Dam Yankees!

If I Have To Remind You That We Do Not Make Spelling Mistakes Here ONE MORE TIME -
I will backtrack you via your ISP, send a transient electro-magnetic pulse down your cable and destroy all your electronic equipment instantly, in addition to all other electronic equipment within a two-mile radius (TEMPs are a bit of a blunt weapon, to be honest).
     I refer - obviously! - to another engineering disaster as listed on "Interesting Engineering", to wit: the Johnstown, Pennsylvania Flood of 1889.
     We begin this sorry tale in 1838, when the Commonwealth of Massachusets (taking inspiration surely from the mighty British Commonwealth) commissioned the construction of the South Fork Dam.  Art?

Very obviously, before

     The dam was eventually sold later that century to a conglomerate of wealthy industrialists, who proceeded to render the artificial lake more suitable to the leisure activities of the extremely rich, by the addition of fish screens, which were intended to prevent fish getting onto the spillway.  You don't want your angler's prey to escape, after all.  They also lowered the dam, in order to reach a breadth sufficiently wide to take a road.  Not only that, all the piping and valvework that allowed emergency water relief had been scrapped and not replaced.

Contemporary fish screen

     On 31st May 1889, the River Connemaugh behind the dam had been swollen to flood proportions by extremely heavy rainfall over the preceding days, and was about to overflow the dam.  
     Ooops.  No emergency relief pipework?  Trouble loomed.  Trouble loomed even closer when it transpired that the fish screen had become completely blocked with debris - hey, you should have had Post 10 on call!  He'd have cleared that screen months before - and so the spillway would not drain away the excess water.
     Inevitably, the dam gave way and 20 million tons of water devastated everything downstream, killing 2,200 people and causing £10 million of damage - and that's at 1889 prices.  Imagine £350 million today.  Art?

Most definitely after

     The guilty party in all of this, the South Fork Fishing And Hunting Club, who had after all fiddled around with the dam, got off scot-free, thanks to an army of high-priced lawyers who argued the dam's collapse was an Act of God and they weren't to blame.  This aroused considerable anger amongst the Johnstown survivors and some of the rich industrialists had enough shame to contribute to funds for compensation and rebuilding.  Subsequently, South Canadian law was amended in light of Perfidious Albion's case law precedent in terms of liability, and you couldn't get away with this sort of thing nowadays.
     Art?  

     Another illustration of why you do not muck about with dams.
     Motley!  There's nothing left on the fish counter at the Co-Op.  Shall we go down to the lake and get some trout for tea?

An Aside
Whilst cruising around on the "Space Opera" Facebook page, I came across a photo someone had posted there in the interests of stimulating conversation.  I shall see if I can copy and paste it (a tricky technical operation that I won't bore you with the details of).

It took ages to find this.  You'd better appreciate it.

      For those unfamiliar, that to port is Robbie the Robot from "Forbidden Planet", and to starboard we have a Dalek, one of those unlikeable galactic conquerors from Skaro.
     Of course all the people commenting nominated the Dalek, because it comes with a built-in weapon.  What you can't see is the seething blob of mutant hatred inside the armoured casing, making it move by - what was the phrase? - "Psycho-kinetic power".  That, or static electricity.
     Conrad acknowledges that Robbie does have a couple of rather feeble directed energy weapons, which appear to have even less zap than a date-expired Tazer.  I can't find a ready image and I'm not going to load up the DVD in order to take a photo.  Just rest assured that Robbie's ability to surprise a small monkey is not a strategic asset.  That, I admit.
     However - and you just knew that word was coming, didn't you? - there is more to the issue than Dalek Has Gun.  Art?

