Thinking

I Was Stupid
I can admit it now.  Yesterday, shortly prior to leaving the house for work in the cold, wet, dark, dead morning, I carelessly passed the comment "How will First Bus screw things up today"?
     Well, well, well.

That distant orange blur is, in fact, a bus

          Of course, since there was little traffic and few passengers, the 409 was late.  Only a few minutes, however, which is practically on time for First Bus.  No, the sting in the tail of this tale was at the city centre bus stop off Lever Street, where an announcement had been taped to the bus shelter.  I shall endeavour to get a picture of it tonight.
     Due to the roadworks on the A62 northbound, it announced, and a diversion route unsuitable for buses and other large vehicles, the 83, 84, 181 and 182 would all divert at Queen Street, travel north on Rochdale Road and rejoin the A62 further on. 
     Conrad predicts delays.  Long delays.
     I shall keep you posted*.      
     Oh, and whilst looking up BOOJUM!'s prior references to First Bus Spokesdemons, I came across another post from 2018, where there were even more bus shenanigans.

http://comsatangel2002.blogspot.com/2018/02/its-not-conspiracy-theory.html

     Therein the link.
     Motley, break out the shotguns and clay pigeons, for I have a whole load of incipient ire to work off.


Prof Ann Reardon's Quest Against Qurap

The Prof is a food scientist who wages a one-woman war against a tidal wave of toxic tat over on Youtube, promoted by "Lifestyle" channels that put up faked videos that claim to be both fashionable and true, when they are neither.
     The one that follows below is nothing to do with food and comes from the execrable "5 Minute Crafts", who create fake videos for money.  Art?



Yes, that is a hot glue gun being squeezed onto a toothbrush -



 - and then the mouth.

     WHAT ON EARTH?!  It should go without saying, but DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!  REALLY!  JUST DON'T!
     Conrad has experience of hot glue guns and their hot glue; if you get the hot stuff on your fingers straight out of the gun, then My! it smarts.  Not for long, as it cools off verrrrry rapidly.  So, it may be that the idiot in the clip is trying to brush their teeth with cooled glue, which is the same as rubbing them with a piece of plastic, or just a bare toothbrush.  What kind of hack this might be is not made clear, because if they brush before the glue cools off, they are going to have burnt gums.      Ann was just as flabbergasted as I was.  It would be hard not to be.  Overall this is an idea just as stupid as bleaching strawberries - but that is a story for another day.


More Of My Mate Matania
If you have been following these updates that I chuck in from time to time, then you will know that Fortunino Matania was an Italian who emigrated to This Sceptred Isle, and who was renowned for his skilful and swift portrayals of combat in the First Unpleasantness.  Let us have another of his interior portraits for "The Sphere".  Art?

The Arditi in action

     In case you ever cross swords with someone who sneers at Italian martial ardour, bring up the Arditi.  These were the Italian equivalent of the Teuton Stosstruppen, specially chosen, trained and equipped to storm Austro-Hungarian positions. You can see them in their special rig, though what you can't see is their innovative sub-machine gun, the Villar-Perosa, which, if Art will put down his plate of coal -

First in the field

     These chaps packed hand-grenades, daggers, flamethrowers and light 37 mm cannon in addition to the above, and they were rightly feared and hated by their Austro-Hungarian opponents.  This picture is, I think, from late 1918 when the AH's overall position had collapsed and when they were being pursued
     Over to starboard I think you can see some British soldiers, one of whom appears to be throttling his opponent with his bare hands.  The British in Italy were regarded with utter horror by the AH, who seemed to think they were all eight feet tall and ate babies for breakfast**.

Here I must apologise for not making proper notes last night, as I was listening to more of Ask A Korean!"'s list of the top 50 K-pop stars, but didn't write down what I thought of them.  I did dismiss one as "A slushy balladeer", that much I do recall.  But whom!

Back To That Sci-Fi Bucket List
Okay, I'll admit it, I was naughty on Monday, and bought a couple of books from the list above.  Not going to tell you which until I finish them and then Deliver My Judgement.
     Anyway, here we go - Art?

A Droog

     Yes, I have most definitely read it.  Fascinating to see a pop culture influenced by Mother Ruffia, with barbarous renditions of borrowed words like "Droog" (for "Mate") or "Glazzies" (for "Eyes"), though Your Humble Scribe strongly suspects that it will be a little while longer before this happens in real life.  The curious title is from Alex's musings at the end of the novel, where he fears the Ludovici treatment will change him into something odd and un-natural - " - like a clockwork orange."
     Next!

Nope

     Blimey, the plot summary for this one on Wiki sounds complicated, and that's only with a hasty skim through it.  I may have read one or two of CJ's other works.  Did she write "Downbelow Station"? because I read that many decades ago <Googles> yes she did.  I remember that one with a certain fond regard, so Ol' CJ may yet get my custom.  Knowing that will doubtless make her day go better.
I Only Need A Short Item Here To Hit The Compositional Ton
Okay, cast yer glazzies over this pseudo-panzer that I brought up quite randomly by Googling "Volkswagen Tank".  Art?

Behold!

     Your Humble Scribe believes this to be either a joke, or it's a mock-up of a tank so the de-tanked Reichswehr could practice without having any of the real things.  The profile does resemble that of a Panzer I, which was barely a tank.

     And with that, we are done!


*  Do not expect fluffy bunnies and sunshine.
**  Ha!  As if.  They were only seven feet tall.

