When 'S' Met Herman

And Created The Sherman

The tank, that is, named after General William Tecumseh Sherman, a man who had been at the sharp end of war and had no time for anyone who considered it noble or glorious: "War is hell" is one of his pithier sayings.  Art!

     Art!

Ready to render Hell unto Heinies

     Most of this Intro, if not today's whole second blog, is going to be given over to annotations I made of an excellent 'Historical Notes' Youtube vlog about the Sherman, which I'll provide a link for at the end.  The title is "The Sherman Tank Was Never A Death-Trap", which is setting out your stall with confidence.

     First, we travel back in time to 1998, when the work 'Death Traps' by Belton Cooper was published.  Art!

DANGER WILL ROBINSON!  AVOID!

     There's only a couple of problems about that status, in that DT is almost completely wrong, and it's almost completely wrong.  I realise this is the same thing twice but I wanted to emphasise the point.

     Cooper spent the Second Unpleasantness, not as a Sherman crew member, but as an Ordnance Officer in the South Canadian 3rd Armoured* Division's Maintenance Battalion.  It was his job to co-ordinate the recovery and repair of damaged or destroyed Shermans, NOT surviving Shermans.  Also M5 Stuarts, though they don't get a mention.  Art!

     3rd Armoured fielded around 230 Shermans and up to 50 Stuarts.  

     So, Cooper's assertions and allegations were made on the basis of 100% failures and are a classic example of 'Confirmation Bias', where prejudices act to focus attention only on facts that confirm those same prejudices.  

     DT was highly influential because it sold so many copies, and Cooper's claims were widely believed, that is, the Sherman was rubbish and Teuton tanks were better.  Art!

     'Historical Notes'  drolly comments "None of this survives contact with the actual evidence".  For example, the Office of the Adjutant General compiled statistics as seen above, which detailed casualties in the European Theatre Of Operations, ETO hereafter.  Steven Zaloga, the widely-respected author of military histories, used this source to provide hard numbers for branches of service.

Total armoured vehicle personnel in ETO = 49,000

Total armoured vehicle personnel in ETO killed, injured, missing or POW = 1,581

Thus a 14% casualty rate, compared to the 80% in infantry units.  So a Sherman tank crewman was x6 times less likely to become a casualty than the PBI.

     None of these statistics are provided in Cooper's work.

A Dubious Dateline

You may be ahead of me here, as the publication date for DT was 53 years after the end of the Second Unpleasantness.  Cooper was born in 1917 and jitterbugged off this mortal coil 19 years ago, so this blog won't upset him.  

     HN points out that Cooper wrote DT from memory, 53 years after the events he had witnessed.  So there is an element of doubt about how well he recalled these events.  Art!

Salute for Steve!

     Steve has a Bachelors and Masters in History.  When he wrote the above tome he went back to primary sources, a touchstone for historians, using South Canadian After Action Reports compiled at the time to inform his work.  Art!

     This is one of the essential reference works on the Sherman, compiled by Ol' Hunny from original South Canadian Army sources.

The Question Of Fire

Or, why the Sherman was equated with the Ronson lighter, which 'Lights first time', an urban legend that only originated long after the Second Unpleasantness was over.  Art!

A bit of gaffer-tape and it'll be fine

     Cooper's assertion is that the Sherman was dangerously flammable due to the petrol engine, which would ignite if hit.  Curiously, I have recently read somewhere that a diesel engine, thought to be much safer thanks to not burning readily, would suffer aerosolisation of the diesel fuel if hit and burn just as readily as petrol.  Not sure how true that is.

     ANYWAY British and South Canadian Operational Research Teams found that between 60 - 80% of brewed-up tanks were caused by ammunition cooking-off.  Bagged powder charges stored in bins along the side of the hull interior would explode if hit.  Stowage was redesigned to place these on the bottom of the hull, and the bins were double-walled, with ethylene glycol filling the void - known as 'wet' storage.  If a bin was hit, it would immediately be swamped with the fluid, extinguishing any fire.  Art!

