If I Were To Say 'Collapsar'

 You'd Probably Frown A Bit

Except no, because February is a dry month for me.  No, it isn't a typo either.  It's a portmanteau word coined by the author Joe Haldeman, combining 'Collapse' and 'Star' together, to convey the concept of a black hole acting as what we now call a 'wormhole' in space, allowing transit of enormous interstellar distances that consume nil time.  Art!

The best cover picture for the novel

     Yes, we are talking about 'The Forever War', a sci-fi novel informed by Joe's experiences as a grunt in Vietnam and the effects of relativistic travel on both warriors and society.  Yes, I have read it several times and have the triple-volume Marvano comic adaptation to boot.  Art!

     If there is one thing to take away from this Intro's intro, it's about the methodology of travelling between stars thanks to the collapsars, which act as a link.

    HOWEVER you are very much mistaken if you think we're here to postulate on military sci-fi, because Conrad is here to talk about another <ahem> Starlink.  Yes, Elong Tusk's internet baby powered by hundreds of orbiting satellites, able to provide secure, timely and redundant internet capability to those with access.  Whee doggy.  Art!

Elong Tusk

     Ol' Tusky was originally quite pro-Ukrainian, until the FSB showed him what kompromat they had on him, and he recoiled.  Probably not taking his library books back on time or passing port to the right, that kind of caddish behaviour.  He also turned off Ukrainian Starlink in 2022 to hamper drone operations, citing humanitarian reasons.  Then, for the next 3 years, he was perfectly happy to allow Mordorvia to use it's illegal, unregistered Starlink terminals to carry out drone strikes and as an operational level comms tool.  Art!

Say hello to Dobbinternet

     Then, a week ago, Elong - actually the head of SpaceX rather than him - agreed to disable all Ruffian Starlink terminals.  Conrad was baffled at this turnaround and wondered if Budanov had acquired even more eye-watering kompromat than the FSB.

     Well, no.  it transpires that Donald Tusk - his real name, honest - the PM of Poland, jibed at Tusk - the pseudonymous Tusk - about inflicting brand damage on Starlink by complicity with Ruffian war crimes.  SpaceX owns Starlink, you see, and SpaceX is going to move from a private company to a publicly-traded one on the stock market later this year.  Art!

     This cutoff has come as an hideous surprise to the orcs, as Starlink is heavily embedded in their comms systems for use at the operational level, i.e. well behind the front lines.  They have no substitute.  None.  The people who might have been working on a Ruffian equivalent all departed Mordorvia in 2022, going to work in NATO countries.  The irony, it explosively deflagrates.  The orcs are going to have to go back to radios, which are far easier to jam or intercept, or even <shudder> mobile phones, which are also easy to intercept and jam, and which helped to pinpoint Ruffian generals at the beginning of the SMP.  Art!

     The orcs have also been installing Starlink on drones, as it gives them Beyond Visual Line Of Sight, extending range to up to 500 kilometres.  That capability is now gone, as is their speed, which is now restricted to 50 m.p.h. and which causes the terminal to continually reboot, killing connectivity.  Ooops.

     As mentioned above, the orcs used Starlink as a comms system behind the front lines, rather than in them, being used by headquarters, senior commanders, logistics hubs, arsenals and ammunition dumps.  Overall, the number of Ruffian attacks has fallen by over 50% as they cannot communicate or co-ordinate, and we have already seen friendly-fire incidents where units have moved into target zones without anyone higher up realising.  Art!

     As a measure of how desperate they are, Ruffians have been trying to pay Ukrainian turncoats in order to register their orcish terminals and enrol them on the whitelist, for which they are willing to pay a whole $240.  The Ukrainian authorities chillingly explained that this was treason, punishable by 15 years to life in prison if caught. You might think that there wouldn't be many takers for that kind of money.  Stick around.  Art!

     Ever quick off the mark, the Ukrainian 275th Cyber Security Division, with the aid of some Ukrainian hackers, put up fake 'Starlink registration' bots, which scammed Ruffian frontline orcs out of €6,000 as they tried to get connectivity back.  Over 2,000 orc positions were precisely l

ocated, and 31 Ukrainian turncoats were identified.  Oooh-err Matron!   Art?

