We Seek To Gain From Mark Twain's Brain

For 'Twas He Whom Came Up With The Classic Line

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics".  He credited Disraeli with creating it, but no, it was indeed Samuel Langhorn Clemens, to give him his real name.

     For this Intro I'm going to be looking at the recent Ukrainian drone strikes on Ruffia's Yandex data centres, drawing on 'Jake Broe', Twitter and 'Ryan MacBeth' whom is no relation to The Scottish Play.  Art!

Sasovo pre-kinetic sanctions

     The three sites hit were Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir.  Sasovo housed two supercomputers used for AI tasks and may not be recoverable.  A Ruffian journalist put it well: "Then it suddenly emerged that tens of billions of rubles had been spent on internet filtering and blocking online dissent, but somehow no one had bothered to protect data centers against potential attacks by enemy drones. "  The Ukrainians were retaliating for attacks on Kyiv's own data centres and seemingly hadn't planned on causing such immense trouble to the orcs; they may be paused at present to see what the longer-term consequences are for Yandex.  Whom still haven't given a timeline for restored operations.  Art!

Oooops

     The same journalist also pointed out that the centralisation of these data centres made them easy targets to hit and destroy.  Rebuilding from scratch would need at least $100,000, sanctioned microchips no longer available to Mordorvia, and at least six months to achieve.

     Where do the lies come in?  Well, Ruffia uses 'bot farms' to push it's narrative on social media, and the traffic at some social media platforms has fallen off a cliff.  Art!

     'Daily activity over 3 months' - this is the neo-Nazi Teuton AfD's traffic activity, suddenly down by 56%.  Art!

     The equally loathsome Reform party's activity also crashed and burned.

     HOWEVER - a word you surely knew would turn up sooner or later - the contention that the bots have vanished is actually a lot more complex than it seems at first sight, and I've Followed 'Ioana' on Twitter as she explained it using words new to Conrad.

     First of all, the very widely-quoted 99% reduction in bot activity takes in all bots, not just the ones pushing Ruffian propaganda, and a lot of that percentage are what she called 'web crawlers' or 'indexers' working for Yandex itself.  "A web crawler (also known as a spider, spiderbot, or automated indexer) is an automated software program that systematically browses the World Wide Web to discover, download, and index web content"

     Secondly, especially with Sasovo going dark, the bots lost access to Yandex's ability to boost them at scale by using YandexGPT and it's 'cloud translation API'.  "A Cloud Translation API is a developer tool that lets apps and websites translate text and documents automatically using machine learning. Most notably, the Google Cloud Translation API uses neural machine translation technology and large language models (LLMs) to convert content across over 100 language pairs".  So they couldn't craft posts in Ruffian Cyrillic, translate it into the Roman alphabet and post out en masse any longer.

     Thirdly, the outage has completely halted 'Indexing and promotion' activity, meaning that the sites web crawlers would rank and promote by the thousand are inert.  "Web indexing is the process where search engines collect, parse, and store webpage information in a massive database so the pages can show up in search results. Web promotion (often tied to Search Engine Optimization or digital marketing) is the set of actions taken to increase a website's visibility, attract traffic, and improve its position in those search results"  Art!

     Jake played a clip of very angry Ruffians, who now have no access to their funds in Yandexbank, and whom cannot order goods or food online, nor can taxi drivers navigate.  Art!

O but they can

     I believe Yandex has just retroactively changed it's Terms and Conditions to remove any requirements to compensate for any losses.  Typical orc corporate behaviour.  Hence Mister Jazz Beard above being angry.  Also a South Canadian who took up the Yandex Disk storage option - a year's worth of cloud storage for $40, totalling 3 terabytes of data.  He had accumulated 2 terabytes of what he called 'rare bottom porn' across a couple of years, only to see it all wiped in a couple of seconds when Fire Point's flaming messenger arrived.  Conrad, whom is not very accommodating at the best of times, is not one bit sorry for him.

     Fire Point did a bit of trolling of their own.  Art!

Trolling at it's best, inspired by "The IT Crowd"

     Note how Dima coyly uses the word 'damaged' yet avoids explaining what caused the damage itself.  Can't have the orcs making themselves look bad, can we?

