The Siege Of Liege

Ha!  Fooled You, There Have Been Numerous Sieges

 - of this Belgian town over the centuries, the most recent being the one carried out by the Teutons in 1914, during the opening days of the First Unpleasantness, which is the one I want to briefly touch upon, as - you may be ahead of me here - this preamble is not the main Intro.  Art!

    It's surprisingly difficult to find photographs of the 12 forts before the siege began, so that above will have to serve.  They were huge concrete structures erected in the late 19th century as a 'Just In Case' if the Teutons or French got over-frisky.  They lasted all of 11 days in August 1914, the last one falling on August 16 as the Teutons annihilated them with special super-heavy artillery designed for just such a job.  Art!

The 'After' pictures

     Including some Austro-Hungarian special Skoda 'morsers' borrowed specifically for the operation.  

     The ring of forts, as mentioned, lasted only 11 days when under Teuton  bombardment, with one weakness being a lack of sand layers to absorb shell detonations.  A siege of that short a duration means the garrison didn't have to suffer the ignominies of running short of food, water, ammunition and port in the mess.

     HOWEVER! a word you were surely expecting, over on the Eastern Front matters took a different term at the Austro-Hungarian fortress town of Przemysl.  Art!

     As with Liege, the town was surrounded by a ring of forts, and note the legend giving scale in PROUD IMPERIAL MILES.  

     Just to recap a bit, late in 1914 the Russians had successfully occupied Lwow/Lvvo/Lviv/Lemberg <delete where necessary> and then advanced on Przemysl, pushing the Austro-Hungarians back to the Carpathian Mountains.  Thus began the first siege, as of 28th September 1914.

     What was different about this one as compared to that of Liege?  Well, it went on for a lot longer, the defenders were better prepared, and the besiegers were - ah - how can I put it? Russians.  To exemplify, after the town and forts were surrounded - 'invested' in siege parlance - the Ruffian general in charge ordered a frontal assault that went on for days, achieved nothing and resulted in 40,000 casualties.  Ooops.  Art!

     It has to be a painting as the Russians don't seem to have taken copious photographs of their repulse.  How very odd.

     ANYWAY AGAIN one reason this headlong bashing failed is because the Hapsburg commander <takes deep breath> General Hermann Kusmanek von Burgneustadten had taken 20th century precautions, having rapidly established networks of protective trenches and barbed-wiring them to the value of 600 miles.  To have that much barbed wire in stock presupposes intelligent foresight, which is unusual at this stage of the conflict.  Art!

     Given the ebb and flow of warfare at this point, the Hapsburg armies came back in October and raised the siege, Hoorah! a loud reply.  Then they got pushed back again and the siege began again as of November, and in earnest this time, no suicidal frontal assaults.  The Russian strategy was to starve the garrison out and bombard them ceaselessly whilst doing so.  

 There were a couple of aerial innovations during the siege, notably the Ruffians being innovators in the field of tactical bombing in December 1914.  Art!

    How splendid to know that your siege is making history!  To counter the siege the garrison also used aircraft to send out mail, as well as sending mail in balloons when the wind was right, and pigeon post before the garrison got too hungry.

Art!

     Not so much 'Europe after the rain' but 'Przemysl after the siege', as it got a right shoeing for months, between the shelling and bombing.  Numerous Hapsburg attempts to reach the garrison failed until Conrad* von Hotzendorff, the Hapsburg's biggest wig of bigwigs, informed von Burgneustadten in late February that there wouldn't be any more attempts to raise the siege.  Ooops.

     The garrison surrendered on 9th March 1915 after 113 days, yielding up 117,000 troops and 700 guns, in what was the high-water mark of the Ruffian war effort, especially as the unsuccessful Hapsburg attempts to raise the siege had been far more costly than the siege itself - up to 800,000 Austro-Hungarian troops were un-alived or taken prisoner, much to the discomfiture of Conrad** von Hotzendorff.  Art!

"Fixer-upper for sale.  One previous owner."

     Perhaps the greatest blow of all was to Hapsburg morale, which saw their prized fortress overrun by the Rus.  Nor were the Teutons impressed with the martial valour and capacity of their ally.

More Ungentle Shoeing

This one is courtesy David Pakman on Youtube, from 10th August 2026.  You see?  You see how painstakingly I maintain my records? and also why I will never be allowed to enter South Canada under the present administration.  Art!

