The Fantastic Iconoclastic

Conrad's Treacherous Memory Is Sparking Again

You know how it is, you pick up a train of thought and it abruptly changes track into another direction, and then someone (Steve!) throws the points and it goes into a loop.

     You see, I am going to be making an historical comparison between events of the First Unpleasantness and the Special Idiotic Operation.  There Conrad was, all ready to start, and suddenly -

     'What was that future-war novel that was supposedly written by a fictional female officer, who first saw combat in Africa, and who wrote about a clash of arms between Ruffia and China?"  Art!

     This isn't fickle fantasy; the Sinisters and Chinese went to war in large-scale border skirmishes over the international boundary line of the Ussuri River, in Siberia.  So they have a history.

     ANYWAY I've just been having a trawl on Google and cannot readily find the book that I want.  There's scads of novels about a potential Third World Unpleasantness, because it seems we can never get enough drama about blowing the world up <coughcoughCityInTheSkycough>.  Art!

     I seem to recall it was written by a British ex-officer so I may Google later, because this Intro won't write itself.  Indeed, if it did, I'd be out of a job*.

     ANYWAY AGAIN I would like you to cast your mind back to the First Unpleasantness and mid-1916, where the armies of Perfidious Albion (and the M8s) launched what was actually the Campaign of the Somme.  The 1st of July was actually the 8th day of the battle, as the hapless Teutons had been under Allied artillery fire for a week prior.  As we all know, the British army suffered extraordinarily heavy casualties in attacking Teuton defences they had been preparing for over a year and a half.  Art!

     This perhaps overstates somewhat, yet it hopefully gives you an idea of what the advancing Tommies were up against.

     However - and you knew that word was coming - the Teutons,too, suffered appallingly, with their total casualties being at least 500,000.

     Why so, if they were safely ensconced in various trenches and bunkers and deep dugouts?  Surely they were safe underground or behind cover?

     Well, yes and no.  By the time the campaign ended Teuton defences were trenches dug between craters, as each significant retreat saw their fortifications become less impressive.  What really put the serval amongst the pigeons was what might be called the 'Falkenhayn Folly', he being the Lord High Muck-a-Muck of the Teutons during the initial phases of the Somme.  His Cunning Plan was that the Allies would have to carve their way forward over a wall of bodies, because his army would, as policy "Attack without regard to casualties to immediately recapture lost ground, no matter how small the area lost."  Art!

     As you can plainly see, this made them extremely vulnerable out in the open, and their counter-attacks always suffered heavy casualties, even if successful.

     When Falkenhayn got the boot in August 1916, the duumvirate of Ludendorff and Hindenburg who took over were appalled at the Teuton casualty list and demanded an end to the Cunning Plan.  In fact the Teutons were so wedded to this tactic that it took a year to wean themselves off it.  The historian John Terraine counted no less than 330 Teuton counter-attacks during the Somme campaign.

     Apparently Ruffian casualties for the past six weeks have been very heavy, which doesn't make sense, as they ought to be pretty safe in their defensive lines.  You don't need much skill to sit in a trench, point and pull the trigger.  Except it seems Falkenhayn's Folly is at work.  Bloaty Gas Tout - Ukraine's secret weapon as a direct analogue of Herr Schickelgruber in the Second Unpleasantness - is determined to keep hold of what he's got.  No retreat!  No surrender!  Fight to the last man and the last bullet!  Art?

"Hey - that's MY line - stop nicking my scripts!"

Proof That I Am, Indeed, A Terrible Person

Conrad caught sight of a peculiar and ingenious mouse/rat trap on Twitter (you can forget that 'X' nonsense), and is willing to bet it will raise a cruel snigger or two.  Art!

     I can't find the original video, which ended with a bucket of dead mice being emptied out of the bucket, which is perhaps a good thing as you don't really want that whilst eating your dinner.

The Haul

Yesteryon Wondery Wifey got hold of me whilst I was pottering around at lunch time, saying that she was going to put an order in to Cut-Price Barrys, and did I want to order anything that she'd spotted on the stock list?