     That word 'desperate' keeps cropping up here.  In order to establish daisy-chains that allow Wi-Fi to function, Ruffians are trying to place repeaters on any high structure, such as the pylon above.  There are two disadvantages to this: any node knocked out immediately kills the whole chain, and the orcs themselves are horribly vulnerable to drone attack.  The one above has about 5 seconds left to live.

     Hmmmmm welllll  not everywhere.  Inevitably, orc blatherers like Solovyov feel slighted and their delicate feelings are upset, so they instantly resort to nuclear fantasies.  Art!

Yes, Vlad, keep taking the medicine

     We haven't even begun to deal with Telegram or WhatsApp yet.  I bet you can hardly wait.

Ghostly And Ghastly

We have been putting up horrible photos of King Piggy since the New Year, and I am delighted to share a new one with you all, revealing what the Boorish Orange Oaf Himself looks like when he's not stuck his face in a gravy-trough.  Art!

     He looks positively anaemic but, I think, a lot less of a sight than his sepia-tinted facespray.  O and a Norwegian posted a wicked caricature of him.  Art!

     This brought about screams of hatred and streams of invective from the MAGA crowd, all trying to say nasty things about Norway and failing because 90% of them couldn't find it on a map with GPS and a bloodhound.

'Gold Brick'

How very apt after an item on Fat Caligula.  Conrad had heard this expression in South Canadian literature but had no idea what it meant, as the contexts assumed one was up to speed on the definition.

     'Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable' to the rescue!  Art?

     It dates from the Gold Rush days of the 1840's in California, when a scammer would sell a fake or real gold brick to his victim, substituting a fake one for the real one in the latter instance.  Then to depart at speed for far, far away, before .45 calibre justice intervened.

     By the Second Unpleasantness the term 'gold-bricking' had come to mean being incorrigibly lazy and idle, seeking to get others to do one's hard work.

This Cannot Be!

Just picked up on an item in my news feed that took me aback, rather.  Art!

     That picture looks rather similar to the cover to 'Time Considered As A Helix Of Semi-Precious Stones' by The Comsat Angels, which m

     ANYWAY I have to rebut this assertion, because otherwise it means the TARDIS and the Time Tunnel don't exist, nor did Catweazle ever make the transition from the Middle Ages to today.  Art!

     He was a magician, you see, transported from the 11th Century to England of 1970, who was forever trying to get back to his own time. I don't know why he'd give up medicines, flush toilets and Vimto for leeches, a privy and water flavoured with algae.  Still, each to their own.
     

Finally -

From my QI book.

"I eat at this German-Chinese restaurant and the food is delicious.  The only problem is that an hour later you're hungry for power."  Dick Cavett

     If you're reading this in the Allotment Of Eden, you may not be familiar with Dick.  He was a South Canadian talk-show host and you can find clips of him interviewing celebrities on Youtube.  Art!

Ant and Dick

Going Down A Bomb

Let Me Explicate This British Saying

Since it's the polar opposite of the South Canadian expression 'It bombed'.  'Going down a bomb' means to be surpassingly well-received to kudos all around; 'It bombed' is to be a miserable failure, akin to 'Melania's box office, which is more like the Luftwaffe's attack on The Allotment Of Eden in the Second Unpleasantness NOT FORESHADOWING MUCH rather than a single piece of ordnance.  Art!

     This is the Burger King at Gunwharf Quay shopping centre in Portsmouth, the site of much of today's Intro, which deals with 'Entitled People' from 'Ripe's Youtube channel.  I had a sly feeling the tale was set in Portsmouth, which was confirmed by a Commenter, who recognised the event and date and named the exact fast-food joint.  Art!

Dateline September 2016

     Unusually, this Reddit yarn identified the location, brand name and mention of another BK in Portsmouth: Fareham.  Very unusual, but since the event took place 10 years ago, the narrator is hugely unlikely to still be in post, nor are any of the other cast members.

Setting The Mise En Scene

Our narrator, 'Lucky', for so he named himself, was fulfilling a management role at the BK already named, even though he wasn't actually a manager.  He had a union contract that gave him a lot more clout than any mere staff member or even another manager, meaning he was Hard To Kill.  SORRY!  Fire, hard to fire.  Art!