     Jake ends up with a Kozaky comment about the Ruffian disaster relief plan - build data centres in Kazakhstan.

     Enough of lies and statistics!  Bring on the empty horses!

Actually I Meant Aircraft

Not horses.  Empty or full.

     For we still have many, many photographs of the exhibits at Duxford.  Here's one.  Art!

     Ladies and germs and those unsure, meet the De Havilland DH9, the only airworthy and flying plane of it's type.  Once again you can tell it's an original thanks to the drip trays to collect oil.  The plane was a bomber and whilst the design and construction was good, the engine was not, lacking power and being unreliable.  It took a completely new South Canadian engine to turn it into a much better aircraft.  Art!

     Some of the weird and wonderful adaptations of the Bristol Blenheim bomber, a British aircraft I have a soft spot for.  It was quite spiffy when first introduced but by the outbreak of the Second Unpleasantness it was obsolete and suffered badly when sent on operations.  I think the one supposed to be here was in for conservation work, otherwise I'd have a photo of it, wouldn't I?  Art!

In for conservation

     I was delighted to see this ugly beast, as I'd mentioned it to Darling Daughter in the Air Space Hangar.  It's a Fairey Gannet, and surely one of the ugliest aircraft to ever wobble into the air.  You see it here with it's double-jointed wings folded up, as it was used in carrier operations.  I can't think of any other aircraft that had a double-joint like this.  Art!

     Despite looking as if it got caught in the hangar doors, it was a very successful Airborne Early Warning plane.

Talking Of Aircraft -

I don't fancy being the orc who draws the short straw and has to inform Putinpot that 6 Ruffian Su-34 aircraft are now toast, having been hit on the tarmac in the same location.  Art!

Neptune has entered the chat

     Building shelters or hangars is for wimps!  That's a quarter of a billion dollars - dollars, not rubles - of aircraft destroyed, and about 5% of their Su-34 fleet.  'FighterBomber', a Ruffian milblogger, is going mental on Telegram and shouting that the wrecks need to be bulldozed before the Kozaky get pictures.  Too late mate.  In modern air combat losses are normally in ones or twos, not half a dozen at a time.  Perhaps they could send the rest to Kazakhstan for safe keeping?

More Of That List Of Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Novels Like 'Greybeard'

The only thing the novels on this list have in common is that they are post-apocalyptic.  Here's the next one I've read.  Art!

     I read it once and hated it.  Supposedly a classic, I found it dull and boring.  If you want excitement, do not pick this one up.  It's set in a Catholic monastery in the years following a global nuclear war, and contrives to make this setup utterly tedious.  1/10.  Avoid.  Art!

     This is more like it.  I believe it's available for free on teh Interwebz as I seem to recall that's how I got to read it.  It deals with a small Florida town that has to learn to adapt and survive after, once again, global nuclear war and the collapse of civilisation.  The title is a quote.

Finally -

I need to crank this out and take Edna trotties whilst the monsoon rains have paused.

O Delicious Schadenfreude!

It Contains No Alcohol, Calories Or Long-Chain Polypeptides

We have covered a few disastrous music festivals in the past, such as the Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival and the Fyre Festival, and today I'm going to go over one I've not heard of before: Woodstock '99.  Art!

     As you can see from the poster, it was held in New York State but not at the original 1969 location, meaning the promoters were trying to cash in on the original by connection.  The actual site was the disused Griffiss Air Force Base, and if we prod Art with this electric spoon -

As a site it was big and flat, which is all the promoters were bothered about, as they were finely focussed on $$$ rather than things like utilities for those attending.  Doesn't sound very promising, does it?

     Overcrowding became a major problem.  Despite selling 250,000 tickets and getting  $38 million from those sales, up to 400,000 people were onsite, far too many to be comfortably accommodated and causing vendors to run short of goods to sell.

    Overheating made things worse.  There was no shade or grass, meaning concertgoers were stricken by heatstroke as the tarmac heated up in 38º  temperatures.  There was little free water available and vendors were charging the equivalent of $8 dollars per bottle.  In desperation people broke open water mains, which were then contaminated by overflowing portable toilets.  When the promoters realised dehydration and heatstroke were occurring to over 1,000 people, then they provided free water.  Which also turned out to be contaminated with E. Coli.  Art!

