Glass Houses

Let Us Be Clear Here

Ha!  Do you see what I di - O you do.

     Now, you know we here at BOOJUM! typically wend our meandering way across a landscape of verbiage before getting down to what we really want to cover, and this Intro is no different.  Art!

 
     Notice that the use the definite article and there's no separation between 'Glass' and 'House'.  What you're looking at here is the historic British Army prison at North Camp, Aldershot, which was established in 1844 for naughty soldiers who had passed the port to the right.  Since then any military prison has been known as 'The Glasshouse'.  Art!

     This is also a house made of glass - you may be ahead of me here - and is known as a 'glasshouse', again with no separation between the words.  This one seems to be big enough to raise a family of five in.  Art!

     This one is definitely a glass house.  The bathroom and shower is probably in the basement, you dirty-minded perverts.

     Thus we come to that proverb: "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones".

     Why not?  After all, if you travel eighteen miles away to a disused quarry and chuck rocks, your delicate and friable residence is not going to be threatened.

     Conrad, ever one to parse the living lemon-juice out of an aphorism, suspects this is actually an evocation of Good Neighbourliness*, meaning that you ought not to throw stones at your neighbours* because, should they retaliate, you are in a terribly vulnerable position.

     Which - and you may be ahead of me here - brings me to the trials and tribulations of the petrochemical industry within Modern-day Mordor.  Art!

Military and intelligence officers within the Kremlin will be looking at this map with horrified disbelief, because it's an (approximate) display of all the Ukrainian drones being sent on kamikaze missions as of the night of 30th January.  To be clear, these are not the little FPV 'Mavic' drones that act as intelligent artillery shells on the battlefield; these are their much larger cousins like the 'Paliantsyr', which carry an explosive warhead in the tens of kilos.  Art!

Pali with puny human for scale

     The Ukrainians have spent 2024 ramping up drone production on an industrial scale, and for the past week have been launching HUNDREDS of this and other types deep into Ruffia.  The results have been spectacular, in an apocalyptic way, as at the Kstovo oil refinery, Ruffia's fourth largest.  Art!

     This looks like Hades has come to pay a visit.  We may not know how many drones hit it, but there were plenty of them.  Before the Special Idiotic Operation, this refinery handled 15 million tons of crude per year.  Now?  Trending towards zero.

     Further, the refinery at Novoshakhtinsk has 'suspended operations' as they coyly put it, without giving a reason.  Occams Razor suggests it got the living daylights droned out of it.  Art!

     

     Sorry if this is getting repetitive, roll with it, that's how we cope with it round here.  That above is the refinery at Ryazan, which was out of action for two months in 2024 after the Ukrainians hit it.  This is the third largest refinery in Ruffia, so the Ukrainians hit it again, and - more repetition - it has had to 'suspend operations'.  Art!

     That's the Druzhba pumping station going up in a blaze of glory.  This was (past tense) the pumping station that made oil flow into Europe.  Conrad is unsure if it was still pumping oil as of 2025 or not.  Either way, Fico and Orban, Putinpot's European bootlickers, will be incandescent with rage about it, tee hee!  I don't have a picture but the Andreapol pumping station was also droned into ashes and vapour.

     We have a technical wrinkle about the attack on Druzhba and the drone and ordnance used.  Art!

     It was one of these microlights kitted out as a drone, carrying 250 kilo bombs, which is over 500 pounds in proper weights.  This is a quarter of a ton of explosive payload, much larger than a drone itself could accommodate.  Art!

"For Mikolaiev"

     Anton Geraschenko, a Ukrainian politician I follow, put up an interesting Tweet, reporting a news item from Bloomberg.  Apparently the Ruffian oil terminal at Ust-Luga in the Baltic, near Saint Petersburg, had zero oil flowing through it on 29th January.  This port handles 20% of Ruffian oil exports and the flow of oil through it had declined sharply in recent weeks.  Occams Razor again; the Ukrainian drone strikes have cut the supply of oil completely.  This is probably only temporary, yet if 20% of Ruffian oil exports go offline at all, this will impact their coffers.