      Lucky had frequently butted heads with his Area Manager, whom I shall dub 'Kontra-Kamikaze Karen', hereafter KKK*.  An AM, for your information, has overall responsibility for - you may be ahead of me here - a geographical area and the restaurants within it.  KKK dealt with 21 stores, one of which was her base location.  She had rashly, and without any apparent upper management pushback, fire 82 of the 115 managers in these 20 stores.  

     Aha, I see why she got away with this.  At an average salary of £40,000 p.a. she saved £3.28 million off the budget.  No wonder no pushback!  Art?

     

     Also to be found with KKK was her slavishly loyal minion, Kevin, whom she would regularly hurl beneath the bus because - he enjoyed it?  Definitely Muttley to her Dick Dastardly.  Perhaps she had KomProMat on him.

     ANYWAY thanks to all those managers being fired, there were precious few staff remaining who could do the relevant paperwork to keep the restaurants running, you know, like ordering food.  KKK refused to do any admin for any joint bar her own using the phrase "It'll get there when it gets there", which it didn't as none of the ordering had been done.  Art!

     All 20 BKs close for the day as they have no food, and people go to BK to - once again, you may be ahead of me here - buy food.  DAve The Anodyne, hereafter DATA and KKK's boss, calls Lucky to see what on earth is going on.  He's the Regional Manager, you see, responsible for the whole of Hampshire, not merely Portsmouth.  Lucky explains, to DATA's goggling incomprehension, and the BKs remain closed all day as no food arrived until the next morning.

     Lucky, who is not shy about expressing an opinion, informs DATA that a drunken monkey off it's box on cocaine could do a better job than Karen.

Further Dastardly Deeds

The management trainees that KKK put forward for Lucky to train were, without exception, execrable, chosen only for their ability to lick her shoes to a high shine, meaning that he flunked them out in short order.  Muttley then turned up, whining that Lucky wasn't co-operating with the training program and whom they put forward.  Lucky's riposte is that he has contractual discretion and that if he's going to be training managers, he wants promotion to be one.  Muttley rings KKK and then promises, pinkie swear - actually, no, we don't do that in Perfidious Albion, it would have been 'On My Mother's Grave' - that promotion would come.  Art!

Kev The Were-Mutt

     Two months later there was no promotion, so Lucky takes this up as a grievance with HR, who review matters and come down hard on Muttley.  He is suspended for two weeks without pay and gets a written warning; going straight to this level of disciplinary means one more offence and he gets sacked.  Not that namby-pamby South Canadian 'Let go', SACKED!  Lucky is taken off manager training duties and given a £2,500 bonus.  Justice is served and would you like a side of onion rings with it?  Art!

Don't mind if I do

     At this point we'd normally stop and end the Intro, except I've built up a metaphorical head of steam and feel like making the whole of this blog about our explosive tale.  I shall carry on.

The Black Swan Event

Lucky is informed by the daytime Manager of Gunwharf BK that he's got a better job with better pay elsewhere and is leaving right now in mid-afternoon, thanks ta-ra.  Ooops.  He calls KKK to inform, who throws a right paddy at this and turns up at the restaurant 20 minutes later to see why this has happened.  Her first face-to-face encounter with Lucky ensues, where he tells - not asks, tells - her that if she's going to be anywhere but the office she needs flat shoes, a badge, apron and hair in a ponytail.  This goes down as well as collecting for Oliver Cromwell on the streets of Dublin.  Art!

Collecting for Oliver Dublin on the streets of Cromwell.  I think.

     Then the shopping centre security chap arrives, asking for Lucky.  Not the restaurant manager, please note: Lucky.  He informs that a 1,100 pound Teuton bomb SEE I TOLD YOU FORESHADOWING has been uncovered by a dredger in Portsmouth Harbour and the entire shopping centre is being evacuated, by order of the police.  The staff go into a shut-down routine -

     To which KKK objects violently.  I shall quote Lucky's recollection of their dialogue.

Lucky: Are you saying you are willing to sit here potentially less than 30 feet from a live explosive that has a blast radius of at least 50?

