If I Were To Say 'Tanks'

I Imagine You'd Roll Your Eyes

 - expecting me to yark on about how under-rated the Crusader was or that the final drive on the Panther was a major source of breakdowns, or post yet more photos of BOVINGTON TANK MUSEUM, or explain how rubbish the T-34 was in reality.  Art!

Petrol Engine Mother

     Now, I do have a set of notes on the Sherman tank, taken from the 'Historical Notes' Youtube channel, which I will inflict upon you one day, although that day is not today.  Art!

     The brawny beast you see here is the Challenger 3, an upgraded version of the Challenger 2, adapted for modern drone-intensive warfare - note the interesting-looking kit atop the turret.  One innovation you can't tell about is the use of a smoothbore barrel for the first time in a British Main Battle Tank.  Previously they had been rifled and were the only MBT not to have gone over to smoothbore.   Art!

     Here we see the Sinister T-62, which was the first production tank to have a smoothbore gun in 1961.  Smoothbore eliminates the drag from rifling and permits much higher muzzle velocities to be attained, meaning armour penetration is much improved.  However - a word you were surely waiting for - I recall Sinister army veteran Victor Suvorov saying that the T-62 was hopelessly inaccurate 'An all-powerful gun that always missed.'  Because for effective use if a smoothbore, you need computer control, and Sinister computers in 1961 capable of doing that took up most of an office block.  Nowadays there's probably a phone app that'll do the trick.

     ANYWAY the kind of 'tanks' that I intend to inform you about today are the kind used to store oil and fuels, because once again Ukraine has been blamming the living daylights out of them.  Art!

     The 'tank farm' as the South Canadians like to call them, at Tuapse has been extensively blammed, on the 16th of April, then the 20th of April, then the 28th of April, then on 1st May.  Art!

Courtesy 'Jake Broe'

     The Kozaky drones hitting the refinery aren't being intercepted and the fires are so massive and widespread it's not worth the FSB's time to track down and threaten people who post clips.  Tuapse has now been hit eleven times in total and seems about 75% destroyed.  

     Then we have the critical pumping hub at Perm, which as of Sunday was still on fire.  Art!

     

     Don't forget, this site is in Siberia, meaning that very little Ruffian infrastructure is beyond Ukrainian drone range, and it's another indication that Ruffia's size is a major weakness; there are simply too many sites spread out over too much land to protect more than a fraction of them.  Especially when 280 SAM and radar systems are defending Moscow, and another 27 protecting Putinpot's Valdai palace.  Art!

     That's one of the storage tanks at Perm burning merrily away.  Art!

Courtesy 'Special Kherson Cat'

     Six 50,000 cubic metres capacity storage tanks were destroyed, burning up almost 2 million barrels of oil.  Jake then put up some pictures of a tank of that size being constructed, not sure whom to attribute for them.  Art!

Inside

Outside

     Constructing one of these things is a major engineering project in itself.  'EMPRmedia' on Twitter did a bit of digging and found that the cost of a single 50,000 cubic metre tank is $1.5 million, with the contents being worth $30 million at current prices.  So, $9 million in construction costs and $180 million in lost oil.  Caused by 6 'Lyuty' drones that cost $1.2 million, or a return-on-investment ratio of 157.

     O and the governor of Krasnodar Krai Oblast has demonstrated what a copium overdose looks like.  He claims there is no damage to any oil infrastructure, the Ukrainian drones carry fuel tanks of their own that rain down burning fuel when hit, nothing to see here, just keep shovelling that oily sand into a bucket.  Art!

      How do the Kozaky know which tanks to hit?  I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating.  The long-range drones used have thermal cameras that detect how full or empty the tanks are, so the operator can prioritise targets.  My guess is that the four tanks left alone at Perm are empty.  Art!

     I'll stop here to avoid being boring, but above are two more 50k cubic metre tanks blown up at Gorky in Mordorvia, another $63 million in losses.

     So - tanks!

Oooops

One thing that popped up on my news feed was an item about a film released in late April, 'Desert Warrior', to resounding failure.  It seems to have been in Development Hell for 5 years, ballooning the cost to $150 million.  Art!

     It has been an utter failure at the box office.  Art!

     So the studio will get back $350,000.  That $150 million very probably doesn't include marketing and distribution so the final cost could be even higher.  Art!

     No details of performance in May yet.  Conrad confidently predicts it will be pulled from all but a handful of cinemas and then sold to Netflix.

