Soylent Green Tea

"Soylent Green Is People!"
I don't care if that's a spoiler, the film came out aeons ago and you ought to be familiar with it by now.
     It's also WRONG!  I doubt Harry Harrison, who wrote the source novel "Make Room!  Make Room!", was pleased at the film's ending, as in the book Soylent Green is simply a mixture of Soya and Lentil.  It's in the name.  If Harry were still with us, he might be ironically amused that our world's current population of 7 billion equals the hideous dystopian total in MRMR, absent the shortages.

Accurate!

     Well now, none of that has anything to do with Nibiru, which, if you believe the swivel-eyed conspiranoid loonwaffles, is a rogue planet about to collide with Earth.
     Don't rush to gaze upward at the skies, because it doesn't exist.  Of course, a little matter like that never stopped those who are lightly endowed with intellect from believing in Nibiru.  They will cite all sorts of nonsense in support of the invisible planet that is so close it causes earthquakes, extreme volcanic activity and makes cows fall asleep standing up, yet cannot be seen. 
     Oh, and NASA is hiding the approach of this planet, because - well, because they're NASA therefore they are eeevil, and because - well, just because.  Apparently they have a monopoly on telescopes or blackmail material on every astronomer going, and enforce the media blackout that way.  Quite how they manage to stop people simply looking at the skies is a mystery; or perhaps the sky is actually a hologram put up by NASA.  Don't laugh, I bet someone out there is pushing that as a conspiracy, and trying to make money out of it.

Spot the Nibiru

    

Doggone It
If you have been reading these words with any regularity AND YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN* then you will recollect that Conrad has barely any sense of smell.  This is no great hardship, as strong smells give me a migraine.  It also proved a blessing when our Furry Daughter's diet got changed, from processed to raw.  Wonder Wifey had to break up a vast lump of tripe, then to break it down into smaller units.

Doubtless dreaming of tripe

     Tripe stinks. 
     It stinks to high heaven, apparently - I have to take WW's word for it, no sense of smell, remember? - and despite, or even because of, this, Edna gobbles it up as if it were ambrosia.  She loves it.  In her mind, Heaven is a place where there is endless tripe to be eaten.

Ambrosia
I thought I'd better clarify this word, since I brought it into the conversation**, and one of my pet peeves is people introducing stuff without explaining it, apart from those pages of cod mathematics in "They Shall Have Stars", Mister Blish could have kept all that guff to himself.  Those of you who live in the Pond of Eden may be familiar with a brand of rice pudding that has usurped the mantle.  Art?

     'Ambrosia' is actually a term from Greek mythology, a nectar that was brought to the gods on Mount Olympus, and which foodstuff conferred immortality upon them, which is a bit much to expect from creamed rice.  Perhaps it also staves off rogue planets?

Find the Nibiru

Yet More On Sieges
Believe it or not, at the commencement of the First Unpleasantness, there was a Siege of Liege.  It didn't last long, the Tuetons and Hapless armies were using super-heavy artillery that smashed the Belgian forts quick smart.  With the use of bigger and more powerful artillery, you had to place your outer defences a long way from whatever you wanted to keep hale and hearty.

Freud, I imagine, would have made something of this beast ...

     Anyway, the next important development in siege warfare was the creation of LITHIUM BATTERY DESIGN!  No, hang on, that's yesterday's post breaking the reality barrier -
     Helicopters, that's what I meant.  With the advent of helicopters, you could fly in supplies and evacuate the wounded, regardless of how large or small your defended locality was, and whether it was flat or not.  This made the job of the attacker a lot more difficult, which probably made them even angrier than they were, due to whatever casus belli there was***. 
    
Not That There's Anything Wrong With Talking To Yourself
I do it all the time.  Plus, I have that treacherous colleague Mister Hand to converse with, the truth-telling swine.  If I wasn't so attached to him ...

