SISTA and CTOOL (The Repellent Fool!)

Or, Part 2 Of 'MalCom And Bus Factor One'

I shall recap a little, both to educate yourselves, gentle readers, and up the Word Count, for I am a chap of few morals.  'SISTA' is the Solo Integrated Systems Technical Admin, the only IT person working at Move ENhancement logistical brokerage, or MEN.  He had been running IT alone for 7 years before CTOOL arrived.  Technically he was the Chief Technical Officer, but our hilariously satirical acronym is Colossal Twod Of Off-putting Liability, CTOOL hereafter.  Art!

Eighties sci-fi cover vibes

     I put 'CTOOL' in and this is what came out.  Don't blame me.

     After CTOOL proved themselves to know nothing whatsoever about IT, merely spending money to provide their chums with chances to pimp their businesses, he fired SISTA, throwing $5 at him as severance, and hand-writing a note confirming the firing.  Art!

HR react with horror at their legal liability

     Ostensibly, the firing was because SISTA refused to cancel his previously approved Christmas leave.  CTOOL had not run this past HR nor arranged for any transition period, two major omissions that would come back to gnaw on his gluteus maximus later.

     So!  SISTA went home and informed his (absolutely furious!) wife that he was now fired.  They ignored that salient fact and enjoyed their Christmas break out of state at his parent's house with their children.  

     Meanwhile - 

     2 days after his firing, the dispatch server - which I feel like capitalising - the Dispatch Server at MEN crashed, and a self-proclaimed 'PC expert' did a hard reboot of the server, which made things much, much worse.  It needed to run through a specific start-up sequence - which nobody else knew apart from SISTA.  The process had been documented, except PC Expert didn't bother reading the script.  Ooops.  Art!

     Consequentially, the Transport Management System did not work.  When the core part of your business is 'Transport' this is a major flaw.  Next day the E-Mail Server crashed.  You see, SISTA had the passwords and codes to carry out manual maintenance on all MEN systems, and without him there, or any substitute nominated and trained by him to take over, things began to fail.  'Manual' you ask? why yes because CTOOL had refused automated systems as requested by SISTA.

     On day four after his firing, the payroll system collapsed, a week before Christmas.  The tracking portal that allowed customers to follow their cargoes failed.  The MEN phones began to malfunction, because - you may be ahead of me here - their licensing server had been maintained by SISTA, who was no longer present.  Art!

     On day five, the carrier payment files corrupted for 300 carriers, who thus were not getting paid.  EDI - which SISTA had warned was elderly and needed replacing - failed for 3 major clients.  Computers were not talking to other computers, nobody knew what was where or when.

     Then the security system began throwing errors.  Once again, it had been maintained by SISTA until he was fired.  Without maintenance, impossible without the codes he held, the system defaulted to 'Safe' and automatically opened all doors in the warehouse and office complex.   Stock was lost to external theft; not internal as staff knew there was a security camera system in place.

     Ooops.

     By day six of his firing, the Chief Executive Officer, or Number One in MEN, was calling SISTA with increasingly desperate messages.  Whom forwarded them to his employment attorney.  Art!

     This is what happens when you allow an unqualified, inexperienced amateur to interfere with critical systems and whom thinks buzzwords and Powerpoints are the way forward.

     CTOOL retained an emergency IT company to come and save the day.  They charged $50,000 to just look at the problem and would take at least two weeks to fix it.  How's that getting rid of SISTA going, CTOOL?  And did we ever find out why your previous start-up collapsed?

     What happened next is that costs escalate as penalty clauses from carriers are activated, and the failure to pay staff turns into a State Labour Board complaint.  MEN suffers $300,000 in direct losses and $200,000 in indirect losses.  Art!

     I swear down, this is 'State Labour Board' as per AI Art Generator.

     The CEO, by now realising that his buddy-hire CTO is more toxic that a plutonium enema, calls an emergency meeting of the board, investors and owners.  They review CTO's documentation and e-mail trail as provided by SISTA, deciding that they are responsible and fire them on the spot.

     Coda One: after enjoying their Christmas holiday, SISTA arrives back and solves all the problems in 2 days.

     Coda Two: CTOOL tried to fight the sacking.  Their attorney looked at the document trail and told them to walk away.