King Piggy Gets Peggy

Conrad uses the slang 'peg' for 'tooth', just so we're clear.  This Item allows me to use another awful photo of Donnie Dorko.  Art!

     He looks like he's sucking a lemon.  ANYWAY there are questions being raised about a trip he took to a dental surgeon in Florida, because the White House has it's own dental surgery, a fact I was entirely ignorant of.  We may never know the truth.  But it's fun to speculate.

Whilst We're Making Cheap Shots At Cheap Sh-

The repellent crook Rudy Giuliani, a former acquaintance of the Saggy Senile Sepia Sackbut, has been taken to hospital.  Predictably, cruel jokes are making the rounds about him.

Captain Obvious

@TheFungi669

Just in: Rudy Giuliani has been hospitalized. He’s in hypocritical condition and he’s dyeing.

Art!

His finest moment

Droning On Again

I need a wordy Item to hit the Word Count, so we're heading back to Mordorvia and how things are going in Barad Duh.  There's an interesting illustration on Twitter by 'Jay In Kyiv', who needs to be treated with a certain caution, given that they were posting 'Prune60's railway data with no attribution.  Art!

     What you have here are SAM sites where missiles, radar and guns are concentrated, having been stripped out from any other locations, in order to try and protect the May 9th Victory Parade, since the Kozaky aren't participating in a truce.  There are 280 units allegedly protecting Moscow.

     HOWEVER - for the second time today - Art!

     What you're seeing here is Mosfilmovskaya Street, where a high-rise apartment building was hit by a Ukrainian drone.  Since a civilian apartment isn't the kind of target the Kozaky select, it had probably been spoofed by electronic warfare kit.  But it's not a good look a mere 5 days before the big parade.  I bet Putinpot is chewing the carpet with rage at the news.

Finally -

Going out with a Biercism.

"Interregnum, n: The period during which a monarchical country is governed by a warm spot on the cushion of the throne.  The experiment of letting the spot grow cold has commonly been attended by most unhappy results from the zeal of many worthy persons to make it warm again."

Three Day Weekend!

Which Is Great

Although the weather is rather depressing, being cold and overcast with occasional rain.  May - do better!  As for me, I may - do you see wh O you do - break open that bottle of cherry beer.  As for Mordorvia, they are scaling back plans to celebrate 9th May, which is where they boast about winning the Second Upleasantness, usually ignoring the fact that they also started it.  Because Putinpot wants this to go off without a hitch, he's been pressuring his poodle in the White House to put pressure on Prez Zed to have May 9th be a day of truce.  Unfortunately for Putinpot, the Big Orange Oaf Himself has no cards when it comes to the Kozaky, whom are not agreeing to a truce.  Conrad can guarantee there will be no air element if the parade goes ahead, in order to give air defences a clear sky to work in.  This is why Barad Duh is surrounded by 280 SAM systems whilst Tuapse has none.  Art!

The sole tank present in 2025

     There won't be any heavy equipment present if the parade goes ahead, as there's none left.  Conrad keeps joking that the T-34 will be replaced by a T-26, a tank model 100 years old.

      ANYWAY now that we've made Dimya cry, let's look at the links.

2025

BOOJUM!: "Do You Think That's Wise, Sir?"

2024

BOOJUM!: A Meta-Fiction For The Ages

2023

BOOJUM!: If I Were To Say "Baba Yaga"

2022

BOOJUM!: A Diet Of Flies

2021

BOOJUM!: Lava, Meet Tongue

2020

BOOJUM!: Shades Of Schadenfreude

2019

BOOJUM!: Hello, Coincidence Hydra

2018

BOOJUM!: Napalm Trees

2017

BOOJUM!: Rochdale: A Town Reprieved

2016

BOOJUM!: Don't Get Me Started - About "Uncharted"

2015

BOOJUM!: Hot Snood Party At The Rectory Tonight!

2014

BOOJUM!: As It Stands, I Sit

If I Were To Say 'Kursk'

You'd Be Forgiven For Thinking That I Was Yarking On About -

The Battle of Kursk, July 1943, which has become a touchstone of the Sinister Union and then Mordorvia.  To sum up the whole battle would take several whole blogs, so you only get a potted version here.  

     Picture the scene: Nazi Germany under Herr Schickelgruber had lost the initiative on the Eastern Front and had just suffered swingeing defeats at Stalingrad, El Alamein and the complete loss of North Africa.  Ol' Schicky needed to get back in the game and establish dominance, so he was going to attack.  Art!

