Form Faithfully Follows Function

How Alliterative!

No, I'm not going to define it, go look it up.  

     Okay, in this Intro I will be whanging on about design and purpose, in an interesting way that won't cause you to fall asleep.  Hopefully.

     Now, if your criteria were that you have to propel a bunch of soldiers across the modern battlefield, protect them from small arms fire and shrapnel, provide them with offensive ordnance and use the new-fangled internal combustion engine, what would you come up with?  Art!

Mark IV TANK with puny humans for scale

     Nothing less than this beast.  Let us use the Snip function to further elaborate on it's design and construction.  Art!

Tracks

     Yes, a series of caterpillar tracks, that enable it to cross rough ground or inclines, mud, craters, barbed wire and trenches, thanks to having a long wheelbase (or trackbase).  Also any Teutons incautious enough to not get out of the way quickly enough.  Art!

     Here you can see the hatches for the driver and co-driver, in the raised position to give better visibility.  When going into action the hatches would be lowered to give better protection, and both would wear a chain-mail visor to protect their face and eyes.  No, they didn't stick the exhaust in the wrong place, that's a Lewis gun, place to cover the frontal arc.  Art!

     This is a 'Female' tank so it only comes armed with machine guns, as opposed to the 'Male' that carried 6 pounder cannon, and the 'Hermaphrodite' that carried both types of weapon.  Not sure you could get away with that kind of nomenclature nowadays.  Art!

     That object which looks like a large wooden beam is, in fact, a large wooden beam.  It's the 'Unditching Beam' and was carried on the back of the tank.  If it got bogged down - always a possibility on the crater fields of the Western Front - then the crew would emerge, and chain it horizontally across the tracks.  They would start up the engine again, the tracks would carry the beam around (note the rails to carry it over the driver's cab) and hopefully heave the tank, rather like a stranded whale, out of the slough.  Sounds simple?  Not so, especially as tanks attracted artillery fire, and every Teuton able to fire a weapon would be pelting the big steel beast with bullets.

     Now, to prove my titular assertion about form and function, allow me to move the clock forward to the Second Unpleasantness, and the Sherman Tank.  Art!

     Yes, this is the AI art generator at work again.  Looking at this - well, one wonders if Skynet is going to be all that much of a threat.  Yes, it seems to be like a tank, until you look a little more closely, at which point it resembles something more like the Army Surplus Special from "Wacky Races".  It has a hull suspended between two tracks, a turret, a large gun and there all resemblance with the Sherman ends.  Art!

     Now that enormously long preamble is out of the way, let us now approach what triggered this analytical Intro, thanks to "Science Girl" on Twitter.  For Your Information, she appears to put out science-related content.  Who would have guessed, hmm?  Art!

     This creepy little critter is the LIMX Dynamix' P1, a bipedal robot that they were putting through their paces.  As you can see, this is a forest floor, where the ground is uneven and unpredictable, so the robot has to learn how to cope with such terrain.  Also -

     They hit and kick it - no going Awww! it's a robot not a living creature - and it lurches about drunkenly yet doesn't fall over and recovers it's balance in short order.  It also has to learn how to navigate in a clutterered environment with irregularly-spaced obstacles.  Art!

Ooops

Ouch

     If you remember 'Roko's Basilisk', this was an AI that decided to punish all Hom. Sap. who did not collaborate in creating it (that is, most of you us).  Conrad suspects that P1 may well be discovered, it's metal 'feet' covered in blood, with a dead AI robotics researcher next to it.  Clutching a stick.

     Just to polish off this theme of FFFF, let me prod Art into reluctant sentience.

     The Empire seems to have created a turkey crossed with a lemon here, because this grown-up version of P1's great-grandchild manages to get defeated by a load of fnorping koala bears armed with sticks.

Proof That The Stupid Plague Is Spreading

Really, all you need to do is hang out on social media and a swivel-eyed loonwaffle will be along soon enough, which will provide a nexus of stupid that attracts more of them, until you reach critical Stupid Mass and a Logic Explosion occurs.  Art!

     May I just point out that the Titanic sank in 1912 and the CIA didn't come into existence until post-Second Unpleasantness.