     The lights are on, barely, yet there's  nobody home.  By this point Fat Caligula is now having trouble getting in and out of his golf carts, and the purple wimwams have spread up his arm.  He's rotting apart from the inside out, which is probably why he ascends and descends stairs so gingerly; a sudden fall would cause him to split in half.

Back To Bedlam

Since it has come up in my news feed, I am going to address the share value of the Trump Media & Technology Group. which has gone unreported here for many months.  Art!

     TMTG posted a loss of $238 million in Q2 of 2026, which is not very good, in case you were wondering.  You may, sweet summer child that you are, wonder if this total is an improvement on Q2 2025.  Look at the graph to determine that the answer is 'No'.  In fact the losses in Q2 of 2025 were only (!) $24 million.  Ooops.

     Art!

     'Twould appear that the reason Trump's media holdings made such an enormous loss was because they were indulging in both Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, more scambles that, as an investment strategy, resemble the image above.  Art!

An echo chamber

     One thing about 'Truth Social', the sole company asset, is that the users of this social media platform are all fanatical Trump cultees, whom agree fervently with everything he says and does.  Thus is created the 'echo chamber' phenomenon, where people don't bother to stay as there's no challenge or difference in posts.  Art!

Thank you  AI Art Generator.

     So, the visitors at TS have plummeted over the past year, from 436,000 in July last year in total, to 261,000 in July this year.  Typically, Twitter receives 3.3 billion hits per month on average, or over twelve thousand times Donnie Dorko's traffic.  

    You may be holding out hope for the company's profits to transform this doomy financial picture.  'Fraid not.  They only came to $1.17 million to date.  Sorry!

Back To Bruce

Pennington, that is, the current focus of our looking at his portfolio on 'Sci-Fi Art' over on Youtube.  Art!

     This does remind Conrad of another cover, one of the 'Lucky Starr' juveniles from Asimov, let me just check -  Art!

     Perhaps thematically similar, if not alike.  Hmmmm.  Next!

     O it's that band again! the one with 'Blood' in the title that I can't recall totally and cannot be bothered to look up, either.  Tut tut publishing house!  Art!

      O dear me, AGAIN!  Don't these people realise that Bruce needs to pay the mortgage, buy in his groceries, fuel the car and get more paints?  The utter cads and bounders!

     THIS IS INSUPPORTABLE!  DOG BUNS BRUCE I AM GOING TO BE USING THE REMOTE NUCLEAR DETONATOR THANKS TO THIS!

     <short pause for blood pressure to subside>

     I've checked ahead for the next image and it's a different one, huzzah!

Another What On Earth Moment

According to all the pundits and everyone on social media, This Sceptred Isle is undergoing a drought thanks to extreme heat conditions, and I can indeed confirm that I'm guzzling half a gallon of water, not to mention tea and carbonated swill.  So - WHY?  Art!

Finally -

Bracing for the eclipse later tonight - this being typed on Wednesday afternoon despite what day you're reading it.

*  Excellent name!

**  Still an estimable name!

To Make It Make Sense

Allow Me To Shamelessly Exploit One Of The Best Debut Albums Ever

As if anything like conscience, morals or respect for a musician ever had any effect here at the blog.  Art!

     Well worth a listen.  You, children of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, might have a little trouble parsing that title, so just imagine that instead of 'Wireless' it says 'Radio', because that's what it was.

     All clear?  Good.  Let us proceed.  As radio emerged as the media method in the Twenties here in This Sceptred Isle, broadcasts began to span the nation.  By 1922 the 'British Broadcasting Corporation' had been created, with the splendid motto 'Nation shall speak unto nation'.  Not that all spoken was worthwhile, since the first commercial broadcast was of an opera singer.

     ANYWAY Art!

     BBC headquarters.  No expense spared for a national institution!

     Here an aside.  It's a given that all the right-wingers in Perfidious Albion detest the 'Lefty' BBC, whilst all the left-wingers in Perfidious Albion detest the 'Pro-Establishment' BBC, so if it's offending everyone equally it must be doing it's job properly.

     ANYWAY AGAIN back to the radio broadcasts.  By September 1923 these had reached such a profligacy that they required a magazine to inform the listening public.  Art!

      By 1936 the Beeb had ventured (first across the globe) into the dizzyingly new medium of TELEVISION! which has made a lot of people very angry because they can't use their imagination and the cost of a licence <Cont. Page 96> Art!

