There's Nothing Greater -

Than The Silverpit Crater!

Relax, I am being poetic.  Pretty obviously loose-leaf Darjeeling tea, the comic art of Matt Howarth and slightly-overripe persimmons are all far, far better than an obscure geographical feature.  Which I had not heard of until tonight; that's how obscure it is.  Art!

A melange of Matt

  

     Lest ye be unaware, the Silverpit Crater is a submarine feature off the coast of Yorkshire, marking the spot an asteroid 150 metres across, or 3.3 million kilograms mass, hit waaaay back 45 million years ago.  Art!

     I shall refrain from coarse ribaldry about Yorkshire, merely to point out that this prehistoric impact created a wall of water 300 feet high that would have scoured the coast and for miles inland.  Bath night for the Yorkies 
     A.k.a. a 'Tsunami'.  Which is the Japanese for 'Port' and 'Wave'.

     For Lo!  Your Humble Scribe has been doing a bit of background reading on the subject of tsunamis, propelled by reading about the description of same in 'Nemesis Games', and a glance o'er a few other websites.  

     Tsunamis are not common, which is a good thing as they are tremendously destructive when they do happen, principally to coastlines - but not exclusively.  The larger ones can affect terrain miles into an interior, either by direct flooding or by travelling upriver.

     I am certain you are thirsting to know how they happen.  Art!

Gobsmackingly horrifying

      Normally, there is a movement of terrain on an enormous scale that agitates the body of water around it, typically an earthquake, but also due to landslides into or along a shore, or volcanic activity, and only verrrry occasionally as an asteroid or comet impact - certainly none of the latter have occurred in human history.  Art!

     Thus the Silverpit Crater is evidence of an exceedingly rare event.

     ANYWAY what happens to a tsunami might be undetectable at sea, thanks to the volume of water above the event, BUT as the wave gets closer to shore the water becomes shallower, the wave slows and increases in height.  It has an incredible amount of kinetic energy behind it, which is why it can flood miles inland and cause immense damage where it lands.  Art!

     If the trough of the tsunami hits first, water will recede from shorelines, which is an alarm bell to anyone paying attention to get to high ground RIGHT NOW.  There's a Youtube short from a South Canadian television show about first responders that does a good job of displaying this, which I'm not even going to bother trying to find, as that would be impossible.

     80% of tsunamis are generated by earthquakes, meaning that the Pacific 'Ring of Fire' and it's associated tectonic activity, is prime territory for tsunamis.  Art!

     This is the NOAA - National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, a South Canadian NGO - map of historical tsunamis.  The closer and darker the cluster, the greater the number of tsunamis, so Indonesia and Japan win the un-coveted prize of being most at risk.  If you are as aged as Conrad, you remember the ghastly 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean which basically destroyed coastal communities in the region.  This occurred whilst I was at Connexions, and I recall taxiing about a pair of Sri Lankan lady teachers who were in the UK to network about it.  English not great, but very polite and petite.

     ANYWAY AGAIN as an illustration of just how deadly this event was - Art!

     The 'After' and 'Before' pictures of Banda Aceh in Indonesia, where the community was swept clean of habitation bar the mosque, which seems to have been made of stronger stuff than the houses around it.  The death toll was around 200,000, which had slipped my mind apart from being general background This Was Awful.  These were people who had absolutely no idea what was about to happen to them, and whom had done nothing to merit their fate.

     If we abruptly turn tail and refer back to 'Nemesis Games', the sinister dual-entity author James Corey is rather coy about what the mass of the impacting Rocks From Space is, except from the details about what the strikes look like and the effect they have close to Ground Zero.  Millions of tons?  Billions of tons?  Trillions of tons?  Art!

     OF COURSE they egg the pudding - I'm not going to explain this idiom as I've done so several times already and you ought to be up to speed on it - and have at least 7 strikes on Ol' Terra.  If I recall correctly, the bombardiers are interrupted in mid-bombard and nuked into a thin vapour.

