Pinky Strips

 

Not the dynamic duo you were hoping for.

Dickless Tracy

The Dick by Bruce Jay Friedman.

No matter how good his private investigating skills are, the dick won't be doing much probing if he runs around with his hair-trigger gun holstered like that.

The term "dick" for a detective was originally coined in Canada the and brought south into the United States by rum runners during the prohibition.  The fictional comic strip character Dick Tracy was given the first name of Dick in token of its being a slang expression for "detective".  Female detectives have in the past been called Dickless Tracy's or DT's.  Not to be confused with the Australian term DT for male swimwear meaning dick togs.

 

 

Native Commerce

Not unlike the chamber of commerce in my country.

Heroic Anachronism

I'm not all that big on war stories and war heroes but Jack Churchill was the stuff of legends.

 

Rather than wield a rifle or sub-machine gun in battle, the commando leader inspired his comrades by storming beaches armed with a Scottish broadsword, a longbow, a kilt and a set of bagpipes.  Known as Mad Jack, he was very fond of saying "any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly armed",  Lt Col Churchill’s fearlessness under fire became his hallmark and made both Robin Hood and Rambo look like sissy school girls.

 

Born John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill in Surrey in 1906, he was educated on the Isle of Man and at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. He joined  the 2nd Battalion the Manchester Regiment in 1926.  He spent his first few years in the army learning to play the bagpipes, despite his lack of Scottish heritage, and riding his motorcycle across the entire Indian subcontinent just for the hell of it.  Jack later left the Army to pursue his bagpipe playing career.  In that time he also worked as a newspaper editor, a professional male model, represented Britain in the 1939 World Archery Championships and appeared in films. Probably because of a shortage of people hiring bagpipe musicians.

 

 

At the outbreak of the second world war he was recalled to the Army and posted in France just as Blitzkrieg was beginning and British troops were being pushed back towards the sea.  Well Mad Jack wasn't going to have any of that Jerry Blitzkrieg malarkey.  Jack launched small-scale guerrilla raids and surprise attacks on German positions and supply depots.  Riding his trusty motorcycle and armed only with a his longbow and and broadsword, he would assault the Germans medieval-style catching them completely off-guard.  Despite being shot in the neck by a machine gun, Mad Jack Churchill battled throughout the Dunkirk campaign, at one point even winning the Military Cross for bravery when he rescued a wounded British officer from a German ambush.

 

Jack returned to England and signed up to a new organisation known as the Commandos.  He wasn't sure what a Commando was, but it sounded like something he'd been waiting for.  His first mission was to lead the Number 2 Commandos to take out the artillery batteries on Maaloy Island, as part of the amphibious assault on the German base in Vaagso, Norway.   As the landing craft raced towards their LZ, he belted out "The March of the Cameron Men" on the bagpipes to inspire his men, probably alerting the Germans to the oncoming attack.  When the assault ramp swung open, he lead the charge at the head of his men, with his trusty sword in hand.  Two hours later, British High Command received a telegram from the front: "Maaloy battery and island captured.  Casualties slight.  Demolitions in progress.  Churchill."

 

 

He was also playing his bagpipes in the thick of the action while leading the 2 Commando through Sicily, to Messina and the landings at Salerno, Italy, where he won another award for bravery.  His squad was charged with taking out an artillery battery that was pinning down a nearby British force, despite the fact that it was garrisoned by a force much larger than his own.  Churchill  had his men charge the town from all sides in the middle of the night, screaming as loud as possible.  The Germans were surprised and confused, and offered poor resistance.  The 50 men of Number 2 Commando took 136 prisoners and inflicted an unknown number of casualties. Another night on the same campaign, he single-handedly took forty-two German prisoners and captured a mortar crew William Wallace style using only his broadsword, by taking one patrolling guard as a human shield and sneaking from sentry post to sentry post forcing the soldiers to surrender under threat of his sword.

