We Are Starting A New Tradition

If That Makes Sense

Mind you, I don't really care if it doesn't (I'm horrid that way).  Rather than spend ninety minutes crafting another batch of scrivel, I have decided to spend ten listing links that mirror today's date backward in time.  After all, Your Humble Scribe has been creating this stuff for nearly seven and a half years, so I think I deserve to get a little payback from all that ceaseless endeavour.  First of all, we need an eye-catching clickbaity picture that will beguile any unwary passers-by.  Art!

     Why one would aspire to climb a frozen waterfall quite escapes me, you might as well get canned on cooking sherry and play chicken on the motorway.

     Right!  Let the retrospective begin.

2019

https://comsatangel2002.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-sleep-of-reason-produces-monsters.html

2018

https://comsatangel2002.blogspot.com/2018/12/conrad-sneaky-rascal.html

2017

https://comsatangel2002.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-cars.html

2016

https://comsatangel2002.blogspot.com/2016/12/skipping.html

2015

https://comsatangel2002.blogspot.com/2015/12/attack-of-killer-potatoes.html

2014

https://comsatangel2002.blogspot.com/2014/12/doctor-who-surprise.html

2013

https://comsatangel2002.blogspot.com/2013/12/hasty-but-tasty.html

Wagons Ho

Yes Yes Yes More About Wagons

So what?  It's not as if you need to pay to read this scrivel, is it*?  Okay, let me tell you that moving Mother by train was a major undertaking, requiring special ramps and flat car wagons.  Art!

     <sighs and reaches for Tazer>

     Art, we are talking about TANK here.  I refer, of course - obviously! - to the armoured fighting vehicle of the First Unpleasantness NOT the Avengers character.  Can we try again?  

     These things weighed in at 30 tons and were large, as you can see from above with puny humans for scale.  They had to be loaded onto special low-slung wagons by ramps and arranged in order to unload when they got to the detraining station.  Art!  O stop whinging and put some cream on it.

     This is probably being shipped from the factory as in France the sponsons were removed for rail transport due to width issues

     

     Okay, back to "Wagon Train", which we dealt with briefly yesteryon.  It was a television soap opera that began in 1957 and ran for 8 seasons and 284 episodes, so somebody out there liked it.  

     It wouldn't be an earth-shattering revelation to know that it was about <small drum roll> a train of wagons, heading from Missouri to California.  Conrad feels it must have been an immense and immensely slow wagon train, since it took eight years to get there.  I may do some number crunching on that.

     And I have done.  You may thank me later.  Okay, the distance to travel is 1,847 miles**, and it took them 2,920 days to manage that.  We shall be charitable and say that they had on average 12 hours per day to usefully travel, which means their journey took 35,000 hours.  In other words they managed 2/3 of a mile per day at a speed of 0.005 miles per hour**.  It would have been quicker to walk.  Art!

     The character above was one of John Wayne's best friends, I'll have you know: Ward Bond.  He was just as right-wing as Ol' John, and he hated his WT co-star with a passion, in fact with just as much passion as he loved alcohol, since he was an alcoholic by any definition of the word.  Despite being told he was seriously ill Ol' Ward didn't let that interfere with his drinking, no siree! and he was rewarded with a fatal heart attack in 1960.  No explanation was ever offered on the show as to why a leading character had just vanished.

Ward and his hatee have a pointing competition

     There is a saying "My word is my bond" and I think in this case Ward's word was indeed his Bond, and that word was "Drink".

     Now to answer that question from yesterday.  Who pitched their telly series as "Wagon Train to the stars?"  Why none other than Gene Roddenberry, who actually got something called "Starry Trek" off the ground with it.

     Motley! go and help Art with his bandages.

More Crunching Of Numbers

No!  I am not popping sleeping pills - sorry, cryptic crossword withdrawal symptoms.  No, I refer instead to "La Morte D'Arthur" and really, Sir Thomas Malory (the author - do keep up!) was reaching considerably when he describes Arthur and a couple of his knights taking on an enemy host in North Wales.  I say "host" because there were allegedly thirty thousand of them, and Art's Hot Jazz Combo - sorry, cryptic crossword withdrawal symptoms again - trio lay into them and - 

     Beat them!

