscientious and digging is in my nature*.  

     Right, Conrad was pondering on oak again, it being the primary construction material used in the Royal Navy's ships of the line, and wondering what kind of damage it underwent  when hit by cannonballs.  Art!

Johnny Foreigner gets a good spanking.  STAND UP FOR KINGY!

     About the most diametrically-opposed version of naval warfare to our current version with missiles and drones and verrrry long-ranged artillery.  

     What's this?  An intriguing picture came up when I Googled 'Cannonball damage'.  Art!

     WoE?  For Lo! this is indeed the damage rendered by a cannonball.  After hitting and holing the house it ended up in a nearby car, where it's journey ended, fortunately with neither death nor injury resulting.  Art!

     Where on earth had it come from?  No, there is no time-travel involved.  There's a funny story about that, because back in 2007, a group of television presenters and experimenters were seeing about the ballistic and penetrative performance of cannonballs, working with metal ones and intending to move on to stone ones when they had established a data baseline.  Art!

     Yes, it was 'Mythbusters', one of my favouritest shows evah.  Somehow, one of their experiments had gone awry.  The first they realised was after firing their last cannonball of the day, when the San Francisco Fire Department turned up, asking if they'd been firing cannons at all -

     Art!

The article in question

     To put it in another perspective - Art again!

     Here you can see the cannon, pointed at the water barrels full of coloured water, there to demonstrate how effective the cannonball is, and also to retard it's progress sufficiently that it hits the breezeblock wall and plops gently to the ground for recovery.  Note also the protective earthern wall, which our Trans-Atlantic cousins call a 'berm', behind the target.  This is a substantial structure of considerable height and mass.  Yet in the high-speed there is no impact upon the water barrels, and no cannonball recovered.  Art!

Spoofing the opening credit sequence "Jamie, am I missing an eyebrow?"

     

     What happened?  O I thought you'd never ask!  You see, the cannon was incorrectly aimed and fired too high, thus missing the target.  Instead the cannonball hit the protective berm and ricocheted off it, having hit at just the right - or wrong- angle to bounce instead of embedding.  It then continued for over 700 yards, smashing through aforeseen house, across a motorway, bouncing off a roof and ending up in a van.

     I think this establishes that black-powder cannon were effective and dangerous.

     Conrad eventually went back to his original contention, about how damaging cannonballs were to the fabric of ships, and guess who'd been there previously?  Yes, 'Mythbusters'.  They had, seemingly, addressed the assertion that more injuries were caused by wooden splinters than by cannonballs.  

      Let me lay this out:

MYTH:The splinter fragmentation caused by a cannonball's impact with the wooden hull of a pirate ship can kill more pirates than direct impacts with the cannonball itself.

RESOLUTION: To fully confirm or bust the myth, the MythBusters used an authentic Civil War-era cannon. Through preliminary testing, they proved the Civil War cannon was significantly more powerful than the air cannon. However, when a cannonball was fired at the wooden wall, none of the splinters managed to penetrate the pigs with enough force to be lethal. Therefore, the MythBusters concluded getting hit with a cannonball was more deadly than the splinters it creates.

     Art!

Porky gets pummelled

    
     You'd think that was the end of it?  Well, no.  Not at all.  Conrad cheated in the picture above, this is from a separate test involving heavy-duty metal chain.  You see, there are a few criticisms of how the Mythbusters set up their wooden splinter damage test -

     Which is a story for another day.  Rest assured, mind, that we WILL come back to this.  O yes indeed.

Roboflop

Well well Linda Darnell, guess what?  Elgon Tusk discovered that behaving like a bottomhole in the global spotlight brings criticisms, and his fee-fees were hurt.  Poor man-baby.  Then Tesla's numbers tanked, as we posted these yesteryon if you want to check.  Briefly put, they're bad with a capital 'B'.  As if by magic or coincidence, Elong declared he was leaving DOGE.  Art!

     According to Elong, he will now be concentrating on his family - whoops, no, sorry, that's what disgraced politicians do when they get sacked, isn't it?  No, he will be concentrating on his 'Robotaxi' and AI instead when he leaves DOGE.  

     O Rly?  Art!

     This sounds like whistling in the dark.  There is a caption below that picture that I didn't copy but will add in now.

     Fee-fees still hurt!  Not only that, an independent financial analyst at GJH Research, called by wild coincidence Gordon Johnson, warned investors that it would take at least five to ten years for robotaxis to make a profit and added that chilling caveat " - if ever".  So, potentially ten years of pouring investment into a money pit that may never recoup said investment.  What a catch!

     Hence this item's title, with profound apologies to Peter Weller.

More About Oaks!

If you're like me then you simply CANNOT get enough about oaks, so here's one I copied and saved earlier, thanks to wild coincidence.  Art!

     

     Well well Kelvin Gosnell, who knew that sherry was aged in oak casks just as whisky is?  Once again I suspect that most of the flavour in sherry is imparted by the casks, which Conrad doesn't care about as he considers sherry to be a horrid sticky toxic substance best poured down the sink.  No judgement though.  Just FYI - 

How much do sherry casks cost?

Each cask is priced at £11,000 which includes a 10-year maturation period and insurance within the bonded warehouses on site at Annandale Distillery.

     I wonder if there's as big a scam market in sherry as there is in whisky?

Further Tee Hee!

Because Conrad is a terrible person, which he has long acknowledged, I just had to post this sidebar item from my news feed.  Art!

     You see, the 'Daily Mail' is one of the Tory tabloids, essentially the unofficial newspaper of the Conservative Party, and what makes this all the more delicious is their taking a certain degree of sadistic delight in criticising pool Elong, who blamed all his troubles on The Left.  No, Kaptain Ketamine, your assertion is wrong, all sorts of people are enjoying your Long Banana Skin.  If even what I call the 'Daily Malice' is agin you, things are Bad.

    Imagine if he goes back to merely being a plonker of a businessman.  I'd have so much less content to crow about.

"The War Illustrated Edition 207 May 25 1945"

These recent editions are very definitely dealing with the fag-end of the war in Europe, reporting from either occupied Germany or Northern Italy (we are deliberately ignoring the Sinisters).  Art!

     No, this is not London; it's Hamburg, in the heart of Germany, and a stark reminder that Germany had lost the war.  Doubtless this Teuton copper (and Herr Schickelgruber) would never have dreamed of this outcome when the Second Unpleasantness began in 1939.  Tee hee again!

GIBBER PANIC WIBBLE!

Good lord aloft, this cannot be.  Let me warn you, this is how "The Kraken Wakes" begins, with the narrator and his wife watching icebergs in the Channel. Art!

     Have we been invaded by the 'Bathies' without anyone noticing?  Is their sinister polar-ice-cap melting strategy already under way?  Lay in a supply of tinned food and big sharp knives, then get to higher ground I tell you!

*  Did you see what I - O you do.