     The Ruffians response has been interesting, certainly in contrast to last year.  Then it was 'All the drones were shot down but some debris set nearby grass alight, which was quickly extinguished.' It's hard to believe this drivel when you can still hear ammunition cooking-off in the background as they lie to camera.  Now?  Radio silence, probably on the principle that if you say nothing then people can't tell you're lying and if you ignore the problem it will simply go away.  Hmmmmmmm.

     Not very convincing, is it?

     Then there's the lack of air defences.  True, the Ukrainians very probably, with the help of NATO intelligence, know exactly where the Ruffian radars are, and can avoid them.  BUT these refineries have no close-in air defences from cannons or MANPADS - none whatsoever for the third and fourth largest refineries in the whole of Modern-day Mordor?  Not even humble orcs armed with AK-74s?  Plainly, the cope cages erected around some of these targets have been a complete waste of time and resources.  Art!

"They confiscated my fifth Italian villa!"

     That's a very angry Solovyev, ranting on television about who's responsible for defending these refineries and why aren't they being defended, and I'm going to throw my toys out of the pram.

     Conrad's considered opinion:  Tee hee!

     Wowsers, that took up a lot more space than I realised.  Plus there was even more bad news to add in, which will have to wait.  You lucky people.

"Sugar Sugar"

Nothing to do with Lord Sweetie Alan, this one popped up in my mind earlier yesteryon, but I'd already finished the blog so couldn't add it in.  

     Conrad remembers the fuss and fury about 'manufactured' bands back in the Nineties when you had bands like <thinks> NW17 and Boysown (sp?).

     I can raise you manufactured and give you completely fictional.  Art!

     They didn't exist in reality, yet this single was their third (!) and was one of the biggest ever 'bubblegum' pop records ever, being a huge hit on both sides of The Pond.  I used to get sent "Archie" comics sent over from South Canada when smaller and cuter, so I had a bit of background my compatriots lacked.

      No "TWI" today, we've had quite enough of things exploding.

Using The Tube In Paris

We recently did an Intro that went into the subject of pneumatic postal delivery, using vacuums to propel small cylinders over short distances within capital cities, including Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell.  Art!

     Meet the Parisian pneumatique.  This was one of the more elaborate, large-scale and successful pneumatic tube systems, originating in 1866, and reaching it's peak in the Thirties, when hundreds of miles of vacuum tubing connected the burgers of Paris.  The picture above looks positively cathedral-like in it's complexity.  Art!

An instrument of wind?

     The system went into a decline after the Second Unpleasantness, when telephones took off, yet it soldiered on until 1984, so well over a century's innings.  Not bad.  Art!

     There you have an array of pneumatique tubes lining a sewer, which enabled them to be sent without having to clog up Parisian streets, or risk Parisian drivers.

More Misery For Military Moochers

If I can borrow a picture and headline from today's latest feed.  Art!

     The military has lost control of 79% of the country, only retaining the big cities, despite having uncontested command of the skies.  The patchwork of rebels and militias have become progressively better-armed, trained and organised.  Things are looking bleak for the military junta.  For one thing, the Ruffians are critically involved in Ukraine and cannot spare anything to help, not even Wagner.  The junta's leaders must be uneasily looking at the utter collapse of the Syrian regime, and keeping a few private jets stocked with gold bullion, diamonds and yuan in great big bundles - just in case.

Finally -

I did take a photo but haven't uploaded it yet, so you'll have to make do with a stock photo from teh Interwebz.  Art!

     Behold the Boot, Shower.  I plan to test-drive it tomorrow.

*  Note CORRECT spelling.

Sugar Sugar

I Know, I Know

Being a diabetic I shouldn't be allowed to mention the sweet stuff, or it might bring on a withdrawal coma or somesuch.  

     However - that word again! - this Intro is not about Conrad gorging himself on a twelve-pack of cream eclairs <gets wistful look> but rather about - Art!

     This chap is Lord Alan Sugar, and he is by no means a sweetie.  He is the star of "The Apprentice", a program Conrad has never seen but which seems to consist of people trying out business propositions in front of him, and usually failing horribly.  It's now in it's 19th season, so enough of you out there watch it to make a difference.

     Unlike the Orange Land Whale, who got his big break in the South Canadian version, Lord Sugar - must resist the urge to call him Lord Sweetie - has no intention of entering the world of politics.