     

Yeah.  Right.

     Wait, what?  Were they wearing paper armour and carrying cucumber swords?  Even if we apply the Divide By Ten rule for Ol' Tom's poetic licence that still means Art and Co, were outnumbered by a thousand to one.  Conrad knows that, if you go hacking away at a horde, you're exhausted after slaying a hundred of them, never mind a thousand.

     There is more - which is another music for a different kitchen.

Bowled Over

No, nothing to do with skittles.  I refer, of course - obviously! - to the Arecibo radio telescope, which has recently stopped operating thanks to falling apart, in a major way.  As you should already know, the ART was carved out of a hilltop in Puerto Rico as this particular location required the least jiggery-pokery to create a receiving bowl for radio astronomy.  Art!

Before

     It's had quite a long lifetime, 57 years, so the South Canadians have had their money's-worth out of it.  All the recent media attention about it goes blathering on about how a James Bond film had scenes there, as if that were anything special.  Conrad would rather remember an episode of "The X Files" that was set there, though that was quite a while ago.

     During

     What really put the kybosh on the whole - sorry, what's that?  You want evidentiary proof that TXF ever had anything to do with Arecibo?  Okay; let me just add that it was an episode from Season Two, when success had led to the program's budget being increased.  Art!

     I think we'll come back to this once Conrad has gotten a few pictures of the collapse of the telescope as well as the construction.  Keep watching the skies, and also this space***.

Finally -

Gotta keep this short, I need to go put the oven on, sort out some laundry and take Edna for a trot whilst we still have daylight and sunshine, which is a pleasant contrast to yesteryon's snow and slush, and means I don't have to jog upstairs to put my shoes on as, absent rain or snow, my hole-filled Crocs are quite sufficient.  I may still get told off by Wonder Wifey about that, as she fears my advancing years and incipient senility are not aided by having wet feet.

     Art!

     Conrad has decided to re-read the entire collection of "Invinvible", which is complete at twenty-five volumes and is going to take ages.  Not a bad way to spend an hour or fifty.  I'm about half-way through issue 1, so I should finish by about 2023.  You may even get periodic reports on my progress.  And the animation is described as "adult" which seems to guarantee it's going to be as gory and violent as the comics.  Win-win all round!

*  Add usual complaint about Comments

**  None of that metric nonsense here.

***  No pun intended but you can read it as one if you feel like it.

John Wain

(Cackles With Malicious Glee)

You'll see, you'll see how thoroughly clever/tangential/bewilderingly obscure (delete where applicable) I am, in a bit.  And NO that is not a typo, it's a staggeringly funny pun I'll have you know.

     You see, today we have a Theme, which hasn't happened for a good while (code for "I can't remember when and can't be bothered to look") and that theme is "WAGON".  Because I've been perusing all about the TRAIN and concomitant WAGON in "Transportation On The Western Front 1914 - 1918" and good lord aloft, how many wagons did the British army use by late 1918?

     We'll come to that in a minute.  Art!

     How is "Wayne" pronounced?  That's wright, "Wain", and what do you think is Old English for "Wagon"?  Why none other than "Wain", Jane*.  Thus the English surname "Wainwright" is one who works upon wagons.  So you have John Wain in "The War Wain", kind of.

     Okay, from 1967 we jump to 1918 and all those wagons.  We mentioned brake vans yesterday, so that's them out of the way.  That leaves 54,000 other wagons being used on the railways by the end of the First Unpleasantness, in 110 different makes.  There were box wagons, rail-carrying wagons (surely ironic in some way?), tank-carrying wagons, ballast wagons, petrol wagons, a multiplicity of wagons.  Art?

