If I Were To Say 'Concord'

You Might Be Confused

So, we shall explicate a tad in order to provide enlightenment.  Looking in my 'Collins Concise English Dictionary' I see the word 'Concord' defined as "Agreement or harmony between people or nations; amity" and is ultimately derived from the Latin <hack spit> 'Concors', meaning 'Of the same mind'.

     The thing about concord is that it frequently doesn't arrive or deliver as advertised.  Art!

     This is Concord, Massachusetts, looking like a chocolate-box illustration.  How very splendid!  Except it was one of the first locations fought over in the treacherous traitorous American War Of Stabbing GREAT BRITAIN In The Back <pauses for blood pressure to diminish>.

     Then we have the ill-fated Concorde - note the additional 'e' added because of the French.  It was a supersonic airliner produced by the British and - you may be ahead of me here - French and it literally left every other airliner standing still.  There's an awe-inspiring British Airways advert where it tools up at the end, doing Mach 2 and making everything else in the sky look old and tired.  Art!

     You can see the variable-geometry nose here, in the 'down' position before it transitions to supersonic flight.

     The fleet was retired in 2003, thanks to the extremely high cost of running them, not helped by the fatal crash of a Concorde in 2000, which rather knocked public confidence in them.  You might say British Airways and Air France had a concord about Concorde.  Art!

     No, this isn't the 2000 crash.  What you're seeing here is the crash of a Sinister Tu-144 at the Paris Air Show in 1973.  The two aircraft were similar in external appearance, so much so that the Tu-144 was dubbed 'Concordski', whereas there were a lot of internal differences.  The crash occurred because the Concordski pilot made violent evasive manoeuvres, to possibly avoid having a French jet take photographs of the canard foreplanes.  Which sounds suspiciously like an excuse as it's a lot easier to take photos from the ground.  ANYWAY the recovery from the pilot's barnstorming overstressed the port wing, which fell off, and that was that.  It also tanked foreign interest in acquiring any Concordskis, so you might say other nations had a concord about Concordski.

     I think you'll agree when I say 'Concord' is a bit of a mis-nomer.

     ANYWAY AGAIN here we come to the meat of the matter, because I am going to feature an entry from the 'Be Amazed' Youtube channel, about - Art!

     The first section concerns the collision and sinking of an Italian cruise liner, the 'Costa Concordia', and you can tell this isn't going to be a pleasant excursion because of 'Concord's track record to date.  Note that the date for this incident is the 13th, another ill-omen.  Art!

     The liner was scheduled to set sail from Civitavecchia, the port for Rome and yes, I've been there, and spend a week tooling around the Mediterranean in what must have been pretty chilly weather, it being January.  Art!

     Captain Schettino ordered the CC to deviate from it's normal route in order to execute what the narrator and Google call a 'salute', near a brace of islands.  None of the bridge crew protested this ill-advised action, which was supposed to impress passengers and anyone ashore.

     Well, guess what the island of Giglio had in abundance?  Underwater rocks.  When Schettino ordered a course correction, the helmsman misunderstood and steered into the rocks.  Ooops.  The Costa C ran aground, putting at risk over 1,000 crew and over 2,000 passengers.  Art!

Looks expensive

If you want a metric, that hull damage was nearly 80 yards long.  Evacuation procedures were not followed as the Costa capsized, creating panic and causing the death of 32 people.  Art!

     Schettino was tried and found guilty, getting a 16-year sentence.  What made the court especially unsympathetic was discovering that, during the salute, he had been derelicting his duties in order to canoodle with a Moldavian exotic dancer he had brought onto the bridge.  No, I'm not making this up.

     In 2023, over a decade later, an attempt to re-float and salve the Costa began, costing an eye-watering $1.2 billion, which is twice the cost of the ship itself.  Art!

       Then there were the lawsuits and compensation, which tacked on another $93 million, and breaking up the CC for scrap, costing another $100 million.