     Yes, there are parody accounts that are as stupid as this on, except they take pains to point out they are, in fact, taking the mick.

     Hom. Sap. worries me at times.

Proof That Conrad Is A Terrible Person

I was cruising through "The Daily Beast"'s website and came across this, which needs no extra comment, apart from a shake of the head and a bemused look.

     To completely ignore "needs no extra comment" clarify matters a little, allow me to copy in part of the attached article:

"The dropped suits appear to end a long saga involving the Schlapps and Carlton Huffman, an ex-campaign staffer for the former Senate hopeful Herschel Walker who has since been accused of sexual assault himself.

In a statement shared with Politico by Schlapp’s lawyers, Huffman apologized to the Schlapp family and said he regretted ever filing the lawsuits against them, CPAC, the ACU, and Caroline Wren, an adviser to Matt Schlapp."

     In fact matey does such abject grovelling one wonders what behind-the-scenes influence was brought to bear?  We may never know, because I'll bet there's a Non-Disclosure Agreement in there.

"City In The Sky"

The alien 'squatters' are debating eeeeeevil things.  Being evil and all.

‘We would need to create it from scratch.  None of the old cultures are viable after such a long delay from their first use.’

     ‘Ensure it is more destructive than the last disease,’ added Miskan 54.  ‘Much more.’

     ‘Agreed,’ added Arkan 22.  Anger in a Lithoi didn’t die down quickly.  ‘Inevitably some humans will survive.  In the hundred years it will take for the Northern hemisphere to become completely viable, they will breed back up to the required level.’

     Orskan 94 put in a technical objection.

     ‘We do not have a delivery system any longer.  The flying eyes spread the initial disease cultures.’

     Arkan 22’s tail thrashed in anger (to a Lithoi; to any other observer he merely twitched, slowly).

     ‘Then the artificers will have to build more flying eyes!  No rest for them.’

     ‘I would also suggest a more short-term solution for the littoral communities,’ added Mirkan 54.  ‘Missiles, with cobalt warheads.  We cannot wait and allow them to interfere.’

     ‘No!’ hissed the leader.  ‘Cobalt pollutes excessively.  Simple fission warheads will do.’  He swivelled to look at Orskan 94.  ‘Have the artificers work on a dozen such missiles.’

     Like I said, eeeeevil.

More Mikey Mayhem

We're now halfway through "Mike's Book Review" and at Number 5 in his list of Dystopian And Post-Apocalyptic Novels we have "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy, which Conrad has read and not enjoyed.  Art!

     There's a couple of reasons for this.  Firstly, McCarthy eschews punctuation, so you've no idea who's talking to whom about what.  Secondly, there's no explanation about what ended the world.  So, all you end up with is two tramps mucking about in heaps of filth.

     Now, the film is far better as entertainment.  Conrad would say this is similar to "The Time Machine": read once then ignore and concentrate on the film.  Art!

Grim yet entertaining

The Mars Volta Reprise Of A Little Musical Critique

I did threaten to carry on with "Cicatrix ESP"

I've defected

So - you are <drum roll cymbal clash> - Defective!

I've defected

You're defective, I'm not.  We already know this.

I've defected

WE KNOW!

I've defected

          <sounds of Tazer and screams>

Finallly - 

I think we're done here.

Do You Want Colossus?

Because THIS Is How You Get Colossus

That statement is a little imprecise, and deliberately so, because a straight line is the dullest journey between two points.

     Which 'Colossus' do I refer to?  Well, as we are wont to do here, I'll go through all the likely suspect herrings, limn them in shades of scarlet and then move on.  Art!

     Say hello to the film, made in 1961 in Italy.  It starred Rory Calhoun as the South Canadian traffic-baiter, and was helmed by <vibrato guitar effect> one Sergio Leone.  Conrad thinks he's seen the opening credits sequence, or it was the closing credits sequence, and that's it.  Art!

     There really was a Colossus of Rhodes, reputedly one of the Seven Wonders Of The Ancient World, which was created and erected to commemorate the polis' survival of a long siege and war.  It went up in 280 BC and lasted until 226 BC, when it came down again thanks to an earthquake, as the terra in Greece is considerably less firma than in more settled regions of the world.