     Coda Three: CTOOL is now doing 'sales consulting', or in plain English is unemployed and pretending not to be.  Running up a $500,000 debt at your previous employer will do that.

     

Magyarking

I apologise for those amongst you who neither recognise British slang or the Hungarian for 'Hungary', which is 'Magyar; and our native British sentiment of 'complaining loudly' a.k.a. 'yarking'.  Art!

     This is the incoming Minister of Health, who does a splendid dance across the stage when Peter Magyar gotten sworn in as Prime Minister.  The vatniks are horrified at his cavalier attitude.  As others have observed, the number of vatniks squawking across Europe has abruptly fallen since Loser Orban got ousted, making it possible that Hungary was their entrepot into Europe.  

     We can thank J D 'Judge Death' Vance for 'helping' here, as everything he touches, includrump-friendly European nations, dies on contact.  The political equivalent of 'Roundup'.

     

Is This A 'What On Earth'?

For reasons that escape me, Facebook continues to promote guff that I do not want nor have any ever wanted to own.  I've already commented on 'Portable Lumber Mills' and 'Log-counting software' and now we have - Art!

     I think they like to reprint novels with a slip-case, so that suckers will pay $75 per volume.  Not quite sure what's going on here, apart from matey not being able to bring his overdue library books back again.  Yes, I have read it, ages ago, and in fact it may be time to order a cheap paperback copy from Abebooks, because PKD's works do not end up on the shelves in charity shops.

Progress Report

Just to let you know that I'm about 1/3 of the way through 'The Chieftain's 'Myths Of American Armour' vlog from 2015 that I've threatened you with before.  It looks like being a long enough annotation to make up a BOOJUM! and a half, so it will probably get split up into bits.  Too much of a good thing and all that.  Art!

     Mr. Moran in person.  How he contorted his 6' 4" frame into an M1 I have no idea, still less how he managed it for other older tanks for his 'O No The Tank Is On Fire' emergency evacuation drill.

This Is Definitely A What On Earth

On occasion Your Humble Scribe's brain will function as it's supposed to, despite age and gin, and I remember to get evidence of WOE.  Art!

     What the Devil's Dog Buns is this supposed to be advertising?  Is 'Immunogenicity' a real word?  What about 'mNEXSPIKE'?  Why is it mostly capitalised?  Are they trying to sell me something or just provoke a scare?

     What on earth indeed.  Bah!

Finally -

Going out with a Biercism.

"Prescription,n: A death warrant."

MalCom And Bus Factor One

Or, The Perils Of Having An Idiot In Charge

Buckle in, this is a long one.  Firstly, let me explain what a 'Freight Brokerage Company' is.  They are a licensed intermediary, allowing shippers who have goods to be moved, to interact with carriers, who have the trucks that move said goods.  This is a lot more complex than it sounds, as we'll get into.  We shall call the business involved Moving ENhancer, MEN from now on.  The tale is told by Solo Integrated Systems Technical Admin, hereafter SISTA, even though he's a man.  I can be fickle that way.  Art!

     I'm having to use a Google image because the AI Art Generator absolutely refuses to work with 'Logistics brokerage company'.   So, MEN had about 200 staff and handled about four hundred loads per day, including shipments into Canada and Mexico.  They arranged pickups, kept track of shipments, did customs paperwork for cross-border shipping, invoicing and carrier payments.  SISTA had been with MEN for seven years at the start of this tale.  Art!

     When he started, the only server the company had was in a coat closet that doubled as a break-room and Wifi stopped working if the office microwave was turned on.  With a bit of humblebrag he detailed the changes and introductions he made: building a proper air-conditioned server room; installed network infrastructure; got a new Transport Management System which controlled dispatch, load tracking, carrier management and with customer-facing portals; integrated the TMS with accounting; facilitated Electronic Data Integration, fancy-speak for computers talking to other computers; getting GPS; implementing a new phone system; installing security cameras and putting in a security card system.  SISTA knew his onions, garlic, shallots and leeks, to put it mildly.  He originally reported to the Vice President of Operations, whom bluntly admitted he knew nil about computer technology but who recognised competence personified.  Art!