     In total it cost over $2 billion to salve and then break up the CC, which had itself cost only (!) $612 million to construct.  Counting the Costa.

Stupid Items Sub-Editors Create Out Of Desperation

I am going to post the Snip and then comment.  Art!

     There's a never-ending stream of items like this on my news feed, featuring fatuous titles detailing stupid ideas.  I get that people have to create content but come on! use a tad more imagination.  And no more oscilloscopes, please.

     O look, here's another one.  Art!

Bah!

King Piggy Punctured

Or, more gentle shoeing.  DJ Tango loves to boast about all the cognitive tests he's taken, because he's so senile that he believes the indicate how intelligent he is.  The reason you've taken so many, Donold, is because your doctors are worried about your cognition, as well they might.  Art!

     The tests involve drawing a clock and numbering it correctly, naming as many words beginning with the letter 'B' in a minute as they can, then naming the date, day of the week and what city they are in.  This, Donnie Dorko, is hardly a rousing statement of intellect.  Art!

     Here's the Nodfather falling asleep in a meeting again.  The consequence of staying up into the small hours ranting and tanting on social media.  He needs an aide armed with a bamboo skewer to prod him at intervals to ensure 1)  He's awake and 2) He's still alive.

Will I Or Won't I?

Hmmmm pondering.  I know I say that our charter excludes Politics - that above is merely mocking the feeble of mind - but I have saved a detailed analysis from Prof Roth about how the Hungarian elections provide insights for the South Canadian political opposition to Pumpkinhead.  Maybe at a later date.  I bet you can hardly wait.  Art!

     Orban claims he's going to lead the opposition in parliament, which is a fragile hope, since he's going to either end up in prison or flee abroad.  Given that he's been funding MAGA political funds, South Canada might not be a good fit for him.  There's always an apartment next to Assad in Moscow.  Or North Korea.

      Interestingly, the President of Slovakia, Fico, has done a 180º now that his mate The Weretoad is gone and is now best mates with Prez Zed, implying that Putin no longer has any European allies.  Poor Dimya!

UTTER NONSENSE!

Grrrr whom is responsible for this drivel?  Art!

     It jolly well DID appear, but woo-woo sites like this one pretend otherwise, because in photos taken with much better definition, the 'Cydonian Face' resembled nothing like a face.  Art!

     That took all of 10 seconds on Google.

Finally -

Going out  with another Biercism.

"Comfort,n: A state of mind produced by contemplation of a neighbour's uneasiness."

If I Were To Say 'Coach'

You Probably Wouldn't Expect A Treatise About Tanks

And, for once, you'd be right.  No tanks today, neither of the Armoured Fighting Vehicle type nor the fuel container type.  Tankless BOOJUM! shall be.  Unless I change my mind, I'm fickle like that.

     So! one memory I have from my days - well, twenty-two years actually - at Connexions is of Gavin, my manager, who volunteered as a football coach for young lads.   One of the worst things about his role were the aggressive, ignorant, abusive, entitled parents of the sprogs he was tutoring.  Art!

     Never read it myself.

     ANYWAY I had wit enough to look up 'Coach' in my 'Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable' and it did indeed have an entry.  It transpires that, when the railways arrived in This Sceptred Isle from 1840 onward, they inherited or adopted many of the terms previously used for horse-drawn transport.  Such as?  Well, 'Carriage' and 'Guard' and of course - obviously! - 'Coach'.  Art!

     'Coach' is another word akin to 'Biro' in that it has Hungarian roots.  It originates in the Magyar town of Kocs, where they built wagons, known in Hungarian as 'Kocsi szeker' or 'Wagon of Kocs'.  No, I'm not making this up.

     ANYWAY my BDOPAF also explains the use of 'Coach' as a tutor because they 'carry' their charges.  Hmmmm.  Conrad unsure how much he believes that one.  I could look it up in my 'Collins Concise English Dictionary' except it's at the bottom of a large pile of books and I am a lazy dastard.