      This redesign came in mid-1944 and dropped the brew-up rate to between 10 - 14%.  British Operational Research also found that if a Sherman suffered a penetrating hit, there was on average one fatality in the five man crew, or an 80% survival rate thanks to there being 5 hatches to get out of.

Combat Exchange Rates

No!  Nothing to do with currency, you bafunes.  The statistics of tanks versus tanks.  Back to Ol' Zally again.  He worked out that the South Canadians lost 1.9 Shermans to every 3 Teuton Panthers, which must upset the Wehraboos terribly.  Art!

     A case in point.  This Panther doesn't appear to be damaged or burned out, the tracks are still attached and intact and children shouldn't play with tanks.  Note that the hull machine gun is gone, either salved by the Teuton crew, or removed by Allied soldiers, and that the towing cable has been attached to one of the towing lugs.  It may have broken down or, logistics logistics logistics, simply run out of fuel.

     ANYWAY AGAIN back to Zally.  Why were Shermans so much better in action that the much-vaunted Panther?  Because, even a year after their introduction, Panthers were still horribly unreliable with severe final drive and transmission problems.  You could turn the 60-piece gearbox into iron filings with ridiculous ease.  To swap out the engine, a 30-minute job on the Sherman, you needed to practically take a Panther apart in a task that took hours.  Art!

     This is the unglamourous side of military hardware.  As per Zally, it meant that Panther units were normally at less than 50% readiness for combat.  

     There's another factor that HN doesn't address, so I shall <puts on military historian hat>: crew quality.  At the Battle Of Dompaire, the French 2nd Armoured Division came across the Teuton Panzer Brigade 112, and, thanks to having far more experienced crews (probably motivated by a lot of Gallic spite) and air support, absolutely malleted the Panther-equipped brigade.  The French lost 7 tanks, the Teutons 69.  Art!

French Sherman.  Note 'Continental' 7 on turret

     At Arracourt the South Canadian 4th Armoured Division ran into the 111th and 113th Panzer brigades, again equipped with Panthers.  HOWEVER - O that word again! - the 113th crews had only been given 2 weeks training, could not read maps and had no idea what combined arms warfare was.  The South Canadians lost 55 tanks, the Teutons 331.  Sorry, Wehraboos.

     Okay, back to HN.  They sniffily dismiss the Tiger as a 'boutique tank', intended to weigh in at 45 tons and actually hitting 57, a gas hog, wildly unreliable and needing special tracks to be moved by rail, combining all that with an inability to use many bridges.  Art!

     Thus they issued the first 500 with a deep-wading kit.

     'Boutique' may be right.  The Teutons built 1,347 of them during the Tiger's production run, essentially making them by hand.  1,347 might sound good but contrast it to the Sherman's 49,234 total, meaning 36 Shermans for each Tiger, and it looks a bit sick.

     

     Well, we are now at Count and the whole blog has indeed been about the Sherman.  

     Here's the link to 'Historical Notes'

The Sherman Tank Was Never a 'Death Trap'—Here's Who Lied

     The whole vlog is about 20 minutes long.  Now, there is a vlog by Nick Moran about myths concerning South Canadian armour, which is 45 minutes long.  I am tempted, I am tempted.

*  Note CORRECT spelling.

Cursed Construction

Well, Allegedly

As you should surely know by now, Conrad is far too much the rational skeptic to really believe in curses, dooms and the supernatural, which doesn't not make reading stories about them entertaining.  Look no further than the short, macabre stories of Ambrose Gwinnet Bierce - BIERCE FOR PREZ! - or that exemplar in British literature, M. R. James.  Art!

     I don't think Ambrose can realllllly run, as he's been dead for about 110 years, although if they allow zombie candidates to r

   ANYWAY I wanted to mention a few construction sites that appear to have very, very unhappy histories, and where better to kick off with that Gomorrah-On-The-Irwell.  'Manchester' if we're being formal.  Art!

