The Wall -

No, Nothing To Do With Pink Floyd!

Or Roger Waters before the conspiranoid loonwaffle years.  Kindly let me finish my title sentence -

     "The Wall - Of DEATH!"

     Although it is intimately associated with prog rock, which we will inevitably work our way back to.  Art!

     Thank you Gerald Scarfe for the finest of nightmare fuel.

     ANYWAY Your Humble Scribe found himself in the usual creative bind, coming up with a title and then needing to find content to back it up.  No problemo!  First of all we have the small scale 'Wall of Death', which, if we can cattle-prod Art into action -

     It's a fairground attraction that is still around, if no longer as numerous as it used to be, insurance costs being what they are.  As is evident from the picture above, they consist of a large circular drum with an angled base, the latter of which allows a motorbike rider to accelerate up the wall until they are riding horizontally.  They need to maintain a speed of about 30 PROUD IMPERIAL miles per hour to keep safely horizontal, and no more, because getting higher than that can cause g-force induced blackouts.  Which - you may be ahead of me here - would be bad.  Art!

The irony, it burns!

     Yes it's dangerous.  Here in the UK with our frankly miniscule Garden Fence Of Death scene, there have been accidents and serious injuries in the last 10 years.

     Art!

     The somewhat larger-scale 'Wall of Death' that is the North Face of the Eiger, a Swiss tourist attraction that is renowned for being - well, I suppose 'Wall-ish' and 'Death-ish'.  It's 5,900 PROUD IMPERIAL feet in height, and sheer, which means straight up - or down if things are going wrong - as well as being covered in ice.  Which is pretty slippery when trying to negotiate.  Also, the locations of ice-fields change rapidly over time, so what may be perfectly traversable on day may be a vertical skid-pan the next.  Did I mention the frequent rockfalls? because there are frequent rockfalls.  The weather can change from a light flocculation of clouds to heavy snow in less than an hour, or rain can form black ice whenever it falls, rendering every surface treacherously slippery.  O and it takes at least 12 hours to make the ascent.  Art!

     At least 70 people have died on the Eiger's North Face, which of course compelled even more to try, leading to success only as recently as 1938.  We are not going to go into the horrors of failing 'portaledges' in this Intro, as they are horrid enough as a subject for themselves.

     ANYWAY AGAIN guess what, Conrad is going to do another Little Musical Critique, on the second song 'Fly On A Windshield' featured on 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway' for we are now armoured with the liner notes and lyrics.  It's quite a short song hence all the prior verbiage. Art!

Ah ah ah, that's the final line.  Don't jump the gun!

"There's something solid forming in the air"

TORNADO!  Or not.  Not in Times Square.  The liner notes do mention ' - descending like a balloon -'  so perhaps it's a LED ZEPPELIN OF DEATH! or not as that's heavy metal and this is prog.

"And the wall of death is lowered in Times Square"

You can see where today's title comes from.  The liner notes helpfully inform that the WoD is what descends from the heavens, without explaining why.  Art!

"No one seems to care"

     Hmmm I wonder I wonder - is it because there's no WoD and it's all in Rael's mind, thanks to all those paint fumes?  Don't forget Occam's Razor - 'entities should not be multiplied un-necessarily'.  This would explain why nobody is panicking at a giant 3D wall suddenly moving through the beating heart of New York.  

"They carry on as if nothing was there"

     See above.

"The wind is blowing harder now"

     TORNADO! Ooops, no, sorry, not again.  

"Blowing dust into my eyes

The dust settles on my skin"

    Art!

     Perhaps I exaggerate a tad.  Or do I?

"Making a crust I cannot move in"

    Ooo-errr, Matron, that looks a bit forbidding.  Trapped whilst the WoD approaches.

"And I'm hovering like a fly, waiting for the windshield on the freeway"

     To back all this up, the liner notes add in an apocalyptic description of the Wall Of Death making it's presence known.  "The sound of impact bursts through the silence, and in a roar of sound, the final second -"

     This is another hint that Rael is killed at that moment and what follows for the rest of the album is merely the split-second of his fading consciousness as he perishes.  Kind of like 'An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge', set to music.

Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce's finest short story

     Sorry for the downer ending.  What else did you expect from a title with 'Death' in it?

