Aqua Scutum!

No I Don't Mean The Clothing Brand

If I did it would have been a single word.  No, what I refer to today is things being proofed against water, as 'Aqua' is Latin <hack spit> for 'Water' and 'Scutum' is Latin <spit hack> for 'Shield'.  Art!

     Enjoy this depiction of aqua scutum, it being a nuclear-powered atomic umbrella.

     SO, in days of old, when knights were bold, and monkeys chewed tobacco, nobody had heard of the spaceship 'Sulaco'.  They were quite adept at rendering clothing waterproof, on the other hand, because The Allotment Of Eden is gifted with frequent downpours throughout the year.  Anyone who had to work outside, or sailors, required waterproofs, which were fabrics such as linen or wool, treated with melted beeswax or lanolin oil.  Art!

     ART!

     That's better.  

     What else needs occasional waterproofing?

     Exactly!  Tanks!  How clever of you to guess right away.  Yes indeedy.  I am going to poach a picture I created a couple of weeks ago, because I can.  Art!

     These are still from a film clip.  The vehicle you see here is the Tiger I, a barely mobile metal mastodon that weighed 57 tons and was thus far too heavy to cross most European bridges.  The solution?  Issue the first 495 with a waterproofing 'wading' kit that, when applied, allowed it to cross rivers up to 13 PROUD IMPERIAL FEET deep.  Sounds groovy, right?

     Not so fast!  All the hatches, vision ports and engine louvres needed to be sealed, with a large inflatable rubber tube proofing the turret ring, as well as the erection of an 8 foot snorkel tube over the commander's cupola to allow for the ingress of air.  Art!

     Such a process took 30 minutes to manage, and used lots of rubber, of which the Teutons were desperately short, so they did away with the kit in mid-1943, after which they could only ford bodies of water up to 6 1/2 feet.  My guess is that Naughty Hans* was sent to walk across the river bed and if it didn't go over his head, they followed him with the tank.  Art!

     I've put up this illo as the one to port incorrectly shows what might be a Comet, not a Churchill, and the starboard illo is of a Churchill, but the wrong kind as it's an AVRE model - Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineers.  Art!

     A Mk VII, the type that Foley commanded a troop of.  Actually, looking closer, this one has a flame-gun in the hull, instead of the usual machine gun.  ANYWAY AGAIN from this picture you can appreciate all the hatches there were on such a vehicle.  Foley's crew had to waterproof the tank prior to D-Day, which they did by laying explosive 'det cord' underneath the waterproof sealant around the turret and hatches.  The cord was wired to an ignition switch in the hull front.  

     Enter Young Matey, a replacement crew member, who was being shown the interior of the tank a couple of days later.

     "What does this switch do?" he asked, idly flipping it.

     BANG!

     All the waterproofing was blasted away.  The crew had very harsh things to say to and about Young Matey.  Art!

     I simply cannot find any photos of waterproofed Mk VIIs, so here's a side shot showing even more hatches.

     When the crew returned to their tank in the morning, they found a dirty and exhausted Young Matey, who had stayed up all night re-applying the waterproofing.  Bless the lad.  Art!

     Back to Ol' Angelo, and one of the more obscure factors that prevented extensive training was - you may be ahead of me here - waterproofing.  The 21st Army Group planners were a bunch of nitwits about this, insisting that all vehicles landing up to D+42 - six weeks after D-Day - be waterproofed, in the fond illusion that they'd be wading through surf to reach the beach.  Art!

     That's one of the 'Mulberry' harbours in operation after one week.  

     Why was this an issue?  O I thought you'd never ask!  Because the process for 4th Canuckistanian Armoured Division began at the start of May 1944, to get every vehicle done in time for their deployment soon after the invasion.  Art!

A waterproofed Sherman

     A waterproofed vehicle had severe restrictions on how far it could move once the waterproofing began, and it wasn't allowed to move at all once the process was complete.  Consequently, as May wore on, less and less vehicles were available for training.  In reality the arrival of 4th Armoured in France was delayed for weeks, meaning the waterproofing had started to dry out, so it was reapplied when it ought to have been completely ignored.  When the division did arrive in France it went in 'dry', meaning all the effort put into waterproofing was i) completely wasted and ii) prevented training from the start of May.

     There you go, something to chew on.

The Haul

One of the reasons I sorted out my cupboard space yesteryon was to try and locate any remaining packets of loose-leaf Darjeeling, hereafter LOLD.  Art!

Before

     I did discover a couple of things a bit out of date.  Art!

     Three years out of date is practically in date, right?  Art!

