Category War

• Chicken Marengo

  THE YEAR IS 1800. The French Revolution has proceeded through enthusiasm, terror, slaughter, reaction, and finally to dictatorship. The house of Habsburg, rulers of Austria, Hungary, bits of Italy, the rump of the Holy Roman Empire and an 'it's complicated' list of other chunks of Europe, lead the rest of Europe's crowned heads in a coalition campaign against the French in a war over territories, colonial trade. Napoleon's armies, marching on their stomachs, rout the Prussians, the Russians, the Spanish and the Central European cousin-fanciers, occupy more and more of the land bordering France, and set out on an early version of the European Union project with a will.

  Posted 26 July 2019 · Author Liam Hogan

• Rations

  ON SATURDAY 22nd I was part of the NSW Bush Search and Rescue (BSAR) Navshield, from this year an event organised by the NSW State Emergency Service (SES). It’s like a rogaine, or orienteering, only more so. One of the policies of the NSW SES is that its volunteers are fed on training and operational activity. We were offered, and I, out of curiosity, accepted, a Ration Pack, promised as equivalent to those issued to the Australian Defence Force.

  Posted 23 June 2019 · Author Liam Hogan

• The end of the world

  A MATCHED PAIR OF articles I'm reading this time begin this blog entry, which seem to suit each other; Niv M. Sultan's The End? and Patrick Hicks' V-2 and Saturn: A Tale Of Two Rockets.

  The world has, time and time again, survived mostly intact. Life has gone on with some degree of recognizability. The current moment, however, feels different...

  Posted 14 January 2019 · Author Liam Hogan

• Toasted Sandwiches In Space

  
  Lift off: a Titan-Centaur rocket (NASA)

  ON THE 20 AUGUST IN 1977 an ugly rocket drew a smoky curved line in the sky, starting as a noisy flash at the launchpad at Cape Canaveral into a blink somewhere out to sea, off and out into the solar system for Science. “Ugly” is a kind word for it; a Centaur-Titan combination looks, sadly, like nothing else than the kind of phallic symbol you see chiselled into toilet doors all over the world. Take one big liquid-fuelled rocket designed to lob bombs across the Arctic (the Titan stage), strap two generic solid-fuel boosters onto the sides to get it off the ground in the first place, then onto the top add another big rocket to speed a robot up to escape velocity (the Centaur stage). It’s the kind of rocket that you set off underneath the ugly tree, expecting it to hit every branch on the way up. If Moe Syzlak were a rocket engineer, this would have been the lets-strap-together-a-bunch-of-rockets-to-make-one-big-rocket rocket he’d have come up with.

  Posted 17 April 2012 · Author Liam Hogan

• Stick Figure White Silhouettes

  NOWADAYS I SEE THE WHITE chalk silhouettes of 1980s Palm Sundays on the back windows of the middle-class people movers whose drivers want to boast about their happy families. I’ve been meaning to photograph someone’s back windscreen to illustrate the point, but I can never quite get there fast enough with my phone camera. Perhaps it’s just as well I see them so relatively rarely, considering the associations. If you’re over the age of about 25, once you’ve seen it, you can’t un-see it.

  Posted 14 October 2011 · Author Liam Hogan