     So, no, this isn't the Colossus of the title.  Art!

     I've never seen this glorious epic but I bet Degsy has.  In it, the brain of a man killed in a traffic accident is re-housed in a giant robotic body, so that humanity can continue to benefit from his mind.  Exactly why his brain surgeon dad had a gigantic robot mooching about the lab isn't explained, still less why they made it so scary.  Art!

     Why does it need clothes?  Why does it look like three dockers welded together?  How can it do up all those fiddly little buttons with enormous metal digits that make Conrad's unwieldy sausages look petite and dainty?

     Of course - obviously! - it goes completely hat-stand and starts to destroy New York, until it gets de-activated itself.  

     Not the Colossus I was talking about.  Art!

     This is evidence of how perfidious Perfidious Albion can be; you've all heard of Enigma, well now meet Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer, used by the boffins to crack the Teuton's formidable Lorenz cipher.  Second Unpleasantness timeline -

     And still not the Colossus we are concerned with.  Although, if that of New York and Bletchley Park were to have a baby, it would end up rather like - Art!

     This is the villain of the piece in "Colossus The Forbin Project", an autonomous Artificial Intelligence with control over the South Canadian nuclear arsenal, absent any human oversight or ability to intervene.

     WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG.

     This.  There was a Sinister equivalent of Colossus, called "Guardian".  Colossus orders them to be connected and both systems begin to learn at an asymptotic rate.  Over time any attempts to thwart this gestalt AI or it's control of both South Canadian and Sinister strategic nuclear arsenals are defeated, usually with a nuclear explosion.  The film ends with the Colossus/Guardian hybrid saying that there will be peace - at any price: obey and live or defy and die.

     Incidentally, Herman Kahn in his "On Thermonuclear War" did mention that a 'Doomsday Device' was feasible at that time - circa Nineteen Sixty - in that an arsenal of nuclear warheads, probably salted with cobalt, could be constructed that would automatically detonate, without any human control or intervention, given a certain set of circumstances.  'Feasible' is not 'probable' because, as with Colossus, removing Hom. Sap. from the equation leads to teetering on the edge of a precipice.  Art!

     Well, Colossus is a bit of a dinosaur - the film came out in 1970 - so that above is the usual warning I din into your disbelieving ears.  Skynet is a lot more sinister than Colossus, which had an abstracted view of how to achieve peace on earth.  Skynet's aim is even simpler; exterminate Hom. Sap. and Hay Pesto! problem solved.  No more war.  This is a rather reductionist approach, similar to that employed by Judge Death -

     Which is another music from a different kitchen.

A Quart In A Pint Pot

That redoubtable Dutch bloke RG Poulussen posts an "On This Day" on Twitter, and had a remarkable clip of Horsa gliders being loaded OTD back in 1945.  Art!

     Once again, Perfidious Albion showing just how perfidious it can be.  This equipment was to be carried aboard the glider and delivered to the Teuton-held east bank of the Rhine river, behind their lines, in Operation Varsity.  The Rhine was the last major barrier for the Allies to cross en route to Berlin, and the Teutons had thoughtfully destroyed all the bridges.  Hence the glider.

     FYI, the glider was expendable and could be safely trashed completely in order to extract it's cargo.

More Of Mike's Metrics

You recall, the chap with the book list - "Top 10 Dystopian Or Post-Apocalyptic Novels", and this one is "The Time Machine" by H G Wells, which is quite a conceit, because it was written before heavier-than-air flight, radio and Skynet.  Art!

     Perhaps a tad garish, but certainly a whole lot more entertaining than the novella, where the Time Traveller is only ever called that.  Not even "Mister Tee Tee".  Conrad's advice is to read once, then ignore and only watch the films.  Yes, I have read it myself and the only thing I remember is Mister Tee Tee in his chronopede on a beach, looking at the Sun going through it's death throes with an indeterminate Something flopping about in the shallows.

