Why Less Access Means Success

It's A Staple Of Business Procedure

That when you fire an employee - none of this 'let go' nonsense here - that they are given perhaps ten minutes to clear their desk, hand in items like laptops, phones, official USBs and then be escorted off the premises by security, or a more senior colleague if the organisation doesn't run to that expense.  Art!

     There is a reason for this, some examples of which we have covered in 'Destroying an organisation from the inside' -

BOOJUM!: Sabotage!

     The first one we covered.  It is most especially important that any fired employee who worked in IT is NEVER EVER allowed back onto any systems, as they may have maintained a back-door even if officially denied access.  You just fired them, what are they going to do?

     I found another example of sabotage that has only recently been wrapped up in court, so BOOJUM! hasn't covered it before.  Art!

     Meet Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, two brothers from Virginia, South Canada, who were software engineers hired by OPEXUS.  This is a South Canadian federal agency that deals with Freedom Of Information Act requests, investigation systems, audits and workforce management.  It's biggest clients are federal and state agencies, to the number of 45.

     One wonders what on earth their HR department was thinking when they hired the pair above, since both had been convicted for WIRE FRAUD & HACKING FEDERAL COMPUTER SYSTEMS.  Still, boys will be boys, hmmm?  They had both served prison time for these crimes yet they were allowed to start working at OPEXUS.

     When HR finally did it's due diligence, they found the prior convictions, went pale in the face and promptly sacked the pair.  

    HOWEVER - you knew that word was surely a-coming - their system access was not immediately revoked, proving again that HR were hopelessly incompetent.  Art!

     Consequently the pair were able to steal passwords for sensitive data systems, and then deleted 96 (!) databases.  One wonders what the IT admin at OPEXUS were doing whilst this was going on, because it certainly wasn't being proactive.

     They were subsequently investigated by <deep breath> the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Office of Inspector General's Electronic Crime Unit, and were found guilty just a couple of weeks ago.  Sohaib, the muttonhead, made things extra-specially worse for him because he possessed seven guns, which were found when his home was searched.  As a convicted felon it was illegal for him to possess a gun, let alone seven.  He's going to get sentenced in September and is potentially looking at a 21-year sentence.  Oooops.

     No word on OPEXUS's HR and IT leads being fired.  Art!

From a cannon?

     ANYWAY let us get to the meat of the matter, another Reddit tale from 'On Tap  Studios'.  It is narrated by Worthy Internal Technician, hereafter WIT.  He began working at a dotcom that wasn't doing terribly well, alongside Nasty Idiotic Twod, hereafter NIT.

     NIT had delusions of management grandeur and decided they were superior to WIT, despite not having the faintest idea what WIT did, and informed them that they had a week to turn things around or they'd be fired.  

     Without specifying what needed to be turned around, a minor yet critical omissionn.

     WIT, having a backbone of shiny vanadium steel, told NIT to insert it up his nether fundament and back off or he'd quit on the spot.  NIT backed off.  If your sole IT person leaves then you're up excrement creek in a barbed wire canoe with tennis racket paddles.  Art!

     After a year, the owners decided to fire NIT, thanks to info WIT had provided on his poor performance and wasting of company resources.  They then, verrrry much against WIT's advice, gave NIT twenty four hours notice and left him alone in his office all day, without anyone there to keep an eye on what he was doing.

     Apart from WIT, that is, whom as IT head honcho had remote access to NIT's computer.  What was he doing?  O I thought you'd never ask!  Firstly, copying company data from the servers, then deleting it, and emptying his official company contact information folders, proprietary data he had no right to access let alone copy or delete.

     When the (staggeringly naive) owners took NIT for a goodbye lunch, WIT replaced all the deleted data from backups he had.  He made no mention of the USB but from context he took that, too.  Art!

Not his wife!

