It's The End Of The World -

No!  Nothing To Do With R.E.M.
Though it is an insanely catchy song "Deep-fried the alternative tonight" indeed; actually I have no idea what Michael Stipe is singing about and, I suspect, neither does he -
     Which is getting off-track immediately.  Usually we wait a little longer before making away at a tangent.  What I intended to yark on about today was the theme of Post-Apocalyptic Fiction 

<excuse me, got to go turn the cake around in the oven and tent it with foil>

     Frankly it looks rather flat and unrisen.  Should it have been self-raising flour?
     Okay, back to the End of the World.  I happened to come across a Youtube trailer for 'Swan Song' and erroneously assumed this was a fan-made short about the PA novel I've just finished.

Wrong again!

     This did lead me to view a couple of Youtube clips where people recommend their top selections for reading about TEOTW, because nothing makes you appreciate what you've got more than reading about it all being gone.  Let's detail List The First:

1. "One Second After" by William Forstchen - haven't read it, but I may do, as it's an interesting premise - EMP attacks cause a collapse of civilisation.
2. "On the Beach" by Nevil Shute.  Yep, read it and seen the film.  Not sure the premise holds up - fallout from the Northern Hemishpere will eventually kill off the Southern, too.
3. "Swan Song" by Robert McCammon - see above.
4. "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy.  Read, didn't enjoy.  Essentially, two tramps rummaging about rubbish dumps.
5. "Alas Babylon" by Pat Frank.  Read it and enjoyed it.  An inspiration for much PA literature dealing with nuclear war and an acknowledged inspiration for No.1 on the list.

Alas indeed

<excuse me again, off to check on the cake>

     Well, it did rise a bit more after that first check and I bet if there wasn't any xantham gum in the mix it wouldn't have risen at all.  What's that?  I was away an awfully long time if all I did was turn a cake around?  Who are you, my parents?!  I took Edna for a trot, loaded the tumbledrier and put some blueberries out to thaw.  Art?

     There you go, Spiced Applesauce Cake, and no, I didn't use the jar of apple puree that was at the back of the cupboard with an expiry date of 2014, I made that apple puree myself.*  Apple-ocalypse Now, you might say.

The End Of The World (In A Way)
It has finally arrived - trade paperback Volume 25 of "Invincible", aptly titled "The End Of All Things", because it (probably) is.** That means the saga of Mark Greyson, the superhero of the title, has come to an end.  Art?

Like saying goodbye to family ...***

     That's Mark in the middle, with his wife Atom Eve to the left, and their daughter Terra.  There's an hilarious double-page spread that shows her growing up in about 6 panels -
     Okay, now I've got the other 24 volumes out of storage, and I intend to sit down and read them all in sequence, so we shall see quite what that brings.
     I did interpose 'probably' at the start, because there have been several stand-alone TPBs that feature other heroes from the Invincible universe, so there may be more tales yet.

What's Missing In This Picture?

     For a start, the two schoolchildren who mucked up the shot and the joke.  What were they doing, queuing at my bus stop anyway?
     Back to the question, "What's Missing?"
     The bus!
      What's missing in this picture?

     More buses!  Usually, by the time my bus has arrived, three others have gone by on the opposite side of the road, a fact I am determined to make money from in some way.  
     There is a poster on many of the First buses I travel on that encourages passengers to let them know how the journey went.  Gentle reader, I dare not access that website! for the type would boil off the pages, thanks to my Frothing Nitric Ire.

Finally -
We've had bad puns, so making reference to a tank is about due.  I think we'll mention one of the more obscure pieces of kit that Perfidious Albion fielded during the Second Unpleasantness, the Centaur tank.  Art?

Thus

     At first glance it looks very similar to a Cromwell, and they do share a common design heritage, but the engine is different, and that gun is actually a 3.74" howitzer^ cobbled together from a 3.7" anti-aircraft gun, a 25 pounder breech and the mounting for a 6 pounder anti-tank gun.
     The Centaur only saw service in support of the Royal Marines after D-Day, to the number of 114 of them.  As I said, obscure.  Art?