Damn Your Eyes, Universe!
It's not as if the word "Ambrosia" nor any of it's derivatives are especially common, is it?  Yet what do I find on the Beeb's website?  LITHIUM BATTERY - no, sorry - 

Upper left

*  For this is the only hope you have of surviving when I take over.
**  It may be one-sided but yes it is a conversation.  Or am I talking to myself?
***  Latin for "cause of war".  Now you know.

Indiana Jones And The Teample Of Doom

There You Are -
I do hope you're not annoyed or bored with all these tea- and coffee-based puns, because they're going to continue for as long as they amuse me, and they continue to amuse me.  You ought to know your humble scribe and how he loves to muck about with words and language; take Saturday at work for example.  Phone traffic was way down on the absurdly high levels of earlier in the week, so I had a chance to really work on the M.E.N.'s puzzle page.  I got through the Cryptic and Normal Crosswords, the Codeword, the Split Solution, 2 Gogens, the Easy and the Hard Sudoku (and the Hard one was hard!), the Alphamuddle, the Wordsquare and the Niner.  Foolishly I binned the paper, because I know you readers are a skeptical lot and would require proof.
     

But I have an honest face!
Well, a face.

     Okay, we can now send the motley out on it's absurdly long and spindly legs.  Lykke Till!

More About Siege Warfare
Earlier in the week we went over siege warfare in the age of antiquity, that is to say, before gunpowder was discovered.
     I did touch on this whilst inflicting hysterically amusing slander on Windbag Willy, who would turn a simple "Hello" into a three-page soliloquoy, the dastard.  Anyway, fortresses and castles and the like had all been designed and built to a certain pattern pre-gunpowder, usually with a considerable height to them.  They presented lots of vertical surfaces, which were difficult to hit with pre-gunpowder missile weapons, due to their ballistic trajectories.
     Enter gunpowder.  Thank you so much, China, for making the world a much more interesting and exciting place!
     A cannon could fire a cannon-ball with much greater velocity than the old, torsion powered siege engines.  It could also fire in a flat trajectory, which meant those big vertical walls were suddenly very vulnerable.

Quiver in fear, castle!

     Along came Vauban and Coehorn, who clearly saw that fortifications had to change.  They produced works that were a lot shorter, with lots of angled surfaces, meaning that artillery shot would be more liable to bounce off without doing damage.  Art?

A Star Fort, for obvious reasons

     The works tended to be considerably deeper than previous designs, meaning that if a cannon-ball did hit, it had to dig through a lot of property to do any damage.  All those angles mean you could bring a crossfire to bear on any attackers venturing into your comfort zone.
     By the Eighteenth Century and the Age of Reason, we find that sieges can be mathematically calculated and plotted: it would take so long to complete lines of circumvallation, then so long to build caissons for your siege guns, then so long to sap forward and establish closer caissons, then so long to reduce the defences, then so long to send in your forlorn hope.

Thus

     If you were the defender, your choices involved timing.  If you surrendered the moment the oppos turn up, you'd probably be allowed to march out carrying your arms.  Waiting until they deployed for the siege and you'd only be allowed to march out.  Stick it out until the end and you were liable to be massacred en masse, survivors being sold into slavery.
    
"9th Company"
This is a Ruffian film, made in 2005, about raw recruits joining the paratroopers and being sent to fight in Afghanistan.  It actually follows a lot of the plot conventions of Hollywood films, kind of swapping the swamps of Vietnam for the mountains of the Hindu Kush.
     I won't spoil the ending, but if you watch it, careful who you root for, as not everyone makes it.

Watch it, he may be wee but he's wiry!

     Given the amount of military kit on display, I don't doubt it got official backing, even if the end is downbeat and not especially happy.  Ah well, who expects a happy ending in a Ruffian film?

Enough of gloomy military matters!  Let us instead have <thinks> Jack of all Spades.  Art?

A taste of Jack's endeavours

     Jack builds what the South Canadians call "Rube Goldberg" machines, which we here in the Pond of Eden (it's raining again) would instead call "Heath Robinson".  Here is a link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzlsqGTiEoU&t=265s

     This has to be one of the most intricate ways ever to make a point and raise a flag.  Be warned, it takes about 3 minutes to follow it through to conclusion.
     I know I shouldn't really be saying this, but some people do have too much time on their hands ...

