"Remember Where We Parked"

Immortal Lines From Everyone's Favourite Canadian
William Shatner, you lummocks! <sighs heavily in self-pity> Ah me the youth of today.  Well, let me qualify that: the human youth of today.  Back on my home-world, the ice planet <SYSTEM INFORMATION REDACTED> the youth do what they're told when they're told, which includes memorising our gl - excuse me - Our Glorious History.  And if they fail on any of those three counts - well, the organ banks are always waiting.
     Which has nothing to do with "Star Trek IV: The Journey Home".  Art?

One of the best in the franchise

     If you haven't seen it yet THE EXIT DOOR IS THAT WAY!  My title refers to the commandeered Klingon ship being parked in a park, whilst invisible.  If Art will pause sucking the innards out of that nuclear fuel rod -

Thus

     And that's Captain Kirk's reminder to his compatriots.  You can see his point.
     Okay, that bit of the Intro has, at the most, a barely tangential reference to what this item is actually about.
     Okay, you remember me going on about an exceedingly daft story I wrote, that featured an aircraft carrier on tracks?  Sparked by the discovery of similar on a Youtube clip by MetalBall Studios.  I did threaten to come back to the subject, and that's what we're doing here.
     Right!  Art, a picture of the USS Forrestal, please.

With barely-visible puny humans for scale

     This shows what a mighty beast she was.  Assuming we swap out her diesels for a nuclear power plant, could she be made land-mobile via tracks?  A little number-crunching has been undertaken -
     Mass = 60,000 tons, or 132,000,000 pounds*.  Length at the waterline is 330 yards, and we will assume that the first and last 15 yards are unsuitable for emplacing the drive machinery for the tracks, so we have 300 usable yards of hull.  The width (called the "beam", I believe, if you want to make a Scotty joke) is 42 yards.  We want plenty of separation between track units, so I am going to say that these tracks are 10 yards wide, with a 20 yard gap underneath the hull width.  We are going to use four separate track units in mutually-opposed pairs, each of 100 yards length, and with two tracks per unit.  Art?

No images with tracks added.  Sorry

     There is a reason for this track arrangement, and it's called the Crawler, it being the enormous vehicle that carried the assembled Apollo rockets from the Vertical Assembly Building to the launchpad.  Art?

With puny fire engine for scale

     So, we know this arrangement works.
     Okay, what we need now is the surface area of the Forrestal's track unit in contact with the ground, and we shall estimate that 50% of it is in contact at any given moment.  Thus we have 1,296,000 square inches of track on the ground.  We divide the total mass by this figure and we get a total of 25 pounds per square inch.  If you think that's a lot, the average family car has a p.s.i. of 80.
     There you go, technically feasible.  Of course, heaving 60,000 tons out of the water and ashore would require a shore-front with no cliffs, which would limit where the USAS Forrestal could drive inland.  It wouldn't be very fast, either, probably not doing more than one or two miles per hour.  Still, it would be able to keep going across terrain which had water features of less than 100 yards width, for days if need be, so if you were a pilot off on a long recon mission, you would have to follow the tracks.  Unless it was night, in which case - today's title.

We shall come back to this, O Yes Indeed

     Wow, this has been a lengthy Intro.  Motley, bring me a bucket of gin and a couple - actually, no, bring me a bucket of Pimm's and a glass of ice-cubes.  Hop to it now.  And make sure the glass is the transparent aluminium one.

Haunted By Holland
There I was, looking up "Dybbuk" in my copy of Brewers, when I spotted (and read, of course) a whole list of things that began "Dutch -", several of which were very uncomplimentary.  Conrad likes the Dutch so I shan't repeat any of them.
     Then, what do I find when looking for "Practical Engineering" on Youtube?  Why, a Dutch chap warbling on in Dutch, yet with English subtitles, which is completely normal, as all Dutch are fluent in English, frequently better than quite a few of the English (the FiveGees spring to mind here).  Art!