     Note the absence of any LOLD.  I did, mind, rediscover where I'd put my Margaret's Hope First Flush Darjeeling, the horribly expensive stuff I got me as a Christmas present. 

     So, first thing today was a trip into Babylon Lite and Sainsbos, for all the LOLD they had.  Art!

     Yes, eight packets of it for a total of £17.60.  There was a ninth packet on the shelf but it was right up against the rear wall and I couldn't reach it.  One wonders what the staff responsible for restocking shelves think when they see someone has emptied out all the LOLD packets.  'O that bloke who looks like John Bolton has been in again.'

     Supplies of LOLD secured for several months to come!

The Algorithm Has Gone All Donold Judas Trump

This one keeps coming up on my Youtube channel and I've no idea why.  Art!

     What on earth?  Is the algorithm confusing me with a farmer?  Have I ever posted or boasted about owning chickens?  I like scrambled egg but not enough to resort to owning chickens in order to guarantee egg supplies.  Dear Youtube algorithm, I do not own a single chicken, never mind a whole flock that would necessitate purposed accommodation for them.

     Bah!

Just At Random

Have a nuclear-powered atomic sausage.  Art!

     Probably unwise to eat it.

Jake Abroed

NO!  That is not a spelling mistake, it's an hilarious pun I tell you.  Laugh or it's the Remote Nuclear Detonator, no mucking around with the Remote Nuclear Tormentor.

     If you've been reading BOOJUM! for any length of time then you'll be familiar with the name 'Jake Broe', whom is a Youtube vlogger and who's been covering the war in Ukraine since day one.  He has gradually acquired a very large audience, thanks to his consistently excellent analysis and coverage.  Normally he puts out a vlog every other day.

     But not this week.  For why?  Because he's taking his first holiday in 7 years, and is going to South Korea.  He taught English there for 6 years, before joining the South Canadian Air Force.  He posted a short vlog with no commentary.  Art!

This really is letting the pictures tell the story

Book porn

    Not sure how you'd reach the upper shelves.  Library book-carrying drone?

      In the meantime I shall make do by watching more 'Professor Gerdes Explains", whom is another Youtube vlogger who posts at least once daily, in lengths of 15 minutes at most.  In the case of both himself and Jake it's highly amusing to see them trying to pronounce the names of Ukrainian towns and villages.


Finally -

Going out with more QI Banter - 

"A woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainty" - Rudyard Kipling

*  Caught swigging the mess brandy without a chit

Grin And BEARRS It

Here, Only The Lawyers Win

I'm going to detail another instance from 'Be Amazed''s Youtube channel 'Most Expensive Mistakes In All History' and at first was concerned that it might not hit a high enough word count to reach Intro status.  Not to worry, I've got a page of A4 notes to work from.  Art!

I present you, gentle reader, with the henge of Mor Hin Khao at Chaiyaphum, making it one of Thailand's Stonehenges.  For we will be dealing with Thailand and another variety of henge.

     First, a bit of background.  BA is rather coy about attributing what follows to corruption, but I'm not.  The Thai government of Prime Minister Chatichai Choonhavan in the early Nineties was very, very dirty.  Their Cabinet was openly used to enrich members and their business pals, usually on infrastructure projects; stick a pin in that, we'll be coming back to it.  Art!

Ol' Choony

     Things got so bad that the army mounted a coup, absent bloodshed, in 1991, and took over.  Only, they were quite as corrupt as the people they ousted, and the Thai population eventually got so fed up they revolted in 1992.  This resulted in the creation of a new Constitution in 1997.
     Back to BA.  In 1990 the State Railway of Thailand drew up a contract with a Hong Kong company, Hopewell Holdings, to construct 37 PROUD IMPERIAL MILES of elevated mass-transit railway, named for the purposes of this Intro as the 'Bangkok ElevAted Road & Rail System', hence BEARRS.  It was to link the international airport at Don Mueang to Bangkok city centre, and to reduce the horrendous traffic congestion in the capital.  Art!

Total gridluck, which is like gridlock but worse

     Projected cost was $3.2 billion, and Hopewell actually had a background in infrastructure construction, and I know this because I went and checked.

     HOWEVER at the time of signing, there had been no feasibility study done for the project, nor a timeline.  Remember what I said about corruption?  Someone was getting a whacking big backhander from this and a feasibility study that quashed the construction would mean no embezzlement or bribe money.  Art!

     Problem number one was legal.  Ownership of land along the projected route had not been determined before approval, and determining who owned what proved to be incredibly time-consuming.