The main stage

     The vendors were also trying to get rich quick by grossly over-charging for food and drink - see above - which antagonised their captive audience, never a good thing where there are lots of people and alcohol is involved.  Check out the Soda Pop Festival to see where this can lead.

     Then there was security, or, rather, the lack of it.  A total of 1,100 security guards were employed, which sounds like a lot but is one security guard to 300 attendees.  Nor were they well-trained.  Nor were they properly deployed.  On the Sunday night rioting (!) broke out, fires were started across the site, cars, trucks and trailers were overturned and set ablaze whilst security looked on.

     Then - we're not finished yet - there was the litter problem, especially at the campsite.  Art!

     I've seen the aftermath of the Leeds Music Festival, where the campsite is merely a rubbish tip with tents, but at Woodstock '99 the site was full of rubbish from the get-go.  Insufficient janitorial staff.

     Moreover, the general vibe of the festival was violent.  There were rapes, assaults and three deaths; two from heatstroke and one hit by a car.

     Reading about all this cement's Conrad's assertion that music festivals are a form of torture you have to pay a lot of money for.

     Okay, transiting from an epic of misery for hundreds of thousands, let us now take a final look at the duelling brothers No-Chrysler-4-Me and Chad Wannabe.  Did I mention that CW hated hated hated being upstaged by his younger brother?  Hearing of NC4M's final camping trip going so well piqued CW to the core, so much so that he decided to visit the very same campsite, solo this time.  His brace of pothead friends had probably decided camping with CW was far too dramatic.  Of course he had to purchase a portable DVD player, but at such short notice he got gouged for it.  Inevitably blaming NC4M for that.  Art!

     He complained that the other campers didn't like him, NC4M acidly commenting that was because on first impression his older brother is 'a whiny bottomhole, mooching hothead or a general douche'.  No love lost there.  Nor would they tolerate any pestering or attempts to steal food or beer.

     Nor was he a fan of the DVD player, since the screen was so small.  He had a TV and game set-up in the camper - just no way to power them.  So he was bored.

     He was even more bored on Sunday, since it rained heavily all day long and he was stuck in the camper.  This does tend to happen in the north of South Canada in autumn, which is why NC4M had gotten his final camp in before the rainy season started.  Art!

     Come Sunday evening, the Mini-Ram wouldn't engage gears, even if the engine did start.  Utterly defeated, CW called NC4M for a tow in a massive blow to his ego.  Sportingly, his younger brother showed up with a can of Lucas Transmission Fix and a bottle of transmission fluid, as it had all drained away since CW didn't bother to check levels.  The Mini-Ram could then engage gears, but NC4M still towed it home to avoid further strain on the engine.  Decent chap!

     CW almost redeemed himself on the tow back but, once in the company of his pothead 'friends' he reverted to type.

     Sadly there is no Part 3.

     How's that for an epic of misery for a single camping person?

Ken Paxton Axed On

Ken 'Walking Dumpster-Fire' Paxton continues to generate hilarious content, which I will maintain is entertainment, not Politics.  He's the incumbent Senator in Texas, currently trailing the challenger James 'Cleaner Than Clean' Talarico in the polls thanks to a murky background of sleaze and adultery.

      Now, the 'Wall Street Journal' has published an article about his shenanigans on New Year's Eve last year.  Art!

     Also present was Anosh Ahmed, another fugitive from justice in South Canada.  He was indicted earlier this year but failed to return home from Dubai.  Do you know something else?  He donated $190,000 to Ken Paxtons bribe fund SORRY 'campaign fund'.

     When asked to comment about this mysterious congruence, Paxton's Senior Advisor completely dodged the issue and avoided any kind of explanation.

     Bring on the wheelie-bins of popcorn!

Being Literary

Writing this feels like having a shower after the immersion in Paxton's sordid life and times.  So, onto Page 3 of 'Books Like Greybeard'.  Art!

     I first heard this as a play on the radio and was intrigued enough that I took it out of the local library later.  The tale is narrated by Ann, a young woman who lives alone is a secluded valley, where terrain and weather have kept it free from fallout after a global nuclear war.  She thinks she's the last person left alive on the planet - until a stranger wearing an unusual protective suit arrives, towing a trailer -

     It's pretty bleak and it doesn't have a happy ending.  I loved it!