KKK: Well I'm obviously not but it will be your jobs to stay here nevertheless.

Lucky: Okay she's an idiot ignore her.

     Conrad would like to point out that the blast radius of a 1,100 lb bomb is of the order of at least 300 feet, not 50.  Art!

     The Royal Navy's specialist diving unit recovered the bomb, which was towed over two miles away at sea in order to be detonated without risk to life.  50 feet radius my hairy white hindquarters!

     MEANWHILE KKK locks BK's kitchen door, as this is how the staff get ingress and egress, and one presumes she carries the key as an Area Manager might need ingress, too.

     Security chap returns with a police officer, who hops the counter - one imagines 'vaults' is more apt - into the kitchen and confronts KKK, who still refuses to unlock the door.

     Unbeknownst to her, Lucky had been slyly texting DATA all the while about what was going on.  DATA, normally as vehement, assertive and abrasive as a lettuce sandwich, calls her and absolutely tears into her.  I shall append what Lucky later put down as his rancorous diatribe.

"HAVE YOU HAD A STROKE OR SOMETHING!  LET THE STAFF OUT AND GET OUT OF THERE. YOU'RE SUSPENDED FOR TWO MONTHS NO PAY AND IF YOU OFFER ANYTHING BUT FULL ACCOUNTABILITY FOR YOUR <SWEAR> TODAY THEN I WILL FIRE YOU.  JUST BECAUSE I GAVE YOU SOME POWER YOU DON'T HAVE A REASON TO DO WHAT YOU HAVE DONE THESE LAST FOUR MONTHS.  I AM NOT DEALING WITH A UNION DRIVE IN STORES BECAUSE YOU WERE WILLING TO GET THEM BLOWN UP.  WE'RE NOT IN AMERICA WHERE RULES CAN BE FAST AND LOOSE SO STOP LARPING LIKE WE ARE AND DO AS YOU ARE TOLD."

     'LARPING' means a hobby that Darling Daughter partakes in 'Live Action Role Playing', just so we're clear.

     KKK unlocked the door and the staff who weren't able to hop the counter fled.

The Denoument

KKK was banned from the shopping centre for three months, meaning she couldn't go back to Gunwharf BK, thus hampering her job.  She was further suspended from work for two months without pay, meaning about £10,000 cut from her salary.  She got a written warning - same proviso as Muttley - had to undertake empathy and management courses and was sentenced in court to 90 days community service, which in the UK means menial grunt work like painting fences, clearing waste ground of junk and weeding.

     Like a stick of rock, badness ran through her; she messed up again and was fired.

Gunwharf Quays; Verboten for KKK

     I hope you appreciate a British tale of torrid trauma, identified in place and time.  CYA!

*  Yes, I KNOW.

Meat The Ruffians

NO!  That Is Not A Typo

It is an hilarious pun, hilarious I tell you - laugh or it's the Remote Nuclear Tormentor for you!  Art?

Quite possibly a Remote Nuclear Tormentor

     You see, I am trying to combine two different elements from Janet Macdonald's "Supplying The British Army In The First World War", which has been a fascinating and verrrry detailed account of that activity on an industrial scale.  You ought to recall, from an earlier item about sugar profiteers, General Long, who was a canny customer equally as adept at challenging the profiteers as they were at exploiting the system.  Art!

Refrigerated meat storage in a ship's hold

     Moving from sucrose to protein, Great Britain* imported the majority of it's meat supplies (up to 80%), from South Canada, Argentina and Australia as the primary suppliers.  This meant using refrigerated ships, keeping the meat preserved at sub-zero temperatures, a quantum step beyond mere salting or smoking.

     When war broke out, the government requisitioned all those ships with frozen meat transport capabilities in order to supply said viands to the Army.  This meat needed to then be assessed and inspected for fitness to be consumed, a process that did not sit well with the meat-packing companies supplying the meat, who wanted to be able to set their own prices and sell to whomever they wanted to.  Art!

More like Bottomms; recalled and condemned as unfit

     
     So, to try and get round these restrictions, the meat-packers attempted to import substandard meat that would have failed Army inspection, which they could then sell at a huge markup after it's rejection.