     Hmmmm.  I asked for 'Confidence Personified'.

     SISTA made a point of telling management that he needed at least one or preferably two IT understudies, and explicitly mentioned the Bus Factor.  Art!

     He was always turned down on the grounds of cost, or 'next year'.

     ANYWAY suddenly a crony of the CEO turned up and was appointed 'Chief Technical Officer', which is odd as freight brokerage companies don't typically have any such position.  However - that word again! - he'd just become unemployed when the start-up he was working at tanked hard.  We never find out the reason it tanked but Conrad is 95% sure it was do to with him.  I shall dub him 'Complete Twod Of Off-putting Liability', hereafter CTOOL.  His background was in sales and he had zero knowledge of or experience with IT, but he could throw around buzz-words as if he knew what he was talking about and hadn't just Googled them.  Art!

      As an example, he wanted everything migrated to the cloud within six months.  SISTA patiently pointed out that doing so would take a team of at least three people eighteen months, that the TMS had no ability to integrate with the cloud and that the EDI kit was aging and had to be physically present on-site, all of which CTOOL branded as 'insubordination', because once again he had no idea what SISTA was talking about.

     You can tell this is going to end badly.

     CTOOL then cut the IT maintenance budget by 40%, again being warned by SISTA that various bits of kit were aging and needed to be replaced.  CTOOL used the money instead to hire business cronies to pimp their wares, a major conflict of interest in case you're unsure.  SISTA documented all their interactions, printing off e-mails and threads as evidence.  Art!

     Then came the Christmas holiday furore.  SISTA had booked two weeks off, buying tickets to travel out of state to his parents over Christmas, and all had been approved by the VP of Operations long before CTOOL showed up.

     Surprise!  CTOOL told him the holiday was cancelled as he needed SISTA on-site to - something something something.  He outright said 'This is a loyalty test' and was power-tripping hard at this point, giving SISTA the option of cancelling the holiday or being fired.

     SISTA insisted that he had to be given two week's notice, at which CTOOL fired him, throwing a $5 bill as severance, and scribbling down on paper that he'd just fired SISTA.

    One can only wonder at the idiocy of CTOOL at this point.  He had absolutely no idea what SISTA's job involved and had now fired the man who built the system, with no transition or backup.

     Ooopa.

Right, rather than have this become the whole of BOOJUM! for Monday, I shall end it here.  We will deffo get back to this as things begin to hot up.

Another WOE Moment

It stands for 'What on Earth?' because we are SFW here and won't use the vulgar alternative.  Art!

     WHY AM I SEEING THIS?!  I do not run a business and thus have no need for lessening the time I spend doing billing, because I currently spend ZERO time doing billing.  The algorithm here is going potty.

With Undignified Haste

You will doubtless have heard about Prez Zed's epic trolling of Putinpot, sending an official document permitting Peter The Average to have his May 9th Victory Charade - beg pardon, Parade - thanks to the generosity of Ukraine.  Art!

     I bet that had the Puffy-Phaced Petrol Pimp chewing the carpet in rage.  The parade didn't feature any tanks or other heavy equipment, partly because they haven't got any left, and because what's left is needed in Ukraine.  The whole thing was over in 45 minutes, half the usual time, and nobody important turned up for it.  That's not what I want to concentrate on.  Art!

     Devoid of makeup and flattering lighting, this is what Botox Boris looks like now - more lke 83 than 73.  Stress, one imagines.  The 3-day SMO has been going on for more than 1,500 days, longer, as satirists like to point out, than the Great Patriotic War. Which took the Red Army (40% Ukrainian) from the outskirts of Moscow to the heart of Berlin.

     The Kozaky's ability to hit central Moscow is another cause for Dimya to feel stressed, as it is the result of strategic decisions make in Ukraine two or three years ago: to go in for drone warfare on an industrial scale.  In early 2024 the Ukrainians only made 110 long-range strikes, and were curtailed by Western powers who had supplied missiles.  In March this year they launched 7,300 long range strikes, an average of 243 EVERY NIGHT.  These kind of numbers saturate Ruffian air defences and have been hitting targets further and further inside Ruffia.  Perm, where a vital pipeline hub is located, is 960 miles from the Ukrainian border, and it's been hit twice in a row.  Art!