     Problem number two was political.  As Cabinet members were changed, they shut BEARRS down as being a bottomless money pit, only for a new arrival to start it back up again as an essential infrastructure commitment.  This happened several times and played merry hob with the timetable.  The first stage was supposed to open in 1995, five years after construction began, with the rest opening by 1999.  

     'Twas not to be.  Asia was hit with a severe financial recession in 1997 and all work on BEARRS was completely halted.  Ooops.  Art!

     After 7 years, only 13% of the work had been completed, meaning at that rate it would take 55 years to complete.  State Railway of Thailand voted to terminate the project in 1998 as Hopeless Holdings had no chance of completing it in a reasonable timeline.

     Inevitably, with huge sums of money at stake, both sides blamed each other.  Both sides wanted compensation, Hopeless on grounds that the government had failed to acquire land with any speed or urgency, SROT allegedly asserting that HH had mismanaged funds and run out of money.

     The lawyers on both sides rubbed their hands with glee.

     By 2010 (!) HH wanted $1 billion for the wrongful termination of their contract, and SROT wanted $6 billion in lost business and damages.  Art!

The lawyers

     By 2023 (!!) the Thai courts ruled that HH's case was valid - BA gets it completely wrong here stating that they weren't successful - and they would  receive compensation,  No incurred costs were published at the time, so I did a bit of digging and SROT were out of pocket to the tune of $800 million, which is why they were looking for a x5 payoff.  They had to pay this sum to HH, whom, however - a word that keeps popping up here - had gone through $640 million of their own capital on BEARRS.

     What remained were over 1,000 concrete pillars, ironically dubbed 'Thailand's Stonehenge.  Art!

     Most were demolished in a scheme that cost another $6 million, though a few remain if you ever visit Bangkok and feel mischievous, alongside the Vibhavadi road.

     To contrast BEARRS with a successful elevated railway scheme, the BTS Skytrain was begun in 1996, long after the years of corruption, and was finished in 1999.  It was built by both Siemens and Italian Thai Development and cost $1.4 billion, spanning 70 kilometres.  So, longer than BEARRS and delivered at half the cost.  Something of a victim of it's own success, it has seen up to 760,000 passengers being carried daily <lawyers look verrrry disappointed at this>.  Art!

BTS Skytrain doing the train thing

     But the lawyers went away happy and well-paid, which is what really matters.  Right?

Now, a short intermission as I go to sort out laundry.  BRB!

More Gentle Shoeing

Hmmm, maybe not so gentle.  Alright, downright vindictive.  Yes, time for another embarrassing photo of Donnie Dorko, this time as a contrast in colour tones rather than being bloated like a flesh blimp.  Art!

     I love the contrast between his sepia-toned face and his bright pink ears, and note that his Hair Helmet appears to be failing to maintain sufficient contact to prevent him looking bald.

     Long after the event, I recall seeing one of these terrible photos on Twitter, and a Comment "He's 79'.  I should have countered 'Is that his IQ or his weight in stone?' but I have it in reserve for the future.

Necessity Is Both Mother And Father Of Invention

Especially when you add a bit of Kozaky ingenuity and innovation into the mix.  Art!

     I would say 'Game Enhancer' rather than 'Changer'.  The tests have shown that a Hornet drone taken to 8,000 metres height can be released and glide for 400 kilometres, rather than the normal 200 klicks.  This would increase the list of targets inside Mordorvia even further, and decrease the effectiveness of orc electronic warfare along the contact line, as well as warning time.  Why so?  Because coming in at a 45º angle means the orcs below don't get warning until the last minute.

     The downside is that balloons are non-steerable, so you'd need to wait for a favourable wind.  Conrad unsure how the weather works on the borders of Ukraine.  Art!

Courtesy  'Dronebomber.  Fill in your own wind patterns.  Blue tracks are jet-powered so deffo not directed by wind.  Just so we're clear.

Updated to add: 340 'Ukrainian Angry Birds' flying tonight.  Mordorvia sowing the wind and reaping the hurricane.  Bomber Harris and the Second Unpleasantness comes to mind.

"21 Days In Normandy" by Angelo Caravagio

Further into Ol' Ang's very detailed account of the 4th Canuckistanian Armoured Division pre-D Day, and how circumstances worked to seriously diminish the division's ability to train as a single entity.  Art!

     This is Mackenzie King, quite possibly the only person bar Mackenzie Crook to have that first name, and he was Prime Minister of Canuckistan during the Second Unpleasantness.  The reason he's here is because when he came to GREAT BRITAIN (ha, take that, Lavrov!), the whole of 4th Armoured Division had to stop what they were doing and parade for him, a process that ate up 4 days that could otherwise have been used for training.  Art!