     WIT also discovered e-mails that showed NIT had been cheating for months, along with a picture of the cheating couple on holiday together.  NIT had been plotting to ditch the wife, keep the house and saddle her with the kids and it was all there in the e-mails, which got sent to the wife's e-mail address.  Sadly we never get to learn what happened to WIT's marriage, except there was sufficient grounds for divorce, and his affair partner wouldn't want to hang out with a man with no job, house or money.

There Has Been A Rich Harvest

Of pictures showing King Piggy in an hideously unflattering light, which is great for the blog as it means I post my slandefamation without having to do much work.  These have all come from the hell-platform Twitter, which is throttling pro-Ukrainian accounts again.  Art!

     Good lord, he looks like a Werefrog three days dead, with sacks, not bags, under his eyes.  Aging in reverse?  Which vision-impaired MAGAt came up with that howler?  Here's another one circulating on social media.  Art!

     I apologise in advance to the orang-utan, which is a sombre and thoughtful creature that never harmed anyone.  The orang-utan is the one to starboard, just so we're clear.

"21 Days" By Angelo Caravaggio

Blimey, this chap is being thorough.  In Chapter One he discusses and analyses "The Division Command Environment" by breaking down what different roles there were and how they functioned.  In "The Key Players" he lists the senior officers in 4th Canadian Armoured Division.  In "Preparation For Battle" he looks at the training carried out pre-D Day.  Art!

     The tall chap to port is Major-General Kitching, the subject of the work.  To starboard is Lieutenant-General Simonds, his superior officer.

     During the invasion of Sicily, all three Canuckistanian ships carrying their 1st Division's communication and HQ vehicles were sunk, a total of 37 vehicles.  Once ashore, as GSO1 of the division, Kitching 'acquired' an armoured command vehicle and three 3-ton trucks, which he was able to improvise into a functional HQ.

That's Going To Sting

Art!

     This map is from September 2025 and is from the very worthy Ukrainian  'Dronebomber', whose stock in trade is creating maps like these.  Now look at one from a couple of days ago, eight months later.  Art!

     The areas attacked have multiplied, including lots inside Mordorvia itself.  A typical night now sees 250 mid- and long-range drones going out.  Art!

     'Staff Agencies of the FSB' in case you were wondering.  Their headquarters on the eastern seaboard of Krim.  Now, take a wild guess at where those drone arrows on the bottom map's southern border are heading?  Art!

     Staff Agencies of the FSB, which gets an absolute MALLETING from 7 drone strikes.  I have omitted one to keep the Snip symmetrical.  Art!

     This is the catastrophic shambles the drones left.  At least 100 FSB were killed or injured, the most casualties they have ever suffered in the Special Idiotic Operation.  Prior to this, in the HIMARS era, the Kozaky would occasionally discover a small gathering of FSB and hit it, killing perhaps half a dozen of them.

     The orcs may have felt safe, being almost 200 kilometres from Ukrainian territory, and with the whole of Krim between them and any drones.  Well, they don't appear to have had any warning in this case, perhaps because the drones came in from the sea.

     O dearie me.  It used to be that being in the FSB gave licence to bully, imprison and torture with impunity.  Not any more.  Getting posted to Ukraine is becoming increasingly fatal.

Finally -

Finally!  I have been saving a grotesque Bookmark in Twitter until I could find a picture of the relevant aliens in 'Dan Dare'.  Art!

     The Hom. Sap. is in the upper photo, and the Mercurian in the lower, just so we're clear.

When Revenge Is Sweet

 If It Is Also Best Served Cold

 - then we can all agree it must be ice cream.  Also, there is a Sork teen drama with the same title, and if Art will put down his anthracite lollipop -

     I've never heard of it.  It's plot seems to revolve around revenge via mystery phone app, which mention of the Devil's Digital Device has killed all interest in it for me.

     ANYWAY inevitably we need to define 'Revenge'.  There is one example I have to hand, from Ambrose Gwinnet Bierce: "Revenge, n; Sending your girl's love letter to your rival after he has married her."