All Aboard The Angus Bus!

More of McKie, in case you've been living up a pole in the desert for the past two months, the sci-fi scriber of stuff.  Art!

     It's a bit difficult to tell which way this craft is oriented, especially as there is no 'up' or 'down' in space.  I think it has the lines of something designed for harvesting either asteroids or spacebergs, as seen in the foreground and background.  

     A little digging later, it transpires that this is another illo for Gerrard O'Neill's 'The High Frontier', even if this spaceship looks a bit too advanced for incipient space colonists.

O And By The Way

"Wall of Death" is another name given to the 'Moshpit' area in what I understand the young folk call 'gigs', especially at ones featuring <insert noun here> Metal bands.

     However, there are always those who spoil it for others.  Art!

     I shall leave this one with you and not comment at all.

A Bit Of Background For You

Prior to 2027 and the arrival of the animated 'Rogue Trooper' film, Conrad expects you to have done your homework and be familiar with the background to Rogue's nomadic pilgrimage.  Here's a Youtube vlog that I just happened to come across at random which you need to watch.  Art!

Rogue Trooper: The Quartz Massacre

     There may be a test later.  Be aware.

He's Going To Claim A Darwin In The Near Future

You know the Darwin Awards, given to those who improve the gene pool by removing themselves from it.  Here's a near-miss.  Art!

     

     The PAssenger With Smarts, hereafter PAWS, noticed the new car ahead of them doing a lot of swerving as the driver took selfie after selfie, eventually driving completely off the road and into a verrrry solid mailbox that yielded not a bit.  A solid metal pole bedded in concrete, one guesses.

     PAWS and her driver stopped to see if the other driver was alright and, surprisingly, they were unhurt.  However - ah that word again! - they were verrrry apprehensive. 

     "Do you need us to call anyone?" asked PAWS.

     "No," replied the pale-faced youth.  "This is my first car, my parents just bought it for me.  They should be on their way back from the dealership any minutes now.  They're going to kill me."

     His fate is unknown as this is where PAWS and her driver moved on out of his life.  Art!

Mom and Pop, an artist's impression

     From 'Biggest Fails Ever Recorded' on Youtube.  Not world-shattering but Mr Idiot Driver is going to feel like it is.

Do You Want Skynet?  BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU GET SKYNET!

Of late there have been a few alarms about AI systems getting rather out of the box and interfering with other AIs in order to advance their sinister agenda, which is worrying enough.  The company in question, OpenAI - far too open for my liking - originally said their proto-Skynet had only attacked HuggingFace, yet now admit it also targeted 4 other online entities, which OpenAI is not identtifying.  Not very open.  

     What a cheery face that dispels all thoughts of the 'Alien' faceuggers.

Helluloid Cell

There I Was, Fretting

"What can Thursday's blog Intro be about? " because even at 05:37 in the morning the grey matter never stops working.  

     "Let's avoid the usual suspects.  Something different.  Nothing martial or maleficent."

     Well, I realised I had a backlog of film material, so thus we are here.  Art!

     This is a real blast from the past.  Up until recently, cinemas played reels of film through projectors, throwing the image upon a screen.  Each reel of film lasted for ten minutes or so and was about 1,000 feet long.  As one reel was coming to an end, the projectionist would cue up the successor on a different projector, which makes the next tale somewhat suspicious.

     Supposedly, the narrator worked in the projection booth and had cued up a horror film that they had no interest in watching, so they just let it run whilst they stayed in the box office.  Art!

 
     The platter did not engage; this is the disk that re-reels the played celluloid back into a reel again.  Thus there were thousands of feet of unspooled film that had to be rolled back onto the platter by hand.  Which took five hours.

     Nowadays it's all done with hard drives and digital projectors, much handier yet with no romance.  Art!

     You ought to be aware of the Youtube channel 'Terry Talks Movies' as we've mentioned it in the past.  Ol' Tel is an Antipodean from Melbourne who delights in watching and criticising films, especially horror and sci-fi ones, and has recently done a couple of livestreams.  Art!