     The plan was to attack the Kursk salient, a giant bulge into Teuton lines, from the north and south simultaneously, cutting off the defending troops in an encirclement or 'kessel'.  

     Unfortunately for the Teutons, the Sinister's were very well aware of their opponent's plans, thanks to a spy ring operating in Germany and carefully collated Enigma information provided from GREAT BRITAIN*.  Thus their salient was enormously well-defended.  It also helped that Ol' Schicky kept postponing the start date in order to have the newly-developed Panther tanks take part.  Art!

     
     The Teuton advances were very limited and came at great cost.  They still inflicted more losses than they suffered but we're talking about the Sinister Union here, where human life had little to no value.  Then came the counter-attacks, and the strategic initiative on the Eastern Front was permanently lost to the Teutons.

    OR I might be talking about the dramatic and sudden irruption across the Ukranian border in August of 2024, when the Kozaky boldly invaded the Kursk oblast.  Art!

'Pirozhok' means a small stuffed bun

     This hadn't been done since 1945.  The Ukrainians wisely kept the operation a total secret from the South Canadians, since the Biden administration was desperately trying to find an 'off-ramp' for Putin, thank you Jake 'The Brake' Sullivan, and would have forbidden it to be carried out.  Once it was in progress they instantly cut off all intel to the Ukrainians, a crucial loss.

     I remember the televised meeting that Putinpot had with Shoigu and Belousev, with Gerasimov blathering drivel on a wall monitor.  Art!

     Poor Dimya!  He looked as if he had toothache in his anus, so miserable was he.  The attack by the Kozaky wasn't a quick raid as in the past, it was a full-on occupation that required all orc reserves to be shifted to counter it.  They still have a toe-hold across the border, which orc media are forbidden to mention.

     But NO!  I am actually whanging on about the Ruffian submarine 'Kursk', which is the subject of another 'Be Amazed' video compilation of horribly expensive mistakes.  Conrad recommends this channel as it provides background information and has actually done research on the subject matter.  Art!

K-141

     Here the Kursk is as it's supposed to be, floating.  In August of 2000 it was carrying out training exercises in the Barents Sea, when hydrophones detected an initial explosion, followed by a much larger one, in it's vicinity.   The crippled submarine sank in over 300 feet of water, with only 23 of the 118 crew surviving.

     Here's when BA gets the facts wrong.  They state 'Sadly, international rescue teams failed to reach them in time.'  Nope.  GREAT BRITAIN* and Norway both immediately offered help in rescuing the trapped crew, only to be refused by the Ruffians.  Putin had only just taken power and probably didn't want to look weak by relying on The Hideous West.  Ruffian rescue efforts took days to materialise, thanks to incompetence.  So the 23 survivors died, too.  Art!

     This girning bafune is Marshal Igor Sergeyev, chief Ruffian military man at the time, who floated the possibility that the Kursk had hit another submarine - The Hideous West rearing it's alleged head again - or hit a mine or bomb left over from WW2.

     In fact a Naval Board found that one of the torpedoes had defective welding, allowing the leak of hydrogen peroxide fuel, which GREAT BRITAIN* abandoned 70 years ago as being too dangerous.  It reacts explosively with copper.  Guess what had lots of copper content?  Art!

    Yes, Ruffian torpedoes.  The faulty torpedo exploded, which triggered all the other torpedoes to explode, blowing off the bow of the submarine.  Fourteen months later the orcs retrieved most of the hull.  Art!

     It cost a lot to manage this.  Art!

     Remember, this is Ruffia, so $60 million was embezzled or stolen.  The Kursk itself was reckoned to have cost $1 billion to construct, of which $900 million would have been embezzled or stolen, because Italian mansions don't come cheap.

'Monte Cassino: Ten Armies In Hell' By Peter Caddick Adams

Getting it down from the Book Cave has proved fruitful, and reinforces the fact that poor or non-existent staff work seriously affected the Allies trying to storm Monte Cassino.  I shall quote from Page 155: "the string-and-sealing wax nature of Freyberg's New Zealand Corps, (with no dedicated corps staff)".  Art!

      Also, from Page 156: "This is where the lack of a corps staff really counted: with a dedicated chief of staff and good planning team, Freyberg's officers could have lobbied for Tuker's plan effectively to the prickly and hostile Clark."

     Tuker's plan was to scale the mountains north-east of Cassino and make an indirect approach to the abbey, with his 4th Indian division troops who were skilled in mountain warfare.  I shall keep you informed.