     It may not be apparent, but this type of wagon was open to the elements, as this was the most versatile version, being the easiest to load: all you had to do was dump stuff into it and Hay Pesto! there it was, full.  If the cargo needed protection from the elements then a tarpaulin would be stretched over it, until British soldiers stole the tarp.  They had been carrying out such thievery since the Boer Unpleasantness, apparently, the rascals.  Indeed, in "Field Guns In France" the author boasts about how these tarpaulins "blow into" his encampment from the stores depot next door.

     One solution was to have folding covers on the wagon, a solution considerably more expensive than tarpaulin and one which risked British troops forcibly removing said covers for constructing dug-outs or making fires.

     Motley!  Make like a dog and - get your wag on!

"On The Wagon"
Which, as any fule kno, means to refrain from drinking alcohol.  Your Humble Scribe wondered, rather, where this phrase came from, and checked "Brewer's" (guffaws at the irony) which seemed to be reaching, to be frank.  They had it that the origin lies with South Canadian miners and loggers (harvesting the raw materials for WAGON!) who worked at remote sites that made the back of beyond look like Hong Kong at rush hour.  Art!

     Thus their water had to be brought in by wagon, overland, and so by extension you were "on the wagon" for your drinking (and washing?) water.  Except this strikes Your Humble Scribe as unlikely.  If you are out in the untamed wilderness, what is going to be abundant?  Streams and rivers, not to mention rain.  Besides which, what's to stop the lumberjacks from bringing in a gross of beer bottles each to keep their insides wet, hmmmm?  

                                                          No, you tell him "No beer allowed."
     I may go into this further.  Or I may not.  I'm fickle like that.

"Waggoner's Walk"

You who hail from the unhallowed shores beyond This Sceptred Isle and whom are less than 40 years old won't have the faintest idea what Conrad is wittering on about.  Even I had to look this one up.

                                                       Man about to eat microphone?

 Okay, WW was a radio soap opera broadcast by the BBC between 1969 and 1980, focussing on a road in London <spits> called - ah, you guessed already - "Waggoner's Walk", which is a bit ironic as normally a waggoner (one who uses a wagon) would be riding, not walking, except that "Waggoner's Ride" is confusing as the natural rejoinder would be "Do they?"  and we're getting off track again.  Art?

     Conrad would say a giant lumberjack with the world's biggest chainsaw is the murder suspect, as Phil Cook must have been at least 300 feet tall.

     Anyway, the program seems to have been a kind of "anti-Archers" as it set out to tackle Modern Life And All It's Problems Set In The Modern Babylon, and one hopes it dealt with those irredeemable reprobates who pass port to the left, along with spelling criminals, fans of Nutella and pineapple.  Sadly, this commitment to being edgy and dangerous (as "edgy and dangerous" as Radio 2 got, which is to say not very much) and urban angst seems to have irked some of the senior heads at the BBC and it got cancelled as a cost-cutting measure.  Sort of 'No wheels on your wagon' as an epitaph.

        WW: As British as a bowler-hatted badger on a bicycle eating a brown-bread bacon barm

Wagon Wheels

Conrad is not sure if this item of confectionery is native to The Pond Of Eden or is an import from overseas, so let us illustrate the point being made.  Art!

     These are a snack that my scornfully-dismissive mater described as "A triumph of quantity over quality" and she might have been correct back in the day (a day several decades in the past).  Conrad was never that struck on them when he could have scoffed them, and now I don't have the choice**.  The maker of these has doubtless kept the price as it was, and graduallllllly decreased their size, and O! here's a skeptic with photographic proof.  Art!

                                                          The cold, hard ineluctable truth

Finally - 

This is going off at a tangent to an item that we haven't even covered yet.  However, said Item would probably run to several hundred words and we're nearly at the Compositional Ton, so it's going to appear in detail in a later blog, maybe at the weekend.  Okay, so we've covered a British radio soap opera, which is the very definition of 'shoestring'; let us now flit across the wide Atlantic to South Canada and a soap opera called - 

     
     This one cost £75,000 per episode, probably as much as WW for the whole of it's 11 years and 2,842 episodes.