     This is where our Intro really kicks off, as we enter a tale related by a Commenter on a Youtube Malicious Compliance vlog.  We shall call them Referee Of Youth, or ROY hereafter.  You see how it all fits together?

     

     ROY was in reality a high-school mathematics teacher, who had volunteered to coach the football team, which South Canadians have to qualify with 'soccer'.  His team were in the next-to-last game when POtty-Mouthed Punk, hereafter POMP, lost his rag and roundly abused the in-game referee.  ROY instantly 'benched' POMP, meaning he was off the pitch and not playing, for unsportsmanlike behaviour.  POMP immediately went whining to His Entitled Mother, hereafter HEM, because he'd never heard the word 'No' in his life.  She stormed up to ROY, demanding that her little darling be allowed to play.  Another person who had never heard the word 'No'.

     Things really kicked off the next morning, a Sunday, when ROY and the School Director had assembled all the players, and their parents, in a single room in school.  ROY rather theatrically introduced themself, and POMP and HEM.  HEM immediately told the School Director to fire ROY for benching her little ingrate.  The School Director gracefully refused, stating they were only present as an observer.  Art!

SD knew where this was going

     ROY then stated that he resigned from his position as coach, at which HEM smiled smugly, thinking they had won.

     They had not.  ROY the informed the assembled players and parents that, as per regulations, a team without a coach automatically forfeited all games, so not only would POMP not be playing that day, neither would anyone else.  By this time HEM is getting serious death-glares from everyone in the room, and whines at ROY for doing what she asked for.  She told SD to fill the now-vacant position and he once again gracefully refused, stating that he was leaving at lunchtime.    She then threatens to have ROY fired from his coaching position in an exemplary case of Buyer's Regret, only for him to trump her with news that he was a mathematics teacher, not a coach.  She insisted and persisted, to no avail.  Many of the team players went home crying, and all their parents nursed a grudge against HEM from that moment on.  Art!

     

HEM and POMP.  Perhaps.

     As proof that neither HEM nor POMP were remotely self-aware, when he moved on to High School, he went for trials at their soccer team, and was immediately rejected.  HEM, watching from the crowd, promptly did her entitled rant, which didn't get him back on the team but which did get her permanently banned from all HS sports events.  Way to go HEM!  

Number One With Lots Of Bullets

Now, this one I have heard of.  Top of the 'Rotten Tomatoes' list of films that scored 0%, we have 'Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever' from 2002, and I remember it being absolutely panned at release.  Art!

     To say it underperformed at the box office is to understate wildly.  Art!

      So, using the 50% return to studio rule, it made $10 million.  What was the budget, you might enquire.  $70 million, an awful lot at the time in 2002 dollars.  No, not even the lure of Lucy Liu is going to make Conrad consider this one.

What Took You So Long?

One has to wonder what lies behind this headline.  Art!

     I cannot resist looking.

     Aha.  So, the polling organisation Ipsos and ABC delivered a poll in April of 2025 that indicated only 45% of people were worried that King Piggy was going to keel over dead  suddenly.  They re-ran the same poll this year in April and found those concerned DJ Tango was going to croak face down in his Happy Meal had grown to 59%.  It doesn't help that he continually necks four times the recommended daily dose of aspirin.

More Randomness From The Algorithm

At least it provides me with a bit of content, so there is a silver lining.  Art!

     What on earth is it?  Sorry but 'Blueridge 47,000 BTU (3,9 Ton) 3-Zone 23 SEER Inverter R-454B Series Heat Pump Ultra' is pure obfuscation.  I am guessing as the maker appears to have 'Air' in their name that it is some species of heating and/or ventilating kit.  'BTU' refers, I believe to 'British Thermal Units' hence my guess at a heating device.  

     Yes, I could click on the link but that would be cheating.  We have our morals here at BOOJUM! and I refuse to raise them.

