Smashing!

Or, Some People Have Entirely TOO Much Time On Their Hands
I know, I know, this is howlingly ironic coming from your humble scribe's pen - a metaphorical pen at that - of a Monday morning.  However, this is one of those things that follows on from other things, in the way that one sausage is linked to the next one.  Of late we have been following on from the hideous torture inflicted upon the motley, which has led to the discovery that there are such things as mercury fountains.  Doubtless fascinating to watch, equally doubtless hazardous to health.  Art?

Sinister and silver

     There you go, BOOJUM! broadening your horizons. A little, anyway.
     I also discovered that there is a chap out there with liquid nitrogen to spare, which he uses in a constructively useless way: to wit, drenching things in it, then HITTING THEM WITH A HAMMER.
     Don't knock it.  If he gets remuneration from it, more power to his elbow.  Art?

     He also brutally deals with spring onions, lettuce and a can of Pepsi, the last of which is hilarious* as he repeatedly whacks the tin apart to reveal a powdery dark crystalline substance.
     Okay, time to throw the motley into a pool of <thinks> molten sulphur!

Yes, Another VERY BAD IDEA!
Sulphur only becomes relatively fluid at temperatures above 1300C, meaning that if you were to go swimming in your backyard pool full of the stuff, it would scorch the flesh off your bones.  Cost in this case isn't an issue, you can get a ton of sulphur for about £60.
     However!  One of the reasons for having sulphur at all is to make sulphuric acid from it, meaning that any moisture in the air above your pool is liable to rapidly become highly corrosive.  Of course, you'll have been cooked to death long before getting sore eyes becomes an issue, so that's alright then.

Molten sulphur tanker crashes: the terror of our times

     And just to prove that pools of molten sulphur are a thing, and I shouldn't have to say this but DON'T GO SWIMMING IN THEM! (the motley has superpowers that you lack), take a look at this.  Art?


Wowsers.  Sulphur bowsers.

Take Another Look
I'm about to watch the last episode of Season 2 of "The Expanse", which is quite serendipitous, since Series 3 is due to start in a week.  The television series is different in detail from the novels, meaning my attention doesn't wander.
     Now, cast your glazzies over this.  Art?
    

     This is the Martian Marine Corps Sergeant Roberta Draper, sitting and looking out over the sea.  Her life on Mars had been lived under a pressure dome, when she wasn't in a suit of combat armour.  Consequently she finds Earth's gravity hard to deal with, and having a far distant horizon also floors her.  What she went AWOL for, though, was to see the sea.  No bodies of open water on Mars, you see.  She also gets to rub the sand between her toes.
     So, no, it isn't just a woman sitting at the end of a concrete sewer pipe.

Look, Another Take
If the art of creating serial narrative artworks (or 'comics') is a mystery to you, then allow your humble scribe to elucidate.  The process begins with the artist pencilling in the outlines, moves on to the inker then inking them in, whereupon they may have colour added if being printed in the four-colour format, then get speech bubbles and lettering to complete the process.
     Here an aside.  Jason Lee (of "My Name Is Earl" immortality) played an inker in a film, the name of which escapes me, and he was always defensively explaining what an inker does.
     Okay, props to Brian M. Bendis, who posted an illustration on Twitter of exactly what kind of difference an inker makes to an artist's pencils.  Art?

     Four different inkers, four different Hulks, with variations shading from subtle to quite substantial.  Hi there, Jason!  Your character no longer need feel quite so defensive about his daytime job!

This Will Make Sense Later
As much as anything does round here.  Quickly - paint the windows with white paint, because that stops the zombies from spotting you indoors and yet allows illumination!**
     Okay, let us whiz off to Finland, which you might want to consider as a destination when the Zombie Apocalypse arrives.***All that low-temperature living means the walking dead are more kind of immobile dead -
     You would also be transporting your supplies by 'pulk', which is a variety of sledge that is towed by dogs, reindeer or humans.  Art?

Zombies just out of shot

     Because - of course! - thanks to the breakdown of civilisation, fuel supplies have stopped arriving.  Still, this is Finland - lots of trees to burn for heat.


