TUCAN Do What One Cannot

 No!  This Is Nothing To Do With Toucans

Get your species right!  This is more of matters in marine mobility, and there is a touch of serendipity about my acronym, which made me happier than it ought to have done.  Yeah, truly I am a very sad man.

      Today's Intro ventures into an area we have not covered before, and which was new to me, so allow me to provide an illo.  Art!

     Two tugs in harbour.  I did try to gimmick them up with atomic power and missiles, but the end result was quite poor, so you have bald reality.

     So!  From 'rSlash' on Youtube allow me to introduce TUgboat CAptaiN, hereafter TUCAN, and surprise surprise, the Tucan is a species of fish, very appropriately.  Art!

Tucans two

     TUCAN ran a tugboat business of two boats and three other crewmen.  His primary work was doing 'Ship assist work', meaning his tugs would shift 'dead' ships around harbours, 'dead' meaning without a crew and not under power, thus being unable to manoeuvre.  Art!

The tug: small but mighty

     For those unfamiliar, a tugboat, usually abbreviated to tug, is a small yet powerful vessel used to manoeuvre much larger ships in confined spaces like ports and harbours, alone or in tandem.  With one tug pushing the stern port of a ship, and the other the port bow, they could turn it clockwise far more easily than one tug alone.  Hence today's title.

     One of TUCAN's more important customers was the LArge Dysfunctional Shipyard, hereafter LADS, a whacking big place that had five drydocks - Art!

     To port is a 'wet' pier, to starboard are two drydocks.  These are basins where a ship can be floated in, the gates secured and all the water pumped out, to allow maintenance or repair to be carried out.

     There were 12 cranes, which TUCAN called 'Whirleys', because they were able to move through 360º.  Art!

     Plus several thousand feet of piers.  TUCAN would get instructions for his boats such as 'Boat 32Y needs to be under Whirley 4 at 07:00' or 'Ship XPV needs to , be in Drydock 1 at 10:45'.  Sounds simple and logical, right?

     O if only 'twere so.  You see, according to TUCAN, the Shipyard Superintendents did not talk to the shop foremen, nor did the shop foremen bother to talk to each other.  Organisation ranged from chaotic to non-existent.  

     Thus TUCAN stepped into the breach, suggesting far more rational marshalling orders that cut down time and costs.  After all, this was not his sole customer and his brace of boats needed to be at other shipyards, not just LADS.  Art!

     This de facto coordinator role oiled the waters for years, until SUDDENLY! what happened but LADS hired an Awful Shipyard Superintendent, hereafter ASS.  Within 3 weeks he focussed on TUCAN, pilloried him and ordered him to stay in his lane: no more coordinating.

     'Yes massah,' thought TUCAN, merely tugging his forelock - do you see wh- O you do - and returning to his boat.  As he gloatingly relates, he then spent 8 hours doing 2 hours work.  To quote him "I figured this was going to get real expensive real fast".  This was because his two tugboats hire cost $900 per hour, and that was the total 15 years ago, I'd imagine it's at least $1,000+ by now.  Thus the invoice for that first non-coordinated day's work came in at $7,200 instead of $1,800.  Art!

     Rather to his surprise, there was no pushback from either LADS or ASS.  Conrad feels that ASS had proved a complete bust by the fourth week if he was there to either improve communication or profitability.  TUCAN lists a job his business carried out where the initial task prevented the second from being carried out in a timely manner, adding in a 5-hour delay, billable at $4,500.
     TUCAN's boat crews learned that, once they'd done a particular job, they could relax with a book or a fishing rod until the next job came round hours later, hours they were billing at $900 per.  

     This went on, not for weeks, nor months, but FIFTEEN YEARS.  We are not told if ASS was still in charge of LADS during this time, so we can assume he was, as I'm sure TUCAN would have gleefully related his being 'let go'.  Art!

     Then LADS went bust.  

     Amongst the Commenters were some who wondered how such a wasteful and inefficient yard could manage for more than a few months before shuttering.  Others speculated it might have been a government shipyard, where losses would be written off, up to a point, as making a profit was more a distant hope than a reality.

      rSlash got out their calculator after the tale ended, working out the hourly rate, how many hours worked per day, how many working days there were in a year and came up with a figure that TUCAN's business had made $1,875,000 out of LADS over the duration, or $125,000 per annum.  You could say that TUCAN really soaked the yard*.