     Let us abruptly change track and ask the question: whose pitch line for a television series was "Wagon Train - to the stars"?

     Answers on a postcard to: Conrad, Apprentice World Dictator, c/o The Mansion, Sodom-On-The-Wold, Greater Gomorrah, The Pond Of Eden.  Or in the Comments, which I'd prefer, actually.

     I'll provide the answer tomorrow, unless I don't, because - once again! - I'm horrid that way.

*  From the Old Dutch "Waegn"

**  SHAKES FIST AT DIABETES.

Barging In

This Will Make Sense In A While

So kindly bear with us.  

     Firstly, however, we need to take an urgent detour into what is either Late Medieval or Early Modern history, because if Conrad has to endure 800 pages of "Le Mort D'Arthur" then rest assured you out there are most certainly going to reap the benefits.  O yes.  Art?

The ancient and noble sport of stone-stabbing

     A lot of Book Two is dedicated to the derring do's of Sir Balin, whom you may feel you've met before, and you have if, at any point in the past, you have read or watched "The Hobbit", as Ol' Tolky was an academic and historian well-versed in the languages of ancient Britain, hence his stealing borrowing homaging the name.  Art!

     Sir Balin of King Arthur's court is a far cry indeed from a Celtic dwarf with a penchant for gold and digging, seeing as he has two swords and is mighty in battle.  He also has a twin brother, Balan, which must have caused some trouble at home if Mum was calling from the keep of their castle home and they were up on the battlements.  Art!

     SPOILERS AHEAD!

     I WARNED YOU

     Sir Balin ends up in a castle where he has been tracking an invisible knight who kills with impunity - no, I didn't turn over two pages at once, this Garlon chap is able to become invisible - and finishes by killing the castle's seneschal, King Pellam, whom it transpires had the blood of Joseph in his veins, and the weapon used to kill him (Balin's sword having inconveniently shattered) was the Spear of Longinus, yes that one, as used to wickedly poke a hole in Jesus.  This causes a curse to fall on the land and kill many people - we may come back to this.

The pointy thing in question

     This is all related to Balin by Merlin, who is always showing up after the fact, instead of beforehand when he could have prevented nasty things from happening, and it seems horribly unfair that Balin is given the greasy magician's eyeball when he had absolutely no clue about Ol' Pelly's bloodline nor that spear.
     Okay, I shall now get to the point.  Art?

     I put this here as yesteryon we were harping on about "Brake vans" and it tickled my sense of humour.  Your amusement may vary.

     

Vandals Took The Handles

For Lo! we are come upon one of the very few interesting bits in "Transportation On The Western Front 1914 - 1918" where they talk about more than TRAIN timetables and portray a little local colour.  

     Okay, Art, we want a bucolic scene featuring the Somme canal.  Hop to it!

     And let's have a colour photo from today.

     In 1917 the Teutons pulled back to their defences in the Hindenburg Line on a wide front, and they lived up to their distant namesakes the Vandals - or the Goths or the Huns, if you prefer - and if they couldn't steal and carry it away, they sought to destroy it.

     Enter the Somme Canal, which you see above a hundred years ago, and today.  The dirty curs had vandalised this transport hub over a distance of 7 miles, at one point blasting the sides of the canal level with surrounding ground, when it should have been 4 feet higher.  Where they couldn't do this they had chucked everything and the kitchen sink into it: barbed wire and wire stays, telephone wire, empty ammunition boxes, railway tracks, railway wagons (!), barges, pontoons, tree trunks, girders, brickwork and masonry and temporary bridges.

     That's actually a different canal but gives an idea of the mess the Somme version was left in.  Heaven only knows how the Teutons got railway wagons close enough to push in.

     The whole of the above was intended to slow down any Allied follow-up into the debatable plundered lands the Teutons had vacated, meaning they needed to repair the canal before it could be used for suppliles again.  Hmmmm well it was all done in 8 weeks, probably a lot quicker than Gustav and Erich intended.

It also made these chaps very cross indeed.

