NO! That Is Not A Typo
Whilst we may be skirting subject matter that is scary, what you are looking at in today's title is the Romanian for 'Stairs', because that's going to be an underlying theme in today's Intro. Art!
These are the Tulip Stairs at the Queens House in Greenwhich, which are supposedly haunted after someone took a very blurry photograph in 1966, and I was actually looking for a completely different spiral staircase, except this illo reminds me of - Art!
Yes, Conrad bigging-up the Comsats again, with their 'hot platter' as I believe the yoof call them, 'Time Considered As A Helix Of Semi-Precious Stones' which is a sci-fi sh
ANYWAY I was after the spiral staircase from 'The Haunting', which would definitely be condemned by the Health And Safety Council today, given how shoogly it is when anyone uses it. Art!
We shall ignore the 1999 remake. Spiral stairs, lest ye be unaware, were invented by the Romans, as a method of creating a compact staircase within a structure, taking up minimal footprint. Going back to 6,000 BC , give or take a month or so, the first archaeological evidence we have of stairs is at the Turkish city of Çatalhöyük. Art!
I know they look a bit rubbish but please allow for 8,000 years elapsed time before you criticise the stair-smiths.
One thing I'll bet you've never considered about stairs is - how do you do a stunt fall down a flight of stairs without suffering broken limbs and a concussion? O I thought you'd never ask! Art!
Cascadorie pe scari
This is stuntman Zachary Herbert, informing the interviewer that you need to protect your head and 'ball up', meaning you roll rather than fall. You can see him doing this in the second picture. Stuntmen doing stair stunts usually have knee and elbow protection under their clothing, in addition to a padded jacket. Art!
The vampires set up cellar stairs as a booby trap later in the novel, by cutting away their lower flights but leaving the handrail intact, leading one hapless investigator walking down them in the dark to fall off the end and onto a set of vertically-positioned knives. Conrad The Coward would never have ventured down there without a pair of flashlights and lots of road flares.
ANYWAY let's talk about Daleks, because we are meandering in the general direction of a point. Art!
Daleks on Skaro. Which is perilously close to 'Scari'
Pretty undeniably, Daleks are designed for flat surfaces. One must assume that they have a braking mechanism to prevent uncontrolled runaway on a downward incline, and that the same mechanism has a power component to allow the ascent of an upward incline. Art!
Both in the television dramamentary and the first film, Daleks are shown using lifts to ascend and descend within their underground city, probably on the same principle as the Romans and their spiral staircase; a lift takes up vastly less room than a series of ascending ramps.
So! Stairs have long been seen as the best defensive measure against the repellent metal molesters, frequently as a humourous trope. Art!
This trope ran for decades, until it got a severe rattling in 1988 and the release of 'Remembrance Of The Daleks', which is one of the best serials ever made. At a cliff-hanger, The Doctor has disturbed a Dalek on sentry duty in the cellar of Coal Hill School, and makes his getaway up a flight of stairs - or so he thinks. Art!
Ooo-errr Matron! Clearly the odious pepperpot is using a variety of energy field to hover and ascend the stairs, although it has taken them 25 years to figure this out. This mechanism returned in New Who, where a Dalek pursues Rose Tyler up several flights of stairs. Art!
Now we get to the meat of the matter - yes, finally! - and an item I discovered on the 'Museum Of Failure' website, which concerned a security robot. Now, before you have an embarrassing accident due to fear, this Knightscope security droid does not resemble what you are anxious about. Art!
For one thing, it's not armed. For another, Knightscope's 'K5' is designed to look imposing yet not threatening. Art!
Art!
<sounds of Tazers and sizzling>
Try again.
It's function is to patrol commercial or public spaces 24/7, monitoring the environment and general public. No guns, but lots of hardware and software. Art!
Yet not enough to avoid this - Art!
Another K5 near a fountain, which it didn't fall into, possibly because a new step-and-fountain-avoiding algorithm had been added, or it detected the drop into water.
Jigsaw Complete!
I like to keep you informed. A late-night session saw all the bits put together - Art!
Bar that piece to upper starboard. I've looked all over the floor in daylight and with a torch and cannot find it, so either it was gone in the first place or Edna ate it.
What made it tricky was the duplication of many scenes, meaning I wasn't sure if a piece was from upper or lower painting. Still, we got there in the end.
The Storm Cut Short
You ought to already be aware that I'm reading James Holland's 'The Savage Storm', which is about the campaign in Italy during the Second Unpleasantness. He makes a good point about the Allied invasion being launched with a lack of resources, wildly optimistic assumptions about the Italian regime, and a failure to appreciate just how awful winter weather in Italy was. Art!
I hadn't paid particular attention to that sub-title yet now, 467 pages in, I realise the work will end at 31/12/1943, when there are still 17 months to go. One suspects Ol' Jim will wait and see if this volume sells enough to warrant a sequel or not. Ho hum, Conrad ought to keep his eyes better peeled.
Getting Shredded
Another in that peculiarly satisfying video montage from 'Discover Tech - US', this time a clip featuring a High-Density Poly-Ethylene pipe getting scragged. Art!
This kind of pipe is designed to be very, very robust, in order that it can sit underground for decades and not suffer any consequences. Art!
Seconds later - What you get for standing too close
The blurb claims that this is a 'DTM 1500' but even adding-in the company name 'Rawmec' as visible at the top of the video, I couldn't find the relevant picture online, so they may have got the number wrong.
Hmmm Conrad Not Impressed
You know Your Humble Scribe by now, always interested in the morbid, gloomy or apocalyptic. Hey, a man's got to have a hobby! Art!
I won't go through them all at once <cries of appreciation at my benevolent mercy abound> but here's the first one. Art!
Nonsense. They mention the Doomsday Clock but not what time it stands at, so why bother mentioning it at all?
The only large-scale conflict going on at present where nuclear weapons might be used is between Ukraine and Ruffia. Ukraine doesn't have any nukes and Ruffia dare not use theirs - if they still work. Neither South Canada nor The Populous Dictatorship are at war with each other, not even via proxies. India and Pakistan both have nukes and have decided not to use them as of their recent border skirmishes, because industrial steam hammer to crack a nut. The Norks have nukes, of a sort, but are aware that if they use them then The Shothile Dictatorship will be rapidly converted into the world's largest glass object. The Israelis have had nukes since the Sixties which have gone unused for 60 years. The Allotment Of Eden and France both have nukes, yes, and are unlikely to use them as the Napoleonic Wars ended 210 years ago.
Bah!
India wins World's Largest Pencil competition
No comments:
Post a Comment