You Can Hardly Accuse Me Of Click-Bait Here
Especially as all of 'The Goons' are now kicking up the poppies. Art!
From port to starboard you have: Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine, Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers, collectively known as 'The Goons'. Their brand of zany, absurd, pun-laden nonsense has established a blueprint for comedy ever since, and we're talking about a radio show that goes back fifty years.
You see, 'Ned's Atomic Dustbin' was a typical title of theirs, redolent of the Fifties when nuclear and thermonuclear weapons were proliferating, and when the new and exciting prospect of nuclear energy hadn't suffered any loss of gloss. Art!
The plot involves Neddy Seagoon inventing an anti-atomic dustbin that has to undergo trials to see if a man inside it can safely go over Niagara Falls, and the Krem
ANYWAY we'll be here all day if I have to sum up the plot.
Nor is that all. O noe. You see, this episode title had such a cachet that it was adopted as a moniker by a grungy indie band from the West Midlands. Art!
Better-groomed than The Goons
Conrad thinks he heard one of their tracks on a compilation album once. Let's try a bit of background thanks to Youtube.
Hmm, got 'Kill Your Television' going on now, and it's not bad, quite raucous and they seem to have two bass players, rather against the musical grain.
ANYWAY AGAIN let me elucidate with a more apt dustbin, this one known as 'The flying dustbin'. Art!
More formally known as '230 mm Bomb, Demolition, Number 1", it was fired from a spigot mortar mounted on a Churchill AVRE, intended for use against fortifications. Art!
How to make a bunker disappear
Take note of the size of a Flying Dustbin mortar round: that's 40 pounds of High Explosive packed into that container. One of these Christmas crackers hitting a pillbox or bunker might or might not slay everyone inside, but would undoubtedly leave them reeling with concussion, and breach the walls.
Here we get onto the real meat of the matter, which is a chapter from "The Seven Pillars Of Wisdom", where 'Ned' (the family nickname for T E Lawrence) and his Arabs, with Yells - hereafter 'Lewis' after the guns he commanded - and Brooks - hereafter 'Stokes' for the gun he commanded - laid an ambush for a Turkish troop train. Art!
To those who think Ned's involvement with the Arab Revolt was all swanning about on camels, looking dashing and noble, this ambush may come as a dull reminder of reality.
Firstly, Ned's intent was to lay a fifty-pound charge of gelignite between two sleepers next to a bridge. Sounds simple enough, right?
WRONG! Because the more people helped to dig the hole to bury the charge, the greater the traces left behind. So Ned dug the hole solo, carrying the spoil away to dump it, invisible to the approaching train. This took two hours, hard physical labour under an unrelenting sun, before he could place the sandbagged charge in it's 'bin'. Art!
That photo gives you an idea of the train crew's perspective, how far they could see and what they could see.
Next came the electrical wiring, stiff, heavy cables that were affixed to the gelignite and which were laid for two hundred yards back to cover and the electrical exploder. More physical labour was required: the surface of the sand had become crusted over, and had to be dug out to lay the cables, which then needed to be weighted down with rocks, and the rocks covered with sand.
Since all this left verrrry obvious traces on the sands, said traces had to be eliminated by brushing them away with loose sandbags and cloaks. From start to stop the whole preparation took five hours and is the complete antithesis of 'swanning about on camelback'. Art!
I put these images up from the film as an analogy. In real life an Arab, Salem, was the one who pressed the plunger, at a signal from Ned, who was watching for the train, because the exploder was out of sight of the tracks. Then, too, there were two locomotives, not the normal one, so Ned went for the second one, reasoning that this would make recovering the first one more difficult.
It did. The second locomotive was rendered asunder in an explosion that created a cloud a hundred feet high and wide, sending one of it's cast-iron wheels sailing over the ridgeline where the ambushers had established themselves, three hundred yards away. The first engine, derailed and damaged, was further damaged by Ned, who went down to inspect and judge if more violent vandalism were needed. It was. The Turks broke it up for scrap later on.
Yes yes yes, it was only high explosive, not an atomic explosion. Go on, sue me.
The Tale Of A Trifle
In the last from Konstantin's "Inside Russia" anecdotes about businesses in Ruffia, he had a bonus tale to tell about innovation, invention and corruption.
Two Ruffian engineers had invented a very lightweight electrical motor, which had obvious and immediate applications in light of what's going on in Ukraine. Art!
Translation: they didn't bribe anyone. This is how you get things done in Ruffia; grease the palm to propel progress.
Surprise! Who pops up but the FSB, the Federal Security Bandits, who express an interest. Art!
How they found out is a moot point; probably told by an informant in the MoD. They contact both inventors and say that they'd be interested in putting both to work in a plant to make these motors.
"O no, we're not interested in being employees. We're entrepreneurs, we want partners to finance the construction," replied the pair.
"We were not asking," is the FSB's response. "It wasn't an offer, it was an order."
One of them managed to escape Modern-day Mordor to South America, the other was charged with treason and is now in prison.
It's all going according to plan.
Evidence Of Absence
You may not have noticed the absence, if you're not looking for it, so allow me to point out that Kaptain Ketamine, a.k.a. Elong Tusk, has been absent the headlines for over a week or so. He did state he'd back off his DOGE work in order to concentrate on Tesla, as the former was poisoning the latter. Art!
This rise in share prices is directly associated with the above news, or lack of it.
However - O that word again! - the damage may already be done. As of May 8th there were 10,000 Cybertrucks sitting unsold in dealerships across South Canada, totalling $800 million in inventory. This is partially explained by Elong being an utter plonker on the world stage, and partly because it's a shoddy, poorly-made, nasty cheap vehicle going for high prices. Or was. It's alleged that the production lines for the Cybertruck are being closed down and workers allocated to the Tesla Model Y. Y indeed. Art!
All heil the Swasticar
All Quiet On The Messed-On Front
You may be aware that Putinpot's May 9th Victory Parade went off without any hitches, thanks to Ukraine not sending any drones in, and also thanks to the 280 (!) air defence systems brought to ring the capital of Modern-day Mordor inside and outside the city limits. Art!
This is damage to Moscovian apartment buildings, caused not by Ukrainian drones but by Ruffian anti-aircraft missiles, which had tried and failed to intercept. These 'collateral damage' incidents can inflict more damage than the drones themselves, and may be why there were no Ukrainian drones launched at Barad-Dur - can you imagine the destruction caused by 280 systems trying to intercept and missing? and Putin would of course - obviously! - immediately blame Ukraine for it. So, not worth losing the moral high ground. Comments welcome.
Evidence Of Sense Absence
<heavy sigh> once again Blogger's tracking algorithm has gone pottier than a Grecian urn. Art!
Hugely flattering yet completely implausible.
- and with that, we are done. Done!
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