     General Long, whose rodeo experience was extensive, arranged with the inspectors to have all this meat condemned as 'unfit for human consumption', which meant it was destroyed rather than passed along the retail chain.  Art!

Smithfield Meat Market circa 1914

     To get around this - O my these capitalist carnivores loved their profit margins - the meat-packers tried sending the inferior meat direct to London to avoid inspection at divers British ports.  General Long, however, whose rodeo experience was extensive, was one step ahead of them and had forewarned the London health authorities of this trick.  They pounced upon this meat, condemned and destroyed it, HA! take that mendacious meat-packers.  Condemnation of their supplies meant £0.00 return, so they gave up.  Art!

     Further to supplying the British army, there were various missions to Tsarist Ruffia, at Murmansk, Archangelsk and Novorossisk, as well as in Western Siberia in the Kurgan Oblast - map above.  These continued to be operational after the Bolshevik Revolution, supplying their British garrisons and the 'White' Ruffian (pro-Tsar) forces.  In retrospect, they were too small, inefficient and regularly looted to be able to support the Whites properly, yet they made splendid propaganda vehicles for the Bolsheviks and the orcs probably still tell tall tales of British ogres ten feet tall with talons and poison fangs 

     ANYWAY Art!

     NO!  This is Kurgan in 1914, not today.  Bite your tongue!  To show how serious the Whites were about plundering - sorry, 'fighting the Bolsheviks' - look at indent they placed at the British depot there:

580 cigars

58 pounds of confectionery

60 pairs of silk stockings

30 yards of dress fabric

85 tablets of perfumed soap

38 bottles of eau-de-cologne

29 bottles of perfume

     The three British soldiers who formally signed for issuing these 'stores' were doubtless in on the scam, and were dismissed from the service.  Ol' Jan does not recount how they managed to get from Western Siberia back to Great Britain*, or if they managed at all.

     So there you have it, an example of probity and integrity in General Long, and another example of how the orc's magpie genes have not changed in over a century.  

The 'Gift Of Anne'

Which, in Welsh, is 'Ynys Gifftan'.  I am talking about a tidal island in the Drywyd Estuary in - you may be ahead of me here - Wales. Art!

Ynys gifftan

     This is from a recent news item on my feed, as it is now on the market for only (!) £350,000.  Part of the estate agent blurb reads "The property occupies a unique and tranquil position" because it's a tidal island, normally cut off by the tide and only accessible by foot at low tide.

     You may not remember, although Conrad does, that many many years ago we had a whole slew of items dealing with British tidal islands here on BOOJUM! as I think they are quite cool.  In fact we covered Ynys Gifftan in May of 2017.

BOOJUM!: Oldham: Overhwhelmed?

     

     The major problem for any potential purchaser is that there are no jetties or wharves on the island, meaning you cannot land, or easily or safely land, anything from a boat, so anything it requires will need to be carried over by foot or taken over by helicopter.  A rather expensive way to do the weekly shop.  O, nor do they have electricity or running water, which is another reason it was abandoned 60 years ago.

More Of Meat, Metaphorically

One of the purchases I made at BOVINGTON TANK MUSEUM in September was 'Meat Grinder' by Prit Buttar, which I have now gotten around to reading.  Art!

     The main part of this work describes the battles for the Rzhev salient, a giant tentacle of Nazi-occupied Soviet territory that was fought over with frightening intensity and then quietly abandoned in the aftermath of Stalingrad.  Art!

     Prit himself is an interesting character.  He read Medicine at Oxford, qualified as a doctor, joined the British army as a Medical Officer in the Royal Army Medical Corps, went into general practice when he left and is now an authority on the Eastern Front of both First and Second Unpleasantnesses.  Hobbies include astrophotography, which is a cut above following a football club.  I have a couple of his books on the Eastern Front as of the First Unpleasantness in my Book Mountain.  If I read these in future I shall let you know.  Conrad bets you can hardly wait.

Talking Of Food Safety -

Conrad noticed this yesteryon and we now have more details.  Art!