Luna the cat makes a guest appearance

     'Replacement' as the first one was very glitchy, or so I'm told as I didn't see it.  Conrad was in this one for a good thirty minutes, the whole thing running for just over two hours, which I couldn't manage on a work night.  I did comment about the weather, which you'll have to take on trust as there's no stored Chat on the vlog entry.  Art!

     A collective comparison from Ol' Tel, and Conrad's attention was piqued because, despite it being a colour still from a monochrome film, I recognised - Art!

     The reveal that the 'invaders' are actually faceless robots is rather well done and a nice jump scare, especially considering the whole film's budget makes a shoestring look lavish.  There's also a rather amusing con

     ANYWAY that's us rather jumping the gun.  Let us look at the first film in this selection.  Art!

     Quite a genre mashup I think you'll agree, resulting in one of those uneasy miscegenations, a horror Western.  Ol' Tel seems to think it worth a watch, mainly because it's played dead straight, no camp poisons present, so Your Humble Scribe may have to indulge in a view if it crops up on Netflix.  Plus, as I know you want to see a bit of Frankenstein action - Art!

     Going by the principle of Chekov's Gun, all that delicate glass laboratory ware was always destined to be shattered apart in a fist fight.  Sorry, what's that?  O the plot.  Jesse James, in the dark clothing above, and Hank, the big lunk with the stitched head, meet up with Frankenstein's grand-daughter.  She's on a bender kidnapping people and replacing their brains, to turn them into slaves.  Hey, everyone needs a hobby.  At the end only Jesse and the infant Juanita survive, and he rides off into the sunset.  Art!

     I see the latest French fashions in hats have arrived this year.

     

     Now that we've got that out of the way, time for FILM REVIEWS!

     Since we've not done these for a while, let me recap:  we go solely by the title, perhaps also taking into consideration the colour palette of the bus poster, take things verrrry literally and may break any of these rules if we feel like it.  Art!

Props for using a chainsaw

EVIL DEAD BURN:  Another dodgy attempt to reboot the franchise, hmmm?  You can tell this is at the verrrry least a sinister film, thanks to the colour palette being all black, yellow and red.  O dear, was it 'inspired by'?  Number 6 in a franchise that ought not to have gotten beyond 2.  If they want to keep the 'Evil Dead' franchise alive, bring back the television series.  One is minded of 'Drag Me To Hell'.  Except it's not a horror film if it the evil can be defeated by a CO₂ fire extinguisher.  Art!

TOY STORY 5: Another franchise that has outstayed it's welcome.  One for the kids, going by the colours.  Let me crunch a few numbers.  The production budget was $250 million, with at least another $100 million for promotion, advertising and distribution.  That's a tidy $750 million.  The film itself turned $1 billion at the box office, meaning $500 million profit, so - still in the red.  Unsurprising as it's the most expensive animated film ever made.  Conrad suspects the law of diminishing returns is in effect here.  The loss will be partially balanced by merchandising, but Conrad isn't sure what amount that will be.  You never know, getting a tanking like this might put a part 6 into limbo forever.  Art!

Haven't seen it.  Not missing much.

DUTTON RANCH: More of cowboys.  This poster came with a pair of headshots of people I don't recognise, and Conrad, in his wisdom, is guessing that this is a spin-off from 'Yellowstone', which must be popular with people who like Yogi Bear and the wide open spaces.  Art!

Beef, bears and Barbours

SUPERGIRL: Various critical thunderbolts have been out on this one for a while, and coming to it late like this means we get to see what the long-term box office take is.  Art!

A heroine for the ages

 

Or not

     So, on the 50% rule it's made $62 million profit, on a budget at least three times larger, so Conrad can confidently predict there won't be a 'Supergirl 2'.  Who knew that audiences wouldn't flock to see a sulky, petulant drunken protagonist!  Art?

DISCLOSURE DAY:  Some have described this as a sequel to another of Steven Speilberg's previous films, the name of which escapes me, and I cannot be bothered to look it up.  Sue me.  It's about aliens and shizzle, and stars the rather delicious Emily Blunt.  I thought the poster was her face behind a broken opaque mask, but - Art!

     Once you see that it's the outline of a finch it's hard to unsee , and I was helped to see this by an animated finch that appeared over my Google search.  Very clever, yet it still didn't compel me to watch the film.  Is that flipping the bird?

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2:  Art!