Bringing On Brucie

The Pennington chap, that is, with more slideshows from the Youtube channel 'Sci-Fi Art' and I promise we're near the end.  Art!

     Aha!  I'm pretty sure this is a book cover.  What we're looking at is one of the 'Elder Gods' dreamed - more accurately, nightmared - up by H P Lovecraft, namely Cthulhu.  Don't ask me how it's pronounced.  One of his residences is visible in the background; artistic licence, since in Lovecraft's reality these places are now sunken beneath the briny deeps.  They pop up back to the surface now and then thanks to tectonic or volcanic activity, and it never ends well for anyone who goes a-nosying.  Let me dig a little.  Aha - Art!

     Ha!  Called it!

     Art!

     They got this one wrong, that's not Bruce Pennington's artwork.  I think it's Peter Jones.  Allow me to check a tad - "The cover artist for The Book of Frank Herbert under Panther Books varies by edition:

• 1977 Panther Books Edition: Illustrated by Peter Andrew Jones.
• 1984 Panther Books Edition: Illustrated by Bruce Pennington."

     They got the wrong edition.  Ooops.  Art!

     That's the Brucie cover they meant to put up.

     And with that we are DONE!

Szárnyak és Dolgok!

Which Is, Obviously - Of Course! - Hungarian For 'Wings and Things'

For Lo! we are back to the IWM at Duxford and the continued documentation of the exhibits there.  So far we haven't even finished with Hangar 1, so let our journey recommence.  Art!

The Conservation Hall

     I believe that's a Tornado at bottom starboard, in front of a Spitfire, and that's a Sea Venom to port, wings folded up as it was a carrier-based version of the fighter.  What I was most interested in was the Lancaster bomber at the back; being in here for conservation work meant it not being on display at ground level, a shame as they are impressively enormous aircraft.  This view is from the observation gallery at the entrance.  Art!

     Well, I thought it was amusing.  Here's one of the lampshades in the cafe, shaped like a cloud.  Art!

     This is the Conservation In Action Hangar, a separate and larger facility than the Hall in Hangar 1.  The fighter here is a South Canadian Grumman F8F Bearcat, designed as a carrier-borne fighter.  They only arrived in service in May of 1945, so weren't used in  Europe, only in the Pacific.  It mounted the biggest engine possible in the lightest airframe and, consequently, went like stink squared.  You can tell this is an original by the drip trays under the engine, since all these old birds leak oil.  Art!

Note the oil drip tray!

     I thought this shot was interesting as it shows the kind of mechanical kit required to keep the old birds in servicable condition.  The aircraft is, I think, a Gloster Gladiator with the engine dismounted and the propellor blades removed; for easier access I suppose.  Conrad guesses re-mounting the engine will be an interesting process.  Don't drop it!  Art?

     Yup I was right: Gloster Gladiator.

     The lines are South Canadian but this is a French fighter, the Curtis Hawk 75 and a very rare bird indeed.  It's fully airworthy and regularly flies in exhibitions, thanks to being pandered to most carefully.  Conrad is unsure why they blindfolded it; to keep veneer off the cockpit canopy?  Art!

     The Glad from the other side.

     Various bits that have been removed from the Glad to either be worked on separately or to enable access.  Note the three removed prop blades and the size of that toolbox.  Toolchest?  Art!

Mystery airframe!

     Actually I can tell from the roundel that this is one of Fascist Italy's fighters, probably a CR42 of the Regia Aeronautica, and if we forcefully prod Art with this electric fork -

Fully assembled

     Art!  O stop snivelling and put a bit of Sudofed on it.

     More stuff waiting to be conserved.  What looks like a Teuton plane with the Maltese cross on the wing is actually a post-war Spanish 'Buchon', using a Messerschmitt airframe and - O the irony - a Rolls Royce engine.  They have been used as stand-ins for the real thing, especially in 'The Battle Of Britain'.  Art!