     The charges relate to food products including pizza and hummus found to be up to two weeks beyond their sell-by-date, back in 2024.  Now you know why retail staff on the shop floor will move product left at the back of the chiller to the front, so that this type of failure does not happen.  One can also speculate that the Store Manager, and the relevant Department Manager, were either fired or demoted and transferred out, because the buck lands with these people.  For one thing, it damages the brand, and although nobody was reportedly ill thanks to eating dodgy food, that's always a risk as well.  I wonder where the fine was paid from, at the corporate level or that individual store in Barnsley?

O Aye 'Factbytes' Again

One image I snipped weeks ago and haven't gotten around to posting until right now.  Art!

     The main reason is because there were so few of them.  We will omit the Panther as it wasn't the heaviest Teuton panzer by a long way, and instead begin with the Tiger tank.  Art!

Tiger I

     Total produced, 1,350.  Which might sound like a lot except not really.  Compare it to the Sinister's Josef Stalin, where they made 3,850 of the Mark II version and 2,300 of the Mark III, or over 4 times as many.  Then we have the Tiger II.  Art!

Tiger II

     Total made = 490.  About a third of it's predecessor.  Stretching the 'tank' definition a bit, there is the Jagdtiger.  Art!

     Total made = 88 (or possibly as few as 70).  The bigger the vehicle the more time-consuming they are to make, and the more resources they hog, and given Teuton over-engineering, the more expensive they are, and given Teuton engine inadequacy, the more likely to break down.  Note that the total of all three of these AFVs comes to less than the lower number of JSIIIs.  

Finally -

"The road to success is always under construction" - Arnold Palmer

*  Take that, Lavrov!

A Geography Lesson You Never Knew You Needed

PAY ATTENTION!

There will be a quiz later.  Okay, for decades I have heard a particular South Canadian geographical location mentioned, without knowing or caring where it was, up until this very moment: "Martha's Vineyard".  There was a vague sense of it being in the north-eastern corner of the continent, which doesn't really narrow it down since South Canada is so freaking huge.  Art!

     Bottom port.  The island was discovered, named and settled by Bartholomew Gosnold in 1602, named after his mother-in-law.  It is part of the state of Massachusetts, and constitutes most of Duke County, which also incorporates the Elizabeth Islands and Chappaquiddick Island.

     There you go, our geographical lesson for today over.  Now you know where to find it.  

     The island is home to 20,000 permanent residents during the off-season but balloons to 200,000 in the summer when wealthy holiday-home owners come to stay.  There are numerous hotels and inns on the island.  Art!

     Enter Steve Lehto, South Canadian attorney who specialises in Consumer and 'Lemon' Law, which I believe is about products of inferior quality being sold to an unsuspecting public.  Steve himself practices in Michigan, not the Commonwealth Of Massachusetts, but has a Youtube channel where he presents cases that his subscribers send to him, and this one is about <drum roll trumpet call>  TREE LAW!  Art?

     This case was covered by the 'MV Times', where 'MV' means - you may be ahead of me here - 'Martha's Vineyard'.  A property owner in Menemsha, Mrs. Cottle, was suing her neighbours for trespass and illegally cutting down trees on her property.  Said neighbours were the Nixons, who owned the Beach Plum Inn.  Art!

There you go

     The complaint - as they refer to it over there - was lodged in the Duke's County Court in 2019.  Mrs. Cottle alleged that the defendants had deliberately cut down 136 trees on a half-acre of her property, in order to gain better views of the waterfront and harbour at Menemsha.  She was suing the Nixons and the man who cut her trees down, Eric Taylor, for the full replacement cost of said timber being felled.  Art!

     You can see the felled trees above, which included beech, oak and locust species.

     Steve interjected here with a detail from the 'Michigan Complied Laws 600.2919' that determined "It is unlawful to cut down or carry off tree's from another's land', and in Michigan, as in Massachusetts, you are liable to x3 damages if found guilty.  Ooo-err Matron, and we've not even got to the assessed total yet!   Again, Steve interjected there wondering how on earth you'd assess the value of a grove of trees; Conrad can tell him.  You go to a certified arborist, who will examine the stumps, any felled timber, get possible photographic evidence and calculate a total.  

     The Nixons claimed that Taylor was staying at their hostelry as a guest and merely did them a favour by cutting down the trees on his own initiative and that their view of the harbour was already so splendid they didn't need anything cutting down.  Art!