 

Mad Jack was finally captured in an attack on the island of Brac, most of his unit had been killed and as bombs exploded around him, he continued to play his bagpipes until he was knocked unconscious by an explosion. The Germans took him to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. But it would take more than some Nazi concentration camp to hold Jack Churchill. One night in September of 1944, he escaped by crawling through and abandoned drain.  He was later recaptured while walking towards the Baltic coast and sent to a prison camp in Austria. This too would prove to be insufficient to hold the likes of Jack Churchill, for one night when the camp lighting failed in  April 1945, he simply walked away.  He marched 150 miles through the Alps, liberating vegetables he found along the way, until finally he met up with a U.S. Armoured division and was sent back to England.

 

By this time the war in Europe was more or less over, Jack expressed interest in fighting the Japanese, but as his train was pulling into the station in Burma he received word that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima and the Pacific Campaign would soon be over. But still, Jack's adventures weren't finished yet.  At the age of 40, he qualified as a paratrooper and went on to see action in Palestine, where he earned fame for defending a Jewish medical convoy from an Arab ambush while wearing his full military dress uniform.  After Palestine, Churchill went on to serve as an instructor at a land-air warfare school in Australia and became an awesome surfer.  He even designed and built his own surfboards and eventually retired from the army in 1959 and died in 1996.

 

 

Sentient Concrete

Concrete is the most widely used structural material used on the planet today, but it has an annoying habit of breaking down over time, leading to cracks and pit holes that require repair or replacement.  Until now.  Now we have bio-concrete.  Bio-concrete is a living, breathing, stone capable of self repair.  Born out of an unholy collaboration between microbiologist Henk Jonkers and concrete technologist Eric Schlangen, this self-healing bio-concrete is a living mixture of concrete, bacterial spores, and microbe-sustaining nourishment in the form of calcium lactate.

 

One of the many things known to contribute to the degradation of concrete is exposure to water. However, when bio-concrete is exposed to water the bacteria impregnated in it set to work converting calcium lactate into calcite, which fills in any cracks and holes.  The bacteria is capable of repairing cracks in the concrete up to half a millimetre wide.  This new concrete abomination is now out of the lab undergoing real-world testing and could be on the commercial market in 2-3 years.

 

From The Sarah Jane Adventures, episodes 1 & 2, The nightmare man (a two part story):
At some point in the early 21st century, a sentient concrete disguised itself as a flyover in Chiswick, attempting to control the minds of the populace, before being defeated by Sarah Jane Smith.  In 2010, Sarah Jane used K9 and a piece of the concrete to contact Luke Smith while he was trapped in the Nightmare Man's realm.

 

Now think about how much concrete is in your city, then consider the consequences of all that being alive.  The question is, how long before it attains enough critical mass for the bacteria to form sentience?  Do you think it will appreciate thousands of people walking all over it every day? Your foot path could be plotting revenge against you!  Not to mention the statues in the park.  What's to stop them creeping up behind you in the blink of an eye?  Our downfall won't be by terminator robots it will be insidious masonry blocks.  Mark my words.

 

Bike Tricks

Fancy Cycling by Isabel Marks.

Isabel? Isabel on a bike?

No hands is kind of fancy, but for really really fancy it should be more like this.

Shoddy the Clown

Carnival in Limburg.

After a lively street parade and street festival Shoddy the Clown has found a special young Belgium friend who is happy to accept his continuing offers of drinks.

Shoddy the Clowns leer betrays his intentions, however as planned, the beer and his experience playing on the excitement of the day keeps his naive friend oblivious. Soon will be the offer of winning a prize by dropping balls in his mouth.

Jeffs Peril

If you listen closely to the Christmas song Deck the Halls you'll hear:

"Dawn we now our day of peril.
Fa la la la la, la la la lah."

and

"Strike the heart, enjoy the florist.
Fa la la la la, la la la lah."

Also in the Christmas song entitled The Chrismas Song, the words are:

"Jeffs nuts roasting on an open fire."

That'll teach him not to fall asleep.