     Inevitably, the 'Radio Times' began to - you may be ahead of me here - list television programs in it's weekly publication.  There was a separate section for films being shown that week, which was outstanding in the double-length Christmas edition.  Conrad could look at all the films his parent's refused to watch.

     ANYWAY ANYWAY what has provoked all this sepia-toned nostalgia?  O I thought you'd never ask!  An image from Facebook is what.  Art!

     The date of publication is important, since the six-week holiday from school for that year had begun as of July, and would continue to run until early September.  So Conrad was at home in the holidays for this page of the 'Radio Times'.  Let's have a closer look at the individual programs.  

'The Flashing Blade': This was a dubbed French program, split into umpteen 25 minute sections, to play across the summer holidays, and I would definitely have been watching this episode as of this date.  Art!

     Terrific theme song, which was in English.  Conrad cannot remember seeing the last episode, so please - no spoilers in the Comments.

"Noggin and the Ice Dragon":  Ah yes, Noggin the Nog, the semi-animated tales of a mythical Norseland and it's inhabitants, one of the outputs from the Postgate studios.  If Art will put down his bowl of coal - 

Supper's ready

     For an 'Ice' Dragon it more resembles sentient spinach.  Art!

     This is shorthand for 'Kid's programs are over for a couple of hours, let the adults watch the batting with a glass of beer'.  I've no idea what happened to the other 4 tests, Conrad is a howling black hole of ignorance when it comes to cricket.  Then, early afternoon -

"The Herbs": Okay, kid's programs are back.  This one was another animated one, that Conrad rather liked.  The central character was a lion dubbed 'Parsley', since all the characters were named after - once again, you may be ahead of me here - herbs.  Thus Dill the Dog, Sage the Owl, Lady Rosemary, the Chives, Bayleaf the gardener - Art!

"The News": Now, back in the early Seventies all the newsreaders were men.  None of that silly gender equality back then.  Note that the weatherMAN also gets a credit, since this is Perfidious Albion and we take our climate seriously.  Art!

     That is the late, great Kenneth Kendall appropriately in black and white, as the new-fangled colour television was still a novelty.  Art!

     Back to the grown ups, in Welsh this time, with an Eisteddford to endure.  Then more cricket.  The British love love love their cricket, but to Conrad it makes as much sense as Welsh.  

"Play School": This was a flagship of the BBC's children's broadcasting, that was around for decades.  It featured a shifting cast of presenters, a set of dolls and a series of windows that the program took an exploratory trip through each day.  Art!

     Conrad always treated it with mocking disregard, as he was far too old and mature to bother with a 'baby's program'.  So I'm not going to spend any more time on it. Tee hee!  Art?

     Okay, a cheap and cheerful South Canadian imported space-filler.  Conrad had a soft spot for the verrrry short-sighted Vincent Van Gopher.  Art!

     You and me against the world, Vinnie, you and me against the world.

"Jackanory": One of the BBC's most famous and cheapest programs that ran for decades.  It was simply a presenter - occasionally a celebrity - reading from a book directly to camera, with a few illustrations thrown in during the reading.  Art!

     Art!

     'Harlem Globetrotters' is an animated series, not the real thing, another filler program from South Canada.  I may have seen an episode where they were all playing blindfold, being helped to score by pies being dangled in front of them on fishing rods - Art!

     'Barrier Reef' is another filler program, the difference being that this one is, unusually, Australian.  Conrad remembers seeing a couple of episodes and they were deeply boring.  Art!

      Zzzzzzzzzz -

     It was boring guff about a research ship saili zzzzzzzzzzzz

     Yes yes yes, it may have been terribly worthy and ecology-aware but it was altogether lacking in explosions.  Give me 'Thunderbirds' any time!

     I have put the 'News' in there as at this point the adults took over the television set, the dastards.  We may come back to the more 'adult' portion of the schedule at a later date.  I bet you can hardly wait.

Conrad Yawns

As you should surely know by now, Conrad is not the least interested in the ballfoot game, apart from the BBC's hilariously venomous 'Have Your Say' when fans throw creative insults at each other's teams.

     ANYWAY AGAIN there is some bimbling guffwater who bribed BOOH with a fake peace trophy and whom is back in the news - Art!

     Hey mate, get in touch with a Hollywood casting agency, the next live-action 'Thunderbirds' film that needs someone to play 'The Hood' just landed you a contract.

     O the ballfoot stuff?  Who cares.