Keep watching the skies, matey

     I just found another photo of him looking utterly miserable.  Art!

Miserable, haggard and old.  I wonder what he's thinking?

Steve, Our Man In Moscow

Rosenberg, that is, the BBC correspondent who works in an environment that must feel extremely threatening.  I doubt the FSB would dare pick on a representative of the BBC, unless the order came direct from the lips of Bunker Grandad, yet we of GREAT BRITAIN live rent-free in the dictator's head, as well as his minions and when another factory gets malleted by Storm Shadows, Putinpot's mind might crack.

     ANYWAY AGAIN I noticed an oddity in one of his transcripts of the Ruffian print media.  Art!

     Steve has translated it as 'Trump' but the literal translation is 'Tramp'.  I would expect them to use the Cyrillic 'Y' for the 'U' equivalent in English.

     Or perhaps they are making a value judgement?

A Little Gentle Shoeing

Apparently the Iranians have been making satirical Lego videos of Donald Judas Trump, which must shrivel his soul as 1) He has no sense of humour and 2)  They hurt his fee-fees.  So his White House staff decided to come back with a meme of their own.  Art!

     I have never played Uno but Larry is right: the goal in Uno is to get rid of all your cards.  Donold loses again.

Sunday's Best

That Makes Me Sound Conceited

Which is one of my finest character traits.  I am, of course - obviously! - referring to the phrase 'Sunday Best' and, having brought that up, need a quick check in my Brewer's to see if they have any info on it.   Aha!  Ones best clothes, as worn on Sunday for churchgoing.  So now we know.  Art!

Close enough

     Well, time to get the Links done and dusted.

2025

BOOJUM!: Pyramus, Queen Of The Desert

2024

BOOJUM!: A Free-Wheeling Spree

2023

BOOJUM!: Aye Aye Aye- What's Going On Here?

2022

BOOJUM!: Snake-Ize

2021

BOOJUM!: When Winnie Met Nellie

2020

BOOJUM!: "Oh Dear Again" Said My Brain

2019

BOOJUM!: Samizdat? What's That?

2018

BOOJUM!: Sugar Me

2017

BOOJUM!: Today In Gomorrah-On-The-Irwell

2016

BOOJUM!: There Was A Woman Who Married A Tree ...

2015

BOOJUM!: Lock Up Your Daughters - It's Roger Waters!

2014

BOOJUM!: "It Had Rained In The Night"

When 'S' Met Herman

And Created The Sherman

The tank, that is, named after General William Tecumseh Sherman, a man who had been at the sharp end of war and had no time for anyone who considered it noble or glorious: "War is hell" is one of his pithier sayings.  Art!

     Art!

Ready to render Hell unto Heinies

     Most of this Intro, if not today's whole second blog, is going to be given over to annotations I made of an excellent 'Historical Notes' Youtube vlog about the Sherman, which I'll provide a link for at the end.  The title is "The Sherman Tank Was Never A Death-Trap", which is setting out your stall with confidence.

     First, we travel back in time to 1998, when the work 'Death Traps' by Belton Cooper was published.  Art!

DANGER WILL ROBINSON!  AVOID!

     There's only a couple of problems about that status, in that DT is almost completely wrong, and it's almost completely wrong.  I realise this is the same thing twice but I wanted to emphasise the point.

     Cooper spent the Second Unpleasantness, not as a Sherman crew member, but as an Ordnance Officer in the South Canadian 3rd Armoured* Division's Maintenance Battalion.  It was his job to co-ordinate the recovery and repair of damaged or destroyed Shermans, NOT surviving Shermans.  Also M5 Stuarts, though they don't get a mention.  Art!

     3rd Armoured fielded around 230 Shermans and up to 50 Stuarts.  

     So, Cooper's assertions and allegations were made on the basis of 100% failures and are a classic example of 'Confirmation Bias', where prejudices act to focus attention only on facts that confirm those same prejudices.  

     DT was highly influential because it sold so many copies, and Cooper's claims were widely believed, that is, the Sherman was rubbish and Teuton tanks were better.  Art!