Never travel without one

     This does not compute.  For one thing, Taylor had to dismantle a fence to get onto Cottle's property, so he knew he was trespassing.  For another, how often do you check into your holiday inn clutching a chainsaw and a can of petrol? because there's no way he cut down 136 trees with an axe.

     The case was delayed by Covid and only reached mediation, not even court, in 2022.  When presented with a potential fine of £3.6 million to restore the grove to pre-Taylor status, both he and the Nixons caved.  It's not made clear in the court documents if this is the x3 total from an original $1.2 million or whether the defendants would be on the hook for $10 million if it went to court.  Art!

A view worth millions

     The deal was that the Nixons would pony up $1.5 million and Taylor would pay $1 million, covered by his insurance - which implies he had business insurance as a lumberjack and both parties were lying about intent and capability.  Why not hold out for a jury trial and $3.6 million?  Because, as I'm sure Steve would tell you, a jury's decision cannot be guaranteed to find for the plaintiff, and it would cost a lot more in legal fees, which might not be awarded back.  A chicken on the rotisserie is worth two dodging around the farmyard.

     There you go, justice served and geography elucidated.

ENOUGH!  ENOUGH WITH THE OSCILLOSCOPES!

I fail to comprehend what the news algorithm is working on in order to pimp oscilloscopes at Your Humble Scribe.  Art!

     I remember Gavin, my old boss at Connexions, mentioning that Hawkwind, in their early years, used synthesisers that could only be controlled by an oscilloscope, as they had not yet been plugged into a keyboard, and in P

     ANYWAY ENOUGH OF THIS NONSENSE!

A Correction And An Audit, Thanks To Adrian

Conrad was somewhat surprised to get a Comment on yesteryon's blog, as the valid ones - after deleting ones warning about the imminent Rapture or Vietnamese who-knows-what - only come to 40.  I shall append the Comment from Adrian.

Very interesting about the water pipeline in Sinai, but I don't think that can be a 12" diameter pipe, it looks too small in that bloke's hands to be that size.

     Well observed!  I, too, had my doubts but this was the only photo I could find about pipelines in Sinai.  No photographs even in the British 'Official History'.  Let's reprint the photograph.  Art!

     Take a closer look at the pipe end.  Art!

     The resolution isn't great, but there doesn't appear to be the interior screw thread present at both pipe ends.  Also, note the size of matey's hand against the outside curvature of the pipe.  Art!

     Now compare Conrad's ham-like hands, and we can guesstimate that the pipe is only perhaps 6" in diameter.  Nor is that all.  The pipeline was positioned to the south of the coastal railway being constructed from Kantara, and it's construction always lagged behind that of the rails.  Check these out.  Art!

     Nowhere in the background do you see a railway, either fully complete or being worked upon by gangs of native labourers.  Conrad is pretty sure this is a photograph of a completely different pipeline elsewhere in either Egypt or Palestine.  Nor is that all!  I like to be thorough.  Art!

     According to Youtube, this is a 12" pipe, getting ready for horizontal insertion and with puny humans for scale.  You're welcome!

'Gallantry In Defeat'

Yes, another of Terence Cuneo's wartime daubs, this one depicting an event in the battles of the Gazala Line in mid-1942 in North Africa.  Art!

June 1942

     What you see is the last stand of 107th Battery Royal Horse Artillery, fighting a mixed bag of Teuton and Roman tanks by engaging them with 25-pounder field guns over open sights.  

     THIS SHOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED!

     These battles of the 'Knightsbridge Cauldron' were the absolute nadir of British tactics, operations and strategy in North Africa.  Field guns like these ought to be miles behind the front lines, dug in with a screen of tanks and anti-tank guns well forward of them.  I put the item title in quotes because whilst undoubtedly true, someone had blundered for this to happen in the first place.

You What?

Conrad freely admits he's a dinosaur for whom nothing exists unless it's written down, which is why I have a 2026 Diary, an A4 notepad and a 'Project Book' for hasty note making.  Also, I cannot make heads or tails of this.  Art!

     A sequel to this?  Art!

     Featuring the '2000AD' cult character - 

     Set in a nearby solar system -

     Of course, I may be overthinking this .....