     There you go, a fascinating insight into marine operations.  And you're welcome.

Well, I Was Going To Look At More 'Daractenus' Food Satire

You know, our Romanian friend on Twitter who hilariously canned South Canadian food - Art!

Do you see what I did there?

     HOWEVER, we're not going to get any more beyond the canned chicken, additive mash in a packet and artificial blueberries, because the thread has seen an irruption of very, very angry MAGA cult members, who have ballooned the thread to epic proportions.  Art

     The problem is, I cannot search for the food brands, al -

     Aha!  I remembered 'third arm' as a phrase.  Wait one.

     Art!

     The word 'Pure' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, as Darac points out South Canadian pigs are shot full of Ractopamine, which boosts the growth of muscle and thus meat and thus profits, and also promotes cancer in Hom. Sap. consuming this meaty melange, thus boosting hospital profits, a win-win all round - in South Canada - this stuff is banned in Europe.

Ole King Cole Is In A Hole

Or, more misery in Mordorvia.  Normally the oil and gas industry steals the headlines, so to balance things out here's a bit of bad news for their coal industry.  Art!

     The orcs have the second largest coal reserves on the planet, which isn't doing them much good, as the industry is in an ever-deepening crisis, the worst since the Bad Old Days of the Nineties.  Sanctions, a failing industrial base and clients turning to alternate sources have all had a baleful influence. Currently, it costs $1,000 more to extract a ton of coal than it sells for. There are now 62 coal business in critical condition, 14 of which are now in the process of being wound-up and liquidated, and another 20 of which have suspended operations.

     Figures for Q1 of 2026 are not out yet, but the projected total loss for the year is $7 billion.  Art!

     China used to import a lot of Ruffian coal, indeed to the tune of 102 million tons in 2023.  However - ah that word again! - in 2024 they were down 7 million tons and are looking to cut imports to about 12% of total in 2026.  O dear.

FIRE THAT SUB-EDITOR!

Do they still have sub-editors now?  Let me check.  Yes, apparently they are still a thing, now being fewer in number but with a wider brief than before, although still being relied upon to ensure legal compliance and avoid their medium getting it's bottom sued off.  Art!

     Where does Pumpkinhead feature in a domestic UK issue about increasing charges on homes in the UK, stated in pounds sterling, as published by a British newspaper (albeit a bit of a yellow rag)?

     Nor am I going to click on their link.  First of all, I spurn their clickbaity headline, and secondly, this is from days ago and the item is no longer there.

Finally -

Another quotation.  A short one, as we are well over Count.

"Most editors are failed writers, but so are most writers" - T. S. Eliot.

*  Ouch.

Three-Way Waterway

Nope, Nothing To Do With Venice

Although you are kind of wrong tent, right desert.  You see, I can legitimately lead with a picture that encapsulates what we're going to be leading onto, whilst only being a little clickbaity.  Art!

A film worth seeing

     This is Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg, in a famous scene from "La Dolce Vita", where they cavort in the Trevi Fountain, and it's pretty steamy, despite everybody keeping their clothes on, and the fountains being at room temperature.  'Trevi', for your information, means 'Three ways', hence today's title.

     Why are we here?  O I thought you'd never ask!  Because we're on a theme for an Intro, which hasn't happened for a geological age.  Mind you, I've not annotated this out, so am unsure how long it's going to be.

     So - Fountains it is!  Art?

     The Trevi Fountain in Rome, which Conrad has actually visited.  Don't be fooled by the perspective here, the fountain is contained in a dense network of streets with no artistic vista and you literally stumble across it whilst traversing The Eternal City. Also, there are hordes of tourists.

     The Pale Fountains were one of the indie bands that mushroomed after the surge of punk rock ebbed, allowing bands with actual musical ability to emerge.  Conrad did not ever see them live, although they were around at the time I was attending gigs in Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell on a regular basis.  Art!

     

Ho ho ho, how ironic, 'pacific' and a man bestrewn with belts of bullets.  This implies he's part of a machine gun team, carrying ammunition in bel

     ANYWAY I think we need a few definitions, forsooth I usually start with a definition, bring on the 'Collins Concise English Dictionary'!

     "Fountain,n: A jet or spray of water or some other liquid.  From the Latin 'Fons' meaning 'Spring'".
     So glad we got that out of the way.

