Lewis And Bark

This May Only Make Sense To South Canadians

And then not very much.  'Lewis and Clark' is instantaneously recognisable to any pre-teen South Canadian children as a reference to 'Lewis and Clark', whom were intrepid explorers who travelled o'er the North-West bits of South Canada.  Art!

     Not sure if any of these are skirts.  Probably best to describe as 'kilts'.  Art!

      Hello! said Isaac Newton Lewis, the inventor of the Lewis light machine gun.  He was South Canadian, whose Army did not want his engine of destruction, so he sold it to the British and Belgians.  The Teutons, advancing into Belgium in the summer of 1914, encountered and did not like the Lewis Gun, calling it the 'Belgian Rattlesnake'.  Which is  atad confusing in an Intro that mentions barking, not hissing.  Poetic licence.  Actually they didn't like being on the receiving end; they pounced on captured Lewis guns with alacrity as they were portable by a single man - see above.

     What does this brief history lecture have to do with anything?  

     Well, I'm afraid we're back to 'Charley's War' again.  Arrt!

     Charley, Ginger The Whinger and Lonely The Looney have accidentally wandered into the Teuton trenches and been taken prisoner.  Yes this did happen; in a barren No Man's Land devoid of any distinguishing features it was possible to completely lose one's direction and end up in enemy lines, especially at night.

     What was I cavilling about when last we covered CW?  The lack of Lewis guns.  There's one in Teuton hands, the soldier handling it with a certain gloating air about him.  Art!

     This is part of Lonely's background, in the winter of 1915 going into 1916, before the Brodie-pattern helmet had arrived and the field cap was universally worn amongst the Tommies.  That looks like a rum jar under the trench sign, usually described as 'SRD' or 'Service Rum Diluted' and as a wag put it, 'Seldom Reaches Destination'.  Art!

     "Do not fire on us - we are Bavarians!  Wait until we are relieved by the Prussians!"  exclaims one Teuton character.  Again, completely believable as nobody liked the Prussians, not even their fellow Teutons.  Moreover, a lot of Teutons had worked in the British hotel and catering trade pre-war, thus being fluent in English.  Rumour has it that, occasionally, plaintive requests in accented English would issue from the Teuton lines about how well or ill Tottenham Hotspur were doing in the League.  Art!

      What is this peculiar medieval device?   O I thought you'd never ask!  That, gentle reader, is a Leach Trench Catapult, a device intended to hurl a grenade or similar-sized object from the safety of a British trench and into a Teuton trench, there to cause harm and despondency.  They were popular in 1915, before the Stokes Gun arrived to displace them.  Art!

     They weren't especially complicated so there was little to go wrong with them.  Except that they might impart so much spin to the bomb being catapulted that it came back the way it had been sent, leading to the crew hurriedly taking cover.  Art!

     There's a couple of points about this artwork  Ha!  D'you  see wh - O you do.

     First of all, note that the Teutons are still wearing their 'Pickelhaube' helmets, but have now covered them over with cloth to obscure their bright shiny regimental numbers, which might give them away.  Art!

     As you can see, far too shiny.  The pickelhaube wasn't replaced with the 'Stahlhelm' until 1916, so this is Pat and Joe paying attention to detail. 

     The second point is the Teuton saw-backed bayonet, which was indeed a horrid weapon.  

     

     The idea was that it could be as a handy saw, but the Tommies thought it was Hun frightfulness and woe betide the Teuton who was caught wielding one.  Art!

     More Lewis gun!  This is Charley hiding under the duckboards at the bottom of the Teuton trench, which is a slimy unpleasant place to hide.  Art!

     Also, Art!

     As you can see from the advancing Teuton soldiery, there is gas about, and plenty of it, which necessitates the use of gas masks - yet none of our trio of British escapees have a gas mask.  Ooops.  You can see these Teutons are wearing the Stahlhelm, so their gas masks ought to be up to scratch - their ones of 1915 were pretty poor quality.

     The vermin seeking refuge above the level of the gas is also fact.  The war gasses used were heavier than air and would hog the ground, descending into dugouts and trenches.  There is a grisly little anecdote in 'The War The Infantry Knew' where a British officer, gas mask on, watches local vermin struggle to get above the level of gas, and sees a field mouse climbing up a stalk of grass that isn't high enough and collapsing dead.  Art!

