Driveway To Desperation

First Of All

I would like to refer you to the word 'Swat', and if we prod Art into a state of semi-sentience with this epée hooked up to a car battery - 

     May I introduce you to one of Edgar Lear's more satirical poems.  You see, back in 1873 when he wrote 'The Ahkond of Swat', the British Raj was still in full play and the river Swat was still part of India.  The Ahkond was the ruler of this particular corner of Empire, and Ol' Ed went on at length pondering about his features and status, rather milking the Oriental Exoticism theme.  Art!

     For your information, the Swat is now in Pakistan.

     ANYWAY we're going off on a tangent here, and I wanted to get back to the verb 'Swat', which my 'Collins Concise English Dictionary' informs is of northern English dialect origin, coming from 'Squat'.  It means 'To strike or hit sharply', and - sorry?  It's a variety of fencing sword, if you must know.  Art!

     If we can resume?  We can?  Thank you so much! <Conrad looks loweringly at those who commented>.

     Remember that definition, because it's pretty apt.  Art!

     We now approach the meat of the matter.  Enter 'S.W.A.T.', which stands for 'Sheila Was A Termagant' sorry 'Special Weapons And Tactics', because the series focussed on the Los Angeles team who are more akin to soldiers than law enforcement.  When you realise that these people have access above and beyond the usual handguns, shotguns and automatic rifles of normal law enforcement, and in fact have tactical nuclear weapons in order sorry kit beyond the ken of common cops.  Art!

The HK UMP is one ugly gun

     S.W.A.T. do not do boring regular stuff like radar traffic stops, doing presentations in schools or wellness checks.  Their stock in trade is counter-terrorism, barricaded suspects or hostage rescue.  You know, cool shizzle.

     And so we come to another 'Ripe' Youtube channel annotation, where the central issue of contention is the wrought subject of -

     Driveway length.  

     No!  Not in the sense of two male neighbours competing to see who has the longer driveway, as men tend to get when suffering from too much testosterone.  This was the end result of  Affronted Driveway Owner, hereafter ADO, having a larger and longer driveway than his Entitled Neighbour Troublemaker, hereafter ENT*.   

     'Ripe' edited out the introduction of this tale, presumably since it included verifiable information that could have identified either party, which is likely to lead to libellous litigation.  Art!

     Let me display a few of the notes that ADO had left on their neighbour's car, which kept finding itself parked on his driveway.

"Sorry for the misunderstanding, this driveway is private property"

"Private property, please keep out"

"I must assume you are ignoring my notes"

     ENT would park her SUV behind ADO's modest Subaru, completely blocking it in and rendering him unable to drive his own car to work, making him late, having to resort to public transport or Uber.  Art!

     After being blocked for THREE DAYS running, ADO had enough and called a tow truck.  Predictably, ENT came storming out of her pit and tried to bully the tow truck driver into leaving her trespassing car alone, because she needed to use ADO's driveway since her own was criminally small and she'd sue him if he got her car towed - entirely predictable shizzle.

     Her car got towed.

     She tried to block ADO, who decoyed her away from in front of his car by rolling his window down, and as she came around the side he drove off.

     Now, a normal person would give up at this point.  ENT proved she was in fact a freaking nutjob.  Because - Art!

     ADO was sitting down to enjoy a coffee in mid-afternoon, when suddenly his local neighbourhood law enforcement S.W.A.T. team shotgunned his front door off it's hinges, poured into the house and demanded he release the child hostage.  At gunpoint.  At many, many gunpoints.

     You're probably ahead of me here.  ENT had rung the local S.W.A.T. office and shrieked that her offspring had been kidnapped and was being held captive by ADO next door.  This is colloquially known in South Canada as being 'Swatted' and is an extremely dangerous and stupid thing to do because we're not dealing with flies here, rather heavily-armed police looking for reasons to kill bad guys.    Art!

     Back at the station, ADO straightened things out whilst technicians traced the errant call back to ENT.

     Surprise!  SHE HAD DONE THIS BEFORE.  It just hadn't reached the level of S.W.A.T. previously.  Thus her offence became a felony - the big step up from a misdemeanour that you absolutely do not want in South Canada, as she ended up being sentenced to years in prison.

     I guess that solved her parking problem.

Credit Where It's Due

Rather than looking at Mordorvia or Ukraine, let us instead focus the actinic eye of BOOJUM! on Belarus, and it's dictator Lukashenko, whom is commonly known across social media as 'Potato Fuhrer'.  Because Belarus has nothing to export that is more sophisticated than the potato.  Art!