     Did I ever!  Art!

£30 the lot

     Those 8 pots in the background are Marmite-Flavoured Peanut Butter, which ought to have cost £24 on their own.  The Mint Cordial is Dog Buns difficult to get and is about £5 per bottle, thus £10 in total.  Those 6 packs of Marmite-flavoured Graze?  £15 in the shops.  And the modest number of 24 noodle packs ought to have been £15.  Overall £64.

     I should point out that retailers do sometimes sell of the MFPB at half-price, because is has sat on the shelves so long the oil has separated out.  It requires a mighty effort to get it blended smooth again.  You can't use a teaspoon or you'll bend the handle.

Sweet, Sweet Schadenfreude

Just a bit of dog-piling on Citizen Trump.  Yesteryon he released a bizarre video broadcast where he begged Congress to stop the witch-hunt against him.  Art!

     He espoused all sorts of drivel, including that Jack Smith is deranged and Joe Biden is the most corrupt Prez in the history of forever.  Funnily enough, he's not made any legal protestations about this in court, because - you know, facts, evidence, perjury, defamation, etcetera.  Nor can Congress do anything to intervene in the legal proceedings, as other South Canadians have pointed out, because it's the LEGISLATIVE arm of government, NOT THE JUDICIAL.  But facts are DJ Tango's Kryptonium.

     This pleading is because he's going to be indicted twice in the near future.  In the past he was able to outlast, out-lawyer and bully plaintiffs into submission.  It must be swimming vaguely into focus for him that he really is in trouble this time, because the Feds are not going to back down, they can run the legal prosecutions for years if needed, and their pockets are infinitely deeper than his.  Plus all his conspiratorial cronies seem to be ready to throw him under the bus before he can do it to them.

     Conrad did suggest in a tasteless Youtube comment that Darth Marmalade's only viable prospect of escaping justice would be to suffer a stroke; given how stressed he is nowadays that's not an impossible consequence.  Art!

Special Counsel Jack 'Smiley' Smith

     None of this comes under the rubric of Politics, of course - obviously! - because 'Benedict Donald**' is a mere private citizen.

"City In The Sky"

The Doctor, sly old dog that he is, intends to update his knowledge of recent events without seeming to.

     ‘We’re a bit out of touch,’ explained the Doctor.  ‘Nor did I ever get to walk in an orbital arcology before today.’  His tone had a touch of the wistful, made all the more appealing because his expression was sincere.

     Virginia looked surprised.

     ‘Out of touch?’ she queried.  ‘Even M3 know what’s going on Downstairs!’

     ‘Quite!  Would you mind showing me around your splendid Bernal sphere and updating me?  My trusty companion will stay here with your redoubtable Warden, if you wish.’

     Closing her eyes, Virginia took stock of the situation: the unravelling nuclear shooting-match going on in the Far East could not possibly be affected by anything the Arcipelago did.  In fact the orbital environments had better hope that nobody Downstairs felt aggrieved enough to repeat what Pakistan had tried in the first place.  Getting away from the claustrophobic Communications building could only do her good – ironically a fear of enclosed spaces was rare in the giant sphere, with it’s trademark open-ness in terms of design and society, yet the perpetual shoulder-to-shoulder jostling with her peers had left her feeling grubby and exhausted.  A stroll amongst the greenery of Arc One should put her in a better mood, even if it had to be with this small, bizarrely-dressed stranger.

     He might jib at that description, love.

Finally -

We've wittered on long enough, time to wrap it up.  Tot siens!

*  Good thing? Bad thing?  Only you can tell!

**  One imagines only the South Canadians will get this.

A Hard Day's Plight

No!  Nothing To Do With The Beatles

Neither the song nor the film, although the merest mention of both allows me to bait the suc - er, the audience in.  Art!