     More formally, as per my "Collins Concise English Dictionary" it means 'The act of retaliating for wrongs or injuries received; vengeance."  Originating from Old French 'Revenger' in the 14th century, it ultimately derives from <hack spit> Latin, 'Revindacare', meaning 'To vindicate'.  Art!

     This is supposed to be a satire, with a lot of blood and gore along the way as the Revenger revenges, until everyone in the cast is dead, including Ol' Revengy.  Sounds grim.  Probably one of the inspirations for cheerful chappy Dostoyevsky and 'The Possessed'.

      ANYWAY what we're going to be dealing with in this Intro is, indeed, revenge, with zero body count.  Sorry about that.

     Our tale begin with the narrator, MIddle Manager Suffering Yark, hereafter MIMSY.  'Yark' in this case means 'Slanderous and defamatory blather'.  They were three and a half years into a four-year contract, running a team doing vaguely-defined admin tasks.  Can't apply too much detail, the lawyers are always listening.  Enter Stalking HOrse Concealing Karen, hereafter SHOCK.  Pay attention to that name.  SHOCK, another middle manager but female, decided to try and prevent MIMSY's contract from being renewed, apparently out of sheer spite or to replace him.  

     A whispering campaign began.  Art!

     Horizontally and vertically, people began to be openly critical of MIMSY, where they didn't simply ignore him.  Things came to a head when SHOCK threatened to make a fake sexual harassment claim against him, in front of witnesses.

     MIMSY went to their mutual manager, Darth Insidious Exemplified, hereafter DIE, whom laughed at him, told him to deal with it and take it on the chin since he was leaving soon.  Not if his contract is renewed, DIE, except you seem to be making assumptions on unrevealed evidence.  

     Well, it turns out that MIMSY is not a person to mishandle without suffering consequences, because he came back at DIE very hard indeed.  This is his Revenge Part One, because, as you may have guessed, his contract was not renewed.  Art!

     He had written the SOP and retained authorship, NOT the business, so he simply shredded the lot, as were his instructions on how to create and deliver reports, as well as required inspection reports.  Since MIMSY also dealt with training and certification, he ensure everybody's training expired the day after he left.  The checks and balances procedures ended up as confetti.

     MIMSY also went the extra distance.  Art!

     This is a white noise generator that he hid in DIE's office, which would randomly make - you may be ahead of me here - white noise at random intervals.  Being a rather thorough rapscallion, he also bribed the janitors to move DIE's desk half an inch per night.  

     We're not done yet.  He also anonymously reported to corporate HQ about the dumpster fire he'd left behind, as he changed his phone number and moved out of state.  DIE was investigated and promptly fired, as were all his peers, including SHOCK, who now had the same employment situation as MIMSY.  Ooops.  Bet she didn't see that coming.  She must have been SHOCKED.

     ANYWAY ANYWAY, once he was sure that tranche of managers were all unemployed, he sued them for 'emotional damages'.  This isn't mentioned again so he may have lost the case against them.  Art!

     DIE also lost custody of her children, as that white noise generator had driven her almost insane and the ever-migrating desk delivered up a big fat serving of paranoia; we aren't told if there was a hubbo in the picture but from following information I suspect not.  She had to sell her house as she couldn't make payments, being unemployed, and had to move back in with her parents, whom she loathed.

     The end.

     ONLY JOKING!  No, this saga is nowhere near the end.  In fact it might end up being most of the blog.  We'll see.

     MIMSY updated that DIE had been kicked out of her parent's house for causing fights and was sofa-surfing with what few friends she had.  He also added in a telling line we will circle back to: "It isn't even the person who made the original threat."  Art!

     The next update brought news that DIE had left her state and moved, hoping to get a better shot at employment now she was no longer encumbered with children, and far away from the business she had been fired from.  Also far from her family, whom she despised and whom despised her right back.

     As luck, good or bad, would have it, DIE moved to the city that MIMSY now worked in, as senior management responsible for training all new staff being inboarded.  He felt a touch of guilt that her life had turned into an ocean of excrement and had another department's HR arrange an interview for a basic team leader job, which she passed.