     This is the 'Stockport Pyramid' and Stockport is perhaps an outlier of Manchester yet still in the Greater Manchester area, so I'm allowed.  It was constructed in the Nineties, a process taking three years, and the building firm immediately went bust after completion.  Ooops.  It stood derelict for years, whilst companies in the business park around it went bust, a process leading to the environs being called 'The Valley Of Death'.  NO JOKES ABOUT 'NEFERTITI' AND BUST!

     It was taken over by 'Royal Nawaab', a halal restaurant chain, in April 2025, and is still in business, so the curse may have been broken.  Art!

     This is 'B Of The Bang' which we have covered on the blog before.  It was an art installation erected in 2002 for the Commonwealth Games in Gomorrah-OTI, and you can see how large it is from the passing traffic.  Problem was, those enormous metal spikes were not well-secured and kept on falling out, risking the impalement of passing pedestrians, for it was located on a busy thoroughfare leading to a ballfoot stadium.  It was dismantled and totally destroyed in 2009 and nothing now remains.  Shades of 'Ozymandias'.  Art!

 

     Another from 'Be Amazed's Youtube channel and their 'Most Expensive Mistakes In All History' vlog.  The enormous skyscraper you witness here is the 'Hancock', more formally known as 200 Claredon Street, Boston.  Looks impressive, doesn't it?  Yeah well you know what they say about looks.

     First off, it was slated to open in 1971, but only cut the ceremonial ribbons in 1976.  To be so late opening implies bad planning in the first place, scarcely a cause to celebrate. Initial costings for the building came in at $75 million, but with the five-year delay, this ballooned to $175 million.  If you fast-forward 50 years to 2026, that's the equivalent of $427 million escalating to $995 million , meaning that initial cost projections and returns on investment were now waaaaay out.  Ooops.  Art!

With puny human for scale

     Here we have one of the on-site coffer-dams that were intended to act as a retaining wall and prevent soil movement at the perimeter of the construction site.  Hot tip: they didn't work.  Which meant bulges and distortion in vertical surfaces, earth movement and damage to streets above.  The construction is not taking place in a barren wasteland, after all: this is the centre of Boston.  What essentials do you have running underground in major urban areas?  Electricity and gas and phone lines, all of which were damaged or destroyed by the horizontal displacement of earth.  Cue  further lawsuits.  Art!

     Also there is the Boston Trinity Church, which sued and won an $11 million lawsuit about damage attributable to the Hancock.

     Supernatural or not, this building does seem jinxed, doesn't it?

     Matters had not reached equilibrium, though.  The Hancock had attempted to be cutting-edge in skyscraper design, utilising a unique blue window glass, and these windows were very substantial, massing 500 pounds each.  Art!

     The thing is, they hadn't properly analysed the thermal contraction and expansion of these novel window panels, with the end result that they began to fall onto the street below after their adhesives failed.  Police sealed off the adjacent streets if winds were high, and the whole panoply of blue windows had to be replaced.  Over 10,000 of them at a cost of $7 million.  Art!

     The vacant window frames were covered with plywood before being replaced, because 10,000 windows being replaced takes time.  A lot of time.

     The Hancockup story doesn't end here.  O noes.  You see, it swayed in the wind, as every skyscraper does, except a whole lot more than it ought to.  Supposedly so much so that residents on the upper floors suffered motion sickness, although that sound a bit hyped.  What's not hyped are the 500-ton Tuned Mass Dampers installed to absorb kinetic energy - as in buildings at risk of earthquakes - and reduce swaying.  For millions of dollars each.  Art!

     As BA totals it, the Hancock has accumulated $1.1 billion in costs since before opening.  Hmmm makes the Pyramint - as the Stockport Pyramid was dismissively known - look like a good investment.  Sadly you can no longer get Pyramints as they went out of production years ago.  Art!

Gone for 30 years

     I think we need to retain Tallahassee in this instance.  Art!

Clear The Decks

Nothing to do with either cards or the horizontal bits of ships, what I refer to is the backlog of Bookmarks and Favourites that are lurking on the blog's appendices. To deal with the whole load would take days, so we're going to focus  on a couple and thin the herd.  Art!