Big Trouble In Little China Tea

John Carpenter Films A Suitable Source Of Puns, eh?
That one was at least 20 years ahead of it's time.  It's worth getting the Special Edition to hear the commentary from JC and Kurt Russell, which I seem to remember is interspersed with clinks of whisky glasses and the rasp of cigars being smoked.  The part where they escape via a sewer was quite horrid to shoot, apparently, the water being disgustingly warm and soupy.

"The one that got away -"

     Which is a very tenuous connection to my Thursday evening, when we went to Sweet Mandarin to celebrate Degsy's birthday.  Chinese restaurant, you see.  Wonder Wifey likes it because of the gluten-free menu.  I had already made my mind up as to what I was going to have - Fragrant Spicy Pot.  art

Read it and seep

     Those little red things are chillis, and there were plenty of them, believe me.  So much to that, when all the other content had been devoured, what was left was nothing less than chilli sauce.  A whole lot of spicy, more so than I expected; which meant that nobody else wanted any, so a bit of a win-win dining situation.
     Darling Daughter was also present, with her beau, Tom the Quiet One.  Art?

     I was waiting for them on a street corner, and recognised young Tom by virtue of the doormat nailed to his chin.  Between times he uses garden shears to keep it in trim.
     You don't get a photo of DD, but she was wearing a new metal silhouette on her chain.  Art?

Miaouwe*.

     A cat.  Slighly more sellable than the rat version, one feels.  Also available in Bunny.  I did enquire about a Weasel version - as you already know, Conrad ploughs a lonely furrow trying to redeem the global reputation of the weasel - but it would be hard to design one that is readily identifiable as Weasel.  Possibly ehance the silhouette?

I'd buy that for a dollar!

     Further to the above, DD and Quiet Tom were late to our rendezvous as they got lost.  This is howlingly ironic since DD works at the Kula art shop & gallery, which is at the other end of the street from Sweet Mandarin.  And it's a short street.  Art?

The gallery, with human for scale

     Rat, Cat and Bunny available from here soon.  Weasel-on-a-Woodpecker - maybe later.
     Further about that meal, DD chose food that fought back.  "Angry Beef" I termed it.  Art?

     I think the official name is "Sizzling Beef".  When it was decanted onto that metal platter, it made so much noise I thought the waiter was being attacked; he certainly vanished behind a tower of steam.
     Oh, to make it official, DD has finally gotten her Degree.  Art?

     With official hologram sticker to prove it's genuine.
     Okay, one last shot from the meal, my side order of noodles.  Art?

     Dammit, Art!  Don't post photos of me without my human camouflage on.  The noodles?

     Sweet Mandarin don't stint on portions, your humble scribe was stuffed by the time I'd gotten through my selection.  Plus, they provided a nice handwritten birthday card for Degsy, which is pretty good service.  We shall be going back.

Is This Good Or Bad?
As you should surely know by now, your modest artisan likes watching bad films.  Nobody intentionally sets out to make a cinematic aberration, it's just how things end up, due to all sorts of stars lining up in a very bad constellation.  With "Manos the Hands of Fate" it was because the director had never made a film before and did it for a dare.  With "Fantastic 4" it was because the director was a newbie with only a single film of a much smaller budget under his belt; plus a whole lot of other things.
     So, how could I resist when I saw this on the Beeb's website?

     I did score 7 out of 8.  So - is that good?  Or bad?  Only you can judge!

Further Of The World's Most Boring Hobby
I have been banging on about "Kelly's Heroes" and the Goofs listed on the IMDB for it, but those sharp-eyed scallywags at the Internet Movie Firearms Database picked up on a couple of points that nobody over on IMDB spotted.
     Apparently the Browning Automatic Rifles used are a Polish version, not the proper South Canadian issue.  Art?

Polish version

The evidence!

     

*  I know it's not spelled that way, I just wanted an excuse to use all the vowels in a single word.