     Imagine her surprise when her training was delivered by MIMSY.

     He considered his revenge complete.

     The end.

     ONLY JOKING!  No, we're not done yet.  You see, whether they had been tipped off by MIMSY, were carrying out a random audit, or knew DIE's background, Internal Affairs had a weather eye upon her and -

     Surprise surprise, DIE was grooming another minion to go after a different minion, exactly as MIMSY had been targeted.  Art!

It can change it's background colour, not it's spots

      To quote him again: "It isn't even the person who made the original threat."  No, because SHOCK was actually SHOCKED - Stalking HOrse Concealing Karen Enabling DIE.  Hopefully the acronyms are as hilarious as I find them.

     HR rolled the DIE and fired her immediately.  The abused and abuser were separated, as per MIMSY's SOP that he'd written with his case in mind, just in case it happened again.
     Then came the company lawyer's and a Cover Your Bottom procedure, intended to prevent DIE from claiming unemployment - which she would technically have been entitled to, as the company had fired her, rather than her quitting.  They found a pattern of similar abuse at every position she had held, which is rather alarming - no previous employer had checked up on her references?  Tut tut gentlemen!  Art?

     The most recently abused employee got in touch with all the people who had suffered under her and, with expert legal advice from MIMSY's company, filed a class harassment action suit.  That they were able to do this implies a lot of victims, and it's highly unusual to use the Class Action Lawsuit against an individual rather than an employer.

     As a result of the outcome, rather than a financial penalty, DIE was permanently blacklisted from nearly all employment 'in my country' as MIMSY put it.  In fact there were so many aggrieved parties he suspected she'd have to emigrate to get a job.

     He also coyly refused to provide any kind of identifying detail, so the prospect of DIE doing jail time remains hypothetical.  I shall dig a little but don't expect results -

     Nope.  I am confident that the case is from South Canada, as he refers to 'States' not 'Provinces' as in Canuckistan and we here in This Sceptred Isle don't possess them.  On the other hand, he does say 'Telly', which is very British

     

Finally -

We've already had a Biercism, so here's another terrible picture of Pumpkinhead.  Art!

The image Melania dreads

Me Three

You Will Be Delighted To Know That The Number Three Intro Continues

Just to give you an insight into the creative process that goes on behind the scenes here at BOOJUM! I was considering doing 'A Little Musical Critique', that po-faced literal interpretation of song lyrics, and targeting 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway', the title song of Genesis' epic 1974 concept double-album.  Art!

     There isn't much point in trying to make sense of the lyrics, as you need to be off your box on illegal substances to understand them.  So I deferred.

     THEN! there was the possibility of having Arnie Schickelbaum and his wife Gardenia relating their adventures, incorporating 16 Codeword solutions in the body of the tale, with definitions.  It may yet happen.  Art!

One of the solutions

     Instead, we're going to be continuing with the theme of 'Three', as evinced earlier in the week.  Instead of a long, long description of mythology and theology, let us begin with a bit of pop culture.  Art!

     The title refers to the three female leads tossing three coins into the Trevi Fountain in Rome and making a wish about their romantic destiny.  I note that there are two leading men in the title sequence, not three, so - draw your own conclusions.

     Let us now whistle up 'Brewer's' and begin explicating.

The Three Wise Monkeys: A carving of three monkeys over the Sacred Stable door in Japan circa the 17th century.  Art!

The Toshogu Shrine

     They are displaying the three attributes for a blameless life: hear no evil, speak no evil and see no evil, but surely there ought to be a fourth monkey covering his nose?  Also, they are about four hundred years adrift as they need another monkey abhoring a mobile phone: thou shalt not pass on unverified and unattributed info on social media.  Conrad unsure if we need a fifth member covering their tongue, since nobody has yet informed me if evil has a taste*.

The Three 'F's: No!  Nothing to do with swearing, you dirty-minded lubbers.  It is much more higher-minded than that.  We are talking about the Irish Land League of the 1880s, whom were Fenians attempting to overthrow absentee English landlords.  Art!