     I've not seen one of these in action before; it's a CNC drill.  That's "Computer Numerically Controlled", although it probably smacks of witchcraft to the FiveGees.  If any of you poor confused folk happen to be reading this, don't worry! It will not steal your immortal soul should your gaze linger upon it.
     Not as long as you sacrifice a black cockerel in the graveyard at midnight, any
     NO!  Bad Conrad!  Naughty Conrad!
     Quick, Art, a picture!

     This is what our artisan was making with his digital deviltry carpentry.  When completed he put it to work, "It" being a 'Perpetuum Mobile', or Perpetual Motion Machine.  Art?

     Of course it didn't work!  Mechanically impossible, thanks to the Laws of Thermodynamics.  No, our rascal had installed a small electric motor in the base, which is what made it rotate.  Note the English title in upper port.

Finally -
The English and Teutons both believe that the others do not possess a sense of humour.  I can prove that this is incorrect for the Teutons, and this blog ought to convince you that at least one out of seventy million inhabitants of This Sceptred Isle has a sense of humour**.  Art?

Hilarious in Teuton

     It was a satirical magazine that poked fun at Teuton militarism and class, at least until 1914.  There is an hilarious series of cartoons about a hapless British dashund being vilified, arrested and then bravely forbearing being executed, which I might try to dig up at some point.  Amazingly enough the Nazis never banned it; Conrad suspects someone very very senior in their heirarchy had a soft spot for it.

     And with that we are done!


*  To reiterate: none of that nasty metric stuff here.
**  It is mine, however, and - well, you can call it idiosyncratic if you like.

I Get The Bird

In A Good Way
Come on, when have you ever known this blog to be straightforward about anything when we can be convoluted at the very least, if not positively cryptic at times?  Mandy did say that she sometimes wondered exactly what I was going on about*.
     I refer, of course, to the game of Mah Jongg, which is apparently Chinese for "Sparrows", which comes in two versions: i) A game played between four people, in a similar convention to bridge, apparently, which I will take as read because I've never played bridge.  I have only played this version of MJ against a computer, and got pretty good at it.  Art?

The game in play

     The idea is to build hands from tiles you pick up, getting a bonus if you have one or more of the special tiles.  There's a lot more to it.  We have an MJ set lying around somewhere -
     Anyway, that's what this is not.  Because ii) is a solitaire version, much like solitaire, where the tiles are arranged at random and you have to remove edge pairs, attempting to clear all the tiles.  You can try to set this up with actual tiles, which is tricky, and most people prefer the computer version, which I got back into yesteryon.  No idea why, because it's a tremendous time waster.  Art?

An example

     There are "Undo" and "Hint" options with this one, which of course I never use. If you look at the picture above you can see that the extreme right hand tiles are blocked, because there's no Four Of Bamboo to pair with the edge tile.  On the bottom row you can see two Seven Of Dots next to each other, which is a pain, because to match either of them you need to get rid of all the tiles to either left or right.  You can also see the centrally-stacked tiles, but only the top ones.  If one of these piles has a pair of tiles one beneath the other, you're pretty much goosed.
     I do win occasionally.  Art?

Proof, you skeptics! Proof!

     Motley, when I said "shall we play with tiles?" it did not mean get up on the roof and strip slates <sighs heavily>

"Pimlico"
What's in a name?  Your humble scribe brings this name up because he was processing a form sent in from the branch there of My Still Coyly Anonymous Employer, and - as ever, curious** - wondered at the origin.  There is an entry on Wiki; however, I consulted my copy of Brewers (which was ironically apt, as you will see in a minute) which informs that the name - yes, Art, a picture, please - 

Nice Regency architecture
(Averaging £1,250,000 per house, or twice the national average)

     The name comes from a brewer (do you see wha - O you do) called Ben Pimlico, who was famous for his <ahem> "nut-browne" ale.  Allegedly.  Because, not to be outdone, the South Canadians claim it was borrowed from a place-name of theirs, to whit: Pamlico.  You can guess which origin Conrad prefers.
     As mentioned above, it is pricey, and has been the haunt of some famous people, whom presumably had deep pockets or inherited handily.  
     And there you have it: Pimlico.  Now we are all better-informed than we were five minutes ago.