P-47 with puny humans for scale

     This is the P-47 Thunderbolt, a monster of a plane that was the biggest single-engine fighter of the Second Unpleasantness.  I think it weighed something like 7 tons and it was made out of box girders and railway sleepers.  Conrad recalls the tale of one that made a crash-landing with a live 250 pound bomb under the fuselage, which did the unfriendly thing and exploded.  The aircraft behind the cockpit was destroyed but the pilot stepped out utterly unscathed, although probably needing a change of underwear.  Also nicknamed the 'Jug' for reasons nobody has been able to explain.  Art!

     That's not going anywhere, mate.  Art!

     A caustic comment.  My hands will, indeed, stay off.  Art!

     The only interesting part of 'The History Of Duxford' to Your Humble Scribe, as the rest seemed to be designed with 7-year olds in mind.  Art!

     I'm not sure what this is, exactly.  Let me dig.  Aha!  A Fairey Sea Fury, I believe.  Not entirely sure so we shall move swiftly on - 

     Not the real thing, sadly.  It's a Fokker DVII replica put together by Mr. Paul Ford at his aviation factory, taking about 15 (!) years to build and finished off in the colours of Teuton ace Rudolf Stark.  Yes the Teutons used a colour scheme as bonkers as this one because they were heavily into psychedelia actually quite logical about it.  The colours were printed onto the fabric in a factory, eliminating the long process of painting the fabric by hand and also reducing weight.  At a distance they served to break up the outline against either ground or sky.  So now you know.  Art!

     The first sign of anyone doing conservation.  Although it was Sunday.  Also, this is a replica of a Fokker Treidekker DR1, or triplane, rather than the real thing, done up in the colours of Von Richthofen.  The triple wings gave it an excellent rate of climb and a very small turning circle, but they added significant drag, limited their top speed and prevented diving quickly.  Which is why they were not persisted with.

     Okay, that's enough Dux for one day.  More to come, so I hope you like wings and things.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

I've yarked on already about how my newsfeed algorithm keeps throwing up bizarre mechanical products, which I then have to investigate, meaning the algorithm smugly thinks it's O-so-correct.  Here's another.  Art!

     From that long mechanical saga about his Ram and Mini-Ram, I am able to identify this as part of an engine.  Not something I would ever be found working on.  In fact to Conrad a 'Supercobra' is one of these.  Art!

     I bet that algorithm is pleased with itself.  Piker.

More Andorra

Currently 'Flavour Trip' are playing in the background, from a Youtube vlog they made in February, in Andorra.  Art!

     Very picturesque, also very cold.  Note that Amii is wearing warm clothing rather than her customary wisps of chiffon.  Art!

     Cool, an above-ground hobbit-hole.  They're probably not going to make much use of the - pool?  Hot tub?  Jacuzzi?

Bad News For Droopy

I bring you abject proof that Donnie Dorko has mashed potato for brains.  Art!

     Neither Prez Zed nor Putinpot were aware that they'd agreed an energy ceasefire, principally since they hadn't.  At this point Donold Judas Trump seems to be taking advice from the voices in his head.  What next?  'The United States Of Trump'?  'Pepsi-Trump'?  'God King Emperor Of The Universe'?  Art!

     Wow he looks OLD.  And swollen.

     His defamation case against the BBC is also not going well for him.  His attorneys immediately dropped the case for financial harm being caused to him when the BBC's attorneys demanded discovery of all his 400 businesses.  He dare not allow an independent audit of his finances as all the corruption, grift, bribery and fraud would come to light.

     The BBC's attorneys were also trying to serve subpoenas to his idiot children, who used the Secret Service to prevent the papers from being delivered.  So, a judge admitted that he saw no compelling reason not to send them electronically and by registered post, given the scale of money involved; so the idiot children and their spouses have now been served and will have to appear in court if the case goes to trial.  I can guarantee they're not happy about that.  I can also guarantee that Don Snoreleone will happily throw them all under the bus to keep himself out of trouble.  Art!

     This is why I call him 'Saggy'.

     There's also the absence of the Ruffian bots on social media that have been promoting him and MAGA, thanks to that third Yandex data centre being hit.  I read in a Tweet that their own internal documents stated a single data centre going down could be managed reasonably well; two going down would make things extremely hard; three down and their whole system collapses.  Thus Twitter is now a much quieter, less rancourous place.

 

Finally -

Leaving you with a Biercism.

"Deny, v.t.  See HURL BACK THE ACCUSATION"