"City In The Sky"

Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted, so the Field Service Manual would have you believe.  The Doctor is putting this aphorism to the test.  Meanwhile -

INTERPOSIT FIVE

 The Lithoi were angry; their plans were slipping out of control and that meant their Contract might not be honoured.  Their last two flying eyes had been shockingly and unexpectedly destroyed in New Eucla.  Yes, the artificers could build more but that would take time.  Their sleeper agents, concealed in Transports, were being flushed out along the Australian coastline, and remorselessly killed.  It had proved essential to order them back to the base, and they’d have to walk with no flying eyes to return them.  Of all the fifty sleeper agents deployed, no more than ten or twelve might get back alive.  If they could get past the dingo packs, that is, since the feral canines seemed to have an especial grudge against the Lithoi.

     The loss of a few dozen from a crew of five hundred didn’t matter especially, their concern was over how little control the Lithoi could now exert, thanks to their secrecy being breached.

     Accordingly a panic session had been convened.  Arkan 22, the nominal head of the Lithoi mission, spoke rapidly to the others.

     ‘We have considered a cull of human survivors in the past, especially since their numbers in the Northern hemisphere began to increase.  It is imperative that we implement a cull now!’

     Miskan 54, the human expert, hissed in agreement.

The Stupid!  It Turns Into Plasma!

I have only just learned about the Dali cargo ship hitting and demolishing the Francis Scott Key Bridge, and watched a clip of the accident in progress.  A horrifying testament to the inertia of a cargo shop carrying ten thousand tons of freight, because the bridge went down as if it were made of tin and sellotape.  Art!

     That's scant seconds after the collision.  Six people from a work team filling in potholes are still missing.

     Of course - obviously! - an event like this brings the swivel-eyed loonwaffles out of the woodwork, anxious to stake their claim as having the IQ closest to room temperature.  Art!

     I can only think this bafune was dropped on his head.  Not as a child, but from a couple of years ago and he repeated the process.

     You can't fix stupid but you can point and laugh mockingly at it.

Finally -

As we should surely know by now, all our IT is powered by hamsters.  What you may not know is that all white goods are powered by gerbils.  The Mansion's gerbils are apparently taking strike action.

     Watch this space.

From A Different Angle

Allow Me

We've featured a couple of inventions from the First Unpleasantness on the blog of late, one being the entirely fictional 'land-torpedo' form of protection, and the other being the entirely factual, and entirely rubbish, 'Hughes Shovel'.  Art!

I dare not even ask

     I should also have pointed out that these big, bright, shiny objects could only be more obvious on the battlefield if they came flying a flag emblazoned with "HERE I AM" on them.  No camouflage at all, hmmmm?  I am going to poach a little text from the PM website, because I can and it ups the word count.  

To make the trench less secure for the enemy is an object which each of the belligerents is striving to accomplish. A step in this direction is found in the work of a British inventor who has developed a wheeled body shield that affords immunity from rifle bullets and shrapnel when advancing upon fortified positions.

     Notice that they don't name this mysterious "British inventor".  Paddy Griffiths, in "Battle Tactics Of The Western Front", details how the War Ministry had to sift through oodles of suggested inventions, many of which were complete garbage, submitted by any loon with an axe to grind and a conviction that they were their country's saviour.  Art!

     No, this is not Ned Kelly.  Here you see a South Canadian wearing the Brewster Body Shield, sans wheels.  It was touted as being bulletproof, which was by virtue of it being made of thick metal, and it tickled the scales at 40 pounds.  Art!

     It only protected the front of the body, because a fully enclosed version would doubtless have weighed 80 pounds.  Good luck negotiating No Man's Land carrying the equivalent of 16 bags of potatoes.  Art!

     This one never bothered the War Ministry as it's French.  Note that the canny M8s have painted this one in olive and mustard, the better to blend in.  We can even see the interior.  Art!

     In real life they were practically ineffective, as they were extremely heavy, which they had to be in order to be bulletproof, and moving over muddy crater-fields was beyond any bar the most Herculean physique.  First Unpleasantness battlefields bore scant resemblance to a bowling green.  Art!