Also -

The Devil's Dictionary!
Not literally, although I do own a copy of that amusing and horrendously cynical work by Ambrose Gwinnet Bierce.  No, I refer to my copy of "Brewers Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable", because it is indeed A Tome Of Satan: all you have to do is pick it up and check an entry, and then another one catches your eye, and then another, and you have to look up what it cross-referenced, and - then it's bedtime.  And you picked it up at breakfast.
     Today, however, I have managed to discover something useful within it's pages and put it down again.  First, though - Art!

Nice with a slice

     This drink is gin-based, which Your Humble Scribe did not know.  It is one of a clutch of Pimm's drinks, six in total.  Number 2 was whisky-based, Number 3 was brandy-based, Number 4 was rum-based, Number 5 was rye-based and Number 6 WAS A FREE MAN - sorry, came over all Prisoner there - Number 6 was vodka-based.  And it's called "Pimm's" because that's the name of the chap who invented it in 1840***.

"Dimya did not react well to being told he could not have a cut of Pimm's Number 6 profits"

"Dybbuk"
I know, I'm sorry, one of those words that pop up in my head like a mental eructation.^ I'm not even sure that's the correct spelling.  A minute, please, whilst I consult my trusty Collins Concise -
     Yep, spelled correctly.  It comes from Yiddish by way of Hebrew, and is the spirit of a sinner who has taken up non-paying residence in another person.  Possession?  Probably not a good thing.  

Conrad pretty sure this is a metaphor, as otherwise sitting down would be rather difficult

     As I recall, the way to evict this unwanted resident is to array a set of people around the sufferer, and have them blow a ceremonial ram's horn, preferably all out of tune.  This is enough to break the dybbuk's ties with the mortal body, especially if they were at all musical in life, and off they pop.  Where to?  Hmmm, good question, is there a Jewish Hell or Hades?  <Googles quickly> hmmmm a big question - perhaps, and if so it's called "Gehinom".
     Now we are all far better-informed than we were ten minutes ago.  BOOJUM! - educating you one factoid at a time!

Finally - 
Gotta tie this up quickly, Conrad is hungry and wants some lunch!



*  On occasions, so do I.
**  An euphemism for "Nosy" <the horrid truth courtesy Mister Hand>
***  Maybe he made enough money from it to go live in Pimlico?
^  No, this is NOT rude.  Wash out your dirty minds!

The Literary Tee Tea For Me

One Of My Ex-Colleagues Knows Me Only Too Well ...
Don't worry, it's nothing secret, so he will never mysteriously vanish whilst on his way to have a little chat to the police -
     No, this concerns a tee-shirt, hence the "Tee" of the title, and tea, the cup that cheers and not inebriates, and me, Your Humble Scribe.  Me.  You know, the person who writes this stuff! - what, did you think it was all churned out by some writing algorithm?
     Art!

Apt.  Accurate.  Got me down to a  -

     This does sum Conrad up pretttttty well.  As you should surely know by now, my Book Mountain never grows any less, since I never stop buying books they magically appear out of nowhere.  My reading of same has been slowed of late by a side-project I have, which I may inform you about if you're good.  Maybe if you're bad, even.
     "Know things" is rather a broad term.  Conrad now knows how to make pierogi from scratch, or why neutron flux is an unholy terror, and that the USS "Forrestal" weighed 59,500 tons (we shall come back to this later on).  
     It's the tea situation that worries me.  Before this wretched coronavirus, Your Humble Scribe got through three pots of loose-leaf Darjeeling over the weekend, which was a fine and sustainable rate of consumption.  Now, though, working from home, I am getting through two pots per day in the week in addition to the regular three at the weekend.

I realise talking about tea-leaves is a bit dull, so here are some people jousting on mobility scooters.
I joked about this as a sport earlier today.  Me and my big mouth.

     I've used up about half the stock I got from my work-shadowing at A Major Supermarket last year.  This is getting serious.  Why, who knows what effect this crisis is going to have on tea plantations in India?
     Motley, what say we stand in the backyard paddling pool after filling it with water, and then try slapping each other with electric eels?

Electric Eels*!

