YOU'D NEED TO WASH OUT YOUR FILTHY MINDS!
Wouldn't you? Disgusting perverts the lot of you. For Lo! we are back to Bovington Tank Muse - I beg your pardon, BOVINGTON TANK MUSEUM, and the revamped display area where various miscellaneous kit is there to be seen. Art!
Here you are, the ironically named 'Little Willie', which is 20 feet long and weighs 16 tons, so nothing little about it. The name, lest ye be unaware, comes from the British public's nickname for Kronprinz Wilhelm, son of the Kaiser, who was usually depicted as a figure of fun.
Here an aside. I did wait until we got the first picture out of the way! Wilhelm was actually a pretty shrewd character, whom had held a military command at the regimental level, and whom was smart enough to let his Chief Of Staff take the big military decisions when he got promoted to command an Army. Art!
ANYWAY back to LW. This was the first tank prototype, constructed in September 1915 by order of the Landships Committee, who wanted a vehicle that could shrug off machine gun bullets, crush barbed wire and cross trenches. Conrad is unsure about all those rivets, which would shear off on the inside and fly around if the tank was hit by anything fast or large. Art!
Originally, the design had tailwheels which proved to be redundant, and a dummy turret was fitted, as the real thing would have raised the centre of gravity too high. LW never saw service at the front lines but was invaluable as a test bed for proof of concept for the TANK. Art!
Behold the French Renault FT 17, the iconic tank upon which all post-First Unpleasantness tanks are descended from. I believe one was found in running order in Afghanistan by NATO forces there.
ANYWAY AGAIN, here you see the tracks that are elliptical, not rhomboid, and with suspension. The crew, a driver and gunner, sit in the front of the hull and the engine resides in the rear, a massive improvement on the British 'Mother' design with the engine sitting squarely in the crew compartment. The FT's crew was thus far less likely to suffer from carbon monoxide poisoning or burn injuries. The armament - here a machine gun - was contained in a fully-rotating turret, meaning that the tank didn't have to manoeuvre itself to aim at a target. This model has a cupola so the gunner can look out of the slits to see where he needs to fire. Art!
The 37 mm gun version
They were intended to be used en masse, as at their debut in May 1918, where they skittled two Teuton divisions for the cost of 5 tanks out of 31 total. Art!
This is the British 'Whippet' medium tank, which could manage 8 mph. That may not sound like a lot but is twice as fast as the 'Mother' variety, as the Whippet was intended to function as armoured cavalry and exploit any breakthrough in Teuton defences. They massed 14 tons, could cross trenches up to 10 feet wide, had a crew of three (driver, commander, gunner) and mounted four machine guns at all four cardinal points. Art!
That's the carcass of 'Musical Box', which eventually ran out of luck and into a Teuton shell, but not before performing the textbook definition of 'a swathe of destruction' behind Teuton lines. Art!
This is a 'Vickers Crossley Armoured Car', and you can tell it's British courtesy of the twin Vickers guns poking out from the turret. You may get an idea of it's ancestry and use by looking at the portrayal of them in service in India on the mural in the background. The VC came into service in 1925, long after the First Unpleasantness had ended, where the British Empire STAND UP FOR KINGIE needed armoured vehicles for imperial policing. An armoured car was a heck of a lot cheaper than a tank, especially if your restless natives had nothing more powerful than a rifle in their arsenal. Art!
What we have here is a Lanchester 6 x 4 armoured car, constructed 1929,which is in reality more of an armoured truck, given that it weighed 7 tons and was 16 feet long. Again, it's purpose was to quell unrest in the further-flung corners of the British Empire - you can sit down for Kingie now - and it had twin Vickers .303 machine guns in the turret, and a .50 Vickers in the hull, which fired armour-piercing ammunition in case the restless natives had gotten a bit of armour plate.
They were around long enough to see service against the Japanese in Malaya.
Enough of TANK for today.
You Couldn't Make This Up
Conrad recently regaled you with the April 2025 sentencing of George Santos, the convicted crook who got kicked out of Congress for being so bent he made a pretzel envious. Serendipity struck. Art!
'Have a great life!' Trump orders prison release of disgraced ex-lawmaker George Santos
George Santos was jailed for seven years for stealing identities, including from members of his own family.
I should have stayed quiet, shouldn't I?
Still, this is the Boorish Orange Oaf Himself merely commutating Santos' conviction, not pardoning or removing it. Expect The Pretzel Politician to publish a book and do the chat show circuit publicising it. Bah!
May you trouble the headlines no longer
Order! Order!
As you should surely know by now, Conrad is a fiend for collecting comic trade-paperbacks, which are the collected editions of several month's worth of individual comics. I've been doing this over decades, meaning I've gotten an awful lot of comic TPBs, many of which are stored in their own cardboard boxes. Art!
Since I happened to be in 'Travelling Man' I thought I'd check and see if they had any more 'Saga' in stock. They did, so I quickly flicked through 'Eight', confirmed that I'd not read it and got 'Nine' as well. Which was a mistake - I'd already got a copy, so Darling Daughter is going to benefit from the ravages of old age and gin. Earlier today I bought three storage boxes and now need to sort out that huge stack of TPBs by the foot of my bed. First world problems, hmmm?
A Piece Of -
Conrad has already explained that DD made him a cake tester, which is a resin tab from which projects a long, thin piece of metal rod. Having a cake tester meant I needed a cake to make and no, I wasn't going to walk all the way into Lesser Sodom to get a pack of butter. Art!
It worked fine on this Sultana Cake. The problem is, I now have sixteen slices of fruit cake to consume: this takes so long I have found the cake goes mouldy before it gets finished, which is why a brace of slices are stored in a sandwich bag. First world problems again, hmmmm?
You Couldn't Make It Up Part 2
What happens when you're disqualified from driving? HINT: you do not drive.
You most especially DO NOT DRIVE your bright yellow BMW away mere minutes after having been disqualified, because such a vehicle is a head-turner especially of the police. Art!
"But I have to drive it home"
Perhaps he needs to ask DJ Tango to commutate his sentence?
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