Finally -
Because this will make sense when I post it on Facebook and Twitter - 

Here is Edna, busy huffing and puffing because, yes, she has a lap to lie on, but - NOBODY'S PLAYING WITH HER!
     Call the ICC in The Hague, eh?

*  Okay, it may just be me.
**  BOOJUM! - educating you and saving your life.  You're welcome.
***  That's 'when', not 'if'

Naked And Unadorned

No!  Wash Your Dirty Minds Out
For this is BOOJUM! where we cherish our SFW status, although we did once feature a female statue displaying her buttocks, except that counts as art, not nudity.  Finding a SFW picture of a female demon was quite difficult, too; the default assumption amongst artists, it seems, is that "Demon" + "Female" = "Slutty and/or underdressed".  Art?

Fortunately not showing anything below the neckline ...

     That above took a bit of sifting to find.  Anyway, demons and dressless women are not what I meant.  I refer - of course! - to the Cardamom and Caraway Seed Loaf that I baked last night.  Art?

     There it is, naked and unadorned, before Wonder Wifey slathered it with icing.  Note how well it has risen - no sniggering at the back - despite being made with Gluten Free flour, thanks to a generous spoonful of Xantham Gum.*
     Okay, time to throw the motley into a pool of liquid nitrogen and see what happens!

Why A Swimming Pool Filled With Liquid Nitrogen Is A REALLY BAD IDEA
First of all, it would cost about £60,000 to fill an average back-yard pool, so there's that to consider.  Secondly, because liquid nitrogen boils at -2000C, your pool is going to evapourate the instant you start filling it; to prevent this from happening you'd need to super-freeze the floor and walls of your pool with industrial strength elements.  More cost, I'm afraid!  If you're not careful about the evapouration, you could well asphyxiate, because nitrogen is inert - it isn't poisonous, you just can't metabolise it.
     Lastly, and this is the kicker, if you were rash demented enough to dive into it, the temperature difference would probably kill you outright via shock, as would the whole-body frostbite, although you'd freeze to death long before having to worry about that.
     So there you have it - all the cons and none of the pros of a liquid nitrogen swimming pool.

DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!

     There will now be a short pause whilst I go get some of that food stuff which is so essential to life.  Later!

     Much later - an hour and a half later.  Let the nonsense restart!

Ringing My Own Bell (Since I Lack A Trumpet)
I looked in at a post from this date 3 years ago, which had been thrown up on Facebook by default, and I append the link, if you care to go see BOOJUM! in full vintage form.

http://comsatangel2002.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/numbers-humbers-and-cucumbers.html

     It is more about numbers than the other two things, featuring me gloasting about how much traffic I'd had the previous month - nearly 900 hits!  Thanks to ceaseless self-promotion and keeping up an unending stream of drivel, last month in 2018 saw nearly 3,000 hits.  Whether this is a good thing or bad thing is entirely a matter of perspective.

Conrad, indulging in his favourite sport

     After all, Conrad's fans out there may have been slightly confused by the appearance on the South Canadian political scene of one John Bolton.  Art?

John Bolton

Conrad

     I strongly suspect that my superiors back home have seen fit to send out another alien-spy-in-human-guise, because they don't entirely trust me.  As if!

I Talk Of Harper's Duds
As you ought to know by now, Conrad has an obsession interest in the First Unpleasantness, and especially Official Histories of the various units involved, for there is little that is more interesting than reading about other people having a bad time.
     Thus we come to the 51st Highland Division.  Art?

Their insignia

     Since their commanding general in the First Unpleasantness was named 'Harper' and they did rather poorly to begin with, their nickname became 'Harper's Duds'.  Later, the uneasy Teutons called them 'Devils in Skirts' because explaining a kilt to a European was always going to be difficult.
     Latterly in that conflict they earned themselves another nickname, the 'Highland Decorators', because they scrawled their divisional insignia on anything they captured, including other people's captures, which is a bit naughty.

This one is okay, though

     I bring this up because that post from 2015 mentions reading their official history in the First Unpleasantness, noting that it lacked an index and considering creating one myself - 

     Dog Buns!  Whilst looking for pictures of the 51st, WHAT do I come across but a photograph of a Vickers gun mounting an emergency tripod beneath the barrel.  Why couldn't I find this when I created "Vickers Emergency Tripod"?  Art?