The Abuse Of A Bus

Here You Will See More Of Conrad's FROTHING NITRIC IRE!
Perhaps we ought to upgrade that to CONRAD'S FROTHING CHLORINE-TRIFLOURIDE IRE! because there are few chemicals more terrifying or dangerous that ClFl3.
     If you recall, this hideous substance was discovered in 1820, yet found no practical use until the Sixties, where it was used to scour circuit boards clean.  It was once described as "The chemical too deadly for the Nazis to use", as they stockpiled it for use against enemy fortifications, and then had second thoughts.

Prospective target

     Once again, let us shudder delightfully as we recount the sheer horror of ClFl3, the most powerful fluorinating agent know to man.  This stuff can only be kept in a very limited number of containers that experience an oxidation on their inner surface; thus the actual Hell Chemical does not directly contact the metal.  All good?  Yes, unless the container undergoes any kind of stress or trauma, because that will breach the oxide layer on the inside.  If a flake of oxide is shed, or a shear line forms and exposes bare metal - why, then you have a fluorine-metal fire! which is best dealt with by running very far away very quickly.




     Chlorine Triflouride will spontaneously set fire to things that have no business igniting.  Concrete?  Ablaze!  Sand?  Ablaze!  Water? An enormous explosion that creates two deadly acids that will dissolve you from the inside out and the outside in!  Glass?  Ablaze?  Ashes?  Ablaze!  Yes, this stuff will set alight the ashes of something that has already been burned.  In the case of an accident in a chemical storage warehouse, a ton of ClFl3 was voided from a container that was dropped from a forklift.  This stuff ate through a yard of concrete flooring, and on into the soil below; the responders dealt with it by evacuating everyone to a mile distant and waiting until it had all been reacted with.
     Which has nothing to do with First Bus.  O noes.  You see, I was at the bus stop this morning by 06:15, ready for the 06:20 bus, and I chose to walk to the more distant bus stop atop the hill because it was chucking it down.  Art?

A day of dismal downpour

     I think you can get an idea of how depressingly disgustrous it was.  And - the bus didn't turn up.  
     The next one was late, unsurprisingly, because it had to pick up all the passengers who were waiting for the 06:20 bus, meaning that I only got into Gomorrah-in-the-Irwell with enough time to spare to make a pot of tea.  No toast or waffles until an hour later.  Art?

Please note entire absence of bus

     I promise, when I take over, the first people into those (blunted!)  Compost Shredders will be First Bus executives, and they will be washed down into those coffers with a ton of ClFl3.
     I say, motley, shall we have a cream tea with strawberries?

Bitten By The Coincidence Hydra - AGAIN
This item has a bit of a history.  Okay, Listy over on his blog (which is a whole heck of a lot more sensible than BOOJUM!) has an entire article devoted to the Merchant Navy of Perfidious Albion during the Second Unpleasantness.  By chance I had been reading "An Englishman At War", being the diaries of Stanley Christopherson, and he had been extolling the virtues of the Merchant Navy in maintaining Tobruk during the Great  Siege.

Sorry about the kilometers

     No, that's not the Coincidence.  Listy went on to mention that the MN was made up of people from across the globe, including - women! and might even include people from countries that were actually at war with the British, such as the Japanese.
     This is where Kenji Takaki comes in.  He was Japanese, and came to This Sceptred Isle from Japan in search of a better life, whereupon he joined the MN.  After a long and interesting career at sea, which included being taken prisoner by the Teutons and put in a PoW camp, he went into - acting!  Obviously.  He was much in demand in war films, where he played - Japanese soldiers!  Including "A Town Called Alice".
     What was one of the lead items on the Beeb's website yesteryon?  A huge collection of film posters being sold.  What was one of the posters O-so-prominently featured?

THE COINCIDENCE HYDRA STRIKES AGAIN!
(Kindly get your teeth out of my nethers, Hydra)

     Conrad is unsure exactly what ATCA is about, though probably not civil architecture and road planning.
Vic-Torious
Ouch.  I refer - obviously! - to that pioneering ghostbuster Vic Tandy, he who discovered the Fear Factor Frequency.  That is to say, sounds at 19 Decibels or lower cannot be heard by humans, but they have a definite effect on the bodies of Hom. Sap., bringing on hallucinations in the peripheral vision, trembling, sweating and nausea - as said, all the sounds of fear.

Hmmmm
<taps fingers on Tazer but doesn't use it>

     One location he was asked to test was Warwick Castle, a splendid post-medieval pile with scads of ghosts and ghost stories attached.  Art?

Very castle-y

     And guess what?  He found very high levels of infrasound present.  This could be due to two factors: electro-mechanical equipment generating oscillations at 19 Db, by design or accident; or parts of the physical structure acting to create a standing wave if, for example, winds of a particular speed or direction move over the structure.
     Ghosts solved!
Finally -
I didn't take any photos so you'll just have to roll with me on this one.  You hopefully remember Ann Reardon, whom I think is a professor in food science, and her Youtube channel "How To Cook That", which puts some serious effort into debunking fake food videos on Youtube.  Art?

Words don't quite fail me

     She followed the recipe that "5 Minute Crafts" posted on YT, and found she needed to add a lot more ACTIVATED CHARCOAL (yes you read that correctly, charcoal) to make the ice cream black rather than grey.
     She was careful to give the resulting disgusting grey sludge to "Dave" for testing.
     Dave tested.  Dave did not like.  "It tastes weird.  And gritty," was his observation.
     The black sludge went down the drain.

And with that we are done!