Fountain Of Youth: A fountain that was able to restore anyone who drank from it to a state of youth.  Art!

     In Conrad's opinion this raises a whole lot of questions.  For one thing, how much water of the FoY do you have to consume in order for it to have an effect? Litres?  Hogsheads?  Tuns?  Is there an on-site lavatory facility?  Can you accidentally overdose and end up aged 7 not 17?  Has it been properly sterilised and rendered fit for human consumption?  What happens to toddlers who ingest it?  Can it be sprayed on crops and arable land to rejuvenate, and will the government require a cut of it?

     Just to be going on with.   

     ANYWAY gentle readers, welcome to the meat of the matter, namely a fantastic descent below ground-level into the beating heart of Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell.  Well, maybe an arrhythmic heart.  Art!

The current state

     Welcome back, gentle reader, to 'Martin Zero', Mancunian industrial archaeology explorer, whom has cropped up on the blog before, and who has now gotten an opportunity to explore the fountains in Piccadilly before they are gone forever.  Art!

     Nor is that all, for at night - Art!

     The fountains are now long shut down, the whole area is fenced off and about to be turned over, with the fountain's infrastructure being ripped out, and the hideous 'Berlin Concrete Wall' being torn down, at which there will be cheers.  It was a Dog Buns eyesore, and I bet bri

     ANYWAY - the fountains required a lot of subsurface machinery to operate, much more than you might imagine.  Art!

All pictures from now on courtesy Martin Zero

     The somewhat forbidding entrance, usually inaccessible to the public, although at one time it was  - Art!

      An underground public convenience.  There's little evidence of any 'sanitary installations' remaining, so no need to cover your eyes, Vulnavia.  I hope you appreciate Martin's efforts here, it's not as if Manchester Council will just let curious members of the public in.  Art!

      This is one of the electrical control rooms for all the machinery on site, and it required more than a junction box and a switch.  There's just as much around the corner that you can't see.  Art!

     One of the requirements of having fountains that are accessible to the public is that the water used has to be potable at contact point, hence the need for chlorination and sterilization kit as above.  You can't have kids frolicking through a liquid solution of cholera.  Art!

     The second power utility room, where power can be supplied to other events taking place above ground such as concerts, seasonal markets, etcetera.  Art!

     These are the gadgets that turned the fountains different colours at night and yes there's a lot of them.  Doubtless very expensive yet with no moving parts, which comes into play shortly.  You see, this underground installation has a second, lower level.  Art!

     This is where all the pumping equipment is located, and there's a lot of it.  Martin stated - not sure how accurately - that the company contracted to maintain this equipment went bust, which may well be true.  Because there were severe and accumulating problems over time as equipment wore out or broke down.  Art!

     If this gear malfunctioned, the fountains went dead until repairs could be carried out, and Manchester City Council usually had more pressing problems to fund than decorative fountains.  This meant them being out of order for months or even years, and verrrry expensive maintenance bills, which is one reason why they are being shut down.
     Herein the link for Martin's Youtube vlog.

The forgotten history of Piccadilly Gardens. Manchester + Underground

     The fountains forms a prelude to a history of Piccadilly Gardens, most of which was new to me.  Well worth watching!

Well That Figures

Conrad has come across another Youtube compilation of horrible disasters caused by neglect, incompetence, stupidity or drunkenness, on the '#Mind Warehouse' channel, which merely posts them with no explanatory narrative, so I'm going to use this one sequence and then bin it.  Tee hee!  Art!

     Truck rolling along.  At this point, all is well, no problems intervening, except a bridge underpass looms ahead.  Art!

     Note what appears to be an overhead warning sign about maximum permitted height, as well as the bright red-and-white warning stripes, cautioning that this is an extremely robust structure, I warrant.  Art!

     An Ooops! moment if ever there was one.  O I wonder what 'Poshta Rossiy' means?  'Russian Post', so possibly all four of 'neglect, incompetence, stupidity or drunkenness' apply here.  

The Pen Is Sharper Than Any Sword

Especially when wielded with malice and wit, two quantities that came as naturally as breathing to Ambrose Bierce, whom we at BOOJUM! are big fans of.  You may recollect his dictionary entry for 'Literature', where he lambasted two contemporaries of his, one being Adair Welker, a poet of those times.  Art!