"Parnell led with his extremely aggressive beard"

     What they referred to was: Fair rent - nobody wants to pay scads for a hovel with no indoor plumbing or internet; free sale - erm unsure what this means but it sound really progressive and empowering <digs digs digs> aha, it means the tenant farmer can sell their holding to another without landlord retaliation; fixity of tenure - which means not being evicted for little or no reason, as long as the rent was paid.  Three 'F's.

THREE FIELD SYSTEM: O sweet lord aloft, I remember this phrase from secondary school, all of 50 years ago, when it got beaten into us as part of - History? because we definitely didn't have an 'Agriculture' O level.  'Beaten' as in inflicted through repetition, not that they actually thrashed us with bamboo switches.  A deficiency some teachers mourned. 

     ANYWAY Art!

     'Three-field system' meant a crop rotation arrangement, whereby arable fields were used sequentially for wheat, then the year after for barley or oats, and then in the third year they were left fallow, meaning left strictly alone in terms of farming, although cattle were allowed to graze on them, to prevent an irruption of weeds.  Doing this meant that land could recover after intensive farming, and it had the benefit of working for a good five hundred years.

And Then There Were Three: We go back to Genesis, an ironic line if ever there was one, for their 1978 album.  To elucidate a little, Genesis were originally a 5-piece band: Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins, Tony Banks, Steve Hackett and Mike Rutherford.  Peter left in 1975, and then Steve left in 1977.  So, what did they release in 1978?  Art!

     I remember a frustrated and hostile punk fan writing in to the 'NME' when the album was released, complaining 'And then there were three, and then there were two, and then there was one, and then there were none AND THEY WERE STILL MAKING MUSIC!"

     You may or may not like Genesis but you have to admit that's pretty amusing.

     Right, I think we can squeeze out at least another Intro dealing with Three, so we shall put this one to bed.  Please note that we have so far only touched on Nine and Three, and there are at least 8 other cardinal numbers to resort to.

The Wind Of Change

No, we are not talking about The Skorpions era-defining track concerning the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Sinister Union, which remains an incredibly catchy and powerful song ab

     ANYWAY AGAIN we are rather talking about how a wicked wind served to deliver up to King Piggy a rather unflattering photo.   Art!

The Hair Helmet seems to be gaining sentience and will soon be agitating for it's own security code.

Dock Lobster

No!  This is not about the B-52s, the sole South Canadian band as far as I know whom are named after a strategic bomber.  Art!

Band or bomber, which would I choose?

     Known as a 'BUFF' or 'Big Ugly Fat Feller', which sounds like a DJ Tango reference but which isn't, they pa

     ANYWAY AGAIN I am once again referring to 'Be Amazed' and their 'Most Expensive Mistakes In All Of History' Youtube vlog.  This particular tale of woe concerns the South Canadian seafood chain Red Lobster, and I've definitely heard this story before, so am unsure if we've posted about it.  I shall assume not.  Art!

     In 2003 RL offered an 'All The Crab You Can Eat' promotion, where customers for the low, low price of $23, could gorge themselves on as much Alaskan Snow Crab as they wished.  The company's accountants, who had plainly never dined on crab, reckoned that their diners would eat 2 plates of crab total.

     WRONG!  It was more like 4, and diners took their own sweet time eating the fiddly crab legs, which needed cracking and separating before they could be eaten, meaning less diners and more delay.  Not only that, the increased demand for Snow Crab Legs drove up prices and -

     

     

     Here are the losses for a single quarter.  

     It got worse.  Wall Street got wind of this farrago and detailed it in the press, at length, as an example of corporate stupidity, and knocked $400 million off Red Lobster's stock price.  So, even if they'd only lost $12 million across the year, the market rather rebounded against them by 33 times, effectively docking their income, hence today's title.

     Ooooops.

     That's what you get for not thinking things through.

