The Dangerous Book for Boys. Conn Iggulden
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Название: The Dangerous Book for Boys
Автор: Conn Iggulden
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Справочная литература: прочее
isbn: 9780007444403
isbn:
How to Prepare Your Conker
The best conkers are the ones you left in an airing cupboard the year before. If you do this, remember to make the holes first as it’s practically impossible when they’re rock hard. By all means, play the first year – but at the same time, prepare for the next by securing a supply. Apart from the passage of time, the classic methods of conker hardening are:
1. Soak in vinegar for an hour, then bake in an oven at 250 °C for five to ten minutes. All you’re trying to do is speed up the effect of drying out for a year, so don’t leave them to roast and go black. It’s best to let your parents do the oven bit, as well. They will probably pat you on the head and talk about their own conker triumphs many years ago. Try not to go glassy-eyed in case they have a secret technique we’ve never heard of. If they have, send it to the publishers. We want to know and we like to win.
2. This one probably steps over the line of clever competition preparation into outright cheating, but a single coat of matt varnish is difficult to detect and helps to hold the conker together. Do not try more than one coat as a conker that looks like a cricket ball will be noticeable.
Avoid trying to fill the conker with something hard, like glue or fibreglass resin. At some point, the conker will break open and reveal what you have been up to. Bear in mind that suspicious opponents may want to check your conker. It’s best to play ‘clean’ and be sporting.
Now go out and find a big stick.
CATAPULTS HAVE INTRIGUED boys for as long as they have had access to strips of rubber. Before then, slingshots of leather were used right back to Biblical times, as when David slew Goliath by hitting him in the forehead with a stone. They do have a serious use in hunting, of course, or for launching bait into a river whilst fishing. However, the classic images are more to do with Dennis the Menace and Bart Simpson. They can be astonishingly powerful and accurate, though this is not something to demonstrate by telling a younger brother ‘Run,’ and laughing in an unpleasant fashion. Never aim or fire a catapult at someone else.
You will need
A forked stick.
A piece of rubber – 2 ft (60 cm) long.
Twine to tie the ends.
A piece of leather, such as the tongue from an old shoe.
1. Find and cut a forked stick. We found our example in a large holly bush, but the ‘Y’ shape can come from almost anywhere.
A Swiss army knife has a saw attachment that makes short work of small branches. You don’t want the diameter of the wood to be any thicker than your thumb. If you are not confident in your ‘eye’, cut a little more than you think you will need. A good top to bottom height is six or seven inches (15–17 cm).
2. Cut rings from the bark at the top of the ‘Y’ to anchor the rubber – a Swiss army knife is perfect for this, too.
3. Finding the rubber is the hardest part. After a fruitless search in hardware and toy shops, we found that a strip cut from a bicycle inner tube works very well. Cut a two-foot length of tube and then make two cuts lengthways to remove a long strip. Some experimentation will be necessary to get the right pull tension and power.
Note that we have used two pieces of rubber. It was tempting to use one long piece, with the central pouch threaded through. In practice, we found that the pouch piece moved after one or two shots and suddenly we had a catapult that could fire almost anywhere without warning. It is far better to tie two pieces securely.
4. The central pouch piece is easy enough if you have an old shoe. Either the tongue of the shoe or some part of the body can be cut to produce a rectangle of material around 4 × 2 inches (10 × 5 cm). Leather is best for this as it can be holed without splitting. Make two holes with a sharp point and attach the ends of the rubber. You now have a catapult.
HALF A BILLION YEARS ago there was no life on land and only worms, snails, sponges and primitive crabs in the seas. When these creatures died, their bodies sank into silt and mud and were slowly covered. Over millions of years, the sea bottom hardened into rock and the minerals of the bones were replaced, molecule by molecule, with rock-forming minerals such as iron and silica.
Eventually, this process turns the bones into rock – and they become known as fossils, a slowly created cast of an animal that died hundreds of millions of years ago. Other fossils are formed when dying animals fall into peat bogs or are covered in sand. As each new sedimentary layer takes millions of years to form, we can judge the age of the fossils from their depth. You can travel in time, in fact, if you have a spade. You can reach Roman times in just six or seven feet down in some places. To reach levels millions of years ago, you’ll need to find a cliff where the layers are already revealed – like Lyme Regis and Charmouth in Dorset or the Lake District in Cumbria.
Those sea animals can move a long way in the time since they were swimming in dark oceans! Geological action can raise great plates of the earth so that what were undersea fossils can be found at the peak of a mountain or in a desert that was once a valley on the sea floor.
In parts of New Zealand, you can see the fossilised remains of ancient prehistoric forests in visible black bands on the seashore. This particular compressed material is coal and it burns extremely well as fuel. Oil too is a fossil. It is formed in pockets, under great pressure, from animals and plants that lived three hundred million years ago. It is without a doubt the most useful substance we have ever found – everything plastic comes from oil, as well as petrol for our planes and cars.
By studying fossilised plants and animals, we can take a glimpse at a world that has otherwise vanished. It is a narrow view and the information is nowhere near as complete as we would like, but our understanding improves with every new find.
Even the commonest fossils can be fascinating. Hold a piece of flint up to the light and see creatures that last crawled before man came out of the caves – before Nelson, before William the Conqueror, before Moses. It fires the imagination. Here are some of the classic forms of fossils.
Ammonite. A shelled sea creature that died out at the KT boundary 65 million years ago (see Dinosaurs). Sizes vary enormously, but they can be attractively coloured.
Trilobite. These СКАЧАТЬ