     There you go!  Today's lesson about meteorology and hydrology, and you're welcome.

O Good Lord NO NO NO

Conrad has a few saved pictures that he fully intends to come back to in order to create an Intro or two.  Here is one I saved from a couple of days ago.  Art!

O my do I remember

     The blurb reads, since I don't expect you to use a magnifying glass "The adventures of a cheery schoolboy who has a navy, army and air force of his very own - wonderful scale models operated by a radio wrist-controlled gadget!"

     Excuse me, but is it wise to give a ten-year old the ability to storm the local council offices and declare martial law?  Or, you know, destroy the school if he dislikes his homework assignment?  Who, exactly, gave him executive authority over a military force not past of HRH The King's armed forces?  And, why is there a trio of Panther thanks 30 years obsolete in the foreground?

     Let us hope the submarines are simply hunter-killers and not SLAMBAM nuclear missile boats.

     Or - am I overthinking this a tad?

I Don't Want To Turn Us Into The 'Donold Judas Trump' Kicking Site

But I have to take my chances while the oleaginous sweat-stain is still alive, as I'm pretty certain he's not going to make it into 2027.  Bring on another ghastly photograph of him!  Art?

     To port is what he looks like absent makeup, hairdressing, lighting and a hernia truss.  To starboard is what he likes to imagine he looks like, sweaty, swollen and sepia-tinged as he is.  Art!

     He looks as if someone punched him in the face and delivered two black eyes.   Or purple eyes.  Perhaps his eyes look like Wildberries?  What a delightful contrast between eyes, skin and ears.  Purple, orange and pink, three colours of the rainbow.  

     36 days until the mid-terms, Donnie me boy.  Hearken to the clock.

Talking Of The Apocalypse

In case we're unclear, I have been bloviating about post-apocalyptic novels similar to 'Greybeard' by Brian Aldiss and a looooong list of books that came up in the search engine.  I've been pontificating about those I've read already, because you might need my guide to literature.  Art!

     Not only have I read it, I saw the adaptation put on at the 'Royal Exchange' as a play, which was pretty darn impressive.  ARGA WARGA!

     You might find it hard going, as it is written in a debased argot of English, but it repays study.  It's set in the post-apocalyptic wastelands of the English south-east, where a central plot driver is the discovery of -

      GUNPOWDER!

     What can possibly go wrong*?

     Quite a lot, actually, and not only open flames.  Static electricity will also set off black powder.

Finally -

Watched the reboot of 'Resident Evil' at the weekend and even though I have not played a single second of the game, it is 100% better than the original Mila Jojo films.  Which, I am embarrassed to say, I have seen for years after the original.  What can I say. Conrad and zombie films.

*  An enormous amount which we will not tackle here

Gone For A Burton

We Are Digging Into British Idiom Here

More specifically, the times of the Second Unpleasantness, where, for many years, the only way of delivering justice upon the Nazi hordes was via air-delivered ordnance.  Art!

     Take your oil-swilling hump and serve it against a glasshouse!  On the way there please ensure your Sidcot is free from castor-oil lubricant t

     ANYWAY - er - please forget any nonsense from the Second Unpleasantness about terror, destruction and havoc delivered from the skies, because in this Intro we have more than enough in all three dimensions.  

     Or don't, as I've not explained it.  'Gone for a burton' was an euphemism from the Brylcreem Boys during the Second Unpleasantness, referring to someone no longer present thanks to being dead.  It being impolite to call them 'dead'.  In the First Unpleasantness Biggles would have used the euphemism 'Gone west', as in Batson, who had 'Gone west' owing our hero forty francs.  1917 francs, mind you, so at least £237 in today's currency.  Art!

     ANYWAY AGAIN to get back to the meat of the matter, Your Humble Scribe is now over half-way through 'Nemesis Games', Number Five in 'The Expanse' series of novels, and the narrative cycles through all the different characters.  The most interesting one is of the 'Rocinante's engineer, Amos.  Amos Burton.  Hence today's title.

