Adventure Rocket Ship

I'm starting to get the impression that my 'social' 'media' 'profile' would likely become quite something if I just shut up and posted more pictures of more inanimate objects.

Aside (i): this '#nofilter' business. What does that even mean? My initial assumption was that whoever-it-is that was using that hashtag had finally admitted to having no boundaries whatsoever and that we could look forward to pictures of their bog, distraught partner or pile of Jack Wills carriers. LIke some app-happy Toby Young.

We don't talk about folksonomy any more, do we. Clay Shirky is probably doing the nostalgia circuit with that Shingy bloke, no doubt MC'ed by some Barry Shitpeas who's warmup is some twenty minutes on things that people in 2004 found impenetrable - 'D'you remember when the people who could afford houses went on about white dogshit? What was that all about? Etc.' - before Shingy and Shirky take the stage. Two falls, two posts to Corante or a startling haircut to decide the winner..

Aside (ii): Out-of-context metadata makes you look like a pillock.

So here's a picture linked to/from Faceache, because I hate what people have done to the internet through sheer greed. It is of a really ratty looking Dodge Challenger. An ancient and agricultural American vehicular conveyance m'lud. Two doors, mostly bonnet and fuel-guzzling iron V8, cart sprung, probably drum brakes at one end and the upholstery in the things smells just like my grandfather's Austin Cambridge.

Aside (iii): See what I did there?

What I would like to know about those things is why that sort of car in that sort of state is so close to a perfect conveyance?

Ok, so it could be better with an IRS, discs all round, modern ECU, modern 4WD and tyres of the same size at each corner. But apart from that...

Accidentally one of these. That was careless.

For MOT-related reasons, I'm bobbling about in a different 9000 while mine is being fettled by Justyn-who-does-SAABs (and who was pleased to tell me that he'd just bought a mint 9-5 Carlsson for 700 notes. The complete rotter).

It's a CS with the blower set to 'hooligan' and it is very silly indeed.

(Un)fortunately, I am forced to drive it for a few more days because the poor sod managed to crack the sump on mine...

On the other hand, the Youtubes has worked what I'm like (or at least what one facet is like) and keeps presenting me with DieselPr0n. Yes I would like some footage of a Bristol Hercules and/or a 60-litre V12 Paxman diesel. Although I have to say that I've been closer to that one than the camera-person (It is going to be a bloke though, isn't it.) and it's much more impressive when you're nose-to-injector with the thing.

I grew up on a large and mechanised farm. The smells and sounds that remind me of summer are warm hypoid, burnt stubble and idling diesels. I suspect every season is the same and has a specific set of sounds and smells, given that it was cold last night walking back to the house and I could smell wet earth. The smell of wet earth in October is different to September is different to May. Last night I thought 'Oh. Andoversford Young Farmers ploughing match', which for a long time was held on Charlton Abbotts land. Until, I think, they changed the rules about stubble burning, which meant the ground had to be turned over within some small number of days and couldn't be left until the first or second weekend in October.

Anyway. Big diesels, Gerry Anderson and the malign influence of one too many Chris Foss-illustrated paperback covers.

I guess it always seemed that if you had a large diesel-powered vehicle and a selection of large spanners, most problems you might encounter would be trivial. Non-trivial problems would require the length of big chain and a couple of pry-bars. This theory seemed borne out by early seventies viewing of UFO. Problem with Johnny Alien-chap arriving to shoot the place up? Send for SHADO-2: boggler boggler whoosh bang game over. Of course I had the Dinky version.

Recently, I was pointed at the DT-30 Vityaz. It's more or less exactly like the designers at the 'Big fuck-off diesel powered vehicle design bureau no. 23' had been watching UFO and/or had read 'Damnation Alley' (See, this is where Hollwood and by extension the USA gets it wrong. The transport in that film was the best that the set-design and custom car people could come up with. It didn't have to work, it just had to look like it could cope with a post-apocalyptic landscape. It's utterly outclassed by kit that the Russian military had been beetling about in for half a decade.) and thought 'Bugger me, I think we can do a bit better than that decadent western pish.'

For me, the money shot in the video is when the beast hauls the tank out of the snowdrift. Sadly there's techno music where there should be 'boggler boggler boggler BRAP! BRRRRAARRRR!' and some tank driver going 'Hoi you bastard mind the bodywork!' But y'know, it looks like the sort of thing that would be excellent for dealing with stroppy vampires, supernatural uprisings, zombie rugger teams, natural disasters, plagues of frogs or baldy blokes in metal gimp-masks.

It's also the sort of vehicle that one could write into an alien-planet version of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Were one into such obvious dieselpunk tropes. Never mind the plot, look at the threads on that injector-pump.




I guess the thing that I'm resigned to is that now I'm slightly more grown up and have been forced to understand that the world is just bloody complicated, is that there are no simple and/or elegant fixes, no matter how much I'd like to think that there are. And that the problem-space amenable to fixing in the manner outlined a couple of paragraphs ago is quite small and not one to which I have the luxury of returning.

Although I would like to have a bash with a DT-30 and some big spanners, just to make sure.