     Conrad has actually seen the film and cannot remember the slightest thing about it, except they have Wilfred Bramble in the cast, a British character actor who had the lock on 'seedy', and you might know him better as the father in "Steptoe And Son".  Let me just refresh my memory -

     Ah, a comedy about 36 hours in their day whilst prepping for and doing a televised concert.  It was, apparently, a huge commercial and critical success and was a template for a whole flock of cop

     ANYWAY what this Intro is on about is hard drives, those mysterious bits of kit that are the heart of any computer.  They probably emerged the victorious winner in the evolutionary battle between themselves and the soft drive.  Art!

    They are an electro-mechanical device, where a spinning disk is read by the stylus head.  Bear this in mind; they are a device containing moving parts.  This means that, over time, they are eventually going to fail thanks to wear and tear and friction and getting dropped on a concrete floor or being used as a drinks coaster.
     Here enter Original Poster, who was a network engineer more than an IT technician, but who was asked by a friend to come and do an assay at his business.  Since they were good friends, and there was money in it, he agreed.

     First step was to call the boss, who explained that the company had ONE hard drive, which was passed around the office for different people to work with.  Art!

     OP, probably after dragging his jaw back into place, said this was an accident waiting to happen.  What the business needed was at least two servers, one on-site and the other at a third-party location to avoid both being destroyed in the same accident.

     He quoted $500 to set up <insert whole load of technobabble here>.  The Cheapskate And Stupid Head said this was far too much, just set up the hard drive so it could connect to the internet.  OP did so, then sent an e-mail response detailing what he'd warned about and what would inevitably happen. This proved to be a wise precaution, because a year later - Art!

   His friend rang back in a state of utter panic; their hard drive had failed, and did OP know how to recover data from a formatted drive?

     No, replied OP.  There are companies that can do that, except they're expensive.  Expect to pay $5,000 for their service.

     The denoument is even more delicious.  CASH hired an IT company, and being CASH he must have found the cheapest one imaginable, because the so-called 'IT expert' accidentally formatted the drive and thus deleted all the data irretrievably (a well known consequence of formatting).  The company lost 15 years of data.

     CASH, inevitably, was incandescent with rage.  OP, on a call to him, said 'I told you so', also 'I don't work for you', perhaps a tad smugly, and then hung up on him.

      You may be wondering if this kind of loss is serious or not.  Well, one chap in the comments said he used to do consulting work for a company that refused to do hard drive backups, and he eventually gave up warning them about the perils.  Art!

They missed 0 'Panic;

     Then the hard drive failed.  They spent a whole year and $20,000 trying to restore the data, failing utterly to do so.  As he acidly explained, "the loss of all their accounts receivable data figured heavily in their bankruptcy".  A hard 366 night's plight, you might say.

     So, yes, a very serious loss.

More Box Office Mojojojo

Sorry, couldn't resist.

     ANYWAY let us return to having a nosy at more box office figures, prepping things with an input from Art.

   Erk.  It's only been out 4 days on the stats above and yet it's already well past Indy 5 and even MI:DR.  There is no danger of Conrad ever going to see this but Holy Dog Buns! this one seems destined to do well - the budget was a relatively modest $145 million so it's probably already into profit.  Conrad supposes if there's a message here it's that lightweight entertainment without budget-bloat can do well.  Art!

     This one also doesn't especially appeal to Your Humble Scribe, although if it came out on a free streaming service he'd probably move his eyeballs over the screen.  It, too, has only been out 4 days, which makes predicting how much 'leg' factor it has a bit daunting.  Given that it's budget was 'only' $100 million, of course - obviously! - it doesn't need to rake in as much as the competition.  You definitely cannot call it lightweight in any way.  Art!

     Don't laugh at the take up there - 

     Because this is the 18th day of release and, given that it only cost $16 million to make, it stands to make back 10x it's budget, even if the critics didn't like it.  There is a truism in the film industry that the only two kinds of film that are guaranteed to make their money back are pornography and horror, because the outlay is so low.  Conrad is willing to bet cold hard cash that this is definitely NOT the end, because the studio chiefs will be getting that $$$ in their eyes.

     Meanwhile how is Indy 5 doing?

     O dearie me.

Those Medalling Kids!