Let Us Now Descend To The Depths

Conrad would like to display another pulp magazine cover from the early Fifties, featuring, of course - obviously! - an attractive young lady not wearing a lot.  These were the prime reason for catching people's men's boy's attention when the publications were displayed on newsstands, with author's names coming a distant second.  Art!

Small = SFW

     Note the strategically-placed bubbles and eddies in the water that mean the picture is just this side of acceptable, a phenomenon that Derek and Clive have commented upon**.  It's still quite striking, as it juxaposes (not a word you were expecting to hear today) a mermaid with a submarine, giving you a sudden realisation about what the scale is here*.  Also, who knew that mermaids were heavily into shockingly scarlet lipstick?

Another Wallet-Drainer

Professor Gary Sheffield, who works at Wolverhampton University, recently stated on Twitter that he's going to post up military history books from the past year that he thinks particularly highly of, at which Your Humble Scribe groaned aloud and, shaking his head, directed a searching look at Wallet.

     "O noes!" squeaked Wallet.

     First up has been "The Fortress" by Alex Watson, which is about the Austro-Hungarian fortress of Przemysl, and it's siege during the First Unpleasantness.  Most of those commenting on Amazon and Goodreads had never heard of it UNLIKE YOUR HUMBLE SCRIBE, who knows the outline.  Art!

     I may return to the subject and elucidate briefly, that you may decide if you want Alex's book or not.  Prof. Boff (another military historian) also recommends it.

Finally -

We are nearly at the Compositional Ton so what frothiness can we end BOOJUM! upon, we wonder?  O yes!  At the back of "Once And Future" - which deals with Arthurian legend and myth and makes a good primer for LMDA - there was a panel with half a dozen other titles from Boom! publishers, four of which looked interesting.  Let's look at "The Woods" first.  Art?

     From what I can gather, over 500 pupils and staff at a South Canadian college are suddenly transported from planet Earth to Somewhere Else.  It ran to 9 trade paperbacks, so it must have been popular and have plenty of plot.  Dear me, dear me, another wallet-drainer.

     "O noes!" squeaks Wallet.

*  Er - I just realised.  No pun intended.

**  English comedians and very, very NSFW.

Late Braking News

Ha!

Yes, I'm afraid Conrad is letting the punnery fly once again.  You see, I am still whanging on about "Transportation On The Western Front 1914 - 1918" (don't fret and snivel so, it doesn't become you, and we're 60% through it).  Today we are taking a gander at an entity known as a "Brake Van", which Your Humble Scribe knew not wot of before today, though know he does and so will you, too*.

CAUTION! Know your Basilisk.  THIS IS NOT A WYVERN!

     So I could have started off with something horrid like "Brake Van Morrison" or <cackles and tweaks moustache ends> "Brake Van Der Graaf Generator" or <thinks> "Shooting Brake Van".  Thus think yourself lucky you got today's title.  Art!

Brown Eyed Girl Brown Painted Brake Van

     The job of a brake van - there's a clue in the name - is to tootle along at the back of a train of trucks, and apply the motion-retarding mechanisms (brakes) when the whole massive array comes to a halt, in order to prevent it inadvertently moving off again.  Because a short train of locomotive, tender, 10 empty trucks and brake van can easily weigh 170 tons and if this were to rumble off - you can see how that might end up poorly.

     The other time a brake van gets used is when a train is going downhill.  Rail design keeps gradients as shallow as possible, but if you're pulling 200 tons and going downhill you can't risk going too fast, or see above.  Thus the brake van helps to slow the whole array down.  Hooray for brake van!

     A third, last, and critical function that you don't really want to experience is having a coupling in that assemblage of trucks or carriages break.  Yes, "Break" not "Brake".  Mechanical failure.  In order that the contents of the box trucks (or the screaming passengers in a carriage) do not go over the edge of a cliff, the guard in the brake van heroically puts the brakes on.  Hooray for brake van and guard!