     'Historical Notes'  drolly comments "None of this survives contact with the actual evidence".  For example, the Office of the Adjutant General compiled statistics as seen above, which detailed casualties in the European Theatre Of Operations, ETO hereafter.  Steven Zaloga, the widely-respected author of military histories, used this source to provide hard numbers for branches of service.

Total armoured vehicle personnel in ETO = 49,000

Total armoured vehicle personnel in ETO killed, injured, missing or POW = 1,581

Thus a 14% casualty rate, compared to the 80% in infantry units.  So a Sherman tank crewman was x6 times less likely to become a casualty than the PBI.

     None of these statistics are provided in Cooper's work.

A Dubious Dateline

You may be ahead of me here, as the publication date for DT was 53 years after the end of the Second Unpleasantness.  Cooper was born in 1917 and jitterbugged off this mortal coil 19 years ago, so this blog won't upset him.  

     HN points out that Cooper wrote DT from memory, 53 years after the events he had witnessed.  So there is an element of doubt about how well he recalled these events.  Art!

Salute for Steve!

     Steve has a Bachelors and Masters in History.  When he wrote the above tome he went back to primary sources, a touchstone for historians, using South Canadian After Action Reports compiled at the time to inform his work.  Art!

     This is one of the essential reference works on the Sherman, compiled by Ol' Hunny from original South Canadian Army sources.

The Question Of Fire

Or, why the Sherman was equated with the Ronson lighter, which 'Lights first time', an urban legend that only originated long after the Second Unpleasantness was over.  Art!

A bit of gaffer-tape and it'll be fine

     Cooper's assertion is that the Sherman was dangerously flammable due to the petrol engine, which would ignite if hit.  Curiously, I have recently read somewhere that a diesel engine, thought to be much safer thanks to not burning readily, would suffer aerosolisation of the diesel fuel if hit and burn just as readily as petrol.  Not sure how true that is.

     ANYWAY British and South Canadian Operational Research Teams found that between 60 - 80% of brewed-up tanks were caused by ammunition cooking-off.  Bagged powder charges stored in bins along the side of the hull interior would explode if hit.  Stowage was redesigned to place these on the bottom of the hull, and the bins were double-walled, with ethylene glycol filling the void - known as 'wet' storage.  If a bin was hit, it would immediately be swamped with the fluid, extinguishing any fire.  Art!

      This redesign came in mid-1944 and dropped the brew-up rate to between 10 - 14%.  British Operational Research also found that if a Sherman suffered a penetrating hit, there was on average one fatality in the five man crew, or an 80% survival rate thanks to there being 5 hatches to get out of.

Combat Exchange Rates

No!  Nothing to do with currency, you bafunes.  The statistics of tanks versus tanks.  Back to Ol' Zally again.  He worked out that the South Canadians lost 1.9 Shermans to every 3 Teuton Panthers, which must upset the Wehraboos terribly.  Art!

     A case in point.  This Panther doesn't appear to be damaged or burned out, the tracks are still attached and intact and children shouldn't play with tanks.  Note that the hull machine gun is gone, either salved by the Teuton crew, or removed by Allied soldiers, and that the towing cable has been attached to one of the towing lugs.  It may have broken down or, logistics logistics logistics, simply run out of fuel.

     ANYWAY AGAIN back to Zally.  Why were Shermans so much better in action that the much-vaunted Panther?  Because, even a year after their introduction, Panthers were still horribly unreliable with severe final drive and transmission problems.  You could turn the 60-piece gearbox into iron filings with ridiculous ease.  To swap out the engine, a 30-minute job on the Sherman, you needed to practically take a Panther apart in a task that took hours.  Art!

     This is the unglamourous side of military hardware.  As per Zally, it meant that Panther units were normally at less than 50% readiness for combat.  

     There's another factor that HN doesn't address, so I shall <puts on military historian hat>: crew quality.  At the Battle Of Dompaire, the French 2nd Armoured Division came across the Teuton Panzer Brigade 112, and, thanks to having far more experienced crews (probably motivated by a lot of Gallic spite) and air support, absolutely malleted the Panther-equipped brigade.  The French lost 7 tanks, the Teutons 69.  Art!