On The Loose With Bruce

Pennington, that is, sci-fi artist as featured on the Youtube channel - once more, you may be ahead of me here - 'Sci-Fi Art'.

     Conrad has arbitrarily decided to skip the artwork sequels to 'Dune' such as 'God Emperor of Dune', 'Dune Messiah' and 'Frank Herbert's Recently Discovered Laundry List'.  Art!

     Conrad recognises this one, it was used as a cover illustration - 'Space-Time And Nathaniel' if memory serves.  Brian Aldiss?  Art!

Close enough

     Nathaniel has let himself go a bit, hmmm?  As have those skyscrapers in the background.  Brucey also likes to repeat flying objects ranging back to the horizon, doesn't he?  Hmmm and where did a mountain of skulls originate from, I wonder?

     Having a look at book review sites doesn't help, this is a collection of 14 short stories from early in Bri's career, so there may be a story where an hideous alien sits on a pile of bodies, scanning the skies, but we'll never know unless I buy it and that's not going to happen.  Art!

     Looks like an album cover.  Allow me to dig a little - 

     I rest my case Your Honour.

Conrad: Trailblazing Or Is It The Silly Season?

For Lo! these many years we have been carrying out 'A Little Musical Critique' whereby we rigorously and analyse, in exaggerated fashion, song lyrics.  Of late we have focussed on 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway', which is difficult to make sense of even when quite sober.  Art!

Shall I click?

     Or is this an example of editors without enough content to fill their webpages, and whom resort to the basest of all journalism?

     Don't worry, we'll be returning to TLLDOB, don't doubt it!

Finally -

No photographic evidence but I made a huge bowl of zharkoye last night - Ukrainian beef and potato stew.  

Toppling Timber

We'll Get To The Main Matter In A Moment

Before that, I would invite you to imagine the Carpathian Mountains in the depths of winter, in the year 1915, as the Ruffians are struggling to get over and across them in order to invade Hungary, one part of the Dual Kingdom, only to be thwarted by terrain and weather, both equally bad.  Art!

     Here you see the Ruffians advancing on foot over one of the Carpathian passes.  They had it easy.  The artillery train and freight wagons made heavy weather of deep, wet snow on narrow mountain roads.  To quote from Nick Lloyd and his 'The Eastern Front':  "The horses were completely exhausted, they could not carry the heavy loads, and the soldiers had to pull our carts and guns with their own hands.  In some places, we had to line the ground with felled trees so that we could tow our heavy guns through the deep snow."  Art!

     This is a corduroy road from 1913, made by felling tree trunks perpendicularly to the road, enabling progress over soft ground or snow.  Except absent the snow.  Look at all that toppled timber!

     One wonders what the Hapsburg landowners who owned those forest acres thought of their vandalistic neighbours.  Bad Ruffians!  Naughty Ruffians!  No biscuit for you!  Art?

     Say hello to Devin Stone, the bird-brain behind 'Legal Eagle' , a Youtube channel that deals with - you may be ahead of me here - legal matters, in an entertaining fashion.  In this vlog Devin tackles TREE LAW in three examples, as well as a prologue, which is what we shall be focussing on in this Intro.
     Dev well observed that any case involving 'Tree Law' brings out the frothing vengeful maniac in the mildest-mannered gardener, although in a few cases Vengeance is better pursued than Justice.  As in the case he describes first, to get people's tempers riled up and whetted for revenge.  Art!

     The town of Bowie, which the South Canadians incorrectly pronounce 'Boo-eeeh', instead of 'Bowey', in Prince George County.  For your frustration, neither plaintiff nor defendant are identified by name, har har!

     Devin rattled through this preamble at a rate of knots, hitting the high points that the final settlement came to $935,000, that there had been 9 trees cut down, and the neighbour arranged it all when the plaintiff was away.  The timber company claimed they were perfectly within their rights to accept whatever the neighbour told them as being true.  

     Conrad did his due diligence and also digging.  Art!

     The case began when the trees were attacked in February 2024, the plaintiff returning from a week-long work trip to find a deficit of trees where there ought to be a surfeit.  Neighbour Nasty Ned - poetic licence, gentle reader - had left a note in her mailbox that she only encountered on her return.  The sueing began as of January 2025, so don't let anyone bamboozle you with how quickly the law grinds, as forsooth it does not.