     The question has to be asked, whom is he going to war against?  He's successfully avoided managing to commit his country's armed forces alongside those of Botox Boris, which would have triggered a coup against him, as he was explicitly warned.  Conrad suspects he's still waiting to see who comes out on top, and will then stirringly declare that he was on their side all along.  Whilst keeping a plane loaded with gold bullion ready to depart at short notice.  Orcban The Weretoad being deposed has made allies of Botox Boris a lot more nervous.

Another Very, Very Expensive Mistake

Going back to 1980, and a horrendous drilling versus sub-surface geology and workings issue.   Yes, we are taking the details from a 'Be Amazed' vlog about terrible financial failures, and O boy is this one.  Art!

     You see, Texaco were drilling in Lake Peigneur in November of 1980, just with sketchy knowledge of where the subterranean Diamond Crystal salt mine was located.  In case you are unsure, they were located directly beneath the drilling rig's borehole thanks to not knowing what a left hand was, let alone what it was doing.  Art!

     The drill bit cut through substrate into the mine, meaning there was now a direct link between the lake and the mine, and the lake promptly emigrated into the mine.  Water, lower levels and all that.

     A tug, eleven barges, the drilling rig itself and a small local island ended up disappearing down the borehole.  Incredibly, nobody was killed, which means the good luck at another effed location is already goosed.  It cost the equivalent of $140 million today and may be the embodiment of 'Mine Mine All Mine'.

A Late Entry!

If you are unfamiliar, the winter season in Mordorvia brings along the - how can I put it? - season of sewer ruptures creating impromptu ice-sculptures, as they get gigantic fountains of fecal matter playing o'er the landscape.  All provided for free, as per instructions from Botox Boris about Ruffian infrastructure.  Art!

     Here is one such performing in the suburbs of Barad Duh.  Look on and weep O yeh Western artless goons! and commiserate that you cannot truly appreciate the smell, nor the delicate patter as half a million cubic metres of ordure spoil and spill from the skies.  That was me being poetic.

Are You Sitting Comfortably?

This used to be the broadcast line from 'Listen With Mother' on Radio One so long ago that many of you were not born.   I recast this trope as I put forward another factoid showing that Donold J Trump is rotting apart at the seams.  Art!

     Inevitably this will be blamed on Joe Biden.  Or Bill Clinton.  Or Harry S. Truman.  Whom served his country as an artillery officer in the First Unpleasantness, unlike Billy Bonespurs.

     Come at me Secret Service.

*  Tip of the hat to Ol' Tolky.

Under Cover Of The Night

Bear With Me, It'll Take A Minute

Especially as I have to keep popping downstairs to monitor the chicken kebabs and whether they're cooking properly.  They looked distinctly underdone last time I looked.

     ANYWAY Art!

     Not quite this blog's title but pretty close.  No, we are not going to focus on an obscure Thirties thriller featuring stock actors you've never heard of, it's just I wanted a catchy Primo illo to attract the visitors.  Then again I might have chosen an obscure 2006 romantic thriller - do such things exist? - by Linda Howard.  Art!

     Again, close but no cigar.  There is always a recourse to The Rolling Stones, those cyborg-zombies whom are still going through the motions - because cyborgs are really, really good at replicating the movements - and their track 'Undercover Of The Night' which is, again, close to today's title.

     No, I'm not going to put up an illo of said track, I don't like them very much.  Their film attempts were also way, way feebler than those of The Beatles.  Art!

     From 'Help' with the very delicious - sorry I mean 'very talented actress' Eleanor Bron.

     Where were we?

     O yes!  Darkness and dark deeds.  You see, going back centuries if not millennia, armies in conflict used to employ the hours of darkness to carry out all their logistical functions; resupply with ammunition, rotate out soldiers gong on leave or training or sick, move in food and water, repair field fortifications, control the media, send back administrative data.  Art!

     BECAUSE THEY COULD NOT BE SEEN.

     Up until now.  One hundred and ten years ago, as our predecessors fought on the Somme, both sides would partake in an unofficial truce during the hours of darkness, allowing them to carry out the actions detailed above.  Any bright young spark on either side who decided that they were going to Wage Unmitigated War was rapidly and brutally brought up to speed on how things actually were, not how the print media described.  Yes yes yes, for both sides.  Art!

     These are British paratroopers getting ready to deliver air mail and bad wishes to the Teutons as of 6th June 1944, because once again THEY COULD NOT BE SEEN.  It was dark and they were wearing cam-cream.