     ANYWAY I want to set out my reasons for disagreeing heartily with Lord Sugar about his position.  Art!

Conrad.  In case you'd forgotten.

     Working From Home - hereafter "WFH" - is eminently unsuitable for any kind of outdoors job, as in the British Gas workers currently filling in the holes they've dug so far.  Art!

Noisy beggars

     Nor would WFH be feasible on a factory floor, although with the arrival of AI a lot of basic hands-on tasks are going to become automated and both hands- and person-free.  

     Neither example applies to Lord Swe- Sugar's comments, as he specifically stated 'Office'.  He's completely wrong in this case, probably because he's an old fuddy-duddy set in his ways and doesn't understand the yoof.

     Conrad's perspective is very different.  If you've been reading BOOJUM! for Lo! these many years, then you'll understand I used to work in the beating heart of Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell, which was not a fun commute.  Art!

     Especially when one had to rely upon the wretches at First Bus.  The total for monthly bus passes came to £68, and if I caught the tram back to Oldham in order to be quicker, once per week for the shopping day, then that added another £24.  In total £92 monthly for bus and tram, in a journey that might consume three hours if busses were late, slow or encountered heavy traffic.  Over a year that comes to over £1,100.  So, when G4 took over the contract I work on and instituted WFH, Conrad was a happy bunny, because it was like getting a pay raise.  Art!

     That's an old photograph because the premises next to the Pleasant are now 'Panthera', whatever they are, and the bus stop is just out of shot. 

     Let me recap my schedule when due to start at Sainsbo's for an 08:00 start.

05:50  Roll out of bed, toilet, get dressed, pick up laptop bag.

06:00  Get lunch, bag it and head out to bus stop

06:20  Bus is late, rammed and there is no Metro

06:40  Get to Oldham Bus Station (this is before they mucked about with the layout)

06:55  83 is late

07:35  Debus in Manchester, begin the Long Walk

07:45  Arrive on 17th Floor, brew pot of tea, make two slices of toast

07:55  Log on for 08:00 start

Starting at 08:00 meant finishing at 16:10

16:10  Lift down to Ground Floor of Arndale House

16:20  Get to bus stop on Oldham Road

16:40  Bus is late and three arrive at once.  Huge crowd begins to board.

16:45  Bus eventually departs.  Immediately hits city centre traffic.

17:00  Arrive Oldham Bus Station

17:20  Bus is late and rammed.  Still no Metro.

17:40  Debus at The Mansion 

     Do you think Your Humble Scribe wants to endure this ever again?  Art!

     That's the entrance to Martin House, where Serco were based, in a physical open-plan office (more steel and glass than bricks and mortar).  Prime city centre property, which must have cost an arm and two legs to lease.  I bet G4 underbid them because - Surprised Pikachu Face - they had all their staff WFH, thus minimal overheads and no lease to pay for.  Plus Conrad doesn't have an extra 10 minute walk out through the Arena car park if there's a concert on, which used to irk me, until I began using my very small manbag.

     Back to the office?  Bah!

The More Things Change

The more we are reminded that everything has been done before, except for AI and aerogel, both of which are frighteningly futuristic and probably created by black magic as much as science.

     ANYWAY I would like to take us back in time, to the dark days of summer and autumn 1940 in This Sceptred Isle, when the Teutons reigned supreme on the continent of Europe - those bits that their bezzy mates the Sinisters hadn't already occupied - and we had lost an awful lot of kit in the aftermath of Dunkirk and Le Havre.  Art!

     This is the 'Bison', which was a mobile concrete pillbox mounted on a large truck chassis, sporting a concrete cab, too.  The eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed the lack of doors; there was a large hole underneath the pillbox that the crew entered via, and the cab had no roof.  Art!

     This is the 'Armadillo', which made the Bison look like a Challenger tank by comparison.  The <ahem> fighting compartment on the truck bed was made by placing one wooden box inside another, with the gap being filled up with - er - gravel.  Art!

     This is a Ruffian T-72 with the turret removed, then having logs placed between two sheets of metal on each side, in order to carry infantry around.  They appear to be running out of proper armoured personnel carriers.  This bodge-up is not unique.  Art!