The 'Google-eyed Booger' model

That Escalated Quickly

We have already covered the Ruffians boasting about their 'Burevestnik' nuclear-powered cruise missile, of dubious utility.  Even more recently the Sentient Vodka Bottle, a.k.a. Dmitry Medvedev, Ruffian mouthpiece for Putin, has been bloviating about their 'Poseidon' nuclear-powered nuclear torpedo, again of dubious utility if it even exists at all.  Art!

As real as Narnia

     This gloasting was exactly the wrong thing to do in front of the Orange Land Whale, whom immediately took umbrage and decided that he was going to outdo the Ruffians in this urination contest.  Thus South Canada is going to resume nuclear testing.  As Chuck Pfarrer mentions on Twitter: " Ru is astounded the US announced it'll resume nuclear weapons testing." Art!

This is Peskov The Pest, who has been desperately trying to backtrack, saying that yes, they are nuclear-powered but that doesn't mean they're actually nuclear or shizzle, because it's all the fault of the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, honest.

Good luck with that.

Calling Jake Broe!

Art!

     If you're not familiar with this film, because I wasn't, it's three separate chapters looking at the same event from different perspectives.  The core of the plot is that South Canadian satellites fail to detect the launch of a missile off the coast of Korea.  The missile is picked up mid-track and has a ground zero of Chicago.  Bad news for Chicago.

     Ryan attempts to answer if the film is accurate or not.  He goes over the pros and cons, and admits Jake Broe would be a better fit here as he used to be a Nuclear Missile Operations Officer.

     The origin of the missile is deliberately kept ambiguous, because they need the drama.  HOWEVER - that word again! - the South Canadians have a forensic analysis unit in their military that can identify the isotopes from a nuclear detonation.  Art!

     One has to wonder at the stupidity of a regime that deliberately targets a single South Canadian city with a single missile, because when the South Canadians find out who did this, 

 - is going to be doing a whole lot of visiting.  'because they need the drama' one supposes.

Matters Martial

We have been rather into the internecine this blog, so I'm going to continue and if you don't like it, then it's not as if you have to pay to read this scrivel.  Art!

     British troops having a wet and a wad during the Third Battle of Gaza, which began on 31st October 1917 - Conrad is typing this scrivel on the 31st before you ask - involving the assembly, in secret, of 88,000 troops, with several divisions of cavalry.  There was a Camel Corps, too.  Yes, quadrupeds were actually of immense use in Palestine and Egypt, with all the commensurate problems of getting enough water for them, and for Hom. Sap. as well.  Water in Palestine and Egypt was always a problem: insufficient in the summer, far too much of it in winter.

     Anyway, the Briton's Cunning Plan involved a feint attack against Gaza, with the real, mounted attack much further away to the east, where the defences were much less formidable.  Art!

I'm Just Going To Throw This In Here

You ought to know by now that Conrad finds the mordant, citric works of Ambrose Bierce to be hilarious, and so I finish with an entry from 'The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary'.  To wit:

Impunity, n: Wealth

 

Of Pluto, And S.L.A.M. and Stormy Petrels

Firstly, Discard All Notions About Cartoon Dogs Or Planetismals

No, we are not talking about Clyde Tombaugh's finest moment and his discovery of the planet Pluto, which has of late been downgraded to a planetismal, or A Very Small Planet.  I needn't detail that dog.  Art!

     This an artist's impression of the Ruffian 'Burevestnik' nuclear-powered cruise missile, which translates as 'Storm Petrel' because they haven't released any pictures of the beast itself.  Putinpot recently used this beast as yet another nuclear sabre being rattled in it's scabbard, claiming that it had flown to Alpha Centauri and back at x200 the speed of light and made the crew a pot of tea and crumpets when it got back.  Or, it flew 14,000 kilometres and only made the crew an instant coffee with a digestive biscuit when it got back.  Take your pick.  Art!

     One has to say that all this needs to be taken with an enormous column of sodium chloride, as the Ruffians lie about everything all the time.  Conrad recalls 6 years past, when the orcses were testing this particular missile, unsuccessfully.

In August 2019, a fatal accident occurred at a missile test site near Severodvinsk, Russia, during the testing of a liquid-fueled rocket engine. Five military and civilian specialists died and three were injured. While Russian officials initially downplayed the event, evidence of a brief radiation spike and official confirmation from Russia's nuclear agency led to speculation that the incident involved the testing of a new nuclear-powered cruise missile, likely the 9M730 Burevestnik

Oooops.  Pretty obviously it wasn't 'Liquid fueled' as molten uranium in a rocket engine would be a spectacle for the ages.  As long as you were watching from 5 miles away via binoculars.  Art!