I Think They Ironed The Kinks Out

We have commented a few times on the Kozaky's 'Flamingo' Firepoint cruise missile, which has had issues with accuracy ever since it was introduced.  It came late into service because the orcs bombed the original factory location and everything had to be moved.  

     Well, last night one of them travelled 450 miles into darkest Mordorvia, where it hit the VNIIR industrial plant in Cheboksary, which produces guidance kit for drones and missiles.  Art!

     This hapless orc was out wandering the night streets with his mates whilst air raid sirens are going off all round.  His mate hears the noise of a jet engine approaching at speed and manages to catch sight of the Flamingo.  Art!

     That's the bird in flight.  The trio were dangerously close to the VNIIR plant, which gives them a splendid opportunity to appreciate the 1,100 kilo warhead the Flamingo carries.  Art!

     None were injured but may have needed a change of underwear.  Might take a bit of spade and shovel work before the VNIIR plant is fit for purpose again.  After the night-time explosion the orcs moved a load of electronic warfare kit into Cheboksary, which is causing Kozaky drones to hit apartment buildings as they get spoofed.  

Finally -

Going out with a Biercism. 

"Neighbour, n: One whom we are commanded to love as ourselves, and does all he knows to make us disobedient."

If I Were To Say 'Tanks'

I Imagine You'd Roll Your Eyes

 - expecting me to yark on about how under-rated the Crusader was or that the final drive on the Panther was a major source of breakdowns, or post yet more photos of BOVINGTON TANK MUSEUM, or explain how rubbish the T-34 was in reality.  Art!

Petrol Engine Mother

     Now, I do have a set of notes on the Sherman tank, taken from the 'Historical Notes' Youtube channel, which I will inflict upon you one day, although that day is not today.  Art!

     The brawny beast you see here is the Challenger 3, an upgraded version of the Challenger 2, adapted for modern drone-intensive warfare - note the interesting-looking kit atop the turret.  One innovation you can't tell about is the use of a smoothbore barrel for the first time in a British Main Battle Tank.  Previously they had been rifled and were the only MBT not to have gone over to smoothbore.   Art!

     Here we see the Sinister T-62, which was the first production tank to have a smoothbore gun in 1961.  Smoothbore eliminates the drag from rifling and permits much higher muzzle velocities to be attained, meaning armour penetration is much improved.  However - a word you were surely waiting for - I recall Sinister army veteran Victor Suvorov saying that the T-62 was hopelessly inaccurate 'An all-powerful gun that always missed.'  Because for effective use if a smoothbore, you need computer control, and Sinister computers in 1961 capable of doing that took up most of an office block.  Nowadays there's probably a phone app that'll do the trick.

     ANYWAY the kind of 'tanks' that I intend to inform you about today are the kind used to store oil and fuels, because once again Ukraine has been blamming the living daylights out of them.  Art!

     The 'tank farm' as the South Canadians like to call them, at Tuapse has been extensively blammed, on the 16th of April, then the 20th of April, then the 28th of April, then on 1st May.  Art!

Courtesy 'Jake Broe'

     The Kozaky drones hitting the refinery aren't being intercepted and the fires are so massive and widespread it's not worth the FSB's time to track down and threaten people who post clips.  Tuapse has now been hit eleven times in total and seems about 75% destroyed.  

     Then we have the critical pumping hub at Perm, which as of Sunday was still on fire.  Art!

     

     Don't forget, this site is in Siberia, meaning that very little Ruffian infrastructure is beyond Ukrainian drone range, and it's another indication that Ruffia's size is a major weakness; there are simply too many sites spread out over too much land to protect more than a fraction of them.  Especially when 280 SAM and radar systems are defending Moscow, and another 27 protecting Putinpot's Valdai palace.  Art!

     That's one of the storage tanks at Perm burning merrily away.  Art!