     Behold the equipment of the 'second army in the world', rolling back technology 85 years.

'Twas Another Noisy Afternoon

One of the drawbacks of WFH is that you're only at a relatively low height, as compared to being on the seventeenth floor of a skyscraper.  If there were roadworks in city centre Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell none of their noise made it to us in Sainsbos.  This afternoon the honest artisans of British Gas were busy filling in their previously dug holes, to the accompaniment of much shaking and hammering.  Art!

Before

After

     They may get working on the three holes outside The Mansion tomorrow, which will make my phone work especially interesting.

"The War Illustrated Edition 202 March 16th 1945"

Yes yes yes, I know we've already covered matters martial on BOOJUM! so sue me, and this is a distinctly political cover photograph rather than anything military.  Art!

     Yes, this is Winnie.  He, Roosevelt and Stalin all met at Yalta to discuss what the post-war map of Europe ought to be, because by this time the Third Reich was on it's last foot, never mind legs.  It was patently obvious that borders and spheres of influence needed to be thrashed out, and Yalta was where it happened.  Stalin refused to travel abroad, because he felt safer at home, and he could boast and swagger as much as he wanted, so once again Yalta.  The discussions here determined Europe's fate for the next 45 years, so no pressure.

Finally -

My 'shower boot' arrived earlier today.  Now all I have to do is work out how to put it on and thus keep my injured big toe's dressing dry.  No photo today as I'm still charging my phone and the charging lead is quite testy and temperamental.

Chin chin!

Back To Delicious Schadenfreude

You Know, That Uncharacteristically Succinct Teuton Word

Which can be interpreted, a little prosily, as "Malicious enjoyment of other people's misery" because there's nothing better than gloasting about how awful another person's life is going as compared to your own.

     Whilst we're on the subject, allow me to mention trainwrecks.  Art!

     Nothing too contemporary, we're not completely tasteless.  Conrad has a book lying around somewhere called "Danger On The Line", which is a morbidly fascinating look at railway accidents here in the UK.  Art!

     Ol' Stu came to the conclusion that deaths and injuries were far more likely to occur if th

     ANYWAY what I meant were metaphorical trainwrecks, where you witness disastrous behaviour obviously leading to a very bad conclusion, but, like a real trainwreck, you cannot look away.  Thus it is that I would like to mention Ryan Kinel and his 'Outpost' Youtube channel, which has the merit of only putting up vlogs that are 5 or 6 minutes long.  I mean, I love 'Perun' like a brother, but a seventy minute vlog?  Art!

     ANYWAY AGAIN one thing Ryan is consistent about are his dislikes: if he hates a film or game there's no way he's going to be reticent or forbearing about it, he will give them a right old verbal lashing.

     Okay, so which live-action film comes out at the end of March from Disney Studios?  None other than "Snow White".  We have already ladled invective over this farrago but, again, schadenfreude.  If you remember, it was going to feature 'Seven Magical Beings' who would embody Political Correctness.  

     Apparently this didn't work out and the studio suits suffered a collective case of the stupids and decided to go full reshoot.  This time the 7MB were replaced with seven ghastly CGI abominations.  Art!

     Studio accountants go white and quiver when they hear the word 'reshoot' because it ALWAYS increases the budget, substantially.  In this case the already enormous budget of $240 million ballooned to $270 million.  The bottom line budget total for - you can see why I called it a trainwreck, can't you? - this film needs another $100 million added on for promotion and advertising.  No distribution costs as Disney do their own distribution.

     $370 million.  Wowsers.  This Titanic-sized turkey is going to have to clear $740 million at the box office just to break even.  

     The litany of woe doesn't stop there.  Rachel Zegler, the lead, has proven incapable of keeping her flapping pie-hole shut.  She ought to go out in public with a tongue-wrangler.  She has annoyed fans of the original animation, Gal Gadot, Ryan Kinel and - it would be easier to list whom she hasn't annoyed.  Art!

     If I were the suit responsible for this hot garbage, I'd let it quietly die and never release it, because the omens are not good.  In the same was that an exploding volcano is quite dangerous.  Art!