     Amos had an extremely horrid upbringing in Baltimore, which he rarely refers to and does not care to reminisce about.  He generally stays away from Earth and only returns in this volume to find out how and why his old foster-mom died.  Natural causes, it transpires, otherwise a whole lot of people would have suddenly died.  Art!

Amos and friend

     Whilst still on Earth, Amos elects to visit Clarissa Mao, whom is being held in an underground prison in North Carolina, for multiple crimes including murder, and whom had been a temporary shipmate aboard the Rocinante.  That subsumes at least 500 pages of plot and character development.  You can thank me later.

     SPOILER! SPOILER! SPOILER!SPOILER! SPOILER! SPOILER! SPOILER! SPOILER!

     It's at this point that things get interesting,  since a radical OPA Belter faction has decided to rock the Earth's ashes, by hitting it with rocks.  The OPA is a scion of the asteroid belt, hence the name.  These rocks are not the variety you can kick aside; they mass millions of tons and are travelling at very high speed.  Art!

     This chap is the first to see the initial impact, which was thought to be a cosmic accident.  He's around for about five seconds before the blast wave hits him and he vanishes.  I have gone back and forth in the novel to see if the authors - for they are a joint team writing under a common pseudonym - mention exactly where the first Space Rock hits, but cannot find any details.  All they say is 'North Africa', which is a pretty large piece of real estate, and 'Morocco', which only slightly reduces the geographical spread.  

     Aha!  Teh Interwebz reveal that the impact was at Laghouat.  Ta WWW.  Art!

     Nor is it in Morocco.  Algeria, pilgrims, Algeria.  We are told that Rabat, which is in Morocco, was 500 kilometres west of Ground Zero.  Also that the strike registered as 8.75 on the Richter scale.  The one they use to measure earthquakes.  To get a grasp on that, that's the equivalent of 30,000 Hiroshima nukes.  These are BIG rocks.

     The second strike is also not precisely defined, merely as being ' - in the middle of the Atlantic ocean'.  This strike is even more deadly than the first, since the subsequent tsunamis affect every coastline along the North and South Atlantic, creating disasters from Greenland to Brazil.  Art!

     From 'Deep Impact' but it illustrates the point well.  We are also told that Dakar, on the African coast, is hit by the shockwave an hour after initial impact.  Art!

     We then get to the third impact, as if the first two weren't enough.  This one hits near Bethlehem in North Carolina, the same state that Clarissa is ensconced in, and where she and Amos are deep underground.  About thirty stories deep, if I recall correctly.  Thus, they survive the impact but are trapped, as the lifts don't work and the stairs have collapsed.  Bottom!

     Amos' other crewmates from the Rocinante are all off-world, watching this apocalypse unfold with horror, which allows the authors to impart that the death toll is at two hundred and fifty million within a couple of hours, shortly to become billions.

     Grim stuff but my word! is it entertaining.

More Grim Reaper Statistics

Here's an interesting statistical comparison.  Art!

     Ruffian medical care is as up to date and modern as it was in the Crimean War of 1857.  This means that the normal ratio of dead to wounded in modern warfare of 1:3 is, in Mordorvia, closer to 1:1.  So, approximately 750,000 dead and 750,000 injured.  Art!

     18 dead and 624 injured is a ratio of 1:34, which is again an illustration of modern South Canadian military healthcare as compared to that of the orcs.  Grim, yes, and also illuminating.

More Gentle Shoeing

It has to be gentle as Droopy is pretty much dead on his swollen meat-balloon feet at present.  Allow me to introduce the latest of our mocking photos of the Big Orange Oaf Himself.  Art!

The Swollen Sweaty Senile Sepia Saggy Sackbutt himself

     Now you know why one of my nicknames for Donold is 'DJ Tango', which might be obscure to non-British folk.  Art!