     Looking at the Youtuber 'Jake Broe' from which the monochrome above is taken, cheap infra-red vision technology is verrrry widespread, so much so that it is being widely used on Ukrainian drones.  In case you miss my point, it means that the technology has been produced on such a scale that it's now cheap and affordable enough to allocate to individual FPV drones.  YOU WILL BE SEEN.

     The night, it seems, no longer provides cover.

      I shall draw a curtain across what happened to the orcs in the first instance.  Nothing good,  as Jake explains that the Kozaky will call in more drones from across their front lines and assemble in order to disassemble the orcs.

Art!

     A Ruffian 'Tunguska' SAM system, once again recorded in infra-red as proof that the night is no longer any protection, about to become a Transformer.  In this case, into Ruin, whom cost $15 million.  You see - the technical explanation? - the radar 'gates' on this system  are set to 'Narrow', because if they were set to 'Wide' it would pick up not only drones but bird flocks, insect swarms, leaves, dirt, rain,  snow and ground clutter.  Causing so many false alarms that the system would be useless.  Art!

     An oil depot in occupied Luhansk.  The Kozaky drones are able to work out which tanks have content and which do not, and have gone to those with content, which cannot have contented - O do you see wh O you do - the Ruffians.

     

       A chart used as per 'Clement Molin',  an excellent Twitter analyst and provider, whose statistics are enacted above.  Here you can see the dramatic upturn in Kozaky strikes on Ruffian SAM systems, leading to a total of 30 destroyed in April.  These things cost akin $10 million each and are becoming increasingly difficult for the orcs to replace, as they are chock-full of valuable electronics that they cannot easily or quickly replace.

     It gets worse for the orcs.  Art!

     What we have here is an Ukrainian Sky-Sweeping Drone-Malletting Gun Turret System that I shall call 'Spitfire' because I can.  They are currently being deployed on the front lines with the intent of shooting down Ruffian drones, at a fraction of their overall cost, since a burst of 20 mm ammo is a fraction of  fraction of your average Shahed.  Ukraine currently shoots down 90% of the Ruffian drones attacking it's territory, so anything above that is cool - once again, the orcs expend $100 million per night trying to reduce Ukrainian toilet statistics to their own level.  No word of a lie. This may have lead to Putinpot looking to be 103 years old at his Victory Charade as of May 9th.

More Of Nine!

Do not worry, we have a lot more of 'Nine' to come, including one that occurred to me whilst delivering Edna during her trotty quotient.  Art!

     This is 'Doctor TIGER Ninestein'  as of the dramamentary series 'Terrahawks' and whom is one of nine clones whom can be called into action whenever the plot demands it.  As I recall, if one of his clones in leading the fight against extra-terrestrials based on Mars - NAUGHTY NAUGHTY Gerry stealing concepts from 'Captain Scarlet' - is totalled, the next clone can be implanted with his predecessor's knowledge.  Quite a concept.  If only it could be adopted amongst South Canadian manglement!

Establishing Depth

Art!

     What's going on here?  You may well wonder, I did myself after coming across this picture on my list of Bookmarks And Favourites.  Ol' Art and Stanny rather stood out from the crowd, and Deke also stirred a chord.  This is a background publicity shot from 1968 at the MGM studio lot in 1968 during the shooting of "2001: A Space Odyssey" where the studio and scriptwriter were assembling various NASA authorities to see if they were being sufficiently accurate.

     They were.

     In fact they were being so accurate there were conspiracy theories about how Ol' Stanny filmed the -

     Which is another nonsense for another blog.

Now, Speaking Of Sweaty Secondaries

It used to be that South Canadian politicians in the Wizard Lizard Gizzard party who were not fans of Donold Judas Trump did not dare to stand up to him, for Lo! he would turn up at their political location on his personal airplane, and campaign against them.  Which would be political un-alivement.  That, however, was before he began to display symptoms of dementia and utter idleness, becoming more wedded to cheating on a golf-course than wielding political power.  Art!

     He seems to be more focussed on what extras he can ladle onto his burger than anything else, and before he can get out on the course and cheat anyone else.  Who else is up for a round of golf curse*?

This Is How Horror Films Begin

You know, that trope with a telephone call from within the house itself, which cannot occur nowadays given mobile phones and modern digital deviltry, which at least deletes one method of cheap horror film production -

     HOWEVER -'

     See you in September.

*  Did I use 'else' too ofen?  Do let me know!

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.