His beams were focussed on their blasters

     We're not sure of what range that negating ray has, but - ooooh, suddenly Dalek Without Gun.  In fact one suspects that Robbie could turn off the Dalek entirely - although that does bring up another dilemma, because his creator, Morbius, states that he has an inbuilt inhibition about harming rational life.
     Would Robbie see the demented paranoid aggressor out to enslave the galaxy as rational?  Obviously this would require a considerable period of psychoanalysis, so he may just pull that weapon out of it's socket and junk it before commencing a bit of counselling.  To be on the safe side.
     If the decision is that All Daleks Are Barking Mad, then Robbie does have a secret weapon.  Art?

And, once on higher ground, you can drop things on them.

     So, don't write Robbie off quite so quickly
     Of course, I may be overthinking this ...

This will all make sense on Facebook -

Time For A Bit Of Gloasting
As yesterday, I have been bashing on with the crosswords section of my Reader's Digest book of puzzles, and found most of them pretty easy, to be honest.  There are two Cryptic ones at Level 3+ that are proving extremely difficult, mostly because I don't have a background on how the compiler's mind works, and they may stump me yet.  As for the time-trial ones -Art?

     I actually did better than this, since I was diverted for a couple of minutes into listening to more r/AskReddit tales, before hastily getting back to the crossword.  Not bad, hmmm?

Also From Yesteryon
I had been going on about the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry at the outbreak of the Second Unpleasantness, and how they had almost stepped out of the pages of 1918, being a horsed cavalry regiment.  I couldn't find any relevant photos on the internet, which either had pictures from the First Unpleasantness with cavalry, or pictures from the Second Unpleasantness with tanks.  So, I came across two relevant photos in the book I'm annotating at present, "An Englishman At War".  Art?

Sic

     This photo could easily have come from 22 years earlier.  In fact, you would have to be a uniform buff to work out when the picture was taken (hint: nobody is wearing puttees).  Art!

No bad puns here.

     This is one of the enlisted men holding a pair of nags whilst in Palestine, and you can tell it's 1940 because of his stylish trousers.

     And with that we are jolly well done!

Cargo Go Cog

This Will Probably Be News To You
Unless you happen to specialise in Medieval shipbuilding, and I'm willing to bet not many of you are.  Earlier today I put a throw-away picture in here of a set of cogs and gears, in order to be able to bloviate on Facebook.  However, a phrase about "cogs" in relation to ships has always stuck in my mind, probably to do with Medieval European History when I was reading a relevant textbook.
     Anyway, there was indeed a variety of small merchant vessel known as a "Cog".  These were principally used in the Baltic, by the Hanseatic League amongst others, with their use spreading westwards over several centuries.  Art?

Be agog at cog

     They were round-hulled, with a single square sail, and had castles at both stern and bow, upon which one could mount weaponry if feeling particularly liverish; initially they didn't have a deck, which only arrived in the 13th century.  They could carry between 100 to 200 tons of cargo, which was an enormous amount by comparison with road haulage methods of the time, and they were quicker.  Art!

Assail of the sail

     Ships such as these were able to make it out of the Baltic and across the seas to Western Europe, creating a level of trade that grew constantly over time, until the cogs became obsolete - victims of their own success.
     Well, this isn't what I'd planned to lead with today, but hopefully all of us are better informed thanks to BOOJUM!'s didactic impulse.
     Motley, how many bits do you think a wind-up clock has, and shall we see by smashing one with a hammer?

Strike one!

Up The Rabbit Hole
For yes, we are back to "How To Cook That"'s forensic analysis of the very sketchy The Soul Publishing, the people behind all those fake 'life-hacks' on Youtube that don't work and which will merely result in you wasting money if you try to copy them - at best; some of these things are positively dangerous.
     Here an aside into what a different Youtube channel, First Media did.  Their video was "How to remove wine stains with beer".  

Before

    Ann tried their method.  It didn't work.

   Then one of their ex-producers said that they couldn't get it to work, either, so they just dampened another bit of carpet, filmed that and said it worked.