Bah!

     Right, back on track.  The Official History, Art?

As held in monopoly by the Naval & Military Press

     Well, I did create an index, broken down into:  Officers; Units; Places; Weapons; Captured From The Germans.  It took ages.  Now that I've got it, what to do with it?  I could offer it to N&MP - free! - but would they want it?  Because they'd have to create another edition, and are they even allowed to do that?  Who knows.  In the meantime I can look up any Scottish unit, officer or weapon and quote about them.**



*  Which is in reality a powder.  No, I don't know why, either.
**  Goes down great at parties.

Squash Stuffed With Meat And Groats!

No, This Is Not Mere Word Salad*
This story takes a bit of telling, so hopefully you'll appreciate it in the end.  Okay, several weeks ago I got a pack of Polish Barley Groats for a bargain price, all of £0.60 or something like that.  Figuring out what to do in order to cook the groats was quite simple.  Making sense of the Polish recipe on the packet was a lot harder, because Google will translate literally, rather than getting the idiom right, which is what makes all the difference.  Art?

Cooked groats

My bargain.  I don't care if they taste horrid, they're my bargain and I'm going to eat them

     However, your humble scribe is nothing if not resourceful, so I asked - well, let's be frank, I pestered - both Damian and Ania at work about translating the ingredients and instructions.  Here we have the squashes (courgettes) busy being broiled - Art?

     They were swines to get out of the pan once cooked, because they're long and soggy and fingertip deep in boiling water.  I resorted to a palette knife to get them out and here is the end result.  Art?

     And after all that they're not bad, which is solely down to my cooking.  Of course if they had been horrid, that would have - of course! - been down to Ania's translation.
     Now, time to put the motley behind the driving wheel of a car wearing square wheels!**

From 'Rufus' To 'Ruthless' In A Microsecond
You will probably never get the chance to muck around with enriched plutonium at sub-critical masses, but just in case here is a cautionary tale, which might also be subtitled "Clever people doing stupid things".
     Okay, once upon a time 'Rufus' was a subcritical mass of plutonium, engineered to be close to the limit without exceeding it.  This is 1945 we're talking about, when atomic fission was new and exciting!***It would not explode no matter what, because it simply lacked the necessary mass.
     However.
     Rufus was quite capable of going supercritical, if the amount of neutrons it absorbed got beyond a certain level, which means it would give off a huge burst of radiation.  No explosion, just about a bazillion X-rays worth of radiation.
     You can see where this is going, can't you?  Art?

Nuclear safety: the early days

     Above, you see Rufus within two halves of a beryllium sphere, which was a neutron reflector.  The two halves were prevented from closing by our hapless victim Louis Slotin, who used the very tip of a screwdriver to keep them apart.  No screens, no protective clothing, nothing but a Philips flat-head between himself and perdition.
     You can guess what happened next: the screwdriver slipped, the sphere became complete, sufficient neutrons were reflected from inside the whole sphere to induce a supercriticality in Rufus, and Louis got a fatal dose of radiation.

Rufus at rest

     The strange and rather sinister thing is that this was the second lethal accident with Rufus, whose name was abruptly changed from that homely moniker to "The Demon Core".
     So remember!  No fiddling about with subcritical masses without proper protection and remote-control machinery.

It's A Thin Link -
Bear with me on this.  Today is the RAF's birthday, that organisation formed from the amalgamation of the Royal Naval Air Service (who got their long intrusive fingers into many more pies than they were entitled to), and the Royal Flying Corps.
     Then we briefly dart aside to mention Squadron Leader James Bigglesworth (DSO, MC and Bar), who enjoyed a long career in both the RFC and RAF, to the confoundment of Perfidious Albion's enemies.  Art?

The man himself

     The reason I mention this is because in "Biggles Second Case" he ventures forth to the Kerguelen Islands, whom you will have never heard of, and for good reason.  They are one of the most remote and desolate places on Planet Earth, the nearest population being in Madagascar, over 3,000 miles away.  There is no airport and all travel to and from is by ship - and before you ask, Biggles used a flying boat.  Art?

The location

     It is administered by France, and has a transient population of about 100 scientists at most, so if you do happen to call in on your round-the-world yacht marathon, I'm sure they'd be glad of the novelty.