     I've not seen this picture before.  It is said to be a Ruffian mobile shield, captured by the Teutons on the Eastern Front.  For one thing, it looks extremely hefty, lots of steel plates, and it would need a gang of hefty Ruffian infantry to merely move it about.  Again, protection from the front only, no side armour unless you count the larger wheels.

      "Where are you going with this?" I hear you quibble.  Well, all the designs above are about protecting the user/wearer/sweating minion from threats directly to their front, which you, as amateurs, are nodding your head sagely to.

     HOWEVER! and we all knew that word was going to crop up, didn't we, pilgrims? there is the concept and practice of 'Enfilade'.  Art!

     The chaps in green can 'walk' their rounds up and down the length of the unfortunate red guy's formation, only needing to adjust elevation a bit. The blue blokes would need to swing their weapons about madly to try and hit the oncoming red tide, which in reality would have spread out an awful lot more.  Napoleonic tactics don't work on the modern battlefield.

     So, all the impressive armoured designs that address the problem of defilade-only fire were instantly cast adrift.  The Teutons were especially fond of hiding their machine guns in enfilade positions on the Western Front.  

     This completely overlooks artillery fire, either high explosive bursting at ground level, or shrapnel going off at height -

     Which is another topic for a different kitchen.

    Speaking of which, I feel the need to brew a pot of tea.  Be back shortly!

     Just to keep you up to speed, I ought to explain that I got another five packets of loose-leaf Darjeeling from Sainsbo's on Saturday.  

More Of Mike's Picks

That list of his top 10 dystopian or post-apocalyptic novels, as evinced on his Youtube channel "Mike's Book Reviews".  This one was "The Giver" by Lois Lowry, a title and name unfamiliar to me.  Art!

     Hmmmm okay, it's about a society that has eliminated crime and sadness, by making everything focussed around order and 'Sameness'.  

     Nope, not selling it well.  It sounds like a dull and plodding text version of that film "Equilibrium" where they use omnipresent drugs to dull people's emotions.  Pass! 

The Three-Headed Elephant In The Room

That's me making a point.

     Okay, cast your minds back to the early Eighties, when New Wave was still new and nobody had ever heard of DJ Tango.  Back then, "2000AD" published a strip called "Skizz", which was a kind of dour British look at ET, if ET had accidentally landed in Birmingham not California.  Art!

     Birmingham, to be clear, is a big industrial wart in the Midlands, where they speak with a funny accent and pretend to be England's Second City.  That's Skizz above, being all purple.  His spaceship crashed on the outskirts of Birmingham, and promptly blew itself up to prevent it falling into the hands of Hom. Sap.  Not before our plucky young alien had absented himself, or the story would only have lasted a single page.  Art!

     Of course, Skizz ends up in the hands of The Authorities, who are keen to learn all his saucy little secrets.

     The biggest take-away from this, even if nothing of Skizz's ship is recovered bigger than a pinhead, is that INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL IS POSSIBLE!

     That's all Hom. Sap. needs to get on the research train and find out how to do it, because now they know it's possible.  Yes, it would be costly and complex and take decades; at the end of it you can bet your boots Hom. Sap. would come a-swarming out of the Solar System like a plague of cyborg locusts.

"City In The Sky"

Timelord-dingo comms have been established successfully, and the Doctor is now having a nosy at the Lithoi's base.

     He carefully parted the sedge stems hiding him and his canine accomplice, covering to the  horizon

and back, twice.  Puzzled, he frowned and thought.

     No sign of an interstellar spacecraft, disguised or otherwise: no landing site, no hardstand, no launch gantry.  The Lithoi couldn’t have left their ship in orbit because then they’d have been easily able to destroy the arcologies, decades ago.  There weren’t any visible blast marks where a vessel might have landed or taken off, no stand-alone terminii to guide a starship to a landing or ascent.  No aerials or antennae –

     The phrase “hide in plain sight” suddenly stung him. 

     Of course the Lithoi ship didn’t appear to be lurking around anywhere, because he could see it right in front of him.  The ship was the base, and the base was the ship.  The aliens had driven it into the surface of mother Earth like a screw into a block of wood, concealing most of the vehicle beneath the surface where it would be out of sight, protected from attack and free from airborne precipitation.