After

     First Media stated that they would put up different results to the original because they thought that was acceptable*.
     Back to TSP!  They operate what is known as a "Content Farm" on Cyprus that churns out videos by the thousand on Youtube, all well-produced, well-shot, well-edited, and all complete drivel.  Dave Reardon got involved because they made a few test videos about political issue; as he put it, a very small number when compared with their normal metrics.  Almost as if they were experimenting with the media and format ...

Proof.

     Lately, TSP has admitted that they got a few things wrong, possibly because their content is now coming under scrutiny and they needed a bit of damage-limitation.  They remain one of the biggest content-creators in the world, regardless of what they put out, so Dave reached out to an old friend who runs a cyber-security business in Silicon Valley, and asked if we (you, me and the Western world, plus Mauretania) ought to be concerned, lest they move into murkier business practices?
     "Cause for alterness," clarified his friend.
     So -  if YOU have ever watched one of these videos, you are DIRECTLY BRINGING ABOUT THE COLLAPSE OF WESTERN CIVILISATION!!
     Just so you know.

You!  You did this!

     Blimey.  Time for something a little less real-world and wicked.

I Know - "Detroit's Abandoned Jewel"
This was a featured page over on the BBC's website, and it struck a chord as I've seen the building in a long series of Creepy Abandoned Buildings listed on some clickbait site ages ago.  Art?

Back in it's heyday

     This place opened in 1913 and was a bustling hub of industry, commerce and travel up until the late Eighties, by which time poverty, riots, an exodus of population, car manufacturers going bust and lack of bran in wholemeal bread caused the station to close down.  Art?

Stark and dark

     It looks forbiddingly grim, which is why it was on that clickbait list I mentioned.
     Somewhat unexpectedly, it has recently been bought up by the Ford motor company, who are looking to renovate it, which is going to be a lengthy - and expensive! - process.  Still, if and when it comes to fruition, a splendid old building will not have been replaced by some hideous concrete barnacle.

Oh, And By The Way -
This will all make sense once it gets posted on Facebook, honestly.   Art?

Quite

"An Englishman At War" By Stanley Christopherson
I did warn you that you'd be getting feedback about this edited version of his diaries.  
     Okay, at this point Stanley's regiment, the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, are still a horsed cavalry unit, which is fair enough as this is what they were at the outbreak of war.  In fact they had barely changed since the First Unpleasantness; a lot of the officers were landed gentry who were independently wealthy and who 'rode to hounds'.  In fact there were three Masters Of Hounds amongst the officers and the Colonel in charge was Lord Yarborough.

First Unpleasantness iteration, but not a lot different

     After travelling across France in early 1940, the SRY ended up in Palestine, performing colonial police duties, in a throwback to their earlier version as in the picture above.  They were closer in comparison than they liked; as Stanley bemoaned, all the regiment's Bren guns had been taken from them and given to the infantry, and in their place came ancient Hotchkiss guns that had equipped their fathers in the First Unpleasantness.  A real step backward.  Art?

State of the art.  In 1914

     And with that, we are done!


*  Stretching the elastic limit of this definition a bit, aren't we, boys?

One Man And His Clog

This Is A Bit Unusual
But bear with me, if you will.  Last night Your Humble Scribe was, as is his wont, cruising Youtube and looking for r/AskReddit and the delicious dishes of schadenfreude that infest it.  I know, I know, it makes me a terrible person, but we already knew that, didn't we?
     Well, what did I come across but a video posted by someone with the handle "Post 10", whom is a South Canadian, and Post 10's mission in life is to unblock drains, sewers, ponds, car parks (okay, "parking lots" and he's done lots of lots) and other water features.  I don't think he gets paid for it, it's just his bag; his and his faithful rake.  He opened his epic with an illustration of how horribly slowly a large pond was draining.  Art?

As you can see, the water is barely moving

     Then he shifted back up the slope, so he could illustrate the whole pond, showing that water had flooded over the edge and into the trees.  Ol' Pos also pointed out that this is autumn, and all the trees had shed their leaves, and that there had been a storm the previous night.  Art?