     This is the Canuckistanian 'Ram' tank, one made by taking the hull of a Lee, changing the superstructure and adding a new turret, to the tune of 3,000 of them.  All the Canuckistanian armoured divisions were equipped with these until early in 1944, when they began to be replaced, slowly, by Sherman tanks.  This meant some brigades didn't get Shermans until May, meaning that much less time to train on them.  The Lee hull did have a certain degree of commonality with the Sherman, but they were not the same.

Finally -

Supplies of loose-leaf Darjeeling are running dangerously low.  A visit to Sainsbo's in Babylon Lite beckons.

All Tea'd Up

No!  That Is Not A Typo

It's me being hilariously creative and clever, and definitely nothing to do with golfing and tatty cleeks or niblicks.  Art!

     I shouldn't have to explain but, go on, here's an atomic-powered golfer with guns.  Thank you AI Art Generator, you are proof we never need fear Skynet arriving.

     ANYWAY what I meant is that I've now gone through my first pot of tea for Sunday.   I may have to sort out my cupboard section to see what the loose-leaf Darjeeling situation is.  So! let us now lay out the Links.

2025

BOOJUM!: Meteor Maker

2024

BOOJUM!: THERMONUCLEAR THRUSH!

2023

BOOJUM!: An Eventful Morning

2022

BOOJUM!: Teyler Made

2021

BOOJUM!: Matte Gates

2020

BOOJUM!: Zinc And Sepia Boutique Karma!

2019

BOOJUM!: Dawn Of The Replicannots

2018

BOOJUM!: Flowers

2017

BOOJUM!: Business As Usual

2016

BOOJUM!: Conrad: A Man Of The People

2015

BOOJUM!: Presenting A Positive Plethora Of Pictures

2014

BOOJUM!: The Wonders Of A Wet Weekend

Why Less Access Means Success

It's A Staple Of Business Procedure

That when you fire an employee - none of this 'let go' nonsense here - that they are given perhaps ten minutes to clear their desk, hand in items like laptops, phones, official USBs and then be escorted off the premises by security, or a more senior colleague if the organisation doesn't run to that expense.  Art!

     There is a reason for this, some examples of which we have covered in 'Destroying an organisation from the inside' -

BOOJUM!: Sabotage!

     The first one we covered.  It is most especially important that any fired employee who worked in IT is NEVER EVER allowed back onto any systems, as they may have maintained a back-door even if officially denied access.  You just fired them, what are they going to do?

     I found another example of sabotage that has only recently been wrapped up in court, so BOOJUM! hasn't covered it before.  Art!

     Meet Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, two brothers from Virginia, South Canada, who were software engineers hired by OPEXUS.  This is a South Canadian federal agency that deals with Freedom Of Information Act requests, investigation systems, audits and workforce management.  It's biggest clients are federal and state agencies, to the number of 45.

     One wonders what on earth their HR department was thinking when they hired the pair above, since both had been convicted for WIRE FRAUD & HACKING FEDERAL COMPUTER SYSTEMS.  Still, boys will be boys, hmmm?  They had both served prison time for these crimes yet they were allowed to start working at OPEXUS.

     When HR finally did it's due diligence, they found the prior convictions, went pale in the face and promptly sacked the pair.  

    HOWEVER - you knew that word was surely a-coming - their system access was not immediately revoked, proving again that HR were hopelessly incompetent.  Art!

     Consequently the pair were able to steal passwords for sensitive data systems, and then deleted 96 (!) databases.  One wonders what the IT admin at OPEXUS were doing whilst this was going on, because it certainly wasn't being proactive.

     They were subsequently investigated by <deep breath> the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Office of Inspector General's Electronic Crime Unit, and were found guilty just a couple of weeks ago.  Sohaib, the muttonhead, made things extra-specially worse for him because he possessed seven guns, which were found when his home was searched.  As a convicted felon it was illegal for him to possess a gun, let alone seven.  He's going to get sentenced in September and is potentially looking at a 21-year sentence.  Oooops.

     No word on OPEXUS's HR and IT leads being fired.  Art!

From a cannon?

     ANYWAY let us get to the meat of the matter, another Reddit tale from 'On Tap  Studios'.  It is narrated by Worthy Internal Technician, hereafter WIT.  He began working at a dotcom that wasn't doing terribly well, alongside Nasty Idiotic Twod, hereafter NIT.

     NIT had delusions of management grandeur and decided they were superior to WIT, despite not having the faintest idea what WIT did, and informed them that they had a week to turn things around or they'd be fired.  