More Gentle Shoeing

I have discovered a couple more awful photographs of King Piggy on Twitter, but will only subject you to one.  Art!

Unsure if 'were-hog' is better than 'were-toad'

  He looks as if his morning toilette involved sticking his face in the gravy boat.  Note the hilarious contrast between his sepia skin and pale white ears, and he must have put swimming goggles on to protect his eyes.  Will he make it to the mid-terms?  Only time will tell.

Oil's Well That Ends Well

Rather than having tourists visiting their resort city on the Black Sea, the governor is now evacuating residents of Tuapse thanks to the close proximity of the burning refinery and storage depot, now hit by four waves of Kozaky drones.  'Jake Broe' has speculated that these drones are approaching Tuapse from over the sea, meaning there is no warning of their arrival.  The orcs could put patrol boats or naval vessels offshore, to try to detect and shoot down the drones, except that they make themselves sitting ducks for Sea Baby drones.  Art!

     These containers are being filled by people wielding shovels.  Jake also noted that a lot of the clean-up was being done by women, and wondered, waspishly,  where all the men had gone?

Number Nine Isn't Fine

We're up to the runner-up on Rotten Tomatoes list of films that earned 0% in reviews, a flick called 'One Missed Call', dating from 2008.  It's a remake of a Japanese horror film, about a woman whose friends start dying after receiving voicemails, which is another reason never to trust mobile phones.  Art!

     So, going by the rule of 50%, it made back $22.5 million, on a $20 million budget, so after adding on promotion, advertising and distribution, it undoubtedly lost money.  Well done, Warner Bros, it takes rare talent to make a loss on a horror film.  Which is why there was no sequel.  Art!

*  It irks Horse-face Lavrov when I say this.  Tee hee!

When The Machines Rock

No! I Am Not Talking About The Gary Numan Track

Although, since I have mentioned it, I can now use it as an illo that is totally justified and not clickbait at all.   Art!

     Actually I came up with this title whilst taking Edna The Entitled trotties, as previously I was going to use the track 'Generator' by Bad Religion, perhaps also in conjunction with the Yes album 'Big Generator'.  Art!

     You see, today's Intro is another from 'Ripe's Youtube channel, and is all about hubris, pride, arrogance and rotor bearings.  It is narrated by Industrial MillwRIGHT, hereafter IMRIGHT, who explained that he and his team worked on maintaining and rebuilding industrial gas and steam turbines.  As you might imagine, these were whacking big pieces of kit, weighing hundreds of tons.  Art!

     IMRIGHT's area of specialism was in aligning the turbine and generator rotors together, in this case massing fifty tons and intended to spin at up to 3,500 revolutions per minutes.  They needed tolerances of 0.001", which is one-third the thickness of a sheet of paper.  To achieve this level of compliance meant operating with laser alignment tools, hydraulic jacks and shims, in a time-consuming process that typically took 12 hours to manage.  Enter the Superintendent, whom I will dub the Subintendent as he possessed all the wit of a jelly doughnut and who focussed only on budget and schedule, not critical details.  Then enter the villain of the piece, whom IMRIGHT dubbed 'Karen' with no sense of irony at all.  

Art!

     Karen was an obnoxious boastful blowhard who wanted IMRIGHT's job and openly sucked up to Subintendent, putting IMRIGHT down and claiming she could do his job much, much faster.

     Never mind that IMRIGHT had been doing this job for 5 years with no failures, Subintendent made the worst decision of his professional career and ate up all Karen's 'advice'.  He replaced IMRIGHT with her, quoting "She has a much faster method that she used on her last site".

     This was blatantly untrue and one can only speculate that her entitlement and arrogance made her think she could do better than an operator with 5 years experience behind them.  Art!

     IMRIGHT was told to go torque bolts, which he did, but not before warning Karen and Subintendent about 'Thermal growth' on the rotor.

     You see, a metal rotor spinning at 3,500 RPM creates a lot of heat, which causes it to expand, and this expansion has to be taken into consideration when aligning the turbine and generator rotors.  You CANNOT align them perfectly when they are 'cold' (that is, at room temperature) and there are engineering manuals that give exact figures of how much offset to use; in this case the turbine rotor needs to be 0.045" lower.

     You can probably guess where this is going.  Both Karen and Subintendent ignored the warning, then signed off on the paperwork.  Five days later the rebuild was complete and the plant was going to be started up.  IMRIGHT impressed that starting up a gas turbine is a lot more involved that pressing a 'Start' button or turning a key.  Art!

