Notes to Brick chapter 13, "where are all the good times?"

[madbadandplaid]

Chapter here.

OKAY, ARE YOU READY TO NERD? I HOPE THAT YOU ARE READY TO NERD.



T2 Is Full of Shit

• I fudged a lot of stuff in that steel mill. Just getting that out of the way right now. However,
• Wet charges are a very real thing in foundries. If you did have something full of water (like a body) in a receiving ladle and poured molten steel on top of it, the flash to steam indeed would bring you all your Fourths of July at once, but the way it generally happens in mills is that wet scrap metal gets loaded (charged) into a furnace at the top, which can take out an entire furnace.
• This applies equally to sealed scrap, such as old pieces of pipe that have been pinched shut with air inside. Dumping random things into very hot liquids is just a very bad idea in general. And that's why T2: Judgment Day is actually bulllshit. So much bullshit.
  (All that fucking work and you're just gonna blow up John Connor by basically turning yourself into the world's biggest and dumbest wet charge? What. A. Douchebag.)
• That said, it sounds like wet charges are less feared these days than the innocuous-sounding cobble. Boingboing has helpfully collected a bunch of videos of this phenomenon if you, too, enjoy being mesmerized by hot metal.
• Child workers falling into vats of water and cooking to death? Yeah, that really happened, along with a lot of other fucked up shit.

That Dan Brown Bull Hockey

• The history of Freemasonry in Greece was tightly bound up in the orchestration of the Greek Revolution against the Ottomons. Many disparate lodges ended up getting subsumed under the umbrella of Philiki Etaireia, and although Masonic activities in England/Scotland/America were pretty chill even when they did intersect with politics (less than sometimes thought), these dudes did not fuck around. That has minimal bearing on the fictional Phylakon Liontaria cooked up here; I just enjoyed reading about it.
• Masonic tracing boards are kinda neat; if you're curious about them, a search for the term will yield all the results you could possibly read.

Other Random Procrastination Fodder

• I made sure "3ARHIDIA" isn't a real Illinois plate, of course (it's one character too long to be possible), but somebody in Florida is driving around with just "ARHIDIA." (Balls, testicles.)
• Sid is a fan of Greek thrash metal; both Necrogasm and Rotting Christ are real bands you can groove to, if you like. (I prefer Rotting Christ, personally. Clock way they deploy all those Orthodox hymn quotations (harmonic and melodic)? Fantastic.)
• By "Granddaddy Tetragrammaton," Sid means, of course, Yahweh, though by this I only mean to refer to the (approximately) "Judeo-Christian" God of the SPNverse. No pot-shots at any real-life religion intended.
• Linear B script was used to write Mycenaean Greek (the earliest form of the language for which we have records). Plus, it just looks cool.
• Yes, I know I used "flux" a bit wrong in the metallurgic context. Don't @ me.