     Here is a South Canadian design from the late Fifties and into the Sixties, branching off from research into nuclear-engined bombers, that could stay up indefinitely and travel to any target on the planet - you know, as Charlie Chipmunk Cheeks has been boasting.  Art!

     The Burestevenik engine design is what the engineers from the Fifities 'Project Pluto' would have called 'direct', meaning that the atomic pile is cooled directly by airflow over it, thus leaving behind an exhaust plume that contaminates the ground below, and also anyone not wearing a hazmat suit.  The much, much safer 'indirect' designs that the South Canadians evolved were much, much more complicated, much much more expensive and much, much harder to realise.  Art!

        What you are looking at now, gentle reader, is a 'Tory II' experimental nuclear engine, circa 1961 in the sadlands of South Canada.  Yes, it's as big as a rail car, but it worked.  Had Project Pluto continued, this would have been the motive power for thermonuclear-armed atomic-propelled cruise missiles.  Conrad did ponder, back in 2016 when this blog and photo was originally posted, about what a contemporary nuclear engine would look like.  Much smaller, given material design, one would guess.

     ANYWAY ANYWAY seven years ago I wondered where the South Canadian prototype would have been made to land, as you can't risk a nuclear accident in upstate New York or the Florida panhandle.  One presumes that with Stormy Petrel they crash-land it anywhere in Ruffia where there's space and a lack of wary residents.  Art!

    'Dull fireball' would seem to be more apt.  No, this is just a coincidental meteor or satellite burning up over Mordorvia, in what our superstitious ancestors would say was a 'fell omen'.  You can choose any one of a dozen different things going wrong in Ruffia to choose from.

     ANYWAY AGAIN there is, of course - obviously! -, absolutely no evidence that this missile actually exists in real life nor that it ever flew 14,000 millimetres let alone 8,400 miles.  Test film?  Before and after shots?  Telemetry data?  Trust me, bro.  Art!

     We know more about SLAM that we do about Burevestnik.  

     Once again, this is Bunker Grandad trying to scare the global West with sinister Ruffian technology, which is the kind of threat he trots out every few months when things aren't going particularly well.  Note that the South Canadians gave up on nuclear-engined cruise missiles because MIRV'd ICBMs - sorry for the acronym salad - Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles on Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles - were far less complex, much more reliable and (bonus!) considerably cheaper.  Note, too, that the Storm Petrel is sub-sonic, making it slow and thus easy to shoot down.

     One is struck by the parallels with another bunker-dwelling fantasist who blathered on about his 'Wunderwaffe' that were going to turn the tide and bring victory -

     Well, that scotches the original Intro I had planned, which was all about 'Charley's War'.  Maybe tomorrow.  I bet you can hardly wait.

Aha!  That Reminds Me -

From the contents of my sagacious, or at least capacious, mind, Conrad recalls a quote from John Wyndham's magnum opus 'The Kraken Wakes'.  To wit:

     "The petrels of Muscovy -"

     The 'petrels' he mentions here were a phenomenon of the Cold War (as this novel was published in 1953) being fellow-travellers who were big on pushing the Sinister agenda, as long as they didn't have to live there.  Art!

     An evocative cover showing an event that never happens in the novel.  Sorry about that.

More Cold War Combatants

Yes, we are going to hop, skip and jump our way to BOVINGTON TANK MUSEUM once again.  This time for a South Canadian entry now that we've had the British, Teuton and Sinister variants.  Art!

     Apologies for not getting the full barrel in.  This, gentle reader, is an M-48, one of the mainstays of South Canadian armour up to the early Eighties.  After that it was replaced by the M1 Abrams, and good luck begging one of those from the South Canadians.

     ANYWAY AGAIN AGAIN thanks to South Canadian production capabilities, they made 12,000 of these 50-tonners.  They were armed with a 90 mm gun and you can distinguish them from the later M-60 by the lack of a cupola on their turret.  These were the main battle tanks that went to Vietnam, as it was thought they were better suited to the jungle.  Art!

     I don't think a British CO would stand for the hull art.  A bit garish, don't you know.

Woodent It Be Nice

Another instalment in the litany of woe enacted by 'Joe Blogs' on his vlog about the industrial troubles facing Ruffian industries.  In this instance we are looking at 'Sveza', the Ruffian timber enterprise.  Art!