     A total of 40,021 Likes versus 1,000,141 Dislikes.  This huge difference is known as 'getting ratioed'.  That's not all, because Ryan also played a song that the Youtube 'Chat Music' channel did, where the lyrics were all Comments on the 'Snow White' official Disney trailer.  They are epic.  Art!

Sick burn, as the yoof say. More!  More humiliation!

Herein the link, because it's not half as funny when you simply read the Comments instead of hearing them sung:

FUNNIEST Snow White Trailer Comments (as a Song)

      Those of us with patience, long memories and a willingness to suffer moderate torment, might well check back here in March 2026, because if any of this cinematic slobberdegullion was filmed in the UK, Disney will have had to file a complete financial audit of their accounts and have it open to public scrutiny.  Then we'll discover how much it really cost.  By then, of course - obviously! - it will have been forgotten amongst all the other odious tat that Disney seem determined to pump out.  This will definitely be a case of the online roastings it will receive are far more entertaining than the film itself.

More Of Snow That Is White

Don't worry, no singing, Zegler or hideous CGI monsters in this item.  No, this is another one that I've cribbed from that compilation video that annoyingly thinks a vapid voiceover rather than providing details like a date and location is what the viewing public wants.  Art!

Snow, white

There isn't even a number plate to identify which country this is.  Pretty fair guess it's not Mali or Thailand.  What you see here is the caterpillar tractor nearest the camera towing another one, which seems to have lost power.   Art!

Ooops

     Cat One has apparently driven over a body of water that had iced over.  The wind-blown snow covered it, thus making it seem just as solid as the ground around.  Perhaps a 4WD might have gotten away with this, but a ten-ton caterpillar vehicle's ground-loading is simply far too high, and down it goes.  Art!

     This is how Cat One comes to rest, which is extremely lucky for the driver, because if it had gone down horizontally, not at an angle, then he wouldn't be able to escape.  Art!

     Change of underwear time!  There were several people clustered around the chap filming this, none of whom dared approach the sunken vehicle, as it's utterly obscure as to where the ground ends and the void begins.

     Conrad would like to point out that the Slaedepatruljen Sirius would have skated o'er this with no trouble.
     
 

Jumping Jack Flash It's Not A Gas Gas Gas

Conrad has always found it instructive to model Donold Judas Trump's behavious on that of a spiteful, petty seven year-old, because that's how he behaves, and is also his reading age.

     ANYWAY it seems that this childish mindset is either catching or influential, because guess who else has been throwing their toys out of the pram?  Art!

     This is Robert Fico, pronounced 'Bottomhole', the President of Slovakia, whose primary skill is being able to lick the boots of Bloaty Gas Tout to a high shine.  He has been threatening blood and thunder for Ukraine and Prez Zed, rather in the manner of King Lear "I will do such things - what they are, I yet know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth"

     Yeah right.  Art!

     As I pointed out on Twitter, Slovakia has had THREE YEARS to source alternate gas suppliers instead of relying on Ruffia.  Fico has deliberately avoided making any choice, probably believing the Kremlin Gremlin's line that Ukraine was going to collapse any day now.  Annnnnny day now.  Just around the corner.  Annnnnny day now <Cont. Page 94>.  This proves that crossing your fingers REALLY HARD is not an effective political solution to anything.

     FICO - "Fuel Inbound Cut Off" would be a great political epitaph for him, one thinks.

Bennu And The Jets

Sorry, couldn't resist.  Have we covered this asteroid before?  I cannot be bothered to trawl the archives, so let's just say 'yes'.  It's one of those Near Earth Objects that has a significantly less-than-zero chance of smacking into your our planet in the middle future.  Art!

     It was the first target of NASA's asteroid-return project, meaning that samples of it were returned to Earth for study, all 140 grams of them.

     Well, well, Kelvin Gosnell.  It seems that Bennu was positively hotching with organic molecules, including amino acids, which you might describe as the Lego blocks that more complex life is assembled from.  There is every possibility that life on Earth began because our biosphere was 'seeded' with organic start-ups that arrived by virtue of asteroid bombardment.  Art!

     None of this would have been possible without the OSIRIS REX mission, which - Art!

     - used jets.

Finally -

Edna has finally given up hoping for a bit of pizza crust.  As well she may, it was a rather picquant one thanks to all the jalapenos it sported.