Was Coming Across The Term 'Hyperart Thomasson'
I had never heard of the expression, mostly because it ran it's course decades ago and was associated primarily with Japan.
To understand what it means, we need to go back to 1980. Art!
Just to jog your memories. In late 1980, the baseball player Gary Thomasson was bought from South Canada by a Japanese baseball team for an enormous sum, hopefully to big up their scores and win lots of games.
In fact he proved to be a complete dud, who spent his entire career on the bench, not playing.
Enter, stage left, artist Genpei Akaegawa, whom began noticing architectural oddities across the Tokyo metropolis, as the Japanese indulged their fondness for tearing down old buildings and structures and putting up new ones. Bricked-up doorways, stairs that led nowhere, handrails with no purpose, all that kind of artefact, which he dubbed 'Hyperart', decided that wasn't descriptive enough and added in 'Thomasson' as the archetype of having no purpose. How cruel!
By the early Nineties, HT had pretty much run it's course. More recently it has been dug up and resurrected on teh Interwebz, meaning it will now never die and instead circulate endlessly.
Perhaps an example. Art!
When a building hasn't been demolished quite enough, or someone ran out of funds, or the workers knocked off early and never came back. There's a story behind these Hyperart Thomassons, though we'll never know what it is in many cases.
Aha! Apparently what we see above is part of the 'Winston Churchill Bridge' in Strasbourg, where all but the stairs were demolished in 2006. The stairs remained until 2014, thanks to the civil engineer losing the sign-off chit or similar. Art!
As constructed in 1968
There are other revenants to wonder and ponder at across the globe. Art!
From the background, this one is in an hideous Seventies housing estate. I tried a reverse-image search but that only came up with 'Echtenerbrug'. However, a trawl of Reddit confirmed this is in Holland. One can speculate if there was ever a water feature this bridge crossed in the first place, or whether it was put there as decoration. Given that there are rails only on one side, and a treacherous trip-rail on the other side, I wonder. Art!
Another French building revenant, this time in Paris. These giant metal staples are hammered into the bricks to allow egress to - the chimneys? Perhaps so, although I would have expected them to be off-set in order that you don't get blocked in by said chimneys when you go up to maintain or repair them. Also, when going back down, you'd be frantically swinging your feet around to get purchase on the topmost rung. Surely it would be a lot safer and easier to gain access via a trapdoor in the roof?
As for the large gap between ground level and the first rung; security. You don't want any thieving footpad to be able to gain access to the rooftops by climbing up rungs that conveniently reached the ground. No, anyone needing to access the roof needs a ladder. Art!
One hopes this door's interior has been plastered over, lest someone try it out of curiosity to see where it goes. Pretty obviously there used to be a structure that the door opened onto, but no longer. The other purpose it might have is as a burglar-deterrent: the interior door has a large sign upon it declaring 'JOOLS AND PRESHUS STOWNS', so any aspiring thief boldly opens it and -
Plummets. Art!
There is a shot of Tom Campbell, played by the splendid Bernard Cribbins, doing exactly this in the film 'Dalek Invasion Of Earth 2150 AD' but can I find a still or clip of it? NO I CANNOT! So you'll just have to make do with Tom looking rather nervous and out of place. Art!
I guarantee there's a few Hyperart Thomassons in there somewhere.
Er - we seem to have gotten somewhat off-track, don't we? Back on track!
From the exotic climes of - ah - Holland and Paris, to the provincial backwater of Chelmsford, Essex. Art!
Steps and a ramp leading to a blank brick wall. The blurb says that this was an Odeon cinema in Chelmsford, fallen on hard times and with access revoked. Don't be fooled by the 'windows' that are bricked over, they were originally designed like that. Art!
I think this is the cinema when it was thriving, due to the similarity of the brick facing, meaning Conrad also believes the HT picture is of a rear exit that got closed off.
I shall have to close off this Intro, too, as the HT were only supposed to be a short introductory piece for architectural follies, which will now have to be broached at a later date. I bet you can hardly wait.
Here's Something You Don't See Every Day
Conrad would like you to cast your mind back to Spring of 2022. The lark was on the wing, the snail was on the thorn and the orcs were invading Ukraine. Thanks to dreadful maintenance, ill-trained crews, a distinct lack of willingness to die for Putinpot and a lack of fuel, there are hundreds of clips of Kozaky farmers salvaging intact Ruffian tanks that had been abandoned. Art!
A Chieftain main battle tank, yes, but - what is it doing in a farmer's field? Surely British farmers haven't 'salvaged' NATO equipment that belongs to the army? Art!
The caption claims that an ex-army Chieftain costs just the same as a tractor. Maybe so, but I guarantee the mileage is going to be a lot worse! On the other hand you could hire it out for novelty rides.
Bubbling Over
SIT BACK DOWN! This is nothing to do with 'Dictatoritis'. We invite you to cast your mind back to the Intro we did on a fire-fighting foam incident in 2016 at Santa Clara, where a massive foam discharge took place by accident. Art!
Make The Orc Walk
Krim continues to suffer chronic shortages of fuel, as the occasional tanker gets through and a petrol station can supply go-juice for perhaps eight hours until their tanks run dry.
Orc drivers have been queueing up in single-file car parks for days, until they run out of the smidgeon of petrol they had. What happens then? Art!
Take off the handbrake, put the gears in neutral and push it.
The chap filming this was humming a happy tune and snickering at the sad procession above, leading me to believe he's one of the original Ukrainians enjoying the giant vampire schadenfreude chickens coming home to roost.
More seriously, Conrad had to resort to public transport to do the shopping last week, as our car is in for repairs. Being on the bus meant being able to carry a lot less, spreading it out over two days. The benighted orcs of Krim don't even have public transport to go and do their shopping.
Better get walking soon, it's a long way to the Kerch Bridge. Art!
"Benzina nyet" = "No Petrol" in 'Krim'.
Depending on how much less than 2,000 tons of food daily that Barad Duh can arrange to transport to Krim, food supplies are going to run short, even with rationing. 'Trent Telenko', logistics sage on Twitter, said that fuel shortages are going to prevent ground water from being pumped up the boreholes drilled to provide potable water. This would also kill whatever agriculture is left in the peninsula, and cripple any industry still extant.
Song To The Siren
No! Nothing to do with The Cocteau Twins - are they still going? Hang on - no, they had a very messy breakup in 1997 - but rather an enormous honking great siren. One of my Bookmarks I'm using up. Art!
The not-so-little friend here is the Chrysler Air Raid siren, powered by a 180 horsepower V8 engine and capable of being heard 35 miles away thanks to an output of 138 decibels. Which is like standing next to a B-52 taking off, and will cause instant deafness if you are next to it when turned on. The cameraman here wisely decamps well away from it when it gets cranked up. Art!
They are both still too close and I bet they spent the next day going "WHAT? WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU."
Finally -
Going out with a Mopey Dickism. Art!
Jowly and scowly. O dear that's me banned from South Canada for the rest of his term, how will I cope.
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