Our hero

     Motley!  We're going to roleplay Snidely Whiplash and Gerta Goodness, and we need someone to tie to the railway tracks.  You're it.

Decembeer Begins

NO!  THAT IS NOT A TYPO!  It is an hysterically funny pun**.  Laugh, you dastards, laugh!

     For yes, yesterday (actually today as I'm writing this on 1/12/2020 but it won't get published until 2/12/2020, sorry if this confuses you) was indeed the First of December.  01/12/2020 if you want to be specific; this shouldn't be necessary but if you have a time-machine you might have gotten confused and there isn't always a convenient discarded paper, with the date prominently displayed, that blows across the street in order to wrap around your ankles, a trope which I sp - 

     Back on course.  Art!

     Behold an early Christmas present!  A beer advent calendar, with one variety for every day up to 24/12/2020, after which one has to supply the tipple for Christmas Day itself.  As tonight is a school night Your Thirsty Scholar won't be consuming it just yet.  Wait until Friday, though.  And yes, you will be getting other pictures of beers in the days to come.

When Greek Met Greek

I'm going to have to explain this, aren't I? <insincere sigh as it allows showing off> You see - hang on, has that treacherous appendage Mister Hand been adding in facetious little notes?

Mumbletypeg the ancient way

     The thing is, it's a metaphor that doesn't really apply.  Typically, it's used to refer to when two equal forces pitch into each other in battle, and I'm referring to the podcast "We Have Way" featuring Jim Holland and Al Murray, and Nick Moran, whom you may know as "The Chieftain's Hatch".  Two sets of trackheads, definitely.  Not that any of them are liable to go sparring with each other.

Our two entertainers

Nick at left - and I'm pretty sure that's Ian from "Forgotten Weapons"
(O and that tank has a - waitforitwaitforit - muzzle BRAKE)

     Nick, you see, possesses not only a sound theoretical backing in TANK, but actually drove one for a living in hot and distant lands.  Besides working for "World of TANKS".  He has a great line in debunking a lot of urban myths about TANK and you should check his work out on Youtube***.

A Little Schadenfreude Goes A Long Way

O Frabjous Day!  I won't go so far as to add "Kalloo kallay" as that would be overdoing it a bit, approaching two exclamation marks.

     No, what has perked me up and generally brought a smile to my normally grim visage (no great improvement it has to be said) was the BBC's daring to allow Have Your Say on a ballfoot game.  I enjoyed the comments and especially this one, which had me laughing out loud.  Art!

"The amount of time Grealish spends writhing on the floor is frightening, maybe he should have been a worm"

     It still makes me laugh after having read it half-a-dozen times.

     Sorry, no idea who he is or which team he plays for nor who he was playing against.  Minor insignificant details!

Here's One I Made Earlier -

A famous phrase from "Blue Peter" lest ye be unaware.  Conrad realised he still had a spare photograph left over from the clips taken of Idiots With Chainsaws, so let us hie Art from the coal cellar, tell him to put down his knife and fork and -

"I warned you not to brake my car!"

     The previous five minutes, where these chumps felled that very large, solid tree and dropped it squarely on their car, is not recorded.  Actually that should be the previous ten minutes, as the second five minutes would have been spent in ferocious cursing, finger-pointing and assertions about mother's morals.  Look closely and you'll see how the roof has already acquired a large dent, and how low the chassis sits above the rear wheel, which implies the suspension is feeling a bit poorly.  When the tree trunk falls off it catches rubber sealant around the door and pulls that off, too.

Finally -

I did a little Google-fu yesterday and discovered that there's prospectively an "Invincible" cartoon series in the offing.  Conrad wonders what kind of rating they are going for, because whilst the comic books are a little coy when it comes to sex, and I don't think there's any drugs present, BOY! are they violent.

     There's some of the voice talent right there.  Colour Conrad curious.

     And with that, Vulnavia, we are like those jacket potatoes.  Done!

*  Whether you want to or not.  Heh.

**  IT IS!  IT IS TOO!

***  If you do, it will get you remission from the uranium mines when I take over.