Conrad noticed that Shoigu The <insert alliterative vulgarism here> has flown to the land of Norks, probably to see what the Ruffians will be reduced to by next year thanks to sanctions.  It's always hilarious to see the grotesquely bemedalled Nork generals on parade.  Art!

      Cold hard logic points out that the Norks were last involved in a war 70 years ago, so where on earth do all these medals come from?  Well, they appear to award a medal to anyone who can get out of bed on time three mornings running, or eat a steak dinner with greens and potatoes.  Possibly.

"City In The Sky"

The amazed and startled inhabitants of Arcology One are not only dealing with what seems to be World War Three breaking out on the planet below, but also the arrival of two complete strangers in a mysterious big blue box.

And then Nat arrived with two bizarrely dressed strangers, people who definitely weren’t crew or she’d recognise them.  There were no scheduled arrivals for the Black Knight’s lifting body, nor any visits from any other arcology.

         It had been the Doctor’s intention to obtain up-to-the-minute information from the crew, or occupants, of Arcology One, and have Ace separate from him to provide a correlational baseline for his own information.  However, with the innate suspicion and acuity of the sphere’s crew, wandering alone and asking questions didn’t seem possible.  He’d have to improvise –

      Their introduction didn’t go too well, until the Doctor managed to include his terrestrial alter ego, Doctor John Smith.  At this Virginia stopped looking aloof, started to look more amazed and became more involved. 

     ‘I had an adviser called Doctor John Smith!’ she blurted.  ‘Long gone now.  But he warned me about what might happen in the Little Crash and the Big Crash, and – and - ’ her voice broke.  ‘To pay attention to other Doctor John Smith’s.  I thought he was being figurative.’

      She looked around, at the giant all-encompassing world-city that girdled Arcology One and felt sad that her ancient adviser didn’t last long enough to get Upstairs.

      Hmmm yes, that Doctor John Smith does get around, doesn't he?

From Slavs To Slaves

A couple of points from Konstantin's last economic analysis that didn't really fit into the (woeful!) précis of how Ruffia is getting along.  Or, rather, not getting along.  The news that you can now be stripped of your citizenship for merely criticising the army was lost in the fuss made over the arrest of Igor Girkin - and we've yet to discover what that was really about.

     Also, apparently at the order of The Fat Controller, Belarusians who are involved in any kind of agricultural work cannot now change for a non-agricultural job, or off their farm, or do anything except what Lukashenko deems acceptable.  One wonders how long he'll last once Putin falls out of a window after shooting himself in the back of the head (27 times) whilst having had a pot of polonium tea.  Art!

Girkin.  He's in a bit of a pickle.

Finally -

WILL YOU JUST STOP!  I have 0% interest in the ballfoot game to begin with and banging on relentlessly about female ballfooters is not going to change my mind.  Just you wait until I take over.

Being Square

Is Not A Square Being

Because a lighthouse is an artefact or structure, not a living article.  Yes! we are back on the fascinating subject of lighthouses again, an architectural item that we at the blog have often expounded as an item of interest in it's own right.  Of course, hailing from This Sceptred Isle, we tend to focus more on the lighthouses that gird our nation's shores.  This is a bit of a narrow view as other nations with a seaboard also build them, including one that came up as a screensaver and which piqued my interest.  Art!

     This is the Kermrovan lighthouse, near the village of Le Conquet, at the very tip of the Kermrovan peninsula in France.  From the upper picture you can see that the keepers didn't have to risk death or drowning trying to garrison the structure by battling through treacherous seas and shoals.  No, they had a nice easy walk over the bridge.  Art!

     What struck Your Humble Scribe when the image came up, was that the design is square.  Most lighthouses, as you know, are round  and cylindrical.  Art!

     There is a reason for this.  Any exterior stress in a round lighthouse is distributed across the masonry, rather than being concentrated at any one point.  This makes them more durable.

     Compared to a round lighthouse, a square one experiences greater shear forces on the outer walls, with wind eddies at the corners also stressing the structure.  More simply, if being hit with wind or seawater, the corners of a square lighthouse can be assailed from two different direction.