      If you can't resolve the fine print, this is the web page for OSHA, 'Occupational Health & Safety Administration', the South Canadian body that investigates breaches of - you may be ahead of me here - health and safety.  In this particular case the COCA company, which made large commercial furniture, had over-ridden safety features on rail carriages so they could work faster.  Which  resulted in an employee getting crushed to death and a $102,000 fine.  The case is from 10 years ago so the hyperlinks don't work any more or I'd post more about the case.  Discovered via the Comments on a Malicious Compliance Youtube vlog I was annotating.
     

For This One, You'll Need A Long Memory

Sorry to keep whanging on about the Special Idiotic Operation, it's just that I couldn't resist this one.  The Kozaky Angry Birds have struck again and sunk an orc naval vessel, a 'Project 22800 Karakurt' missile corvette (about the smallest naval warship there is).  Art!

     I am afraid I cemented my reputation as a terrible person by commenting: "Little Dead Corvette".  People Liked it, mind.

Not So Gentle Shoeing

I do enjoy putting up ghastly photos of Donnie Dorko, just to feel that I'm puncturing his zeppelin ego - huge but fragile - and documenting that his health is getting worse by the day.  No, he won't resign; being Prez keeps him out of prison as long as he's in office and I suspect he won't leave the White House unless in a body bag.  Which would have to be made from two stitched together.  Art!

     This one is from Twitter and the poster is 'Canada Hates Trump'.  Unusually for them there are no swears.  King Piggy looks as if he's checked out already, the lights are on but nobody's home and he's listening to the voices in his head telling him what to do, and how handsome and fit he it.  They lie!  His Hair Helmet looks to be failing, too.

Meanwhile In Mordorvia -

All Hail Steve Rosenberg, the BBC's Moscow correspondent, whose presence must surely irk the FSB, as he's fluent in Ruffian and does not need a translatoer, and whom is willing to go out and interview the natives in Barad Duh.  Well, he has another Item on the BBC webpage - Art!

"For the first time in nearly two decades, there will be no military hardware, just soldiers during Saturday's parade in Moscow."

     Ordinary orcs in the street, especially the younger ones, are questioning why there's a 'Victory' parade at all, as they know they're getting their collective bottom kicked everywhere.

Finally -

Going out with a Biercism.

"Accordion,n: an instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin."

We Define 'Nine'

I Know What You're Thinking

'It's the number between eight and ten, consisting of three threes'.  Well, yes, technically correct, except you omit an awful lot that comes under 'Nine' in my 'Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable' and I thoroughly intend to explore all of them.  Thus, if you don't feel nine is fine, you may repine.  Art!

      But if you do, stand ready for the Remote Nuclear Tormentor.  You have ben warned.

     ANYWAY whilst I was musing on 'Nine' I recalled a Lord Peter Wimsey novel, 'The Nine Tailors' and seemed to recollect that it was about bell-ringing; 'campanology' if we're being formal.  Am I correct?  Art!

     Why of course I am!  I'm pretty sure I got rid of the paperback because once I read a murder-mystery to the end, the solution sticks with me.  So I cannot go back to it for years yet.

     ANYWAY AGAIN let us begin

NINE MEN'S MORRIS: A peculiarly British game, like a variant of draughts (or checkers for our Trans-Atlantic members), coming in two variants: a board game or etched into grass.  Art!

     The aim is to get three 'men' in a row and prevent your opponent from getting three of his own in a row.  It's been around for centuries and even the Barf Of Avon quotes it: "The fold stands empty in the drowned field

And crows are fatted with the murrion flock

The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud"
(A Midsummer's Night's Dream 1595).  From this we can tell that English weather in the sixteenth century was just as bad as it is now.  Art!

NINE DAYS' QUEEN: Lady Jane Grey, 1537 - 1554.  She was proclaimed Queen at the age of 15 on July 10th 1553 and was deposed nine days later, being succeeded by Bloody Mary.  That's all Brewer's says about here, which is being a bit cheap, I expected more gore and conspiracy.  I shall dig a bit further. 