     The can might be beaded with moisture if it is straight from the fridge.  The Farting Fraudster is beaded with sweat because merely moving his massive carcass is an effort.  Art!

     Here is a still from a sequence taken after he descended the steps of Air Force One, where he's visibly struggling to breathe, to the vast delight of many cruel people on Twitter (including me).  Art!

     Which brings me to an interesting vlog by Chris Cillizza, pictured above.  He brought up a promise that SSSSSS made months ago, that he was going to visit all 35 critical districts in the runup to the mid-term elections.  That means one per day.  Has he started yet?  

     No <gasps of shock and horror>.  Instead he's going to cheat at golf, or to meetings with governors in safe Republican seats, or football matches.  He is definitely not 'on the stump' as the phrase goes, campaigning for Republican candidates.  One reason, as Chris pointed out, is that candidates in tight races don't want to be associated with him in any way whatsoever, as he is massively unpopular.  The second is that he is a morbidly obese 80-year old with bad circulation, who is now unable to get down a flight of stairs without difficulty.  Doing a campaign appearance over the month of October would finish him off.

   Hmmmm.  GET OUT THERE AND CAMPAIGN, DONOLD!

More From That List Of Books 'Like Greybeard'

I bet you thought I'd forgotten about it, didn't you?  You lucky people, here we are again looking at post-apocalyptic sci-fi novels.  Art!

     'Or, How We Got Along After The Bomb'.  Conrad has definitely read it, but I cannot remember anything from the novel, except to say that the blurb definitely mirrors 'Deus Irae', which I have also read and can remember.  A combination of old age and gin, I think.  Hang on -

"Dr. Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick is set in a post-apocalyptic world following a nuclear disaster caused by scientist Bruno Bluthgeld. As society attempts to rebuild, the story follows several quirky characters, including the telekinetic Hoppy Harrington and Bonny Keller, who navigates this strange new reality. The plot weaves through their lives, exploring themes of redemption and the human condition amidst chaos"

     You can see the parallels I'm seeing, can't you?

Once More We Venture

Into The Kaleidoscopic World Of Arnie And Gardenia Schickelbaum

Don't fret, I checked and I've not done one of these for over two months, so it's well beyond due.  No idea if this will be a single-subject blog, though the probability is high.

     To the uninitiated:  Conrad, as you should surely know, is pretty much addicted to the crossword-variant known as a Codeword, where every letter of the alphabet is given a number, you get two or three and work out the other twenty-three or twenty-four.  The thing is, which mildly enrages me, the compilers keep using obscure, obsolete or foreign words as solutions.  Being a creature of habit and rote, I make a note of these words - and use Arnie and Gardenia as a framing device to list said words, in an hilarious fashion.  Art!

     Hilarious I said!  Laugh or it's the Remote Nuclear Tormentor for you!

     ANYWAY I have another list of excoriating Codeword solutions that I vehemently object to.  So let's get it on.  Art!

A satyr

     SATYR:  Arnie was feeling a little glum.  He had put a written proposition to City Hall about renaming one of the days of the week, changing it from 'Saturday' to 'Satyrday', and had paid for it to be notarised and hand-delivered with proof of receipt, only for it to be shot down in a one-word reply: NO.  Bold and in capitals.  The city did not have any red ink to hand or they'd have used it.

     In case you were wondering, and even if you weren't, a 'satyr' is one of a class of Greek sylvan deities, initially depicted as half-horse, later as half-goat.   They drank to excess and danced and frolicked as companions of Dionysus, chasing the nymphs.  They were supposed to represent wild animal passions.  Quite what Arnie was thinking in renaming Saturday to Satyrday is beyond my ken, and I'm the one writing this.

     What's that, Arnie?  You thought it would express the untrameled exuberance and verve of New York?  Yeah right.  What's that horrid noise in the back - O!  Gardenia is singing.  Okay.

CONTRALTO: The lowest female voice, usually having a range of approximately from F, a fifth below middle C to D and a fifth above it.  I looked up the definition in my dictionary, can you tell?  Usually shortened to 'Alto' especially when a member of a choir.  Art!