     As his subconscious was wont to do, the Doctor felt surprised when a sneaky paradigm closely associated with the aliens use of their vessel ebbed into the forefront of his mind

Record-Breaking And Not In A Good Way

The Flabby Fraudster has been sitting in a New York court, trying to delay his hush-money trial into 2027 if possible, only to be told that it's going ahead as of  April 15th.  Art!

IMAGE SOURCE,REUTERS

By Kayla Epstein

Reporting from court in New York, BBC News

Donald Trump will face the first ever criminal trial of a former US president on 15 April, a judge has ruled, over hush money payments he made to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

     Well well what's that smell?  

     He also got the Appellate Court to reduce his payment to New York to (!) only $175 million within the next 10 days.  I wonder if the Attorney General will appeal this appeal?  Watch this space and bring your own popcorn!

Finally -

I shouldn't bruit this about, but folks on our Team Chat have taken to calling Conrad 'Colonel', after Colonel Sanders, the Kentucky Fried king.

     Speaking of which, I have a set of chicken drumsticks a-roasting that need taking out of the oven.

The Towering Infernos

Yes You Read That Right

"Towering Infernos" plural, and as you can see, the phrase has not been emboldened and coloured in Fuschia, which is our default here on the blog for anything with a real-world name.

     Those of you with long memories may recall that, many moons ago, we here at BOOJUM! began an analysis of "The Towering Inferno"  - see? it's in bold and fuschia - for reasons I cannot remember, and did perhaps one item on it before forgetting all about it.  Nobody protested in the Comments, so it obviously wasn't a major hit to your reading experience.  Art!

"NO! I do not refer to that classic disaster thriller "The Towering Inferno" which I have never seen to completion <hangs head a little>.  Art!

Both towering and an inferno.  Does what it says on the tin."

     That was from August 2021.  Later that year I got hold of TTI and remedied the defect above of not having seen the whole thing from start to stop.  This took place in October of that year, after which there might have been another item about it and then - nothing.  Radio silence.  Art!

     

     Yes, it's that chap again, after his football career and before the criminal one.  Take note of all that - ah - 'high-tec' computer gubbins in the background, because Conrad is pretty sure it was used in "Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea", thanks to the director on TTG and producer of VTTBOTS being the legendarily cheap Irwin Allen.  Art!

     Of course - obviously! - none of this has anything to do with what I really wanted to talk about, which is about the ongoing campaign by the Ukrainians to bankrupt the Ruffians.  Clearly Putinpot doesn't care how many mobiks go to their death in Ukraine, and he can still drag fifty-year old tanks out of storage, but how does he fund the war?  

     (Incidentally, it's now being admitted as a 'war', just don't expect all those people sent to the gulags for ten years for saying this over the past two years to be released).

     With oil and gas.   Mostly oil.  Art!

     "Komersant Volga" if you need to know.  Here we see a Ukranian long-range drone over a Ruffian oil refinery.  You can't hear the air-raid sirens going in the background, quite a chilling sound, nor the wine of the drone's engin.  Let us prod Art into more activity!

     The drone is now just starboard of that first chimney, and the clip only has seconds to go.  Your Humble Scribe was wondering if this was all, whereupon the drone abruptly dives onto target.  Art!

Novokuibishev Refinery

     Conrad had to comment on this clip, as it exemplifies what the Ukrainians are doing with these strikes.

Schuler the Spoiler

and 22 others liked your reply

They appear to be hitting the distillation towers that catalyse crude oil. These are central to the refining process. They are also sanctioned and very expensive!

     No, these drones are not hitting the nearest target, nor the biggest; they are being directed to the 'cracking' towers that distil crude oil into refined products such as petrol, diesel, fuel oil, kerosene and others.  This refinery had already been hit by the Ukes with production being shut down, and now even more damage has been caused.  

     Remember my rhetorical question about how Peter The Average funded his war?  Well, NovoKay pumped 160,000 barrels of oil per day.  That's $16 million worth of refined products per day, at least - perhaps up to $24 million, because refined products sell for up to $150 per barrel.  Art!