Point And Laugh

Sorry to include a second photo of Fat Caligula, but this is an hilarious trend where one needs a wheelie-bin of popcorn to appreciate it.  Art!

     The World Cup is a football event being held in South Canada, and since Trump is involved, there were doubtless bribes doled out to get it held there.  The bald chap above - that is, the one without a Hair Helmet combover - is Infantino, whom delivered the bizarre FIFA 'Peace Cup' to DJ Tango, doubtless again to flatter him into concessions of some variety.

     One of the metrics to judge how successful an event is going to be is hotel room takeup, which is doing poorly for the WC.  Not surprising, considering that the hoteliers were trying to gouge fans with prices of $3,000 for rooms.  Then there is the requirement to submit your past social media for inspection, going back five years, and the ever-present risk of ICE shooting you dead for wearing a loud shirt.

     Donnie Dorko will, inevitably, declare that this is the bestest bigliest WC ever.  Art!

     Not wrong.

Finally -

One from Ambrose -

"Language,n: The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure."

*  Doubtless an hideous mixture of pineapple and parsnip.  Or is that just me?

The Baltic Ace Lacks Grace

Conrad Has Just Dug Up Another 'Be Amazed' Vlog

This one is 'The Most Expensive Mistakes In All History'  being the original that has spawned two successor vlogs, one of which we've partially covered.  The initial items cover the 'Deepwater Horizon' disaster, which we covered years ago, and the crash of a B2 stealth bomber, which lacks the kind of narrative depth I need for an Intro.

     So!  I am going for a story that I must have encountered in the media at the time yet which I completely forgot about.  Art!

     Here we have the MV 'Baltic Ace', built in Poland and operated by Ray Car Carriers of the Isle of Man.  It was constructed - you may be ahead of me here - to carry cars, eight decks of them, all lashed down to prevent movement during transit.  Art!

     I'm sure you wondered, like Conrad, how they got the cars on board when there are no hatches on the top deck.  Through two giant roll-on roll-off ramps at the stern, which I have helpfully illustrated above, and you're welcome.  With good drivers and careful parking, they could fit 2,132 cars into this floating allotment.  Presumably those were smaller cars, as on this occasion there were 1,400 Mitsubishis on board.  Art!

     This is the 'Corvus J', a Teuton-constructed Cypriot-owned freight vessel.  If I were a better blogger, I'd give you statistics about how long both ships were and what tonnage and their respective captain's inside leg measurements, etcetera etcetera.  But I won't. 

     ANYWAY actually I will, as I've just come across a very interesting investigative document from Cypriot Department Of Merchant Shipping.  The BA, it seems, came in at almost 4 times the mass of the CJ, being 23,498 tons versus 6,370.

     On the night of December 5th 2012, with high seas and poor visibility, the two ships collided 39 miles off the Dutch coast.  The Corvus J remained intact and upright, but the Baltic Ace suffered catastrophic hull damage and capsized within 15 minutes, killing 11 crewmen.  6 of their bodies were never recovered, with the other 13 survivors being rescued by the Corvus J and the Dutch Coast Guard.  Art!

Corvus Jehosophat

     That's the collision site, which is near the eastern end of the English Channel, one of the busiest and most constricted marine routes across the globe, meaning it was a major shipping hazard, not to mention a pollution risk.

     Ooops.

     Such a peril could not be allowed to bother the burghers of Bruges, or the denizens of Delft, nor the natives of Norfolk, so a salvage operation was mounted in March of 2014.  Art!

     BA makes a major flub here, calling this a 'company'.  It's not, as the word 'Rijk-' gives the game away, being Dutch for 'State'.  This is the Netherlands Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, whom engaged two Dutch firms to carry out salvage operations.  Art!

     You may be unsurprised to know that 'Mammoet' is Dutch for 'Mammoth'.  The marque gives it away.  They maintain some ENORMOUS kit for marine salvage work, which must cost tens of thousands of Euros per day to hire.  I did do a quick dig on the subject, but Mammoet advise they treat costs on a case-specific index.  I did note -

- specialized salvage operations often scale to the millions of dollars depending on the complexity of the wreck or recovery

     We'll come back to that.