French Sherman.  Note 'Continental' 7 on turret

     At Arracourt the South Canadian 4th Armoured Division ran into the 111th and 113th Panzer brigades, again equipped with Panthers.  HOWEVER - O that word again! - the 113th crews had only been given 2 weeks training, could not read maps and had no idea what combined arms warfare was.  The South Canadians lost 55 tanks, the Teutons 331.  Sorry, Wehraboos.

     Okay, back to HN.  They sniffily dismiss the Tiger as a 'boutique tank', intended to weigh in at 45 tons and actually hitting 57, a gas hog, wildly unreliable and needing special tracks to be moved by rail, combining all that with an inability to use many bridges.  Art!

     Thus they issued the first 500 with a deep-wading kit.

     'Boutique' may be right.  The Teutons built 1,347 of them during the Tiger's production run, essentially making them by hand.  1,347 might sound good but contrast it to the Sherman's 49,234 total, meaning 36 Shermans for each Tiger, and it looks a bit sick.

     

     Well, we are now at Count and the whole blog has indeed been about the Sherman.  

     Here's the link to 'Historical Notes'

The Sherman Tank Was Never a 'Death Trap'—Here's Who Lied

     The whole vlog is about 20 minutes long.  Now, there is a vlog by Nick Moran about myths concerning South Canadian armour, which is 45 minutes long.  I am tempted, I am tempted.

*  Note CORRECT spelling.

Cursed Construction

Well, Allegedly

As you should surely know by now, Conrad is far too much the rational skeptic to really believe in curses, dooms and the supernatural, which doesn't not make reading stories about them entertaining.  Look no further than the short, macabre stories of Ambrose Gwinnet Bierce - BIERCE FOR PREZ! - or that exemplar in British literature, M. R. James.  Art!

     I don't think Ambrose can realllllly run, as he's been dead for about 110 years, although if they allow zombie candidates to r

   ANYWAY I wanted to mention a few construction sites that appear to have very, very unhappy histories, and where better to kick off with that Gomorrah-On-The-Irwell.  'Manchester' if we're being formal.  Art!

     This is the 'Stockport Pyramid' and Stockport is perhaps an outlier of Manchester yet still in the Greater Manchester area, so I'm allowed.  It was constructed in the Nineties, a process taking three years, and the building firm immediately went bust after completion.  Ooops.  It stood derelict for years, whilst companies in the business park around it went bust, a process leading to the environs being called 'The Valley Of Death'.  NO JOKES ABOUT 'NEFERTITI' AND BUST!

     It was taken over by 'Royal Nawaab', a halal restaurant chain, in April 2025, and is still in business, so the curse may have been broken.  Art!

     This is 'B Of The Bang' which we have covered on the blog before.  It was an art installation erected in 2002 for the Commonwealth Games in Gomorrah-OTI, and you can see how large it is from the passing traffic.  Problem was, those enormous metal spikes were not well-secured and kept on falling out, risking the impalement of passing pedestrians, for it was located on a busy thoroughfare leading to a ballfoot stadium.  It was dismantled and totally destroyed in 2009 and nothing now remains.  Shades of 'Ozymandias'.  Art!

 

     Another from 'Be Amazed's Youtube channel and their 'Most Expensive Mistakes In All History' vlog.  The enormous skyscraper you witness here is the 'Hancock', more formally known as 200 Claredon Street, Boston.  Looks impressive, doesn't it?  Yeah well you know what they say about looks.

     First off, it was slated to open in 1971, but only cut the ceremonial ribbons in 1976.  To be so late opening implies bad planning in the first place, scarcely a cause to celebrate. Initial costings for the building came in at $75 million, but with the five-year delay, this ballooned to $175 million.  If you fast-forward 50 years to 2026, that's the equivalent of $427 million escalating to $995 million , meaning that initial cost projections and returns on investment were now waaaaay out.  Ooops.  Art!

With puny human for scale

     Here we have one of the on-site coffer-dams that were intended to act as a retaining wall and prevent soil movement at the perimeter of the construction site.  Hot tip: they didn't work.  Which meant bulges and distortion in vertical surfaces, earth movement and damage to streets above.  The construction is not taking place in a barren wasteland, after all: this is the centre of Boston.  What essentials do you have running underground in major urban areas?  Electricity and gas and phone lines, all of which were damaged or destroyed by the horizontal displacement of earth.  Cue  further lawsuits.  Art!