     Why make it square, then?  Well, the oldest reason in the book: £££££.  You needed more building material for a square structure, but it was a lot easier and quicker to build.  You didn't need to accommodate the inner curve with any fitments or staircases.

     The French who constructed Kermorvan in 1848, mind you, were quality craftsmen of the old school, because the thing is still hale and hearty and standing loud (foghorns) and proud. Art!

     It's possible that it doesn't get hit with especially large waves; that above is about the worst I could find in a hasty search, which would mean less worry about erosion or structural failure.  And no, that above is pretty mild compared to a few of the giant waves that assault French lighthouses.  Who'd want to be a lighthouse keeper in conditions like that?  The French would know what sea-states around Kermorvan were like and must have decided they could get away with a cut-price construction.

     There you go, we all know more than we did five minutes ago.  And you're welcome.

Never Let It Be Said That We Were Ever Fair

There has been an interesting intersection at the box office of late, with half a dozen films being closely regarded in terms of their box office take.  Let us parade the winners and loser in public, shall we?  Art!

I like the way this shot is composed

     

     As you can see, after three and a half weeks, the studio is pulling it out of cinemas.  It's going to struggle to hit even $350 million at this rate, which is about half what it needs to make to break even.  Expect it to finish it's run at the cinema soon, and then be put on Disney +, as with "The Flash".  The cruel critics who hate Kath Kennedy are now taking bets on how much it will lose the studio, which is quite horrid of them, and we don't approve, much.  Art!

     

     Hmmmm yes it has made more than Indy 5 in about half the time, but it still needs to clear at least twice this total to break even.  It may still do so; look at the International box office, which is 2x the size of the take in South Canada.  Conrad suspects it will do well to break even, given the budget - $291 million.  Art!

     I know what you're thinking - "It's only made a third of the other two - what a miserable loser of a film!"

     <sound of a face being firmly slapped>

     The studio responsible is a small independent, Angel, who don't have the money or networking to manage an International release.  And their budget was only $14 million, or one twenty-third the size of Indy 5.  This is how you make back a box office almost nine times your original budget*; keep it cheap, tight and as high-quality as you can get.  Plus, it has 'legs' - people are still paying in large numbers to see it.  I expect Angel will do a deal with a distribution group to get it released internationally, conceivably doubling their domestic take.

     Hmmm I think we will pause there for the moment, as there is more to come and you don't want to overdose on Conrad's acid commentary.

Conrad Seeks Clarity

I have seen the film "Deepwater Horizon" film, several years ago, possibly in a <coughcough>ted version as I don't think we've got the DVD lying around.  A couple of days ago I watched two HD clips of the blowout occurring on DH, and if Art will put down his bowl of coal -

     The rig suffers a blow-out.  What you see here is a 30-yard high geyser of mud, oil and semi-solid gas.  Art!

     Inevitably, there's an explosion.  Conrad, puzzled at the scenes of carnage and destruction that ensued, had a bit of a nosy to find out what actually went on, because the studio seem to assume that we're all up to speed on the oil drilling industry.  It's a long and complicated story, which you might get narrated.

"City In The Sky"

Things 'Downstairs' have gone as wrong as can possibly be, with what amounts to World War Three breaking out as nations begin to destroy their neighbours lest they be destroyed themselves.

Instead the supposedly dead warhead plunged right back to Earth, squarely on top of the Kahuta  launch site.  Arc One listened in to the frantic radio babble in Urdu that suddenly cut off with a harsh snap, and a yield indicator blinked into place as screens focussed more sharply on ground zero.  Twenty megatonnes – a city-buster warhead that would have destroyed everything in orbit over that hemisphere with a massive electro-magnetic pulse.

