The Queue: All Tintin Edition

I am making swift work of The Adventures of Tintin since they are, after all, comics. This is all very good for the continuing work on Project TROIKA, currently undergoing Tier 3 revisions, & Project TRIANGLE, work on Tier 1 of which has resumed in earnest.

Recently
Hergé, The Adventures of Tintin, Volume 5 (contains Land of Black Gold, Destination Moon, & Explorers on the Moon)
Hergé, The Adventures of Tintin, Volume 1 (contains Tintin in America, Cigars of the Pharaoh, & The Blue Lotus)
Hergé, The Adventures of Tintin, Volume 2 (contains The Broken Ear, The Black Island, & King Ottokar's Spectre)

Currently
Hergé, The Adventures of Tintin, Volume 3 (contains The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Shooting Star, & The Secret of the Unicorn)

Presently
Hergé, The Adventures of Tintin, Volume 4 (contains Red Rackham's Treasure, The Seven Crystal Balls, & Prisoners of the Sun)
Hergé, The Adventures of Tintin, Volume 6 (contains The Calculus Affair, The Red Sea Sharks, & Tintin in Tibet)
Hergé, The Adventures of Tintin, Volume 7 (contains The Castafiore Emerald, Flight 714 to Sydney, & Tintin and the Picaros)

A Thousand Words
Apropos of nothing, the Vickers VC10 (here in B.O.A.C. livery).



I suspect my fondness for this aeroplane is grounded at least in part in its design for the then-already-dissolving British Empire's "hot & high" aerodromes, such as Nairobi, Kenya; Harare, Zimbabwe (in the period: Salisbury, Rhodesia); & Kampala, Uganda. "Apropos of nothing" is hogwash, since the VC10 is of a piece with The Adventures of Tintin, beloved artifacts of the Twentieth Century. The years 1901-2000 were the bloodiest cataclysm in the violent history of Man & yet fueled by nostalgia for my youth & the mythical "way things used to be" I will always hold a fondness for the Twentieth Century that I will never feel for the Twenty-first. I know well the confusion & nihilism that ran rampant through those decades, & yet the stubborn tendency to idealize the past will always insist, contrary to all the evidence, that life "made sense" back then, as if the madness was held at bay until the stroke of midnight 'twixt 31 December 2000 & 1 January 2001 (or, though it is inaccurate, perhaps it would be more fitting to use the 31 December 1999/1 January 2000 divide, invoking the quaint "Y2K" panic).

Anywho, the Vickers VC10, oddly beautiful & beautifully odd.