*  The jar?  The jar got binned.
**  With comic franchises, it is wise to never say "never"
***  I shan't cry.  Shan't!
^  None of that metric nonsense here.

A Remembrance Of Things Past

No!  Nothing To Do With Marcel Proust
 - although I do give you props for knowing the English translation of "A La Recherche De Temps Perdu", which I have not read and do not intend to, as it lacks a) Tanks, b) Zombies and c) Atom bombs.  It does, according to various accounts, have 'madeleines', which are a variety of cake eaten by the M8s across the Channel.  Art?

Thus

     I've never baked them - a future project? - though I did pig out on the ones that Janice brought into the Electric Goldfish Bowl one day.
     No, what I wanted to go on about at length were more dan - excuse me - Dangerous Toys Of Yesteryear, when you could get away with flogging potentially lethal kit to small children, via their doting and misinformed parents.  Art?

He'll end up in a cast, let alone playing with one!

     This particular kit allowed young boys to cast soldiers, cannon and battleships from metal.  Molten metal.  Molten lead, in fact.  
     Yes, lead, that notorious heavy metal poison, which happens to only become molten at over 3000C.  As you can see, or rather not see, the sole safety feature with this kit was the length of the ladle's handle, which wasn't all that long because of - Box Dimensions And Packaging Costs!  I don't see any warning or cautionary labels on the box artwork about how dangerous inhaling lead fumes is, so - given that this Kollection Of Killer Kit came out in 1936, perhaps those boys who had been huffing Pb at the time were the scientists who gave us the H-Bomb in the Fifties?

Then there's this ...

     But I think that's enough mercurial madness for one day.  Time to lock the motley in a proving oven whilst wearing a suit of armour and see how much weight it loses in an hour!

The Spy In The Sky You Can't See With Your Eye 
Okay, okay, I presume you actually own two ocular identification units, that there above is poetic licence.*
     I refer, of course - obviously! - to the recently launched ZUMA satellite, which may or may not have blown up during second-stage separation; the details are a bit sketchy and the declaration of it blowing up might be a big fat lie, to prevent the Ruffians taking an interest, for ZUMA is a South Canadian satellite.  Or was.  Or is.
     Okay  JENNY LEAVE THOSE EARPHONES ALONE AND DON'T YOU DARE CHEW THEM APART!  (sorry, there's a glitch in the cyborg sentry cat's programming that causes her to chew the ends off earphones).
     Where were we?

No, Art, no.  But thanks for trying to help.

     It is postulated, due to the angle of launch and height of the 2nd stage separation, that ZUMA is a stealth satellite, designed and intended to provide real-time observation and communication about everything it's beady electronic eyes pick up.  If it did deploy successfully, then it won't just be invisible to the human eye, it won't be visible to radar, either.  This is because - Art?

Very Freudian

     - it will have inflated a giant balloon (process shown above), which deflects any kind of impinging radiation instead of reflecting it, meaning that radar won't bounce off it to give a return.  So.  Whether it was successfully deployed or not, we'll never know.
     What little we do know about stealth satellites comes from the technology test-bed project MISTY, which was also stated to have blown up on launching.**

No Phone Photos
I did take a couple on Friday that I was going to work into another incisive critique about the Enemy of Western Civilisation (First Bus), except my phone had mysteriously lost all it's charge, and has thus been rendered hors de combat.*** It's still charging up, so Conrad has no ability to upload his photographs, which - let's face it - is the only reason I have a mobile phone.  Which I have dubbed the "Devil's Digital Distraction", because it's true.

"Conrad, for once, speaks the truth."

     Well, today we've covered tanks and, if not astronomy, at least satellites.  That leaves only two other things to complete our Facebook default description.  Art?