     Matters quickly escalated.  There were other fission warheads waiting to go, sitting mated with their missile launch systems, and at least two of those also detonated thanks to the original explosion.  Ten million tonnes of radioactive fallout cloud began to spread downwind, driving a civilian population before it in terror and panic thanks to memories of the old Iranian death-cloud .  The Pakistani military dictators promptly declared martial law – not really very different from normal daily life – and a State of Emergency.  India blocked their border to prevent an influx of refugees, and mobilised, too.  Then China began to sabre-rattle, and the Russians began to bristle and now Taiwan had fired missiles at Beijing and Shanghai, and an unidentified submarine had hit Djakarta with two nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.  The Chinese were beginning to attack the Siberian army that Russia had along the Mongolian border, NATO had gone to it’s highest state of alert and the USA was at DefCon One, with their Laser Defense Grid on Full Alert.  One shot fired in the wrong place –

     And you can bet that there will, inevitably, be a shot in the wrong place.

Do The Maths

Bloaty Gas Tout and The Fat Controller have been bloviating on television about how the Wagner Group members in Belarus are so, so keen on invading Poland.

     Conrad nearly fell out of his chair laughing.  Art!

     The Wagners that went to Belarus were 'defanged' - the most dangerous vehicle they have now is a truck.  Plus, only 5,000 of them actually went.

     The Poles have a standing army of 160,000 men, armed to the teeth with NATO kit, including Leopard 2s and HIMARS.  They are quite ruthless in battle - they learned that from the French, their traditional mentors.

     Picking a fight whilst being outnumbered 32:1 is not a winning strategy.  The Poles might even mobilise, giving them a 64:1 advantage.

Finally -

No, I will not be going to see "Barbie".  Just thought I'd clear that up in case you were wondering.

*  Indy 5 would need to make $3 billion at the box office to equal this.  Just saying.

But Why Did His Head Explode?

I Shan't Name Names

Because that would spoil it for you, if you ever decide to buy "The Bunker".  Yes, Volume 4 did arrive today, which is well before the August 15th date Abebooks had posted.  It came from South Canada, which explains why it was later than the other two volumes.

     Conrad is a bit on the fence about how it ends.  Given that it involves time-travel and the plotlines move back and forth in time, it was never going to be an easy read, but it kind of peters out rather than achieving anything definitive.  And there's no explanation for why one character's head blows apart like a dropped melon.  World's worst headache?  Art!

     Other reviewers have whined and moaned about the artwork but Your Humble Scribe likes it.

     ANYWAY none of that is what the rest of the Intro is about, because I have a rare example of a Reddit Revenge story on Youtube that's from This Sceptred Isle.  Original Poster had been nagged by his mum into getting the first job available, which involved door-to-door selling.  This is not a job of choice for anyone, but it was a job, the commission was supposedly fantastic and His Mum Nagged.  Art!

     First red flag; their contract was over 50 pages long.  For a door-to-door sales job?  OP tried to at least skim-read it but was hurried along by the other eager chumps.

     The manager's girlfriend was the assistant manager, and both would drive the D2D salespeople to a particular location to drop them off and pick them up.

     Red flag number two; the GF was a raging alcoholic who would go through four bottles of wine per day, which made her already awful driving even worse.  She disguised her swilling the vino by pouring into water bottles so it looked like a fruit juice drink. If she got too blitzed to drive, her boyfriend would do the duty, and he was a worse driver than she was, even when sober.

     Red flag number three: the manager would swoop in to close OP's sales, blithely lying that he'd pass the commission on to him.  This cost OP £3,000 in sales, which to my mind seems rather high for a humble D2D job.  Art!

Come on.  You knew this was coming.

     Red flag number four; the manager never answered his phone, didn't reply to texts and frequently failed to attend the office.  

     OP then handed in his badge at the showrooms in a shopping centre, made a claim for Jobseekers Allowance, and then paid a visit to the nearest police station.  Where he dropped GF and BF right in it, explaining about the drink driving and explaining in detail where they'd be operating from in the following fortnight, together with a map and times.  Art!