The scene of the horror

     Photos provided by Tree Lady's lawyer, Mister Skipper.  Since there isn't anything in shot to really give a sense of scale, be advised that these trimmed trunks are about 30 PROUD IMPERIAL INCHES in diameter, generally regarded as mature trees.  Note that they left a couple of smaller trees alone, Conrad is unsure why, and in all the local press and Devin's item, there is never any reason why Nasty Ned had the trees felled, unless it was to keep his Evil GPA up to average.

     When it became abundantly clear that the case was going to a jury trial, Nasty Ned suffered a severe collapse of testicular fortitude and settled for $500,000, paid by his insurance company.  The case proceeded against - ahem - 'Unlimbited Tree Services'.  Excuse, bad puns are MY JOB.  Art!

     The jury found UTS to be guilty of trespass and negligence, the former as they had clearly been present on the plaintiff's property and the latter as they blithely accepted Nasty Ned's word that he owned the property, the trees, the sky, the sea and all the little brown bunnies.
     By February of 2026 the case had been completed, with UTS being found liable for $783,000 in restorative damages to get 9 mature trees of similar age to the destroyed ones, a total of $87,000 per tree.  Plus an additional $150,000 in 'non-economic damages'.   Art!

     Lew is an arborist based on Potomac, who pronounced this payment to be the largest in Maryland's history of Tree Law, a record that Chuck Prelipsky will probably glower at angrily, he being the owner of Unlimbited.

     Chuck's pronouncements post-trial did not remedy his business savvy: "Tree companies don't usually check property lines" was one howler he came out with.  No, Chuck, yours may not, but the properly-run ones do.  "He believed both neighbours wanted the trees removed" was another claim, exhibiting his use of telepathy, since he'd never communicated once with the plaintiff.

     He is going to appeal.  On grounds of surpassing stupidity?

     Just imagine the cost of all that timber the Ruffians destroyed back in 1915!

The Haul

I have behooven myself to get off my waffle-patterned posterior and take a couple of evidentiary photographs, which I will cattle-prod Art into displaying -

     The now-mellowing ginger beer, which can have the bottle cap cracked carefully open without the contents emptying themselves upon the landscape like a frothy firehose.  Conrad loves the balmy smell of fermented ginger.  Art!

     The 'Blueberry and Soured Cream Loaf' and no, I don't know why they call it a 'loaf' when it is very obviously a cake.  To be eaten one slice per day, unless it looks as if it's going to go mouldy, in which case it's all stomachs to the crisis.

Pennington For Your Thoughts

Given inflation and decimalisation, one would expect this to have reached at least 10p per thought, unless they're Conrad's, in which case they would run to negative-£4.37.

     ANYWAY back to Brucey and his instantly recognisable artwork.  Art!

     His palette for this one is all yellow and green, as opposed to the blue used for 'Dune'.  Kudos to the publisher for allowing the full landscape-format picture to be used, instead of being compressed or omitted altogether.  Thus you get the benefit of all that - city? coral reef? alien architecture? which Conrad deems looks pretttty sinister in aspect.  One Comment on the 'Sci-Fi Art' webpage said they always felt as if something awful was about to happen in a Pennington cover, just out of shot or seconds later.

     The next few artworks are all book covers for the ever-extending sequels to 'Dune' which I may display or avoid, depending on how I feel.  I'm horrid like that.

'Cibola Burn' Afterthoughts

In case you were wondering, and even if you weren't, Volume 4 of 'The Expanse' is set mostly on Ilus, or New Terra, depending on whom you listened to.  It was one of the thousand new worlds that Hom. Sap. suddenly had access to, thanks to The Engineers and their complex of Ring gates that short-circuited the cosmos.  Art!

     This is the 'squatter's' settlement, a shipful of refugees who didn't bother with charter applications, orbital mapping, robot exploration, formal registration, UN procedures and so on.  They simply blasted through one of the Rings and landed here, desperate to establish a viable settlement.

     Of course - obviously! - this comes back to bite them on the bottom very, very severely, as they don't bother to explore their planet, which might end up dubbed 'New Terror'.  

     There is a vignette towards the end of the novel where the simulacrum of Miller, the world-weary Belter detective, lists various locations on Ilus that neither the squatters nor the official RCE settlers know ought of.  "The orbital bases, the power cores in the crushing depths of the ocean, the library vaults where the old ones had lived, the signalling stations in the mountains, the cities deep beneath the ground -"  Art!

     It'll all end in tears.