*  Do you see what I - O you do.
**  Mythbusters tested this once.  Hilarious and dangerous in equal parts.
***  Or, for the fuddy-duddies amongst you, novel and terrifying.

A Ghost Story

If You're Expecting Something Ethereal -
 - then you're in for a bit of a disappointment, although it could well be considered scary, especially if you end up in front of one.
     I am talking - of course! - about the Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, which, if we can prod Art into a semblance of consciousness - 

The lady in question

     There you go, your rather solid ghost in the flesh, so to speak.  This particular model came into it's own at the start of the First Unpleasantness, when - this is where it gets complicated - the Royal Navy operated them, initially merely as plain cars, then latterly as armoured vehicles with a turret-mounted Vickers machine gun, in the service of the Navy's air component, the Royal Naval Air Service.   Kind of a trifecta there:  land, sea and air all together.  Art?

The model at Bovvie

     Here an aside.  I am reading a book of "English Ghost Stories" (even if the very first one is by Sir Walter Scott, who was kind of non-English, being sort of Scottish - the clue is in the name) and came across one by Henry James called 'The Friends of the Friends', which can be summed up in two words: stunningly dull.  No doubt the critics ooh'd and aah'd at the wonderful prose, but it's so incredibly tedious that I skimmed most of it and have no idea where the ghost turns up, if at all.  Not only that, it takes ages to go nowhere. Art?

     There was another one about an eeeevil voice, which was so affected that I got two pages in and gave up.  Lesson to authors of ghost stories: do not suck at telling tall tales.
     Back to the 4 ton ghost.  During the mobile phase at the start of the First Unpleasantness, the armoured cars were very effective at surprising advancing Teutons and introducing them to the exciting sights and sounds of a Vickers gun.  When trench warfare arrived, the armoured cars departed for other climes.  They were present at Gallipolli, surprisingly so in view of the terrain.  Where they really came into their own was supporting Lawrence of Arabia.  Art?

Post-war versions but you get the idea

     With no nasty trenches and open terrain as far as the eye could see, they were quite the Terror of the Turk.
     They were of quality manufacture, that coming with the Rolls Royce name, and so soundly constructed that they were used in the first years of the Second Unpleasantness.  Perfidious Albion gave some to the Irish Free State, and the Irish Army, which never throws anything out, used them for the next 20 years until there were no spare parts left for them.
     There you go: a ghost story.
     Now, let us throw the motley into a pit of snakes!*

Being Where One Should Not
Is that a theme?  By definition a ghost is something most definitely present where it ought not to be, and the RR armoured car often did the same, or maybe I'm just reaching.  Anyway, Art?

Jenny, demonstrating a cat's uncanny skill

      If I put my papers and novels and notebooks down on the kitchen table, prefatory to brewing a pot of tea, Jenny will inevitably come and sit on them.  They can't be comfortable - I mean, do you see litters made with hardback books? - yet she chooses to sit upon them, and will return, purring like a kettle, if tactfully removed.  Again and again.
     WHY, JENNY?  WHY!  <sighs>

     Then we have Edna.  Art?

I have to be careful talking about Our Furry Daughter

     With the choice of a lap and two comfy dog beds, she chooses to lie in repose on the sofa.  Because she can, I suppose.  One imagines what is playing out in her head:
     "Ha!  Take that, wicked and neglectful humans!  I shall seek possession of all your lands and chattels, for possession is nine-tenths of the law."**

Finally -
Conrad has finished watching Season One of "The Punisher", which ended true to form, with Frank getting stabbed, shot and beaten yet still emerging triumphant like the unstoppable force of terror that he is.  Quite where he goes from here is another matter.  He's avenged his family, which was done in the "Daredevil" series; he's also tracked down and <cough cough> punished*** the criminal conspirators who were up to no good in Afghanistan.  He needs to take at least 6 months off to get his red blood cell count up and have all those wounds heal.  Art?

Some bad guys are about to have a very, very bad day

*  Only rubber, but the motley doesn't know that.
**  Not sure where Edna learned to speak in Biblical language, but she's a quick study.
***  Okay, killed.  There.  Happy now?