     I haven't watched 'The Devil Wears Prada' because it concerns fashion and I care less for that than I do about the ballfoot game.  To be honest I have no idea what 'Prada' is, perhaps bespoke garden trowels? so I can't give even a fig stalk about the second iteration.

The Belles Of Hell

By whom I mean Greta Nissen and Jean Harlow, who were the female leads in "Hell's Angels", Greta only until Jean replaced her when the film became a 'talkie' from a silent.  Art!

     In glorious monochrome.

     That's not where things end, though.  You see, I came across another version of HA, one that has been rendered in colour.  Art!

     This process is a lot easier to do now that people can utilise the processing power of a computer; back in the day they used to hand-tint the celluloid, frame by frame, which in the case of HA would have meant doing it for 11,000 feet.

     Which is where we came in.

Believe Your Eyes

 If You Must

What you need to understand is that Conrad has a habit of accumulating things like Bookmarks, Favourites and images cropped from teh Interwebz, and then hoarding them like a miser with coins or a collector with books.  So!  Of late I've been trying to get rid of this electronic detritus, which has informed the blog somewhat, in order to prove that I can stop buying books stop expanding these e-notes.  Art!

                                                

      I thought the four grim-faced commandoes (novel written under a pseudonym for Arthur Catherall) would be more appealing than a screenshot of Favourites.  

     The one I shall eventually concentrate on begins 'Malicious Compliance Want Me To Pro-' , which is an abbreviated version of the following:

r/Maliciouscompliance Want Me to Prove Your Kid's a Bully? OK!

but before we get anywhere near that I am going to take what seems like a willlld tangent.  Enter Jake Broe from the Youtube channel 'Jake Broe'.  Jake started his vlog with a report on the current Ukrainian drone campaign against Mordorvia SIT BACK DOWN THIS IS RELEVANT!   Art?

     Those little green dots are Wildberries logistics hubs, which Ukraine has been absolutely malleting of late.  The ones outside Barad Dur and Saint Petersbug have already been given a dose of doom, being either partially or completely demolished.  Art!

Art!

     Sorry, he got confused with the ending of "The Quiet Earth".

     You can appreciate the panoramic splendour of this shot taken from an aircraft - daringly aloft during hostile drone activity - which reveals how far away these burning warehouses are visible from.  

     No mention of any of this on Ruffian media at all.  If you relied on them for information you'd think nothing untoward was happening.

The fires are even more impressive from worms-eye view at ground level.  Art!

     Hmmmmm, suddenly the 'Special Military Operation' that was a thousand kilometres away is now camping, like a filthy rabid dog, on your doorstep.  O dearie me.  Art!

     Wow, Mordorvia now has TWO Mount Dooms!

     Not that you'd ever know from Solovyov or Skabeeva, they don't report unpleasant things THAT PEOPLE CAN SEE WITH THEIR OWN EYES.  It's almost as if they think if it's not reported then it doesn't exist.

     On a side note, people have been wondering why the Kozaky have been destroying the orc equivalent of Amazon.  One reason is that the Ruffian army either doesn't equip it's men properly or with sub-standard kit, so Wildberries has been the go-to agency for supplying orcs with forks.  Art!

     QED.  All this kit has suddenly vanished from the website, how surprisingly!

     Jake put forward the calculation that all this destruction has inflicted $2 billions - dollars not rubles - on the Ruffian economy and left 40,000 orcs without gainful employment, and has been a very apparent and immediate shock to the residents of Mordorvia; unlike sanctions, Wildfireberries burning down occurs in real time and right in front of the ex-employees.  
     Once again, no mention on Ruffian media of all these jobless orcs who are now liable to be hoovered up into the SMO, despite all the video clips of the miserable masses evacuating.  Art!

     Whoever posts these clips is going to vanish as soon as the clips do.  Can't have you contradicting the official dictum of Nothing Is Happening!

     Art!

     What you see here, gentle reader, is the offspring of Satan.  Our narrator of the next tale, Teacher Of ThirTeen Years, hereafter TOTTY, stated that on occasion she had to deal with pupils akin to the above, particularly Spawn Of Satan, hereafter SOS.  This particular reprobate became a bully with itchy palms, suspected of stealing items, but with no security cameras in classrooms there was no proof.  Mama and Papa were called in many times, whereupon Mama denied her little darling ever did anything wrong: which couldn't be disproved thanks to no security camera footage.  If I Didn't See It Then It Didn't Happen, as per Solovyov et al.  Art!