Watery and wet

     Okay, so let's see where the large pond/small lake should drain from, into a culvert that leads downhill and out of the exit shown above.  Art?

Noticeably not draining

     In case you were wondering, that big metal pole is some kind of emergency valve, allowing water to drain away if the level gets excessively high, by which point Ol' Pos explains the nearby highway would have been flooded, too.  So if it comes into operation, that's still too little too late.
     Ol' Pos gets to work with his mighty rake and extracts copious amounts of rotting leaves, twigs and branches from the drain.  As he further points out, an oak leaf sitting on that drain will take two years to decompose, which means the water being backed up for all that time and even more oak leaves joining in -

     Here you can see just some of the rotting vegetation that he's pulled out of the water.  There was a lot more to come.  Art?

     He's removed enough guff that water is beginning to drain.  At this point I was getting a bit nervous, as you cannot tell precisely what's under the water, and I had images of him being swept into the drain and being sucked to oblivion underwater.  But no!  Art?

     Compare this to the first picture; the water level has risen way up and the H2O is really belting down that culvert.

The drain emerges!

     By now Ol' Pos had left the drain, since the water was really coming in at speed and he risked getting knocked off his feet.  You can see how far the water level has fallen by how low it stands against the valve.

Taken out to port, going in to starboard

     You can't help but feel that Post 10 gets a positively Zen sense of satisfaction when he stands back and sees the fruits of his labours.  And lucky us can watch all of this without getting cold or wet or having to deal with the stench of rotting debris.
     Let's hear it for Post 10!
     Motley, shall we go find a stinking septic sump and clear it by hand?

Let me just append this here -

Intricate gearing!

Back To Normality
Well, as close as we ever do here.  For Lo!  It's back to that Rolling Stone list of the top 50 television sci-fi shows, and at number 44 we have - 
Max Headroom!

You had to be there

     Max was an artificial intelligence that fronted a television channel of the future, where people exploded if they didn't watch the correct channel which contained "blipverts", and he was the product of a journalist in a coma who had seen a sign declaring "MAX HEADROOM 2 Yards 6 inches" -
     I think.  It's been a while since I saw the film that spawned Max, and the subsequent programs where he fronted for music videos.  And for all that he was supposed to be the face of the future, it was all done with make up and that digital art in the background?  All hand-drawn.

This will all make sense once it's on Facebook -

A branchful of batrachians

Your Daily Dose Of Danger!
Oh, yes, about those date-expired croutons from 2014, I had them in a bowl of miso soup last night and hey, what do you know, they were pretty filling once they'd soaked up a load of miso.  Also I am still alive, so yah booh sucks to food safety once again.
     Anyway, today we are going to be looking at the organochlorine compound Aldrin.

Even at 90, do not pick a fight with this guy

     Okay, okay, you knew that was coming.  No, seriously, Aldrin is one of a class of pesticides that were banned once it was realised that they accumulated in any organism that came into contact with a sub-lethal dose - DDT is another in the same class.
    It is not stuff to muck about with.  Let's see what the hazard classifications tell us about it: Fatal if swallowed. So, do not eat it.  Fatal if it comes into contact with the skin.  So, do not have a dust bath in Aldrin.  Possibly carcinogenic, so it may kill you even if you don't bathe in or eat it.  Extremely toxic to marine organisms.  Do not chuck it in the nearby pond.

Wood, okay.  What about every other living thing?

Finally -
Whilst talking of clogs and wood preservative, one wonders whether the Dutch ever used Aldrin to treat the soles of their national footwear?  Back in the Forties, of course, before people knew how horribly toxic it was.  Art?

Also, that's lead-based paint

     Hey, imagine life in the Dutch colony of Surinam, where they might have the Manchineel Tree a-growing, and some locals with a death wish make clogs out of one, and then used Aldrin to preserve the wood, and then wondered why anyone who wore them dropped dead within hours*?


*  Conrad, you have a morbid imagination; yours, Conrad