> So I got to see a ZPMC Post-Panamax 1,093-tonne, 95 metre high crane, which can lift 60 tonnes in one go, close up, from underneath even, and a guy who worked there told me all about how it works, and pointed out the tiny little glass-floored bubble suspended between vast girders twenty-eight storeys in the air, from which it is driven. And he kindly pretended not to notice my abject look of Huge Machinery Geek longing to ask what I could possibly do to persuade him to take me up there. There was an *elevator* to get up there, running up one leg of the crane. I'd rather have climbed up to the bubble on the twenty-eight storeys of ladders, catwalks and steel staircases stuck all around the legs, though.

Heh heh heh. My dad works at a container port with those things standing around, but hitherto I hadn't noticed the resemblance to walkers. Nor had I ever noticed them rampaging off across the land, shooting the Rebel troops and being needlessly tangled up when a simple missile would...

What was I talking about? Oh yes, container port machinery. When I was younger, my dad took me and my sisters down to the port to see this stuff (did I mention he sometimes gets to stick a magnetic flashing light on the roof of his car?) and we had great fun poking around among the enormous pipes, with diameters about equal to my height, which were designed to carry sand and gravel into a big pit. We've been on a dredger a couple of times, too: an experience that most Americans will sadly miss, given that most American dredging is done by the US Army. Walking beside the great big hopper full of mud, seeing an eel wriggling along the surface and being told that on Polish dredgers the cook sometimes comes out there to whack the eels with a rolling pin and cook them for supper. Which was pretty cool. The dredger also had those Star-Trek-ish doors that slide sideways with a "Psssshhh" noise when you pull a lever. Bit cramped, though, especially the second one we went on, which had all the useful parts piled up at the back in a skyscraper-like building, and swayed like nobody's business. Oh well, it was fun anyway.

Si-"Can't keep on the subject"-gi