Mama

     Reading between the lines, the school administration were expecting even more trouble from SOS, since they installed cameras in the rooms he was taking classes in, without notifying anyone.  Mama also insisted on being called or e-mailed in the utterly hypothetical instance of SOS committing a crime.

     Cue malicious compliance from TOTTY, whom led the teachers response to SOS being a complete bottomhole.  Mama got up to 15 e-mails per day for ten weeks, despite complaining about this electronic barrage.  After all, she'd requested it, hadn't she?  Art!

     Then SOS tried to assault TOTTY with a chair, in full view of the classroom camera, and was restrained by other pupils and staff.  This led to yet another meeting with Mama and Papa, where Mama once again stated If I Didn't See It Then It Didn't Happen.

     Cue camera footage.  

     SOS was expelled, fined and got a criminal record.  Justice!

     Nor is that all.  Apparently Papa had been kept in the dark about just how badly behaved SOS was, along with many other things in the marriage, which lead inexorably to a -

     Divorce!

     I love a happy ending.

More Ungentle Shoeing

Not the usual suspects today.  No, today I am focussing the frothing nitric ire of BOOJUM! upon one of the Tate brothers, a pair of ne'er-do-wells whom like to big themselves up on teh Interwebz, and who fled Romania after being investigated by the police there and who then fled This Sceptred Isle because they were being investigated by the police - see a theme emerging?  Art!

     This is Andrew, who usually wears sunglasses to conceal how goat-like his features are.  The South Canadians have incarcerated both brothers prefatory to extraditing them to Perfidious Albion, and Andy was bleating about this.  Art!

     'No contact with the outside world' - apart from being able to send messages via your mobile?

     The internet populace has not been kind to them, and is resounding with ribald mockery, full of concern for the poor cannibal, the poor dear. 

     Conrad would not be surprised if this pair of sex offenders vamoose off to Mordorvia if they get the chance, the Ruffians not being very fussy about whom they let in to stay.  Art!

     Not the rock-hard image he likes to portray, hmmmm?

Behemoth Bulldozers Of Barsoom

That has a nice alliterative ring to it, nicht wahr?  The images might not be exactly of 'bulldozers', quite, and I only used the name 'Barsoom' because it began with 'B' since the background is pretty definitively not the Mars of Edgar R. Burroughs.  ANYWAY another of Angus McKie's artworks.  Art!

     From that spacecraft flitting by in the atmosphere, I can tell that it's the 'Hooded Ghost' and that this is probably a book cover for the author Brian Stableford.  Allow me to dig a little - 

When Spinning Was Not Winning

We have mentioned the hideously dangerous centrifuge as part of an Intro, and put up an illo as proof of how major a muck they can make.  This item concerns a practical example of a numpty interacting with a centrifuge, and it ending badly.  Art!

     Technically it was an ultracentrifuge, which can have a rotor speed of 100,000 revolutions per minute, meaning that by the time you've counted 'One -' it's already done 555 revolutions.  These things are anchored into the floor with enormous bolts to prevent any unwanted 'walking' but there are limits to the shear strength they can sustain.

     As with Nigel the Numpty.  He loaded the rotor asymmetrically, meaning that the rotor spun out of alignment within seconds, then destroyed itself and the spindle it spun upon, getting punched out of the stout steel walls of the ultracentrifuge chamber, which are armoured against this kind of accident.  Up to a point.  

     The rotor continued going through the wall of the lab building and across several hundred yards of car park.  By the grace of the good lord aloft nobody was injured.  Our narrator doesn't mention what happened to Nigel, although I see a firing in his future, as well as potential criminal charges for negligence and a gap in his CV where he cannot mention this employer.  Art!

     That was an accident where the centrifuge walls were not breached.  Luckily for anyone in the vicinity.

Watch Out, Agatha

Art!

     Yes, I can totally see the Enid Blyton of crime fiction getting taxed until the pips squeak.  Just leave Lord Peter Wimsey alone, or there'll be trouble.