     Ah, it's all tied up with religion.  She was a committed Protestant, whereas her sister Mary The Bloody One was a committed Catholic.  Jane was appointed Queen by the Privy Council as per the previous Kingie's orders.  Then, nine days later they changed their fickle minds and deposed her, appointing Mary instead.  She eventually un-alived Jane as she was seen as a dangerous rallying point for disaffected Protestants.  That's how you add detail, Brewer's.  Art!: 

Yes yes yes I know there's only 7.  DON'T QUIBBLE!

NINE TAILORS MAKE A MAN: Putting down all tailors, quite caddishly I think.  The expression means it takes nine of them to make a Real Man, as it's not a Manly Trade like mining or steel welding, although they make good pallbearers.

The poet John Taylor manfully stood up for them.

"Some foolish knave, I think, at first began

The slander that three tailors make one man."

NINE TELLERS: Nope, nothing to do with South Canadian bank clerks or Customer Service Officers as they're probably called nowadays.  No, 'Teller' means a single stroke of a funeral bell, which I shall prod Art to illustrate with -

???

     Ah.  Apparently there is a species of fungus known informally as the 'Funeral Bell'.  Now we're all better informed than we were five minutes ago.  Try again, Art!

     Traditionally there were 3 tells for a child, 6 for a woman and 9 for a man.  I never knew that.

NINE DAYS WONDER: Meaning an event that arrives with a great deal of excitement and acclaim, which then rapidly dies away, becoming quickly forgotten.  Brewer's adds in a rather reaching aphorism: "A wonder lasts nine days, and then the puppy's eyes are open", comparing public interest with puppies, which are born blind.  They also quote the Barb Of Avon but he's had one quote already which is testing the elastic limit of my temper.  Art!

     Yes, it's a comic: '9th Wonders', an in-universe publication from the series 'Heroes'.  That there is Hiro, who loses his memory whilst time-travelling, and whom uses the assorted comics to advise him of what is about to happen, as useful kind of life hack to have access to.  

AS RIGHT AS NINEPENCE: One presumes they came up with this phrase pre-decimalisation.  It means to be perfectly fine and healthy and in tip-top condition, and Brewer's claims it refers to silver ninepenny pieces that were given as love tokens.  Hmmm.  Seems a bit thin to me.  Art!

     Colour me unconvinced.  

     Aaaaaand that's enough nines for today.

Bunker Grandad Is Getting Sweaty

Yes, Putinpot must be feeling an unpleasant itch between his shoulder-blades as he wonders who might stab him in the back, whilst his neck is on a swivel watching for Ukrainian drones.  Art!

     Whatever Charlie Chipmunk Cheek's reason for the sacking, it doesn't look good, and the new commander, Colonel General Chaiko, now has mere days to get to grips with the air defences of Barad Duh.  Thanks to Mordor via still attacking Ukraine with drones, the Kozaky are absolutely refusing to go with a truce on May 9th for the Victory Parade, despite Peter The Average declaring an unilateral truce.  That's not how a truce works, Dimya you dimwit.  Red Square has now been completely closed, there are protective anti-drone nets up and snipers, machine gunners and EW troops are already positioned on rooftops.

     It's going to be a less than impressive event; no aircraft, no heavy vehicles and doubtless as rushed and short as possible.  I doubt Putler will attend in person and instead send one of his lookey-likies, especially since he suspects his own siloviki might assassinate him with a drone and then blame Ukraine.

     Bring on the buckets of popcorn!

I Hope You're Not Eating

Because this next will put you off your chips.  Art!

     Jesus Christ on a petrol-powered pogo stick, he looks like a chimpanzee, and a very sick chimpanzee at that.  I really should keep track of where I get these images from, shouldn't I?  Art!

      Here we see King Piggy making very heavy weather indeed of walking in a straight line after getting off Marine One.  This is as bad as the paretic red carpet shamble at Davos.  Plus there's that laugh-inducing AI photo of him supposedly 'Jogging', having lost at least a hundred pounds.  Art!

     Where will I get all my content when he keels over dead?  Imagine the work I'll have to do if Dimya dies as well.

