What A Bore!

 I Know Using An Exclamation Mark With 'Bore' Is A Non-Sequitur

But all will become clear, unless it doesn't, in which case I insincerely apologise in advance.

     I was torn as to which click-baity picture to use in this Intro; the Mole or part of French Polynesia?  The latter won out.  Art!

     Say hello to Bora Bora, an island in the Pacific, whose unfortunate title has led to BOOJUM! wickedly selecting it to kick things off.  Looks a bit like Tracey Island, doesn't it?

     Which is merely a pretext for me to include the Mole.  Art!

     A wonderful example of a machine that is able to bore, thus, if you will, a boring machine.  Conrad is unsure exactly how it gets recovered after boring a tunnel; reversing the drill and side-treads to go backwards?  I don't recall ever seeing a 'Thunderbirds' episode where it was re-mounted on it's travelling platform.

     ANYWAY, as we are wont to do, I shall explicate about the verb 'Bore', which is defined in my Collins as 'to tire or make weary by being dull, repetitious or uninteresting'.  It is derived from the Old English 'Borian', which in turn comes from the Teuton 'Bohren', meaning 'To drill'.  In the sense of relentlessly drilling and thus wearing someone down, which is to say - boring <see above>.  Art!

     Gentle reader, welcome to the River Severn and it's tidal bore, which is a phenomenon created by the incoming tide, which causes a wave to form and travel 25 miles upstream.  The size varies but can be large enough for people to surfboard on it.  Surfboarding on the Severn - not a spectacle you'd expect to see on a normal day.  Art!

     Then there is 'bore' in the sense of making a tunnel in the ground, as with the Mole above.  One of the deepest bores ever was drilled in the Kola Peninsula, back when that was part of the Sinister Union, being called the 'Kola Superdeep Bore Hole' because - you may be ahead of me here - it was super deep and at Kola.  Art!

     The Sinisters drilled it to a depth of 7.5 miles, at which point the rock they were cutting had become molten, plastic and destroyed the drill, which was not proofed against such high temperatures.  They shut it down and it was permanently abandoned in 1992, when things like getting enough to eat took precedence over vanity science project.

     Not to be confused with 'Boor', which is an ill-mannered, insensitive or clumsy person.

     Of course - obviously! - none of this preamble is what this evening's Intro is about, because once again we're back on the subject of railway artiller SIT BACK DOWN! y, and I have more photographs to illustrate the matter with.  Art!

Gun with puny humans for scale

     This monster is 'Boche Buster'*, one of a handful of British 14"-bore railway artillery pieces that served in the latter part of the First Unpleasantness.  It tipped the scales at 248 tons and fired a 3/4 ton shell up to 38,000 yards, or 21 PROUD IMPERIAL MILES.  This, and it's sister gun 'Scene Shifter' were shipped to France in May 1918 disassembled, then railed to their operating site and put together by August 1918.

     Scene Shifter fired it's first shot on the night of August 8th, by no less a personage that King George V himself, who very sneakily suggested that the target be the Teuton-occupied railway station at Douai, an important railway junction for them.  Art!

      Hmmm a bit blurred but it does show Scene Shifter in her firing position and the camouflage scheme used.

     Anyway. the Teutons very understandably considered Douai to be out of range of anything able to inflict much damage, because they didn't have so much as a sniff of the 14"-bore railway guns being present.  Thus 3/4 tons of high explosive fell on one of their trains which was unloading Teuton reinforcements, causing between 200 and 300 casualties, cratering the rails and destroying rolling stock nearby.  It was followed by 12 other shells, causing so much damage that they stopped using Douai after that, and SS's first round fired in anger was thereafter known as 'The King's Shot'.

     I just noticed there's a typo about the HE shells that BB and SS fired - '14,000 lbs' which is over 6 tons.  Nope, they meant 1,400 lbs.

     NOT to be read as 'The King Is Shot'.

     There is a coda to this story, which I will be merciful and relate at another date.  I bet you can hardly wait.

Context Is Everything

As you may be aware, Conrad tends to copy and paste useful pictures for future use as illos on a Word document.  I did this last night, well done me, except without any accompanying info, idiot Conrad.  Art!

     The Ruffian script talks about 'translation, payments are not working, cards are not being passed for online-banking' - I think that's the sense of it.  I cannot remember who posted this, so shall have to guess that the red area is Bad For Mordorvia.  Art!

     Thank heavens I can relate to this one!  As you can see, the ruble has dropped about 4 to the $ in a week.  I can definitely confirm that this is Bad For Mordorvia.

More Of Green On The Screen

Here we go with more of my wistful, respectful, nuanced - ah, who am I kidding? my citric and jaundiced review of 'Greenland'.  With screenshot.  Art!

     My marginal notes exclaim that is simply not how aircraft fly en masse.  For one thing, how did they all get off the ground simultaneously?  No airfield has fifteen individual runways all pointing in the same direction.  Clearly, they wanted to go for effect in a single shot, which I may just generously allow, as it would take several minutes if they were flying in a single line.  Art!

     That bright dot is Clarke the comet, which Nathan is soooo excited to see visible in the daytime.  He'll learn.  Conrad thinks Clarke looks unpleasantly close and surely if it was going to miss Earth altogether we'd see more of it's tail? as it pursued a non-interception trajectory?

     Having been sent out to get beer and wine, John is in the store when a mystery call comes in on his mobile.  Art!

Aw, he still has Alison's picture on his phone!  How sweet.

     The message tells him that he, Alison and Nathan are all to be given further instructions and that this is not a drill.  Flabbergasted, John checks other shoppers, none of whom are getting any such calls.

     On the drive home he witnesses a military convoy, which might be a sign of precautions being taken about events to come, or a perfectly normal bit of business between Army locations.  We don't know and it never comes up again.  When he gets home, the neighbours have assembled for the party to watch Clark impact Planet Earth, and the thought of turkeys having a pre-Christmas celebration comes to mind.  Art!

     If this were Conrad not John, I'd be headed for the nearest computer, there to have a look at the air traffic patterns over Atlanta, which are freely available.  If there was no displayed mass northward pattern of flights, which had just been seen with the Mark 1 Human Eyeball, then Something Bad Was About To Happen.  Then, I'd Google about the Presidential Alert just received.  But that's me.

Conrad Can Get Behind This

Allow me to prod Art into semi-sentience with this electric cattle-gee-upper.

     Me too.  Avoid doing it.  Problem solved.

Casey Gones

In case you are unaware, 'Caseys' is a South Canadian petrol and general store chain, which also serves hot food, such as pizza.  One of the 'I Quit Have Fun Fixing This' Reddit relators told of how in their branch the supervisor took 20 smoke breaks a day, telling the other staff to 'work harder'.  Art!

     The general manager completely ignored this bottomhole behaviour, so the narrator quit at lunchtime in what  they called the 'pizza order rush'.  Which probably meant bottomhole behaviour supervisor had to cover their job and got no smoke breaks, boo hoo.

And with that we are done!

*  No snivelling nonsense about Political Correctness here.