Ah, I see, Art: a twofer

*  Even though I hate poetry.
**  I dunno, it's almost enough to make you distrust a government, isn't it?
***  M8 for "Dead"

Memories

Ha!  The Irony -
For I have remembered what I forgot yesterday, which was banging on at length about human memory, triggered by watching some clips of "Joe 90", a television programme created by that most talented of futurologists, Gerry Anderson.  Art?

The eponymous Joe

     The background, and I hope I'm not spoiling it for you, is that Joe's adoptive father, Professor "Mac" McClaine, has invented a device which can transfer people's memories between each other.  He calls it - strained punning here - B.I.G.R.A.T. and the first person he uses it on as a functional device is - his nine-year old son, Joe.
     You could get away with this sort of thing in the Sixties, you know.  Today if a brilliant scientist tried to mind-wipe and reprogram a small child, they'd end up in Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital.

Free food provided, though

     The inspiration may have come from an obscure and little-known sci-fi series called "Starry Treks", which sounds like a brand of breakfast cereal.  In an episode entitled "Spock's Brain" Doctor McCoy uses an alien device to acquire super-advanced medical skills.

See?  Super-advanced*

     The thing is, those medical skills are transient.  Use them before you lose them, Bones!
     Anyway, such a premise was also used in a television series called "Dollhouse" which wasn't that good because it didn't last long.
     This - sorry, B.I.G.R.A.T. I lost focus there for a minute - lead me to think and ponder, which can be dangerous given what I know about explosive chemicals and toxins.  The memories that get uploaded into Joe are merely technical skills and abilities, rather than different personalities, as otherwise he wouldn't be Joe any more.  They also appear to be dormant unless activated by a special set of glasses with built-in circuitry; the question is, are they transient memories as well, or do they persist over time?  Thus does Joe retain the ability to carry out neurosurgery, fly a high-performance jet fighter and do ballet?  I suspect not, or the W.I.N. would merely load him up with all sorts of skills and abilities in the first episode.

The very B.I.G.R.A.T.

     This is an interesting speculative subject and I think we'll return here.  O yes indeed!
     Okay, time to make the motley juggle with some balls of TNT after telling it that they're just plastic!

"Tank Action" By David Render
Yes, back to that work again, which ought to satisfy anyone who came here because Facebook mentions "tanks", although perhaps I ought to put "zombies" instead of "astronomy".  We'll see.
     David makes some very good points that I've never seen brought up in print before.  One was the severe disadvantage that the longer-gunned Teuton panzers had in any kind of wooded terrain, which Art can help illustrate.  Art!  Pictures!

A Panther

     You'll struggle to find any pictures of these things operating in forests or woods, because as you can see the gun overhangs the hull by a considerable amount:  put simply it cannot easily traverse where there are tree trunks.  Now - Art?

A Sherman

     As is obvious, no overhang here.  On several occasions David was up against formidable Teuton tanks that bugged out of their wooded hidey-hole, because they feared getting shot to bits without being able to retaliate.
     
Excuse me, just got to go turn the oven off.  Don't want that dinner to burn!

"Happy"
The television series, not what I am.  Mind you, I am pretty cheerful today after working Saturday, because with tomorrow being a Bank Holiday I still have another day off.
     I saw the trailer for this, which seemed entertainingly bizarre.  The warning header tells of drugs, swearing, nudity, violence and all sorts of other good things.  And the first episode doesn't disappoint, as well as a helping of very dark humour.  Art?

This is typical.  And yes, that is a tiny blue unicorn

     
No Cucumber!
Given that the weather is hot and sunny, and that I have my Anthony Worrall-Thompson Diabetic Cookbook out, I thought making an Oinamul salad would be good for the digestion, except - no cucumber!
     I foresee a trip to the Co-Op in my near future.  Besides, they might have some remaindered offal going cheap!

Oinamul

*  Nor any cheap gags about hairdryers.