The Smile On The Face Of The Tiger

For 'Tiger' read 'Employment Lawyer'.  You'll see why in a minute.

     Once upon a time, there was an OVerworked IT engineer, hereafter OVIT, working at a small company, which didn't care about Bus Factor One, which tells you immediately that they were a load of stupid cheapskates.  Illness, injury, leave or going to live in a hermitage are all predictable outcomes in such a situation.  Art!

     

     Then manglement thought they'd get clever.  They got OVIT to sit down and detail exactly what he did, giving him instructions about scope and responsibility.  Shortly after this he was told he was being made redundant as the business was going to be outsourcing his job.  Although, somewhat fishily, they kept any details of the company doing the outsourcing secret and didn't do any transition.

     Freshly unemployed, OVIT goes looking for jobs after taking a week off to drink beer and eat pretzels.  He finds a job that matches his old one but with an massive pay cut.  He asks for a detailed job spec and is gobsnacked- like gobsmacked but worse - to see the job description he'd enthusiastically written for the company.

     This means war!  Art?

The tiger smiles

     OVIT contacts an employment lawyer, who arranges a meeting with the C-suite manglement.  He slides two pieces of paper across the desk at them: the job description and the advertised vacancy.

     "I'm not here to argue if or how you broke redundancy law.  I'm only here to establish how much settlement you are prepared to offer."

     It took less than 60 minutes for the manglement to realise they were right royally lambasted and OVIT got 2 years of severance pay with medical and pension benefits.  I suspect his legal fees were also paid, and whichever bumbletuck invented this plan 'left to spend more time with his family.'

Finally -

Phew.  Just walked up to the Polling Station to vote, and then took Edna for trotties, 6,000 steps in.  Go me!

If I Were To Say 'Concord'

You Might Be Confused

So, we shall explicate a tad in order to provide enlightenment.  Looking in my 'Collins Concise English Dictionary' I see the word 'Concord' defined as "Agreement or harmony between people or nations; amity" and is ultimately derived from the Latin <hack spit> 'Concors', meaning 'Of the same mind'.

     The thing about concord is that it frequently doesn't arrive or deliver as advertised.  Art!

     This is Concord, Massachusetts, looking like a chocolate-box illustration.  How very splendid!  Except it was one of the first locations fought over in the treacherous traitorous American War Of Stabbing GREAT BRITAIN In The Back <pauses for blood pressure to diminish>.

     Then we have the ill-fated Concorde - note the additional 'e' added because of the French.  It was a supersonic airliner produced by the British and - you may be ahead of me here - French and it literally left every other airliner standing still.  There's an awe-inspiring British Airways advert where it tools up at the end, doing Mach 2 and making everything else in the sky look old and tired.  Art!

     You can see the variable-geometry nose here, in the 'down' position before it transitions to supersonic flight.

     The fleet was retired in 2003, thanks to the extremely high cost of running them, not helped by the fatal crash of a Concorde in 2000, which rather knocked public confidence in them.  You might say British Airways and Air France had a concord about Concorde.  Art!

     No, this isn't the 2000 crash.  What you're seeing here is the crash of a Sinister Tu-144 at the Paris Air Show in 1973.  The two aircraft were similar in external appearance, so much so that the Tu-144 was dubbed 'Concordski', whereas there were a lot of internal differences.  The crash occurred because the Concordski pilot made violent evasive manoeuvres, to possibly avoid having a French jet take photographs of the canard foreplanes.  Which sounds suspiciously like an excuse as it's a lot easier to take photos from the ground.  ANYWAY the recovery from the pilot's barnstorming overstressed the port wing, which fell off, and that was that.  It also tanked foreign interest in acquiring any Concordskis, so you might say other nations had a concord about Concordski.

     I think you'll agree when I say 'Concord' is a bit of a mis-nomer.

     ANYWAY AGAIN here we come to the meat of the matter, because I am going to feature an entry from the 'Be Amazed' Youtube channel, about - Art!