     Step One: remove 540,000 litres of fuel oil from the BA's tanks, which seem to have been constructed by Polish craftsmen who were the children of Polish craftsmen, as the North Sea remained pollution-free.  Art!

     There then begins an operation to salve the BA by cutting it apart underwater into 8 pieces and retrieving each enormous piece of scrap metal individually.  Art!

     Sorry I don't have any puny humans to scale this, but what you're seeing here is the removal of relatively small debris from the wreck site.   I can show you another still with various car debris scattered around.  Art!

     That gives you an idea how absolutely mahoosive these salvage vessels are, and the chunks of BA that they were bringing up to the surface.  Art!

     The the bill became due.  Art!

     The cost of the salvage alone.  Art!

     Sorry to mix currencies.  This is how much the BA cost to construct.  Art!

     Here we have the Corvus J repair bill.  Seems a bit high to me for a bit of bow damage but I am not a marine insurance regulator, so what do I know?  Art!

     All those Mitsubishis that never got a forever home.  There's no mention of the missing bodies so I must assume that none were found, which rather interrupts the sense of closure.  Art!

     Ooooh that's expensive.

     And do you know what?  That Cypriot forensic examination worked out that the collision itself was down to human error, and that if both bridge crews had been paying attention and communicating properly, it would not have happened.

I Remember THIS

As you should surely know by now, Conrad has a somewhat ghoulish interest in the structural failure and collapse of dams.  If this happens in daylight there is a safety factor where people can see what's going on and evacuate.

     Not so at night.  Here is an item brought up on my news feed.  Art!

     When they say 'tallest' they mean a dam constructed at the highest elevation in Europe.  What you see here is the Vajont Dam in Italy.  It was constructed in the Dolomites, which are a mountain range, because in hydroelectricity height = power.  Their hydrostatic analysis was sorely lacking, because the mountainside next to the dam's lake was frangible and slid into the lake on 09/10/1963.  Art!

     Here is the dam at completion.  Note the large lake made of water, as lakes are intended to be.  Art!

     The terrain behind the dam, as it is today.  No trace of lake to be seen.

     It was a disaster of epic proportions, with a death toll to boot.  There is no exact definition but the most widely-accepted total is 1,190.  This is the kind of total you get when engineers eff up their calculations..

Wow, rather dark as of so far.  I think we need a bit of cheering up!

Rather More Pleasant Yet Less Of A Pheasant

A pheasant in terms of 'What The Pluck' as we are still SFW on the blog.  Art!

     I am guessing that Yuka Iguchi is Japanese and she is publishing a book called 'Le Chouchou', yet what 'Tokyo News Mook' is remains unclear.  Possibly the medium under which this story is being told.  None of which explains who Yuka Iguchi is nor what her life story is about.

     Conrad baffled.  Logarithm demented.

Angry Birds, Ukrainian Edition

Skip if you're a big fan of Putinpot or the orc regime.  Or even a small fan of them.

     One of the most significant drone strikes that the Kozaky have carried out was over the 16th and 17th of May, when they gave Badad Duh, the Mordorvian capital - I hope Ol' Tolky isn't spinning in his grave at 33 RPM with my usage of his verbiage as insults - a thorough pounding.  The orcs were both angry and terrified.  Art!

     Here you see x6 Kozaky drone streams, heading out in 6 different directions to the total of 107 arrows, which may include multiple strike teams in a single arrow.  We may get to see the end results on 'Jake Broe' in a couple of days yet; he tends to put up compilations of official Kozaky Firepoint drone videos.  The thing is, the orcs cannot mass enough air defences to counter these drones especially as the drones focus on air defences.  There seems to be a lesson in there somewhere.

Finally -

Rocking out with the crown prince of horribleness, A G Bierce -

"Imagination,n: A warehouse of facts, with the poet and liar in joint company."