"Meat Grinder"
Then we all know where your thoughts would flit, and normally you'd be correct, unless you were thinking of 'Prime Cut', where the hapless Murphy, sent down from Chicago to Kansas to collect a debt owed, ends up in the livestock processing line. Art!
There you go, Mister Murphy's Meaty Mealtime snorkers, which is how he got posted back to Chicago. By refrigerated freight, one hopes. I compressed the meat processing part as it goes on for several minutes and you might not wish to be converted to vegetarianism thusly.
ANYWAY I have recently finished 'Meat Grinder' by Pritt Buttar, which, if Art will do the honours -
Pritt's work is focussed on the Teuton defence of this salient, and the Sinister efforts to overwhelm it, with the former suffering 670,000 casualties and the latter up to 2.3 million, which is where the appellation 'Rzhev Meat Grinder' comes from. I don't propose to detail the whole book, as it's 483 pages long, but I did make a note - actually folding page edges (the horror! The horror!) - of three separate topics.
One thing that the Sinisters did badly was logistics*, an observation Pritt tartly notes goes back to before the Red Army even existed. When the regime was under the tsars, Ruffian generals ' - behaved as if logistics were an irrelevance'. Supplies and supply chains were expected to magically appear and sustain the army without any planning or preparation. Art!
He points out the organised chaos that enveloped the Ruffian army in 1914 when it mobilised, which ought to have been done by rail and organised in detailed timetables by companies of railway troops. In reality the army was mobilised first, before the railway staff were assembled, leading to units having to march across Ruffia to reach forming-up areas. In fact this is mentioned in Solzhenitsyn's '1914' when an officer proudly boasts that the Teutons need railways to mobilize but Ruffians will happily walk to Berlin.
The Sinister efforts against the Rzhev salient were constantly harassed by the dismal road and skeleton rail net in their rear, with the former becoming almost unusable in bad weather - the 'rasputitsa' that came in spring and autumn - that were as predictable as clockwork yet utterly ignored. Existing roads were not improved, nor were new ones laid, not even 'corduroy' ones. Art!
Teutons building a corduroy road
Traffic control was also abysmal on the Sinister side*, with huge traffic clots forming along the insufficient roads, preventing organised advances or attacks and allowing the Teutons to shift their scanty reserves to threatened areas and defeat attacks in detail. Equipment such as bulldozers to clear snow and level roads was unknown to the Sinisters and needed to wait for Lend Lease to supply them. Art!
There were also fliers printed by the Sinisters for onward delivery to the Teutons, which now read as tragically ironic. The text was supposedly sent as a reply by the Zaporizhzhia Cossacks to the Turkish Sultan in the War of 1672, whom told them to submit to his will and rule*.
"You are the Turkish Sultan, brother and comrade of the damned devil, and assistant to Lucifer himself! What sort of knight are you, when you can't kill a hedgehog with your bare behind? Your damned face is a mess. You son of a dog, you will not have the sons of Christians under your rule, we are not afraid of your troops and will fight you with earth and water, we will destroy your mother.
You are a Babyonian cook, a Macedonian charioteer, a Jerusalem brewer, an Alexandrian goatherd, a pig herder of Egypt, an Armenian thief, a Tatar bandit .....you pork-faced mare's anus.
That is how the Cossacks answer you, ragged one."
Allow me to put up a close up of the painting above. Art!
You can see where the Ruffian insult 'Khokhol', 'crest' or 'tufty' comes from, that being the de rigeur hairstyle of a proper Cossack.
ANYWAY AGAIN one has to wonder what on earth the baffled Teutons made of these propaganda leaflets. Toilet paper, probably.
Now, one thing to bear in mind about 'Meat Grinder' is that it was published in 2022, and thus written up as an MSS in 2021. Pritt includes a rather eyebrow raising speech by Putinpot in 2020, when a memorial to the Rzhev Salient warriors was raised.
"Participants had written just a few scarce words. It was too difficult to remember that terrible Rzhev Meat Grinder, as it is sometimes called. Fierce, exhausting, bitter fighting continued in this area for months. Soldiers fought for every single grove, hill, every square metre of land.
It is impossible to think of the Red Army's losses in those battles without pain. More than 1.3 million people were killed, injured or recorded as missing."
Getting close to that total yourself, Peter The Average. Art!
Bear With Me On This One
Back in the good old days of the Cold War, there was a branch of intelligence and media speculation dubbed 'Kremlinology', where observers in the West sought to understand what was going on within the Sinister Union. They didn't have much to go on, as Churchill once observed that Kremlin politics resembled two bulldogs fighting underneath a rug; all you saw was the end result. Art!
They pored over pictures like this. Who was present? Who was absent? Who was centre stage? What were they wearing? Who was on the periphery? and so on.
With that in mind, I have another dubious photograph of the Boorish Orange Oaf Himself. Art!
King Piggy might not be aware of this scrofula, as otherwise he'd hike up his collar or slather makeup on it. The White House has claimed the purplish blemish is caused by 'skin cream', which one would expect to, you know, reduce bruising/strangling/bubonic plague symptoms, not increase them.
Doubtless there are thousands of people opining on social media about what this is and how it was caused. An overdose of golf?
Interesting Backstory
Conrad occasionally watches 'Brandon Herrera's Youtube channel, which I cannot recommend as he swears a lot, and has dubious political views, but he's amusing when he sticks to guns. Of which he has an awful lot. He came up with a short video about - Art!
This is the 'Zip 22', named after the calibre of bullet it fires, the .22 Long Rifle round, which is one of the smallest and least effective rounds out there. The maker, USFA, had previously made high-quality replicas of South Canadian Civil Unpleasantness revolvers.
Then they made this item. Art!
Brandon simply could not manage to hold this weapon comfortably, as the stupid dual-trigger arrangement gets in the way. To cock the gun, that is, to put a round from the magazine into the breech, you have to PUT YOUR HAND IN FRONT OF THE MUZZLE and press the cocking piston. The ammunition does not feed properly and frequently jams; on one occasion Brandon had to remove a round that had somehow loaded back to front. Everything bar the firing pin, spring and barrel is made of polymer, so if it gets hot, it will melt or fracture.
Not only that, USFA sold all their production plant for making replica pistols in order to tool up to make the Zip.
The persuasive rumour is that president and business owner, Douglas Donnelly, was about to be taken to the cleaners in a bitter divorce battle. So he deliberately sabotaged the business, which closed in 2017. I cannot find anything to confirm this but you must admit it would explain a lot. Art!
When they made proper guns
Get Thee Behind Me, Click-Bait!
It's only allowed if I'M doing the click-baiting and I don't care how much of a double-standard this is, because once again whose blog is it? Art!
Going by the description and Noah Wyle, this is 'Falling Skies', which Conrad watched for the first season when it was originally broadcast. It was around for five seasons so it did something right. Perhaps time to take it up again?
Finally -
Bring it on down Ambrose!
"Cynic, n: A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom amongst the Scythians** of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision."
* Also a contemporary problem.
** Proto-Ruffians