     The bearings are flooded with oil, then a safety gearing rotates the shaft to ensure there is free movement, the ignition sequence begins and the starting motor initiates.  There were no problems as the rotor hit 1,000 RPM since the machine remained fairly 'cold'.  However - a word you knew was going to crop up - things changed when the rotor hit 2,500 RPM and there was an awful metallic scraping noise as the machine rocked - hence today's title - more and more violently.  Smoke started pouring from the casing as alarm klaxons sounded and the plant operations staff initiated an 'Emergency trip', shutting the rotor down.  Art!

     It took ten minutes to come to a complete halt, by which time an enraged Plant Manager was at the turbine, wanting to know what on earth had happened, except with a lot more colourful language.

     Karen, looking pale and anxious, admitted/confessed/stated <delete where applicable> that she had aligned the shafts perfectly at zero-zero deviation, causing the Plant Manager to have both kittens and conniptions.  "You did not put the thermal offset in?" because of course she didn't as she had nil experience in this work.  They opened up the turbine casing.  Art!

     That's a Babbitt bearing, and all of them in the turbine were squashed flat; the rotor itself had long gouges in it.  The Plant Manager assessed the physical damage at $500,000 alone, on top of the failure to produce energy.

     Karen was immediately given a brush and told to sweep the entire factory floor, which she did with a beet-red face, terminally embarrassed, until her termination came through a week later.

     Subintendent, possibly thanks to family connections, was not terminated or even demoted, but was warned if he ever shirked any critical procedure, he'd be unemployed within the next five minutes.

     IMRIGHT assumed his old position and helped align the rotor correctly, being left entirely alone by Subintendent.

Number Seven

In the list of Rotten Tomatoes films scoring 0%.  This time it's 'Left Behind' in it's 2014 iteration, starring Nicholas Cage.  Art!

Left behind, right behind, centre behind

     The critics were merciless and thoroughly lambasted it, describing it as one of the most inept films ever committed to celluloid.  Back when they still used celluloid.  Art!

     You might think that's not bad, especially as these figures are from 2014, but don't forget the 50% Rule - the studio only gets back half of the box office total, so $13.5 million and it had a budget of $16 million.  Ooops.

     To sum the plot up, "A small group of survivors is left behind after millions of people suddenly vanish and the world is plunged into chaos and destruction"

     Nah, not impressed, not on my To Watch list.

What's In A Name?

Art!

     You might call this Item 'Fields On Fire' because I'm going to return to the subject of the Ruffian oil refinery and storage depot at Tuapse on the Black Sea coast.  It's very much the black sea now, covered as it is with oily residues, and the best the orcs can do is send people out to shovel it into buckets.  Art!

"Tuapse 1st May'

     This is the Kozaky giving the refinery a right malleting, again.  This is the fourth strike on the plant and the orcs don't seem to have anything defending it, although since the strikes were at night it's possible there were defenders.  At any rate, about 70% had been destroyed before this fourth strike.  Art!

Courtesy 'Professor Gerdes Explains'

     I can imagine the Ruffians simply giving up and not bothering to rebuild the site.  That's not all.  Art!

     This is the Ruffian oil pumping station at Perm doing an impersonation of a volcano.  There are two critical factors at play here; firstly, Perm is 1,500 kilometres from Ukraine and may have thought itself invulnerable thanks to that distance, which is now proven a rather hollow hope.  Secondly, it is a vital node in the oil pumping network.  Art!

Courtesy 'Jake Broe'

     It doesn't matter if oil is fetching $120 per barrel if you can't export it.  In fact, the amount of oil Mordorvia is exporting has fallen from 11 million Barrels Per Day to 4.69 BPD.  Less than half.

     Of course - obviously! - it's all going according to plan.

Another What On Earth? Moment

One of the things I miss about 'The Daily Beast' is their TEMU advertising bar, which used to promote mysterious-looking tat that was O-so-tempting to click on, in order find out what they were used for, such as the 'Golf Divot Replacing Tool'.  Art!

      I don't care if it has valves, transistors or integrated circuitry.  What is it?  What is it used for?  Why is the algorithm coming up with suggestions I have less than zero interest in?  Does it go in an engine?  Have I ever expressed a wish to fiddle about with the dirty noisy magic metal mass 'neath the bonnet?

     NO! on all counts.

Finally -

Here's another horrid photo of King Piggy, contrasting his orange face with his pink ears.  Art!

     Poor Melania.