A cabbage

     There are no pictures of Adair, so a cabbage will have to do.  Welker liked to blow his own entire horn section, not merely a single trumpet, and dubbed himself the 'Sacramento Shakespeare', which was like metaphorically giving Ol' Ammy a slap around the chops; he couldn't help criticising.  

The Swan of Avon died—the Swan

Of Sacramento'll soon be gone;

And when his death-song he shall coo,

Stand back, or it will kill you too.

     It's ironic that I cannot find any trace of Welker pictorially.  Bierce, on the other hand -

And For Another Person Frequently In The News -

For Lo! It's time to give Donnie Dorko another kick in the teeth, with a pair of steel-toecapped work boots - metaphorically, I hasten to correct, as otherwise the CIA will be getting tasked to snoop on us, and having UNIT and Spectrum already doing that is quite enough.  Art!

     Here's Weary Willie, looking every day of 89 years old, jowly as ever.  Plus, what on earth, Moon and Mars is his hair doing?  It looks ready to take off and secede as a separate sentient entitiy.

Finally -

Another quote.

"Reader, suppose you were an idiot.  And suppose you were a member of Congress.  But I repeat myself." - Mark Twain.  As true now as then.

You Got A Beef With Me?

Ha, Sometimes I Slay Even Myself

In metaphor.  If I were deceased then the blog wouldn't get written, which would please some people mightily, the utter bounders.

     SO we need to lay down a little definition at the beginning of this Intro.

     BEEF: "The flesh of various bovine animals, especially cows, when killed for eating.  Derived from the Old French 'Boef' for 'Ox'."  Art!

     That's 150 burgers worth of beef on the hoof.  We'll get back to that.

     ANYWAY the BEEF I was referring to, in my O-so-clever title, was 5) on the CCED list.  "Slang: to complain, especially repeatedly".  Where does it come from?  O I thought you'd never ask!  It seems to have one possible origin in English slang of the 1720's, where it was used in the sense of 'Alarm'.  "'to alarm, as To cry beef upon us; they have discover'd us, and are in Pursuit of us".  Art!

     

 

     There is also speculation that it refers to soldiers being fed with rotten beef, about which they naturally complained.

     Why are we here?  Because of the Ruffians being as ever orcish and deceitful, waging a variety of economic warfare against their own.  Firstly, we need to do more background scene-setting, about the disease 'Foot and mouth'.  The scientific name for the virus that causes Foot and Mouth Disease is 'Foot and Mouth Disease Virus'; apparently the people with any creative spark were missing from that meeting.  The disease affects cloven-hooved animals such as cows, pigs, sheep, deer and Stephen Miller.  Art!

     FMDV is treated extremely seriously because it's incredibly contagious, being passed on by contact with saliva, breath, mucus and dung, and equally hardy, so it persists in the environment.  When it's identified in an outbreak, the World Health Organisation needs to be informed, and all potentially affected livestock that might be affected within a large area are culled, exports are banned and agriculture in the stricken nation takes a big hit.  Art!

     The UK's big FMD event came in 2001, where a Northumberland pig farm had been using illegally imported meat as a foodstuff.  There were 2,000 cases reported - that cases not infected individual animals - that required 6 million animals to be culled and destroyed.  Total cost, in 2021, was £8 billion.  Clearly, FMD is a big, bad deal.

     At least if you take it seriously in terms of accountability and responsibility, as we in Great Britain did.  

     Others, however -  Art!

     This is the farmer Pyotr Polezhaev, who raised - past tense - cattle on his farm in Siberia.  The Authorities came in and confiscated the lot, stating that there is a serious disease on the loose in their Far East provinces, which necessitates confiscating, culling and destroying livestock.  The 'serious disease' isn't being given a name, nor is compensation being paid to affected farmers.  To quote official Mordorvian sources:  "Agricultural experts there have blamed the outbreak’s severity on pasteurellosis and rabies.". Art!

HOWEVER in flashing neon letters ten feet tall, there are differing opinions on this 'reason', which in other parts of the world is known as a 'lie'. 'Natalka' over on Twitter posted a clip of a perceptive and canny Kazakh man, or perhaps cynical and realistic would be better terms. Art!

What matey here propounds is that, were Mordorvia actually admit and confess that there was an outbreak of FMD, they would then have to impose all the restrictions on beef exports as required by the WHO. Instead they are trying to control and mitigate it in secret, because otherwise their profits from exports to India and Saudi Arabia would dry up.

