You'd Probably Roll Your Eyes At Me Being Willfully Obscure
Which is fair enough. Art!
The most expensive bottle of port ever sold, an 1863 decanter of Niepoort, which set the buyer back £100,000. So, about £5,000 per schooner. I put this up as an physical example, since I also use 'Port' in preference to 'Left', and if we can cattle-prod Art into work -
None of that 'Front', 'Back', 'Left' and 'Right' nonsense about ships here.
Art!
There is also a position for a soldier bearing arms, as in the above, where the Guardsman has his pig-sticker resting at 'port' on his - er - port shoulder.
All of that is by way of preamble - Conrad is unsure if he's ever done a postamble or not - to the meat of the matter, which concerned a Comment on a Youtube Reddit compilation titled 'Biggest Fails Ever Recorded', which is composed of - you may be ahead of me here - the biggest eff-ups ever witnessed. As an example, one of the shorter tales was about a poster's grandfather, who worked for a tent company. His team went to take down a huge tent that had been rented by a circus, only to find an elephant left inside. Art!
"Yes?"
The Commenter in question was careful not to give either a date or a location, making any confirmatory digging pretty difficult. It was in This Sceptred Isle, if that helps at all.
ANYWAY he stated that this occurred many years ago, at a major city port, where a father employed there had gotten his son a position working dockside for the port authority. Art!
There are 121 different ports in the UK, of which 51 are large, city ports, so there was no quick or easy way to identify this one; I shall come back to this. Art!
InexperienceD Inspection Onsite Technician, hereafter IDIOT, was responsible for testing fire extinguishers at the port's fire department laboratory, which were primarily the CO₂ version, full of carbon dioxide under pressure. Meaning that when their release valve was actioned, they emitted an enormous volume of sublimating CO₂. Art!
IDIOT couldn't get one extinguisher to function as the valve was jammed. He lost his temper and walloped it against the nearest hard object, which had the undesired effect of breaking the whole valve off. Oooops.
With no valve, the extinguisher instantly vented it's entire contents into the lab building, which made Conrad a bit antsy about CO₂ poisoning. There is no mention of this in the Comment, so the concentration must have been at below lethal levels, and they had the windows open. Judging from the speed with which my bottle of ginger beer emptied itself when propelled by carbon dioxide, the venting took only seconds. Art!
Our Narrator states that the port control tower was located directly opposite the laboratory building, which is no longer the case but might well have been thirty years ago. Conrad is making a guesstimate that the port we are talking about here is Swansea, since the Narrator mentions an associated 'bay', which means either Swansea or Cardiff. IDIOT exited the lab to try and signal that it was only a minor accident, nothing to see here, move along, by waving. Ooops.
The control tower staff see, not a minor accident, but a building engulfed in fumes, with a desperate employee signalling DANGER WILL ROBINSON!
They activate the Port Alarm.
Narrator clarifies that this is the master alarm for the whole port, and is a siren exactly similar to those used for air raids, which has only ever been tested in drills and never for a real emergency. Conrad dug a little on this and yes, ports do have a siren alarm system to notify of emergencies. Unfortunately for this story, I couldn't find any examples of it being used at Swansea port. Art!
The Port of Swansea no longer handles tankers, as the port of Milford Haven displaced this function in 1998. However, 'many years ago' they did, so the two tankers offloading flammable cargoes drop their lines and reverse, as fast as possible, into the bay. The local city fire brigade is summoned automatically by the port alarm, and 5,000 employees are evacuated. This is where I did more digging and excluded Cardiff from being the port in question, as their days of having five thousand employees were at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The Narrator ends rather weakly with IDIOT heading home - more like slinking home - and his father commenting on how odd a time it was for an emergency drill at the port, wasn't it? We are then told this was decades ago, so potentially from 1976 to 1996?
Net cost of having a snit was apparently £6,000,000 for a whole day's port operations being shut down. And people still recognise IDIOT as 'the man who shut the port down'. Infamy is a wonderful thing. Art!
£6 million per refill
More McKie Maunderings
Art!
Hmmmm. To judge by the speech bubble and lettering, this is from a magazine, possibly 'Heavy Metal'. Allow me to dig a little.
Aha! Art?
Vindicated.
Allow me to add a bit more detail.
It is a scarce poster and has been out of print for 36 years.
Extremely nice gloss, brilliant colors, and definition.
Highly collectible.
Suitable for framing.
Heavy Metal is an animated film from 1981 and was produced by Ivan Reitman.
This is the famous scene in the movie of the Smiling Alien Spaceship that sucked up Gloria and Anrak.
Now we all know more than we did 5 minutes ago.
Conrad Cavils At The 'Daily Sluggard'
I hope you appreciate me taking the time out of my busy day to save you from the Curse Of Clickbait, unless it's my clickbait, in which case it's perfectly fine. ANYWAY AGAIN Art!
It's a bit iniquitous to select Mike as the 'star' because the film is 'A Bridge Too Far' - and you're welcome - with a list of other stars as long as my arm, and it's a long arm. James Caan, Sean Connery, Robert Redford, Gene Hackman, Anthony Hopkins, Dirk Bogarde, Curt Jurgens, Laurence Olivier and more. Made in the days of practical effects with nary a CGI shot to be scene. And, as I keep saying, the best ever depiction of a Royal Artillery creeping barrage.
Whilst On That Subject
Gosh, what came up in my news feed that was completely unexpected? Art!
Conrad suspects that this is actually a French weapon that the South Canadians adopted, as they had little in the way of manufacturing capacity to make artillery pieces. Though they might manage a minnow like this. Let me dig a bit further. Art!
I was half right. It's a Bethlehem Steel 37 mm cannon, ordered by the French government for use in trench warfare, to the number of 200. Of which the French only got 15, as the South Canadian army seized the rest when they joined in the fracas in early 1917.
Ian's commentary is consistently disturbed and interrupted by the sound of gunfire as other people fire their guns off to port and starboard.
I have seen a similar French gun that they manufactured themselves, where the wheels could be removed to lower the profile, in which case it was hauled by at least four sweating poilus.
Proof Of Concept
I've just finished consuming my second batch of ginger beer, and did a little nosying on teh Interwebz to see if anyone had an idea of how strong it might be. Art!
From what they say, from at least 5% and up to 9% proof, which means no more until September. Although I have found a recipe for ginger beer in my '1,000 Recipe Cookbook' that makes about six pints of it. No word on strength.
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