     
Sharks Are Our Friends!
I hereby apologise to all sharks for not banging on about this topic of late, and can only plead guilty to the fact that I need a day of at least 25 hours length and the ability to exist happily without sleep in order to fit in all my occupational diversions (we shall come back to this later).
     Pausing only to throw a flight of darts at the board upholstered with the face of Peter Benchley, let me re-introduce the Weasel Shark, a creature that combines two of the animals we here at BOOJUM! revere above all others.  Art?

"Weasel shark, weasel shark.
It's bite is worse than it's bark.
For a shark it's rather small.
And, to be honest, it doesn't bark at all.**"

      Whenever I mention sharks, I always bring in that free boardgame that came with an edition of "Strategy & Tactics" magazine, about a GI in Vietnam who gimmicks up a radio that transports him through time and space to a world where there are land-travelling sharks - no, no, I am perfectly sober, honest! It's impossible to track down either magazine or game, but today I did stumble across a - well, let's just have Art illustrate for us -

     Conrad is unsure if this is hilarious or terrifying.  Add your take in the Comments.

The Battle Of Lower Spleine Continues
 O my yes! Those of you not interested in Historical Miniature Replicas, or the English Civil Unpleasantness can SIT BACK DOWN! because this is interesting***.
     Turn Nine had seen the mostly complete failure of cavalry units on both sides to manage a Charge successfully, as the rules balance out both the  charger and the chargee, and only a lucky dice roll makes a Charge effective.  So Conrad decided Turn 10 was going to see what a bit of Close Combat resulted in.  Art?

     This is rather disordered compared to Turn 1, when everything was neat and symmetrical.  For reference:

     No plan survives contact with the enemy, hmmm?
     Anyway, the first picture shows things as they stand after the Parliamentary forces had - unexpectedly getting the first move in - carried out a close assault on the Royalist's left flank cavalry and centre infantry.  I do have a close-up of the central action.  Art?

     That lone infantry base to upper-left is Essex's Parliament Foote, who have just crashed into one of Gerard's companies, after giving it a good dose of lead.  The Royalists have been completely stuffed and are now in a state of panic flight backwards.  This has caused them to run headlong into one of their supporting battalions, causing it, too, to fall back.
     You can also see from the big picture that I've finally managed to get rid of the Unwanted Geographical Feature!
     On a more technical note, there are a lot of problems for the units here that are a result of me not having them deploy properly; essentially there's no room to move because units in "Polemos" cannot move backwards, only wheel left or right to manoeuvre.  I guess what I should have done was begin from scratch, but as i) Conrad is lazy and ii) this is by way of an experiment anyway, Your Modest Artisan is going to carry on.

Black Flag = punk anarchists!

I Did Threaten This Earlier -
You remember my comment about the USS "Forrestal" in the Intro?  Well, MetalBall Studios had something in their list of ficitonal land-travelling vehicles that triggered a memory.  Art?

The Carrier, of course.  That MAWLR thing is just silly.

     The memory was of an idea I had back in the Seventies, of putting an aircraft carrier on tracks, so that it could not only paddle the seven seas, but shed water and crawl about on land, to the confounding of enemy naval strength.  Clearly other people had the same idea, so I was onto a winner.  
     Whether or not you could do it in real life - that's another matter altogether - but, you know, I think I may go away and number-crunch the concept.  I shall get back to you on this one.

Finally -
Your Humble Scribe was reading yet another r/Reddit channel on Youtube last night, and was vastly amused by one that had the title, "Foreign visitors, what was you WOE moment in America?" (we are using "What On Earth" rather than the much cruder original).  There were some common themes, such as how easy it is to get hold of guns - they can be bought off the shelf in Walmart - and how enormous catering portions are.  What tickled Conrad was a comment about a catering establishment he'd never heard of: "Golden Corral", where the OP said that everything lay under a bath of liquid butter.  I think he was jesting - but am not entirely sure.  Art?

They do a "Help Yourself Buffet" - Conrad is going to get to one of these, somehow.

     And with that - we are done!

*  And I'm not sorry, not one bit.
**  I think I've typed this doggerel up ages ago, which is code for "I'm pretty sure I typed this up a geological age ago, but I'm too idle to bother go look it up and confirm."
***  It is!  It so is!