But wait! For we are not done yet. The Far East of Mordorvia is a verrrry long way from Moscow and the Kremlin, and Putinpot doesn't like his eastern orcs getting ideas above their station, such as autonomy or even independence. Here's another take on what's going on.

Think.cz

@ThinkPrague

·

Mar 20

Replying to

@JayinKyiv

Father in law is from there. There's more to it. Many vets of the SMO & families came into money, invested in livestock. Their main export market is China. Moscow considers TransBaikal to be 'an oppositional block' to Putin and the elections are coming up this year. It is war.

     If you recall the protests in Khabarovsk, where a local politician defeated Putinpot's candidate and whom was promptly arrested, which went down as well a a zombie on a tube-train.     

Lay in your supplies of popcorn, gentle readers.

Feeling Blue?

Now that we've roasted the Ruffians - do you see wh O you do - it's time to target the South Canadians again about their execrable food industry products, that seem more designed to find a use for niche chemicals than actually provide nutrition.  Thanks again to the sardonic and witty 'Daractenus' over on Twitter.  Art!

     Conrad has made blueberry muffins before, and seems to recall that you need flour, sugar, eggs, butter, yoghurt - and blueberries.  Let me add in a list of the ingredients for a cake mix that may help you "to grow a third arm."

Enriched Bleached Flour (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Sugar, Artificial Blueberry Bits (Dextrose, Palm Oil, Pregelatinized Yellow Corn Flour, Citric Acid, Artificial Flavor, Red 40 Lake And Blue 2 Lake), Dextrose, Canola Oil, Contains 2% Or Less Of: Leavening (Baking Soda, Sodium Aluminum Phosphate), Modified Corn Starch, Calcium Carbonate, Propylene Glycol Esters Of Fatty Acids, Distilled Monoglycerides, Salt, Eggs With Sodium Silicoaluminate Added As Anticaking Agent, Corn Starch, Sodium Stearoyl-2-Lactylate, Calcium Sulfate, Citric Acid And BHT (Antioxidants), Niacin, Iron, Vitamin B6 Hydrochloride, Riboflavin, Thiamin Mononitrate, Vitamin B12.

     Now now Darac, old chap, a third arm can come in handy at times.  Art!

Handy for chasing down rogue Cyberdyne 'borgs.

Gas Gas Gas!

It rolls off the tongue a lot easier than 'Petrol Petrol Petrol!' I have to admit.  Your Humble Scribe was intrigued by a graph David Pakman was using on his Youtube channel, in the background merely to indicate the overall trend of South Canadian gasoline prices increasing more than that Pixar film.  Art!

No!  Art!

     Try again.

     This is pretttty bad for Pumpkinhead.  One thing that irks South Canadians above all else on this planet is having to pay more for petrol; they see cheap gasoline as one of the Founding Father's most essential decrees and this is why it's enshrined in the Constitution.  Actually it's not but they behave as if both those blatantly untrue assertions were indisputable truth.  Watch Billy Bonespurs try to wriggle out of this by sacrificing Smeggy Heggy or '60 pieces of silver Rubio.

Gritty Flamingo

Sorry, but we're going to have to bore about Mordorvia again, as I'm trying to get rid of Bookmarks that have been hanging around for ages in Twitter.  Art!

     I am unaware of what the source for this data is, but it can't be too remarkable as the data is so mundane.  From the Tweeter 'Jay In Kyiv', posting on the 11th of March, after the Ukrainians had given the port of Novorossiysk a right planking the prior week, reducing tankers loading there to nil.  Art!

     Novo looking suitably apocalyptic.

     Let me copy in a few Comments.

     

     Speak of the Devil and he will appear.  Art!

     This is the port of Primorsk, on the Baltic, 1,000 kilometres from Ukraine, and the FIRMS data shows burning fires as red; so the whole place is alight after getting an utter malletting from Ukrainian missiles or drones.  The Flamingo is suspected thanks to the range from launch sites and it carrying a ton of HE.  Art!

     The orcs immediately claimed that they'd shot down 2,597 drones and nothing got through to cause a few scattered grass fires that were quickly extinguished although still burning 24 hours later.  They must be using DJ Tango's scriptwriter.

Finally -

Going out with a Biercism.

"Immaculate, adj: Not as yet spotted by the police."