We Are Exploiting The Hades Out Of That Film
Since this will be the 3rd blog entry dealing with it, just in a lot less detail than yesteryon and earlier.
If you're unfamiliar with the film itself, then be aware that it begins with a long shower of asteroid fragments impacting various sites in New York, Philadelphia, Newfoundland and Paris. Art!
This gives you an idea of how large - or, actually, how small - these meteors are, and what happens if they hit a large city. You may be ahead of me here, but it's nothing good. Art!
For one thing, property values would drop significantly, and there would be far fewer tourists. We will overlook just how these meteors managed to be 18 days quicker in arriving than 'Dottie' itself, because reality, the laws of physics and long slow tracking shots are all anathema to 'Armageddon'.
For those who simply cannot live without number crunching, those meteor fragments would be travelling at about 1/3 C, the speed of light, whi
ANYWAY let me now shift focus to yet another reference made by "The Sky At Night": the International Asteroid Warning Network. Bay and Bruckheimer didn't ignore this institution; their film came out in 1998 and IAWN was only established in 2014, the year after the Chelyabinsk meteor sounded a wake-up call for the whole planet. Art!
See, it has a website and everything. As to what it does, allow me to nick a bit of it's charter: " - work to detect, monitor and characterise potentially hazardous asteroids and Near Earth Objects".
Even if the worst comes to the worst, IAWN's abilities would enable an impact site to be determined and evacuated, allowing emergency accommodation to be set up, food and water to be stockpiled, and controlled shut-downs to be accomplished.
You see, a monster impactor akin to the one that created the Chuxulub crater and helped wipe out the dinosaurs only comes along once every 100 million years. Art!
Thankfully. The much smaller 'city-buster' variety, on the other hand, is far more common. During 2024 there were 147 that entered cis-lunar space, which is within One Lunar Diameter, and in 2025 up to May there have been 57, so on course for the same total.
This is where things might get a tad alarming for you. Are you sitting comfortably? or not, because I shall begin. IAWN takes data from the 'Minor Planets Centre' and uses this to calculate close approaches, which it characterises in upper case - CLOSE APPROACHES. Just so you know this shizzle is important. Art!
Let us open the link to 'Close Approaches of Newly Discovered NEOs' and see what appears. Art!
You may have trouble resolving the data, so I shall merely add that the top entry is new since I last checked this table a couple of days ago. We shall therefore go with the Close Approacher '2025 KF2' and extract the data specific to that object. Art!
The number in bold in the log above that is how many Lunar Distances 2025 KF2 came to Earth (0.36), which is 86,000 miles in a more down-to-earth format. Ha! do you see wh - O you do. As is typical in these cases, a series of astronomical observations were made, allowing 2025 KF2's trajectory to be plotted accurately.
Observations:
K25K02F* C2025 05 21.70219115 24 25.774-36 36 59.98 16.6 GVEK078P07
K25K02F C2025 05 21.75320616 19 05.599-27 14 02.04 16.5 GVEK078P07
K25K02F C2025 05 21.76645616 31 11.208-24 40 48.04 16.3 GVEK078P07
K25K02F C2025 05 21.76882316 33 15.410-24 13 31.04 16.6 GVEK078P07
K25K02F C2025 05 21.84468817 26 51.384-10 52 38.89 17.6 GVEK078P07
K25K02F C2025 05 21.84750017 28 26.057-10 26 51.68 17.5 GVEK078P07
K25K02F C2025 05 21.90583817 56 17.815-02 43 21.86 18.2 GVEK078P07
K25K02F C2025 05 21.90790017 57 08.153-02 29 21.48 18.1 GVEK078P07I may get into trouble for that, you're not supposed to replicate MPC's asteroid data wholesale.
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| NYYYEEEOOOOW |
The data was captured by one of the Chilean telescopes at Atacama, revealing that KF2 is between 10 metres and 23 metres in diameter. There is a fair probability of it surviving contact with Earth's atmosphere and only then breaking up into small objects, burning up before reaching the ground. Paris breathes a sigh of relief.
So, there you go, an Intro which demonstrates that not even small objects can sneak up on our fair planet, thus completely sinking any chance of 'Armageddon' ever being remade*.
The Invective Collective
Yes! we are back with the 'Have Your Say' Commentary on the BBC's sports website about a ballfoot game between Tottering Hotspurt and Mencaster Frighted (sp?), where the level of creative hatred is inspiring to see. Art!
Only Nonsense
22:02 21 May
Blue Billion Pound Bottle Jobs
03:37 22 May
Read somewhere United desperately needed this win for the financial windfall that comes with being in the CL as without which they will struggle financially and need to make further cuts and job losses.
Could this loss be the 1st step towards eventually bankruptcy for United?
I should explain that the BBC Sports correspondents are incessantly accused of being pro- one club or the other, on little to no evidence apart from rage-powered eyeballs. I'm not sure what the abbreviation 'CL' means, although if you take this Commentary as a whole it might well be 'Cheating Losers'.
"The War Illustrated Edition 209 22 June 1945"
By the time of publication here, Nazi Germany had been a conquered land for over a month, so the delay in publishing photographs was down to simple transmission and replication issues. Art!
We have to include this page about the Ockers, as they get very cross when left out of the limelight. In the first picture you can see men ashore on Tarakan, with a landing ship unloading supplies in the background. To the forefront one Matilda tank is pulling another out of a Japanese tank-trap. By this date - May 1st 1945 - the Matilda was years obsolete in Europe but still outclassed anything the Japanese had, and being squat would fit into landing craft very conveniently.
To bottom port an enormous Japanese periscope is being investigated. No, I have no idea why it was rendered so tall. It's about twice the height of their normal trench periscopes.
To starboard at bottom is an example of a Japanese bunker, with four Ockers taking a cautious look at it. All weapons are levelled and they are off to one side of the firing slit, taking care to be out of the line of sight, so it may not have been declared 'safe' at this point.
The 'Beer Trajectory' As National Metric
Konstantin, or 'Big K' as we have nicknamed him with scurrilous irreverence, presents his Youtube vlog 'Inside Russia' from Tashkent, where he fled with his family to avoid being either imprisoned or conscripted.
He came up with a description that spurred Conrad on to make a measurement of it. Art!
Sinister beer
He scornfully described Soviet beer as a word I'm not going to repeat here, but it rhymes with 'Hiss'. Art!
Then, when the Sinister Union rolled over and died, they had access to excellent Czech and German beers. Sinister garrisons of the Cold War enjoyed service in East Germany or Czechslovakia because - beer! Art?
Thanks to sanctions, they are now going to be getting 'Tumangang', which is not a brand pimped by the Crips or the Bloods, but a North Korean brand.
Go on, go on - one wonders how many will be sunk. Art!
It's Nork and sunk. Tee hee!
Finally -
I need to go box up my Goulash Meatballs and perhaps try a bit of pizza dough, or a flapjack. CYA!
* Crossing all fingers.
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