A famous contralto (it says here)

     No danger of Gardenia becoming one, she sounds like a cat being put through a mangle.  Art!

FANDANGO: Possibly the opposite of an ADAGIO, which we will come to.  A fandango is an old Spanish courtship dance in triple time, between a couple who dance closely and provocatively, and definitely not the sort of word to ever belong in a Codeword.  Art!

     Arnie and Gardenia are a bit past courtship dancing.

ADAGIO: This is Italian, a bit more to A & G's taste as it's an instruction to be played or performed slowly, from the Italian 'Ad' meaning 'At' and 'Agio', meaning 'Ease'.  Art!

Truly wonderful stuff

Now, if you're paying attention to this scrivel, you might well be wondering exactly what Arnie's trade of veeblefetzer repairman involved.  Or you might not.  Either way, it involves the use of -

ALKALIS: These are a soluble base or a solution of a base, also being a soluble mineral salt that occurs in arid soils and some natural waters.  From the Arabic 'Al-qil' - what a refreshing change from Greek or Latin! - meaning 'The ashes of saltwort'.  Art!

Both salty and worty

BEVEL: A good veeblefetzer repairman will also be an expert in bevels, or 'cants', which are surfaces that meet other surfaces at an angle other than a right angle, or the action of cutting a bevel.  From the Old French - hurrah! - 'Bevel' meaning Unattested'.  Hmmm?  Art!

GUMPTION: As stated above, this is what a good veeblefetzer repairman needs, rather than sticking to the rulebook in every circumstance.  For South Canadian readers the word means 'resourcefulness or common sense', except common sense is - you may be ahead of me here - not that common.  It has it's roots in Scandinavian, meaning 'Attention'.  Art!

'Gumption' according to AI

EXTEMPORE:  What veeblefetzer repairman cannot be, because a faulty veeblefetzer can take out a city block.  It means 'Without planning or preparation, impromptu' and is from the Latin <hack spit>  'Ex tempore' meaning 'Instantly'.  Gardenia, on the other hand, being a free spirit, is fond of off-the-cuff activity.  Just thought I'd mention her, too.  Art!

Flax

FLAX: One of Gardenia's plant-based hobbies is making linen fabrics from the stems of flax, which you see above, that she grows in the back yard.  These are herbaceous plants of the genus Linum, such as Linum Uscatissimum, which have blue flowers, in case you were curious.  Gardenia takes the dried stems, strips them into fibres and weaves them into cloth.  The name has a long heritage, arriving via Old English 'Fleax' which itself is derived from Frisian.  Art!

All the work of Gardenia's fair hands

VALANCE: A short piece of drapery hung along a shelf, canopy or bed, or across a window - see above - to hide structural detail.  Possibly originating from the French town of Valance, known for it's textiles.  Just marvel at how adept Gardy is with her arty handiwork.  Art!

Weeds!

BURDOCK: Yes, there were intruders in Gardenia's garden.  Burdock, to be exact.  The burdock is a coarse, woody Eurasian (then how did it get into a New York garden?) of the genus Arctium, having large heart-shaped leaves, tiny purple flowers surrounded by hooked bristles, bur-like fruits.  The name is derived from 'Bur' and - you may be ahead of me here - 'Dock'.  The burs on this plant apparently inspired the invention of Velcro.  Wowsers!  Your Humble Scribe was also passing fond of a soft drink dubbed 'Dandelion and Burdock' in his long-ago youth.  Gardenia dug up the roots, washed them, and cooked them, apart from one, which she kept to make a medical poultice.  Yes, the roots are edible.  Art!

     Those are big roots, it must have taken a lot of effort to dig them up.  Poor Gardenia.  

FORCIBLE: Done by, involving or having force.  See those roots above.

IMBRUE: As per that poultice that Gardy made up from the burdock roots, she used it to treat a bit of eczema on her elbow, staining her skin in the process - or 'imbruing' it.  Normally this word is associated with blood and bloodstains but I couldn't work in a way to have Gardy exsanguinate herself with a trowel.  Art!

     The word comes from the Latin 'Imbuere' meaning 'To stain'.

    You may be wondering how fecund the Schickelbaum's back garden was, the answer is very, thanks to a generation back when -

LEVEE: A word as used by South Canadians and it has NO BUSINESS being in a British Codeword.  An embankment alongside a river, produced naturally by sedimentation or constructed by man to prevent flooding.  Or an embankment that surrounds a field to be irrigated.  From French and before that Latin 'Levare' meaning 'to raise'.  The nearby Salt Flats river broke it's levee and the abundant mud brought forth in the flood enriched the property that Arnie and Gardy ended up buying.  Art!

     And with that, Vulnavia, we are DONE!

Back To Brucie

Bruce Pennington, That Is

Not to be confused with Bruce Forsyth, Robert the Bruce or Bruce Campbell; we are talking about Pennington the artist, whose work we have been featuring for weeks and weeks.  The images are from 'Sci-Fi Art's slideshow, a fact I am careful to mention every time I post the artwork, since Conrad has no wish to be sued.  The whole thing is over 7 minutes long, so there are a LOT of images to get through.  Conrad has identified some of them as book or magazine covers, which takes a bit of digging.  Art!

     Here an aside.  Yes, already!  That above is Amii from 'Flavour Trip' doing their 'Solar Eclipse House Mix'.  During our Air b-n-b we had this channel playing in the background, and Col was bemused at how it worked as a paying business.  I did a little digging and found that they began doing this travel and music and cooking gig in 2022, although their website doesn't give any details about monetization.  Pay from the adverts that interrupt every so often?  They have a Patreon page, if you feel the need to get even more of them, and I put this here as they're playing in the background as I type. 

     ANYWAY back to Brucie.  Art!

     Very symbolic, if a little obscure.  Another severed hand on a tabletop, and it must have been tricky getting it to stay upright.  Not sure what St. Paul's cathedral is doing in the middle of a desert, nor why the spiderweb is made of metal.  Typically, there is no information on teh Interwebz about it.  Bottom.  Art!

     I'm cheating a bit here, I used this for the Sunday links blog, declaring that it looked like a book cover illustration thanks to the 'Title Gap' at top, but not going any further.  Allow me to do a bit of digging now.  Aha!  'Triple engine spaceship asteroids' did the trick - 

     Except someone's telling porky pies, because - Art!

     I think I've read the novel, which is a fix-up of four short stories, and cannot remember a thing about it.  Art!

     Dramatic, nicht wahr?  I am unsure what's causing that giant plume of smoke, unless it's a Wildberries, or a volcano.  Either way, it looks sinister and brooding.  As for the three flying craft, I'm not sure what perspective to take on them.  Are they curved, symmetrical and flat, seen at an elevation, or are they hook-shaped and flying with the lower limb down?

     O and yes, it's a book cover.  Art!

     It's one of his juveniles that he wrote for <gags> 'Young Adults', featuring the ghastly-named 'Lucky Starr' whom had sadists for parents.  Art!

THIS!

     I had this as a poster from 'Science Fiction Magazine' that I liked so much I pinned it to my wall as a tall thin teenager, fifty years ago.  It's brilliant, and so evocative.  You can tell from Saturn in the sky that we're not in Kansas anymore, Vulnavia, which might explain the strange skeletal remains to starboard.  The estuary looks rather similar to one on Earth, except there are those exotic corals to port.  I've no idea why the hamlet in the distance is burning, as it's not an Ozon warehouse.  Is it a book cover?  Let me get my spade - aha!

     More of Ol' Ize and another 'Lucky Starr' thrilling adventure wonder story (it says here).  Art!

     Very surreal.  It, again, looks like a book cover thanks to the Title Gap.  Possibly J G Ballard?  Let me dig.  

     Nope.  I tried combinations of 'Tulips' and 'Road' but didn't get any results.  Still, if you see a collection of Ballard's short stories with this as the cover art, I want royalties.  Art!

     That's definitely a book cover.  Dashed if I know which one, searching for 'skull', 'purple' and 'cloak' brought up nothing.  Nor did 'horror novels'.  So, dream on of what might have been.  Art!

     Hmmm.  From a sci-fi novel about overpopulation?  Note the sweaty masses of proles, whom are literally beneath the upper classes on the walkway.  Prole budgets being what they are, none of them can afford clothes, so it's a good job none of them are ladies.  I think this was Ol' Brucie experimenting rather than being for publication, as it doesn't crop up in any searches.  Art!

     That's how far along we are, so I shall wrap up this Intro.  We can come back to it later.  I bet you can hardly wait.

You May Think Me Crass

By continual insults as per Cankles Von Yamteats, but guess what, I'm not going to stop.  I also have another unpleasant nickname for him: 'Droopy', after his deformed face, which looks like it was made of wax and melted.  Art!

     The smart money has it that he suffered a stroke before he vanished from all media for a week, and he's not fully recovered yet.  Art!

     The Sweaty Swollen Saggy Sepia Senile Sackbutt - I shall have to abbreviate that to SSSSSS as it's getting unwieldy - and what you can't hear is the way he gargles when speaking now, as if nursing half a pint of phlegm in his throat.  Sorry if you can't unsee that.  Art!

     80-year old man shouts at female.  He feels threatened by intelligent women, so instead of answering their questions, he loudly insults them instead.  Imagine calling someone 'Piggy' when you're a morbidly obese 300-pound weretoad.  Art!

     Apologies if that startled you.  Here's Mitch McConnell, the vegetable in a wheelchair, three months after apparently falling down, back in the Senate.  Not only is nobody home, the lights are all out as well.  Present in the Senate to make Droopy look good by comparison.

A Snippet From Warby

'Paul Warburg', that is, Youtube vlogger, principally about Ukraine.  Art!

     His most recent vlogs have been recorded indoors in his den, whereas earlier this year he recorded at different outside locations.  Presumably somewhere quite remote, as I only ever saw a couple in the distance in one vlog.

     ANYWAY AGAIN he was detailing some statistics about Ukrainian drones, which caught my attention enough to annotate.  After all, I am a dinosaur and it doesn't exist unless I write it down.  Art!

     That's a Firepoint-1 drone, together with puny human for scale.  The warhead is a whopping 230-pounds of high explosive, or 105 kilograms in that other metric, and it has a range of 600 PROUD IMPERIAL MILES or 1,000 kilometres.  That puts everything inside European Ruffia at risk.  Estimated cost per unit is $55,000.  Art!

     Meet the Firepoint-2, which only has a range of 200 kilometres but which it makes up for by having a 350-pound warhead or about one-seventh of a ton.  Whatever it hits is not going to enjoy the experience.

     Warby also stated that the Kozaky produce 200 of these per day, or a total of 73,000 per year.  Even if the orcs shoot down 90% of them, that still means 730 hit their targets, say at least two per day, and we're seeing a lot more targets hit than two.

     The Ukrainians have also learned that dispersing the production sites for their drones is essential and there are over 50 factories making or assembling components.  Even if the Ruffians discover and destroy the locations of some, there is enough redundancy to keep things going.  Which Putinpot doesn't want to hear.  Tee hee!

I Must Try This Myself

'NAFOViking' is a Nork - the Norwegian variety - whom posts on Twitter, the hell-platform corrupted by Elong Tusk.  His go-to posts are to insult Finns and post pictures of whatever bizarre food combo he's trying.  Art!

Finally -

The Kids have just arrived after an horrendously long journey consisting of roadworks, closed junctions and a silly-length diversion into Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell, so I shall down laptop and repair to entertain them.