Uke drone with puny humans for scale

     This is the 'Lutye' drone being used for these strikes.  You can see both the engine and space for a 100-pound Happy Engagement payload, though what you can't see is their immunity from jamming.  They cost $200,000 each and even if the Ruffians shoot down 9 out of 10, they are still down $16 million per day.  The 'shooting down' bit is highly contentious, too, as the Ruffians have 44 refineries to defend, never mind fuel depots or terminals.  Art!

     These strikes have been going on for two months now and the Ruffians don't have any counter or answer to them.  Everything within a thousand kilometres of Ukraine is now a target, and since the Ukes are clever and good at improvising, this range may well increase, putting targets in trans-Ural Siberia at risk.  As I have pointed out before, these refineries are enormous static targets bulging with inflammable product and the Ukrainians have absolutely no reason to stop hitting them again and again.  The Gremlin in the Kremlin is going to have to live with going bankrupt if his Special Idiotic Operation continues!

How Very Apt

Eric Arthur Blair, who is better known to you as 'George Orwell', wrote two novels that are still referred to reverentially today.  I say this as an introduction to the next item on that list of Dystopian/Post-Apocalyptic novels from Mike.  Whom I didn't Favourite and now cannot easily find.

     <trawls Youtube>

     Ha!  Art?

Mike's Book Reviews

     Okay, he added "1984".  Enough has been said about this novel already, and the inhabitants of Modern-Day Mordor are living it as I speak.  Conrad would like to add that he considers "Homage To Catalonia" and "Down And Out In Paris And London" as better works, partly because they are fact, not fiction, and partly because Ol' Eric put his money where his mouth was and went to fight Fascism in Spain.  Art!

I Discovered Why The First Bus App Ain't Working

'First Bus' has long been a staple of the blog, able to generate content reliably thanks to unreliability, long before DJ Tango was a thing.  As of last week, the app that allows one to purchase tickets went toes-up, because it has been replaced with a far deadlier opponent.  Art!

     I note that you cannot purchase single tickets any longer, they have to be for a whole day at £5.  Probably still able to use a card on the bus to purchase, which is what Conrad has been doing of late.

"City In The Sky"

We've had to put up with a bit of shizzle where the author thought he was a proper author, but I think we're successfully past that.

Interesting! mused the watching Timelord.  Clearly an electronic baffle of – aha, it’s a programmable thin-film screen, held rigid by an electrical charge.  No doubt it shows two hectares of barren plain when seen from above, and it must also shield against any electro-magnetic discharges.  Plus, it’s wide enough to conceal any purely physical  activity close to the base – tracks or trails or landing-sites.  Rainfall would delineate the edges where water ran off, except that out here on the Nullarbor Plain there was no rain, or not until a certain asteroid fell from the heavens.

     Strange clumps of discoloured soil stood at a specific distance from the Lithoi’s base, even if not arrayed in any kind of order.  The Doctor puzzled over these for a minute and wonderied if they marked alien mining or horticulture, until he realised with a chill that the ashy mixture, washed into the plains, was the remains of countless animals that had blundered into range of the Lithoi.

     None of the lizards were outside.  Not surprising.  The rainclouds had evapourated or blown further inland but the ground remained damp, wet enough to deter an aquaphobic lizard from moving around.

     I wonder where their ship is, he continued.   Stubborn.  Not willing to bale out and leave.  Why can’t they just accept the inevitable defeat, stop pitting their wits against me and fly off, chastened!

     Ah, yes, about that spaceship ...

Not A Headline You Want To Read

I just happened across this on the BBC News website, that font of all that's fit to be writ.  Art!

     One of the less glamourous aspects of life on a cruise ship is that the crew will have a practiced procedure in the case of such an event; all engines stop, crew to watch stations on deck, at least one boat deployed to carry out search at sea.  In this case it doesn't appear to have worked, thanks to the bald statement "Police, who boarded the vessel on its return to Southampton on Friday, said they were investigating on behalf of the coroner".

     It's a little-known fact, but falling into water from a height above 30 feet greatly increases the possibility of fatal injury.

Finally -

Rather surprisingly, it has remained sunny all Sunday!

     Okay, that's it, off to cook up the Sunday Stew.