Courtesy 'Special Kherson Cat'

     Six 50,000 cubic metres capacity storage tanks were destroyed, burning up almost 2 million barrels of oil.  Jake then put up some pictures of a tank of that size being constructed, not sure whom to attribute for them.  Art!

Inside

Outside

     Constructing one of these things is a major engineering project in itself.  'EMPRmedia' on Twitter did a bit of digging and found that the cost of a single 50,000 cubic metre tank is $1.5 million, with the contents being worth $30 million at current prices.  So, $9 million in construction costs and $180 million in lost oil.  Caused by 6 'Lyuty' drones that cost $1.2 million, or a return-on-investment ratio of 157.

     O and the governor of Krasnodar Krai Oblast has demonstrated what a copium overdose looks like.  He claims there is no damage to any oil infrastructure, the Ukrainian drones carry fuel tanks of their own that rain down burning fuel when hit, nothing to see here, just keep shovelling that oily sand into a bucket.  Art!

      How do the Kozaky know which tanks to hit?  I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating.  The long-range drones used have thermal cameras that detect how full or empty the tanks are, so the operator can prioritise targets.  My guess is that the four tanks left alone at Perm are empty.  Art!

     I'll stop here to avoid being boring, but above are two more 50k cubic metre tanks blown up at Gorky in Mordorvia, another $63 million in losses.

     So - tanks!

Oooops

One thing that popped up on my news feed was an item about a film released in late April, 'Desert Warrior', to resounding failure.  It seems to have been in Development Hell for 5 years, ballooning the cost to $150 million.  Art!

     It has been an utter failure at the box office.  Art!

     So the studio will get back $350,000.  That $150 million very probably doesn't include marketing and distribution so the final cost could be even higher.  Art!

     No details of performance in May yet.  Conrad confidently predicts it will be pulled from all but a handful of cinemas and then sold to Netflix.

King Piggy Gets Peggy

Conrad uses the slang 'peg' for 'tooth', just so we're clear.  This Item allows me to use another awful photo of Donnie Dorko.  Art!

     He looks like he's sucking a lemon.  ANYWAY there are questions being raised about a trip he took to a dental surgeon in Florida, because the White House has it's own dental surgery, a fact I was entirely ignorant of.  We may never know the truth.  But it's fun to speculate.

Whilst We're Making Cheap Shots At Cheap Sh-

The repellent crook Rudy Giuliani, a former acquaintance of the Saggy Senile Sepia Sackbut, has been taken to hospital.  Predictably, cruel jokes are making the rounds about him.

Captain Obvious

@TheFungi669

Just in: Rudy Giuliani has been hospitalized. He’s in hypocritical condition and he’s dyeing.

Art!

His finest moment

Droning On Again

I need a wordy Item to hit the Word Count, so we're heading back to Mordorvia and how things are going in Barad Duh.  There's an interesting illustration on Twitter by 'Jay In Kyiv', who needs to be treated with a certain caution, given that they were posting 'Prune60's railway data with no attribution.  Art!

     What you have here are SAM sites where missiles, radar and guns are concentrated, having been stripped out from any other locations, in order to try and protect the May 9th Victory Parade, since the Kozaky aren't participating in a truce.  There are 280 units allegedly protecting Moscow.

     HOWEVER - for the second time today - Art!

     What you're seeing here is Mosfilmovskaya Street, where a high-rise apartment building was hit by a Ukrainian drone.  Since a civilian apartment isn't the kind of target the Kozaky select, it had probably been spoofed by electronic warfare kit.  But it's not a good look a mere 5 days before the big parade.  I bet Putinpot is chewing the carpet with rage at the news.

Finally -

Going out with a Biercism.

"Interregnum, n: The period during which a monarchical country is governed by a warm spot on the cushion of the throne.  The experiment of letting the spot grow cold has commonly been attended by most unhappy results from the zeal of many worthy persons to make it warm again."