     Without specifying what needed to be turned around, a minor yet critical omissionn.

     WIT, having a backbone of shiny vanadium steel, told NIT to insert it up his nether fundament and back off or he'd quit on the spot.  NIT backed off.  If your sole IT person leaves then you're up excrement creek in a barbed wire canoe with tennis racket paddles.  Art!

     After a year, the owners decided to fire NIT, thanks to info WIT had provided on his poor performance and wasting of company resources.  They then, verrrry much against WIT's advice, gave NIT twenty four hours notice and left him alone in his office all day, without anyone there to keep an eye on what he was doing.

     Apart from WIT, that is, whom as IT head honcho had remote access to NIT's computer.  What was he doing?  O I thought you'd never ask!  Firstly, copying company data from the servers, then deleting it, and emptying his official company contact information folders, proprietary data he had no right to access let alone copy or delete.

     When the (staggeringly naive) owners took NIT for a goodbye lunch, WIT replaced all the deleted data from backups he had.  He made no mention of the USB but from context he took that, too.  Art!

Not his wife!

     WIT also discovered e-mails that showed NIT had been cheating for months, along with a picture of the cheating couple on holiday together.  NIT had been plotting to ditch the wife, keep the house and saddle her with the kids and it was all there in the e-mails, which got sent to the wife's e-mail address.  Sadly we never get to learn what happened to WIT's marriage, except there was sufficient grounds for divorce, and his affair partner wouldn't want to hang out with a man with no job, house or money.

There Has Been A Rich Harvest

Of pictures showing King Piggy in an hideously unflattering light, which is great for the blog as it means I post my slandefamation without having to do much work.  These have all come from the hell-platform Twitter, which is throttling pro-Ukrainian accounts again.  Art!

     Good lord, he looks like a Werefrog three days dead, with sacks, not bags, under his eyes.  Aging in reverse?  Which vision-impaired MAGAt came up with that howler?  Here's another one circulating on social media.  Art!

     I apologise in advance to the orang-utan, which is a sombre and thoughtful creature that never harmed anyone.  The orang-utan is the one to starboard, just so we're clear.

"21 Days" By Angelo Caravaggio

Blimey, this chap is being thorough.  In Chapter One he discusses and analyses "The Division Command Environment" by breaking down what different roles there were and how they functioned.  In "The Key Players" he lists the senior officers in 4th Canadian Armoured Division.  In "Preparation For Battle" he looks at the training carried out pre-D Day.  Art!

     The tall chap to port is Major-General Kitching, the subject of the work.  To starboard is Lieutenant-General Simonds, his superior officer.

     During the invasion of Sicily, all three Canuckistanian ships carrying their 1st Division's communication and HQ vehicles were sunk, a total of 37 vehicles.  Once ashore, as GSO1 of the division, Kitching 'acquired' an armoured command vehicle and three 3-ton trucks, which he was able to improvise into a functional HQ.

That's Going To Sting

Art!

     This map is from September 2025 and is from the very worthy Ukrainian  'Dronebomber', whose stock in trade is creating maps like these.  Now look at one from a couple of days ago, eight months later.  Art!

     The areas attacked have multiplied, including lots inside Mordorvia itself.  A typical night now sees 250 mid- and long-range drones going out.  Art!

     'Staff Agencies of the FSB' in case you were wondering.  Their headquarters on the eastern seaboard of Krim.  Now, take a wild guess at where those drone arrows on the bottom map's southern border are heading?  Art!

     Staff Agencies of the FSB, which gets an absolute MALLETING from 7 drone strikes.  I have omitted one to keep the Snip symmetrical.  Art!

     This is the catastrophic shambles the drones left.  At least 100 FSB were killed or injured, the most casualties they have ever suffered in the Special Idiotic Operation.  Prior to this, in the HIMARS era, the Kozaky would occasionally discover a small gathering of FSB and hit it, killing perhaps half a dozen of them.

     The orcs may have felt safe, being almost 200 kilometres from Ukrainian territory, and with the whole of Krim between them and any drones.  Well, they don't appear to have had any warning in this case, perhaps because the drones came in from the sea.

     O dearie me.  It used to be that being in the FSB gave licence to bully, imprison and torture with impunity.  Not any more.  Getting posted to Ukraine is becoming increasingly fatal.

Finally -

Finally!  I have been saving a grotesque Bookmark in Twitter until I could find a picture of the relevant aliens in 'Dan Dare'.  Art!

     The Hom. Sap. is in the upper photo, and the Mercurian in the lower, just so we're clear.