     The first section concerns the collision and sinking of an Italian cruise liner, the 'Costa Concordia', and you can tell this isn't going to be a pleasant excursion because of 'Concord's track record to date.  Note that the date for this incident is the 13th, another ill-omen.  Art!

     The liner was scheduled to set sail from Civitavecchia, the port for Rome and yes, I've been there, and spend a week tooling around the Mediterranean in what must have been pretty chilly weather, it being January.  Art!

     Captain Schettino ordered the CC to deviate from it's normal route in order to execute what the narrator and Google call a 'salute', near a brace of islands.  None of the bridge crew protested this ill-advised action, which was supposed to impress passengers and anyone ashore.

     Well, guess what the island of Giglio had in abundance?  Underwater rocks.  When Schettino ordered a course correction, the helmsman misunderstood and steered into the rocks.  Ooops.  The Costa C ran aground, putting at risk over 1,000 crew and over 2,000 passengers.  Art!

Looks expensive

If you want a metric, that hull damage was nearly 80 yards long.  Evacuation procedures were not followed as the Costa capsized, creating panic and causing the death of 32 people.  Art!

     Schettino was tried and found guilty, getting a 16-year sentence.  What made the court especially unsympathetic was discovering that, during the salute, he had been derelicting his duties in order to canoodle with a Moldavian exotic dancer he had brought onto the bridge.  No, I'm not making this up.

     In 2023, over a decade later, an attempt to re-float and salve the Costa began, costing an eye-watering $1.2 billion, which is twice the cost of the ship itself.  Art!

       Then there were the lawsuits and compensation, which tacked on another $93 million, and breaking up the CC for scrap, costing another $100 million.

     In total it cost over $2 billion to salve and then break up the CC, which had itself cost only (!) $612 million to construct.  Counting the Costa.

Stupid Items Sub-Editors Create Out Of Desperation

I am going to post the Snip and then comment.  Art!

     There's a never-ending stream of items like this on my news feed, featuring fatuous titles detailing stupid ideas.  I get that people have to create content but come on! use a tad more imagination.  And no more oscilloscopes, please.

     O look, here's another one.  Art!

Bah!

King Piggy Punctured

Or, more gentle shoeing.  DJ Tango loves to boast about all the cognitive tests he's taken, because he's so senile that he believes the indicate how intelligent he is.  The reason you've taken so many, Donold, is because your doctors are worried about your cognition, as well they might.  Art!

     The tests involve drawing a clock and numbering it correctly, naming as many words beginning with the letter 'B' in a minute as they can, then naming the date, day of the week and what city they are in.  This, Donnie Dorko, is hardly a rousing statement of intellect.  Art!

     Here's the Nodfather falling asleep in a meeting again.  The consequence of staying up into the small hours ranting and tanting on social media.  He needs an aide armed with a bamboo skewer to prod him at intervals to ensure 1)  He's awake and 2) He's still alive.

Will I Or Won't I?

Hmmmm pondering.  I know I say that our charter excludes Politics - that above is merely mocking the feeble of mind - but I have saved a detailed analysis from Prof Roth about how the Hungarian elections provide insights for the South Canadian political opposition to Pumpkinhead.  Maybe at a later date.  I bet you can hardly wait.  Art!

     Orban claims he's going to lead the opposition in parliament, which is a fragile hope, since he's going to either end up in prison or flee abroad.  Given that he's been funding MAGA political funds, South Canada might not be a good fit for him.  There's always an apartment next to Assad in Moscow.  Or North Korea.

      Interestingly, the President of Slovakia, Fico, has done a 180º now that his mate The Weretoad is gone and is now best mates with Prez Zed, implying that Putin no longer has any European allies.  Poor Dimya!

UTTER NONSENSE!

Grrrr whom is responsible for this drivel?  Art!

     It jolly well DID appear, but woo-woo sites like this one pretend otherwise, because in photos taken with much better definition, the 'Cydonian Face' resembled nothing like a face.  Art!

     That took all of 10 seconds on Google.

Finally -

Going out  with another Biercism.

"Comfort,n: A state of mind produced by contemplation of a neighbour's uneasiness."