     They are a middle-level employer, with 19,000 staff.  So far!  Thanks to a slump in domestic construction, a dramatic fall in exports and a surge in production costs, profits have died on their bottom.  Thus their timber mill at Tyumen has been closed, and it will be followed by others if things don't pick up  big soon.  Going broke when the resource you utilise grows for free takes some achieving, but the Ruffians managed it!  Well done chaps!

     No longer smoking, I'm afraid, and this Tyumen mill is a lot bigger than I expected.

I'm Shocked!  Shocked, I Tell You!  Well, Not Very Shocked

Conrad saw this item in his news feed and immediately copied it.  No idea what the lie is - 'Oil is made by ants out of honey and sand', perhaps - just that it allows me to hit the Word Count.  Art!

"India has rejected U.S. President Donald Trump’s assertion that it agreed to stop importing Russian oil, signaling that tensions between Washington and New Delhi over energy policy are far from resolved."

     Ah, that makes sense.  BOOH wishes for a thing, then in his confused cranium that magically makes it happen.  Don't forget - covfefe.

What A Difference A Year Makes

Waaaay back on the 30th October 1918, the Battle Of Vittorio Veneto was ongoing, fought mostly between the Italians and Austro-Hungarians, with British and French also involved on the Italian side.  Art!

     Our Italian allies.  By this date the Austro-Hungarian positions had been split in two by the Italians capture of Vittorio Veneto, across a front of 35 miles and to a depth of 15 miles.  After a week of fighting the Hapsburg army suffers 250,000 casualties, nearly all prisoners, meaning that their morale is at absolute rock-bottom.  The hilarious irony is that exactly a year earlier in October 1917 the shoe was ln the other foot and it was the Italians who suffered 250,000 casualties at the Battle of Caporetto.  Art!

     The Hapsburg soldiers were also terrified of the British, who were all - allegedly - eight feet tall with poison fangs and whom loved nothing more than to dine of Hapsburg liver, whilst the Hapsburg was still alive.  Not quite accurate.

     And with that we are done!

Bear The Bear

 I Have A Tale Here - 

Which is more hear tail than the latter, scatter my data.  Also what the reasons are for behaving as you do when in the wilderness of South Canada.  Which is yet another reason for confirming why the wildlife here in the Allotment Of Eden is about as worrying as worrisome as badgers.  Because it is.  Art!

     There you go, about the most dangerous predator there is across This Sceptred Isle, whom you might invite inside for tea and crumpets because that's how we roll here.  Art!

     

     This tale, however - that word again! - is set in the South Canadian hinterland, where an isolated cabin in the woods might be hired by outsiders for Lo! these many months across the summer to the tune of three months or longer.  Big city folks like to enjoy the unspoiled wilderness doncha know.

     In Part One, these temporary neighbour's mutant offspawn offspring children throw rubbish all over their next door resident's yard, and yark hilariously - they think - in the face of local law enforcement, whom are called in to deal with the problem.  Because local law enforcement who live and work amongst the locals are going to be so, so sympathetic to outsiders from out of state who are there for twelve weeks out of the year and other big city mistakes.  Art!

     Put Upon Rational Residents, hereafter PURR, began discovering bas of rubbish being dumped in their back yard, which they caught in loving detail on their trail cameras, meaning Neighbours Of Nuisance, hereafter NON, got landed a $500 fine for littering.  They then vanished as their lease was up and the locals enjoyed peace and quiet.  Until next summer, when NON returned, this time with a boat, jet skis and motorbikes and a three-month lease over the season.  Oooops.  Art!

     Proving that there is no  material denser than a human skull, they proceeded to litter their own cabin grounds with their own trash, because throwing it into the back yard was easier then putting it in a bin.  I think.  Their thought processes seem to have been at the level of a two-year old.  The consequences of littering were skunks and racoons coming to visit and tearing rubbish bags open to see what goodies were within.  Given that this is summer, one can only presume that flies and ants were attracted, too, for the vermin bifecta.  

     Then the parties started up.  Loud, intrusive parties that got them fined repeatedly, because they didn't seem to realise local law enforcement was as fed up with them as PURR was.  Art!

     These parties only made the rubbish problem worse, as all the partygoers would carelessly discard their empty beer cans, paper plates, uneaten food etcetera, in the back yard.  Trust me, this is building to a climax.  