     Also there is the Boston Trinity Church, which sued and won an $11 million lawsuit about damage attributable to the Hancock.

     Supernatural or not, this building does seem jinxed, doesn't it?

     Matters had not reached equilibrium, though.  The Hancock had attempted to be cutting-edge in skyscraper design, utilising a unique blue window glass, and these windows were very substantial, massing 500 pounds each.  Art!

     The thing is, they hadn't properly analysed the thermal contraction and expansion of these novel window panels, with the end result that they began to fall onto the street below after their adhesives failed.  Police sealed off the adjacent streets if winds were high, and the whole panoply of blue windows had to be replaced.  Over 10,000 of them at a cost of $7 million.  Art!

     The vacant window frames were covered with plywood before being replaced, because 10,000 windows being replaced takes time.  A lot of time.

     The Hancockup story doesn't end here.  O noes.  You see, it swayed in the wind, as every skyscraper does, except a whole lot more than it ought to.  Supposedly so much so that residents on the upper floors suffered motion sickness, although that sound a bit hyped.  What's not hyped are the 500-ton Tuned Mass Dampers installed to absorb kinetic energy - as in buildings at risk of earthquakes - and reduce swaying.  For millions of dollars each.  Art!

     As BA totals it, the Hancock has accumulated $1.1 billion in costs since before opening.  Hmmm makes the Pyramint - as the Stockport Pyramid was dismissively known - look like a good investment.  Sadly you can no longer get Pyramints as they went out of production years ago.  Art!

Gone for 30 years

     I think we need to retain Tallahassee in this instance.  Art!

Clear The Decks

Nothing to do with either cards or the horizontal bits of ships, what I refer to is the backlog of Bookmarks and Favourites that are lurking on the blog's appendices. To deal with the whole load would take days, so we're going to focus  on a couple and thin the herd.  Art!

      If you can't resolve the fine print, this is the web page for OSHA, 'Occupational Health & Safety Administration', the South Canadian body that investigates breaches of - you may be ahead of me here - health and safety.  In this particular case the COCA company, which made large commercial furniture, had over-ridden safety features on rail carriages so they could work faster.  Which  resulted in an employee getting crushed to death and a $102,000 fine.  The case is from 10 years ago so the hyperlinks don't work any more or I'd post more about the case.  Discovered via the Comments on a Malicious Compliance Youtube vlog I was annotating.
     

For This One, You'll Need A Long Memory

Sorry to keep whanging on about the Special Idiotic Operation, it's just that I couldn't resist this one.  The Kozaky Angry Birds have struck again and sunk an orc naval vessel, a 'Project 22800 Karakurt' missile corvette (about the smallest naval warship there is).  Art!

     I am afraid I cemented my reputation as a terrible person by commenting: "Little Dead Corvette".  People Liked it, mind.

Not So Gentle Shoeing

I do enjoy putting up ghastly photos of Donnie Dorko, just to feel that I'm puncturing his zeppelin ego - huge but fragile - and documenting that his health is getting worse by the day.  No, he won't resign; being Prez keeps him out of prison as long as he's in office and I suspect he won't leave the White House unless in a body bag.  Which would have to be made from two stitched together.  Art!

     This one is from Twitter and the poster is 'Canada Hates Trump'.  Unusually for them there are no swears.  King Piggy looks as if he's checked out already, the lights are on but nobody's home and he's listening to the voices in his head telling him what to do, and how handsome and fit he it.  They lie!  His Hair Helmet looks to be failing, too.

Meanwhile In Mordorvia -

All Hail Steve Rosenberg, the BBC's Moscow correspondent, whose presence must surely irk the FSB, as he's fluent in Ruffian and does not need a translatoer, and whom is willing to go out and interview the natives in Barad Duh.  Well, he has another Item on the BBC webpage - Art!

"For the first time in nearly two decades, there will be no military hardware, just soldiers during Saturday's parade in Moscow."

     Ordinary orcs in the street, especially the younger ones, are questioning why there's a 'Victory' parade at all, as they know they're getting their collective bottom kicked everywhere.

Finally -

Going out with a Biercism.

"Accordion,n: an instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin."