We'll Get To The Main Matter In A Moment
Before that, I would invite you to imagine the Carpathian Mountains in the depths of winter, in the year 1915, as the Ruffians are struggling to get over and across them in order to invade Hungary, one part of the Dual Kingdom, only to be thwarted by terrain and weather, both equally bad. Art!
Here you see the Ruffians advancing on foot over one of the Carpathian passes. They had it easy. The artillery train and freight wagons made heavy weather of deep, wet snow on narrow mountain roads. To quote from Nick Lloyd and his 'The Eastern Front': "The horses were completely exhausted, they could not carry the heavy loads, and the soldiers had to pull our carts and guns with their own hands. In some places, we had to line the ground with felled trees so that we could tow our heavy guns through the deep snow." Art!
This is a corduroy road from 1913, made by felling tree trunks perpendicularly to the road, enabling progress over soft ground or snow. Except absent the snow. Look at all that toppled timber!
One wonders what the Hapsburg landowners who owned those forest acres thought of their vandalistic neighbours. Bad Ruffians! Naughty Ruffians! No biscuit for you! Art?
Say hello to Devin Stone, the bird-brain behind 'Legal Eagle' , a Youtube channel that deals with - you may be ahead of me here - legal matters, in an entertaining fashion. In this vlog Devin tackles TREE LAW in three examples, as well as a prologue, which is what we shall be focussing on in this Intro.
Dev well observed that any case involving 'Tree Law' brings out the frothing vengeful maniac in the mildest-mannered gardener, although in a few cases Vengeance is better pursued than Justice. As in the case he describes first, to get people's tempers riled up and whetted for revenge. Art!
The town of Bowie, which the South Canadians incorrectly pronounce 'Boo-eeeh', instead of 'Bowey', in Prince George County. For your frustration, neither plaintiff nor defendant are identified by name, har har!
Devin rattled through this preamble at a rate of knots, hitting the high points that the final settlement came to $935,000, that there had been 9 trees cut down, and the neighbour arranged it all when the plaintiff was away. The timber company claimed they were perfectly within their rights to accept whatever the neighbour told them as being true.
Conrad did his due diligence and also digging. Art!
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| The scene of the horror |
Photos provided by Tree Lady's lawyer, Mister Skipper. Since there isn't anything in shot to really give a sense of scale, be advised that these trimmed trunks are about 30 PROUD IMPERIAL INCHES in diameter, generally regarded as mature trees. Note that they left a couple of smaller trees alone, Conrad is unsure why, and in all the local press and Devin's item, there is never any reason why Nasty Ned had the trees felled, unless it was to keep his Evil GPA up to average.
When it became abundantly clear that the case was going to a jury trial, Nasty Ned suffered a severe collapse of testicular fortitude and settled for $500,000, paid by his insurance company. The case proceeded against - ahem - 'Unlimbited Tree Services'. Excuse, bad puns are MY JOB. Art!
The jury found UTS to be guilty of trespass and negligence, the former as they had clearly been present on the plaintiff's property and the latter as they blithely accepted Nasty Ned's word that he owned the property, the trees, the sky, the sea and all the little brown bunnies.
By February of 2026 the case had been completed, with UTS being found liable for $783,000 in restorative damages to get 9 mature trees of similar age to the destroyed ones, a total of $87,000 per tree. Plus an additional $150,000 in 'non-economic damages'. Art!
Lew is an arborist based on Potomac, who pronounced this payment to be the largest in Maryland's history of Tree Law, a record that Chuck Prelipsky will probably glower at angrily, he being the owner of Unlimbited.
Chuck's pronouncements post-trial did not remedy his business savvy: "Tree companies don't usually check property lines" was one howler he came out with. No, Chuck, yours may not, but the properly-run ones do. "He believed both neighbours wanted the trees removed" was another claim, exhibiting his use of telepathy, since he'd never communicated once with the plaintiff.
He is going to appeal. On grounds of surpassing stupidity?
Just imagine the cost of all that timber the Ruffians destroyed back in 1915!
The Haul
I have behooven myself to get off my waffle-patterned posterior and take a couple of evidentiary photographs, which I will cattle-prod Art into displaying -
The now-mellowing ginger beer, which can have the bottle cap cracked carefully open without the contents emptying themselves upon the landscape like a frothy firehose. Conrad loves the balmy smell of fermented ginger. Art!
The 'Blueberry and Soured Cream Loaf' and no, I don't know why they call it a 'loaf' when it is very obviously a cake. To be eaten one slice per day, unless it looks as if it's going to go mouldy, in which case it's all stomachs to the crisis.
Pennington For Your Thoughts
Given inflation and decimalisation, one would expect this to have reached at least 10p per thought, unless they're Conrad's, in which case they would run to negative-£4.37.
ANYWAY back to Brucey and his instantly recognisable artwork. Art!
His palette for this one is all yellow and green, as opposed to the blue used for 'Dune'. Kudos to the publisher for allowing the full landscape-format picture to be used, instead of being compressed or omitted altogether. Thus you get the benefit of all that - city? coral reef? alien architecture? which Conrad deems looks pretttty sinister in aspect. One Comment on the 'Sci-Fi Art' webpage said they always felt as if something awful was about to happen in a Pennington cover, just out of shot or seconds later.
The next few artworks are all book covers for the ever-extending sequels to 'Dune' which I may display or avoid, depending on how I feel. I'm horrid like that.
'Cibola Burn' Afterthoughts
In case you were wondering, and even if you weren't, Volume 4 of 'The Expanse' is set mostly on Ilus, or New Terra, depending on whom you listened to. It was one of the thousand new worlds that Hom. Sap. suddenly had access to, thanks to The Engineers and their complex of Ring gates that short-circuited the cosmos. Art!
This is the 'squatter's' settlement, a shipful of refugees who didn't bother with charter applications, orbital mapping, robot exploration, formal registration, UN procedures and so on. They simply blasted through one of the Rings and landed here, desperate to establish a viable settlement.
Of course - obviously! - this comes back to bite them on the bottom very, very severely, as they don't bother to explore their planet, which might end up dubbed 'New Terror'.
There is a vignette towards the end of the novel where the simulacrum of Miller, the world-weary Belter detective, lists various locations on Ilus that neither the squatters nor the official RCE settlers know ought of. "The orbital bases, the power cores in the crushing depths of the ocean, the library vaults where the old ones had lived, the signalling stations in the mountains, the cities deep beneath the ground -" Art!
It'll all end in tears.