     So, PURR came home from work one day to discover two police cars and a Forestry Service truck outside NON's cabin, and a great deal of wailing going on.  PURR made themselves a pot of tea and sat down on their back porch to enjoy the schadenfreude, listening to all the sounds of woe that the massed NON were making. Art!

I can't see Skynet ever becoming a problem

     NON had assembled en masse and gone to town for the day, probably pining for their big city lifestyle, returning in the evening to find that their back door had been smashed in, and the culprit(s) still inside, grunting and swearing.  Impelled by a guilty conscience, they immediately called the police, blaming their next-door neighbours for breaking in and trashing the cabin.

     Alas no.  Art!

     When the police investigated, they discovered that the intruder was a very large black bear, hence the Forestry Service truck.  The FS chaps managed to get the bear out of the cabin, alive, upon which NON tried every excuse under the sun to blame PURR.  Unsuccessfully - these are the local cops, after all.  'Bear baiting' as an excuse doesn't work if you're the one baiting with bags of delicious fermented maturing rubbish emptied all over your back yard. Art!

     By next morning NON and all their impedimenta were gone.  Both PURR snuck across to have a nosey and witnessed that the back door had been boarded over, but the interior of the cabin was a war-zone. Not only did NON get fined for illegally baiting a bear, the cabin owners sued them for the damage caused.

     The story ends there but one can predict that NON would never, ever, EVER  return to that cabin.

   

Metaphorical Cement Overshoes

Another fascinating chapter of misery in the annals of Modern-day Mordor and it's industries.  Today, thanks to 'Joe Blogs' we examine 'Cemros' the Ruffian cement and construction business.  Nominally, they have 13,000 employees, although this is going to only ever decline over time, in alignment with other Ruffian industries.  Art!

Product placement

At only 13,000 workers they lack the political clout of RZD and so cannot merely lay people off.  Thus they have gone to a 4-day working week, meaning their employees get a 20% pay cut, whoopee.  Their industry-specific problem is a big fall in housing construction and cheaper foreign imports (from China) which they are lobbying the government to either ban or restrict.  Their problem there is that other Ruffian businesses need materials to be as cheap as possible, so that's unlikely to ever happen. 

Conrad Is ANGRY!

Angrier than usual.  Yes, we are back to fulminating about Codewords again.  Do you have a problem with that? because the Remote Nuclear Tormentor could do with a workout.  ANYWAY 

MYSTIQUE: An 8-letter word that uses 'Y' and 'Q'?  Bah!  Defined by my Collins as 'An aura of mystery, power and awe that surrounds a person or thing'.  Art!

     Actually that's not bad.  Perhaps we do need to be worried about Skynet.  Which has a mystique all of it's own.  The only good thing about MYSTIQUE is that it's French, not one of the zombie languages.

DIOXIDE: Grrrrr so they aren't satisfied merely with OXIDE, it has to be. two molecules of oxygen.  ARE WE CHEMISTS NOW ALL OF A SUDDEN?  Bah!  Art!

     Say hello to Osmium Tetroxide, which is the deadliest dioxide there is, because you need something interesting to look at. 

DETOX: This isn't even a proper word! It is repellent South Canadian slang <smacks Remote Nuclear Detonator repeatedly>.  If anything it ought to be DETOXIFICATION

More Cold War Contraptions

We turn to the Sinister Union's tanks of the Cold War.  Art!

T-72M

     This is one of the most numerous tanks ever built, 25,000 of the 40-ton rascals coming off the assembly lines.  The gun is a smoothbore 125 mm, backed up by two machine guns. 

     The most striking aspect of the T-72 is it's small size, which was achieved by getting rid of the loader, replacing them with an automatic mechanism instead.  Having only 3 crew meant the same number of crews could man more tanks.  There were significant problems with the auto-loader, which could load parts of the crew into the breech.  The ammunition was completely exposed, meaning any naked flame or anti-tank warhead would detonate the lot and thus we get the orc turret-toss competition.  Nor is that all; the auto-loader was sloooow and far less capable than a human loader.  Ooops.

     Another very significant problem was the inability of the gun barrel to depress sufficiently, meaning that they cannot hide behind cover.   Art!

We Cover These Occasionally

'These' being clifftop homes that are in peril thanks to coastal erosion.  Art!

     It's a bit heartbreaking to see your house get demolished before it falls into the sea.  You can guarantee that there used to be a lot more coastline in front of these houses and the sea has relentlessly eroded it away.  Art!