     When OP next passed the showroom again, there was a big sign in the window advertising a manager vacancy.  The sign stayed up for a year before the showroom closed down.  GF went to prison; British courts and judges take a very dim view of people getting sloshed and driving.  Last OP heard, BF had lost his house and was back living with his mum, because it turns out the 'contract' was completely void and illegal and he'd needed to sell his house to pay the fines.  I hope that £3 grand was worth it, matey.

     And with that, I think we can agree that justice was served.

Speaking Of Which ...

"The Daily Beast" has been speculating, with a touch of malicious glee, about Citizen Trump's upcoming indictment, arrest, and subsequent trial, in Washington D.C.  The jurors who sat on the trials of the January 6th rioters have been unanimously harsh in handing out convictions.  One of their lawyers opined that "If I was Donald J. Trump, the last place on earth I'd want to be tried ... is Washington D.C."  Art!

      Another lawyer for January insurrectionists explained that the process of jury selection had been horrible, because so many residents of DC felt that they had been personally insulted by the riot.  "It took us 12 days to pick a jury and we didn't like what we had."

     Trump is probably dimly aware of how disliked he is in the South Canadian capital and will doubtless throw a temper-tantrum on Twooth Social, ranting about fairness, impartiality and how he wants a different venue.  As legal counsel have already explained, that's not going to happen, regardless how many toys he throws out of the pram.

     Tee hee!

So That's Where It Went

Conrad used to knock around a college in central Manchester back in the day, which was not far from Granada Studios Tour.  This was where various television shows were shot, and Conrad, in the guise of being a male helper on a primary school outing, did the site tour.  Art!

     It closed down decades ago.  Now, an arts venue has been erected on the old GST site.  Art!

     With puny human for scale.  The place cost a whopping £215 million, half of which was provided by The Government, the rest from Manchester.  The first exhibition is by a Japanese artist, Yayoi  Kusama, who has provided gigantic inflatable - sculptures?  Art!

     Also with puny humans for scale.  Conrad is not entirely convinced; it looks like someone was under the influence of something illegal whilst reading H. P. Lovecraft.  Having a quick look at ticket prices, they seem to be a bit coy about the full-price ones but loudly promote the 'Affordable' ones at £10 a throw, so I imagine £20.

You may hear more about this.

"City In The Sky"

Ace and the Doctor have taken refuge in Arcology One, so the Doctor can crack a few heads together - metaphorically - and pound sense into at least a few Hom. Sap., since the ones 'Downstairs' are currently involved in global thermo-nuclear war.

     ‘Taiwan has joined in, and a submarine in the Pacific has hit Indonesia.  It’s spreading.’  She looked coolly at both travellers.  ‘Who are these two and how did they get in?’

      Virginia felt as if the pace of events was speeding up and accelerating beyond her ability to keep track of it.  She looked at the central screens, the ones that displayed launch warnings, missile tracks, projected impact points, and sighed.  They’d over-hauled and updated their detection software since the Iran-Israel affair, and for the moment they’d disabled “Nuclear Detonation Detected” or that would be all the screens showed.

     The madness had begun unexpectedly, with a missile launch from Pakistan, when everyone had seen China and Taiwan coming to blows first.  The Arcologies were the intended target; there was no deviation in the missile’s flight, no post-boost course correction, only a straight track from Kahuta to near Earth orbit.  That had been scary, knowing that a nuclear-armed missile was heading straight for you, and your utterly defenceless, fragile bubble in space.

     Within seconds of the launch track, their permanently-present American watchdog had powered up it’s on-board laser system, bounced a 0.001% strength pulse off the rising missile to accurately determine it’s position in space and then fried the weapon with a gigajoule of coherent gamma rays.  What a shame their American shepherd wasn’t simply an old-fashioned missile-firing platform!  That would have returned the missile to earth in a million pieces

     Dear me, some people really have a grudge against the arcologies, don't they?  Why, it's almost as if they had a hidden agenda.

Finally -

Today the weather has been mocking me.  MOCKING ME!  Sunshine and blue skies all day long whilst I am chained to my laptop and monitor, whereas it rained non-stop all weekend and I got damp on my constitutional to and from Lesser Sodom.

     Bah!