Almost
You ought to know BOOJUM! by now, we loathe being direct or logical, and today's Intro is no different, and yes we will end up a long way from where we started, as the noble and honourable sport of Rabbit Holing is also part of our Modus Operandi.
First of all I shall have to explain my crack about 'John Deere', in case you are labouring under the misapprehension that he's a comic book superhero with all the superpowers of Bambi. Art!
That's Gus, from 'Sweet Tooth', aptly named, because he's the possessor of a sweet tooth as large as Conrad's. I really need to catch up on Season 3.
ANYWAY once again we're concentrating on what we're not. Art!
This monster is a John Deere tractor, made in Perfidious Albion from girders. As is plainly visible, it is literally big as a house, and is being particularly greedy with eight tyres; note the counterweight hanging off the front bumper, to balance out the mass of whatever it's towing. Conrad is more familiar with the titan tractors than you might imagine, as there are farms scattered all about The Mansion's environs and plenty of them have vehicles quite as big as this, which are driven up and down Rochdale Road.
Let us now praise famous men abruptly change tack and return to the topic of avoiding Near-Earth Objects such as asteroid 2024 YR4 smacking Earth square in the kisser. For Lo! we are back on "The Sky At Night" and how to deal with the pesky YR4's of the Solar System. Art!
That's one of YR4's mates: 1950 DA, so-named because it was discovered in 1950, and it may impact Earth as soon as 2880. No pressure, then.
ANYWAY what did TSAN come up with, after their ballfoot analogy for observing asteroid trajectories?
Cupcakes. Art!
Here Maggie gets the plum job of eating cupcakes and drinking coffee in order to explicate science. Heck, it's a dirty job but someone's got to do it. The tractor is standing in for a spaceship, which will be acting as a 'gravity tractor', moving into close proximity to the asteroid that needs deflecting. Art!
Rendered with a spacecraft and asteroid, instead of blueberry cake and a child's toy - Art!
The mass of the spacecraft will perforce attract the asteroid, causing it to deflect from the impact trajectory. Maggie points out the truism that Hom. Sap. cannot put any realllly large spacecraft into space, so the comparatively small mass available is going to need to exert a gravitational attraction for a long time in order to cause any significant deflection. Or, as per Conrad, you launch multiple separate spacecraft, multiplying their attraction and shortening the required duration. Being more exotic. one could send up a mining robotic spacecraft, that lands on the asteroid, scoops up tons of loose rock and debris, and increases it's mass that way, before wobbling off into a nearby trajectory. Art!
Feasible, because the practically non-existent gravity of the asteroid itself means any bulked-up spacecraft could take off no problem, requiring only a fraction of the fuel needed to escape Earth's gravity well.
This, of course - obviously! - bleeds into the Mass Mining Meteor Movement Method, where one establishes a mining robot on the asteroid - Bruce Willis is not available any longer and Ben Affleck is a bit too long in the tooth, too - which proceeds to dig into the crust of YR4 or it's mates. Art!
It then forcibly chucks out mined rock at as high a velocity as can be managed. You know Newton: 'For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction', which means each said ejection will also impinge on the asteroid, very slightly changing it's trajectory.
ANYWAY ANYWAY the MMMMM was not discussed on TSAN so we are veering off course, which is hilariously ironic and also ups the Word Count.
Both these methods require a long lead time, probably years, so what happens if the lead time is cut drastically, down to months or <shudders> weeks?
O I thought you'd never ask. We will come back to this, rest assured.
"Elevation" Versus Conrad The Pedantic Hair-Splitter
I warned you. Your Modest Artisan will endeavour to avoid spoilers if not plot holes, because the film has only just come out on Amazon and you might intend to watch it yourself.
Right! At the 28 minute mark our intrepid trio realise that a Reaper is after them in the far distance. These things are Bad News Writ Large. What do the ladies do? Art!
Apologies if you were expecting a screen Snip; Amazon blocks any attempts to capture images from films, it seems, as the screen went blank when I tried. Fortunately, digital camera.
ANYWAY ANYWAY ANYWAY as you can see from the above, they both stand exposed in the open, standing upright, out of cover practically shouting ERE I AM JH.
Nor is that all. Katie proves the veracity of Chekhov's Gun, as a grenade-firing attachment and a belt of 40 mm grenades she had found but scant minutes before come into their own. Let us gloss over how a civilian like herself knows how to use a device like this. Art!
"Those grenades did nothing!" she complains. Well, love, to do anything they'd have to actually hit the Reaper, and all you did was waggle your gun in the general direction of Nowhere In Particular, ruthlessly killing a whole lot of innocent trees.
If your weapons are so useless, why aren't you climbing up the rungs to get as close as possible to the ski-lift?
You'll be delighted to know that we've still more to come on the plot holes in this film.
I Took The Photo So You Get The Benefit
You lucky people. Conrad neglected to make his Sunday Stew yesteryon, having made tsatsiki and Blueberry cake instead. Today, though, I took up the 'Hairy Biker's' recipe for a Sausage Casserole, which had to be done, those remaindered sausages from the Co-Op needed using up before they went peculiar. Art!
It got rid of the passata leftovers, what remained of the fresh dill, a bit of mint going begging and that creme fraiche, too. Tastes quite reasonable.
More Of Conrad The Film Critic
I was watching a compilation trailer of forthcoming zombie films, and came across this interesting item. Art!
It has a portentous narrator doing the voice-over, explaining that the film is set in the 'Silent Zone', which has nothing to do with libraries, just to be clear.
The trailer tries to give it the impression of being set in Anglophone territory, which one presumes is South Canada, which rather jibbed with the credits. Art!
All the behind-the-camera people are Hungarian. So yes, it was filmed in the land of the Magyars, with abandoned Soviet-era housing projects and derelict army bases standing in for a post-apocalyptic landscape. Art!
Either an abandoned Hungarian housing estate, or Modern-day Mordor. Take your pick. Art!
That old sci-fi standby, a defunct quarry. It has a look of Utah, though, doesn't it?
From what others have said, it's actually just as much a film about surviving in a post-apocalyptic world as it is about dealing with the undead hordes, or the "élőhalott hordák" in Magyar. "A lot hord" you might say. Possibly one to watch out for on Netflix. They seem to have filmed the actors in English, perhaps doing each scene once in the Mother of Languages, and again in Magyar. Which has links to Finnish, actually.
Clearly, Someone Is Desperate
Art!
Laugh if you like, and mock if you will, Greggs has 2,600 bakeries across the UK, so they must be doing something right. One further notes that the shops where this is being trialled are all in London, The Modern Babylon, which does not surprise Conrad in the least.
And with that we are done!
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