Global Warning

 I Intended To Use This Intro To Welcome You To - Pre-Hyperart Thomassons?

However - O how soon that word appears! - before I get there we need to go off at an explanatory tangent.  You see, I'd annotated a Youtube blog posted by 'Tales From The Bottle' with the most ironic thumbnail ever.  Art!

     It's one of the most pointed things ever, which people were careful to explain in the Comments.  The poster mentioned that these architectural follies tend to fall into two date ranges: 1740 or 1840, the latter of which I recognised as the era of the Potato Famine.  The first one?  Never heard of it before, so I did a bit of digging and O my is there ever a traumatic tale attached.  Art!

     Yes, it looks very picturesque, and it was in Ireland for all of one day.  Having all the major and minor waterways freeze blocked marine traffic and killed off fish.  The temperature fell to -20 ºC, killing livestock and ruining any crops not kept in insulated storage, as well as people in draughty homes.  In summer there was a drought, which killed off planted crops and even more people.  As many as 400,000 of  2.5 million population died.  This, people, is a foretaste of what severe climate change can cause.  You have been cautioned.

     The authorities response was spotty and partially effective at best.  Since the labouring class were most affected, one response from the wealthy or concerned was to pay them for labour as they constructed aforementioned architectural follies.  Art!

Conolly's Folly

     Built at Celbridge, County Kildare, in1741 by the verrrrry wealthy Conolly family, whom wanted, not needed, a rear entrance to their estate at Castletown House.  It was erected at a cost of £400, which doesn't sound like much but would be at least £100,000 today.  It still stands, fenced off to prevent anyone from chipping off a souvenir pineapple - there are two graven into the outer arches - or attempting to climb the obelisk, which tops out at 140 feet.  Art!

     Dublin got off relatively lightly compared to central and western Ireland, but was still raddled with famine, hence the above structure, erected 1742 by landowner John Malpas.  Art!

To quote: "Last year being hard with the poor, the walls about these hills and this erected by John Mapas Esq  June 1742".  Yes, they got his name wrong on the inscription.  The Witch's Hat is still there, having been renovated not so long ago, but the viewing platform and steps to it have long been removed for safety reasons.  Art!

At Mullingar, Westmeath

     Why is it called 'The Jealous Wall' and why does it look like a ruined monastery?  Well, because not all architectural follies were built out of noble aspirations and charity, some had a much baser origin.  Like this.  TFTB claims this is Ireland's biggest folly, erected in 1760, so nothing to do with famine relief.  The builder, Robert Rochfort, owned the splendidly-appointed Belvedere House, a remarkably swish abode in it's own right.

     Here enter Robert's brother, George.  The two, it is safe to say, did not get on well with each other.  George, in a deliberate snub to his brother, had Tudenham Park House constructed to go one-up on bro.  Art!

     Robert - terrific name, by the way - wasn't having any of this, since he could see Tudenham Park House from Belvedere House.

     So he had the Jealous Wall built, designed to resemble a derelict monastery, in order to block his brother's house from view.  Art!

     The killing joke here is that Belvedere House is still in occupation and a model estate, whereas Tudenham Park House is a decayed ruin.  Art!

     Also decayed and ruinous is 'The Bottle Tower' in Churchtown, Dublin, which is another work-for-wages project erected in 1742 by one Major Hall, to provide means for the mean that they not starve.  The design is based on another folly on the Conolly's Castletown estate, 'The Wonderful Barn', this one being a scaled-down replica.  Quite what it is replicating is unclear; suggestions have included a dovecote or an Indian rice-store, or, as the down-to-earth Dubliners would have it, a bottle.  As is clearly visible, it's in very poor condition and hasn't been in occupation for over 150 years.  A bit of a fixer-upper, one feels.

     TFTB also mentions another famine folly, roads that go nowhere, or nowhere important.  You couldn't build roads that would compete with existing ones, after all - that was practically Godless COMMUNISM! and not to be tolerated.  So, I dug up a map of these make-work roads.  Art!

     Which possibly explains why Castlebar and Swinford aren't connected directly.

     Conrad, whom is cynical and flinty-hearted, asserts that the creators of these schemes would have carried out the monstrosities of Swift's "A Modest Proposal*" if they believed they could have gotten away with it.  Which is a whole other Intro for another day.

     Wowsers, that was passing grim.  Time to enlighten things.

For The Haul

Conrad recently ordered Volume 8 of 'The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914 - 1918', that being about the Australian Flying Corps in France and elsewhere.  Not a first edition, but about £20 cheaper than same, and being sent from the land of Ocker itself.  Your Humble Scribe confidently expected it to take a couple of months to arrive.  Not so.  Art!

     Ignore the timestamp, it arrive on Friday, much to my surprise, and I've put off opening it until today and may put up an illo when I do.  I bet you can hardly wait.

Conrad Performs A Public Service

As you should surely know by now, Your Humble Scribe is frequently annoyed by clickbait items on his news feed that boldly proclaim ' - better than 'Saving Private Ryan' which is seen as the touchstone for high-quality, and yet THEY AVOID NAMING THE FILM.  So you have to click on their thumbnail to find out what it is.  Art!

     That's like comparing oranges to a 1200 cc nitromethane V-12, completely different things.

     To answer your query, and keeping up with the Irish theme, it's "The Siege Of Jadotville", where an Irish UN garrison force held off a mercenary force in the Congo, outnumbered many times over.  It was the beginning of Eire's support for global UN security operations, making them a verrrry experienced army indeed.  There's another one to be done about them being the filling in the Lebanon sandwich between Israel and the Lebanese militias.

     You're welcome.

What Happens On A Slow News Day?

Bored sub-editors get to ask stupid questions, answer stupid questions, and put the results up on their media pages as filler until anything newsworthy arrives.  Case in point - Art!

     This is not a question I have ever, ever asked myself and is so far from being relevant or important that I'm going to ignore it from now on.  The silly season doubtless continues.

Further Of 'Dictatoritis' And Information Bubbles

You cannot have escaped seeing the awesome images on social media, and perhaps even the mainstream by now, displaying Barad Duh, Mordorvia's capital, under drone attack.  Art!

Mount Doom has entered the chat

     Remember when Putinpot was not told about the 'Moskva' being sunk for a week?  And how the maps presented to him all have the front line many miles westward of where it actually is?  Art!

     He may not be ignoring it, he may simply not be aware of what's happened yet.  Conrad is wondering at this point if Putinpot is running the FSB or whether they are running him - not allowing him to travel, make announcements, go out in public, etcetera, for 'reasons of security', which he's paranoid enough to believe.

     It's also passing rare to be able to talk about the real, actual, not metaphorical elephants in the room

Finally -

     'Best before 2021' merely means that they've matured and are even tastier for me to consume slathered with cream cheese and remaindered strawberries!

* Essentially, fatten-up and sell their children as food to the rich.  One of the hardest-hitting satires ever written.

An Unexpected Result Of Looking At Engineering Failures

Was Coming Across The Term 'Hyperart Thomasson'

I had never heard of the expression, mostly because it ran it's course decades ago and was associated primarily with Japan.

     To understand what it means, we need to go back to 1980.  Art!

     Just to jog your memories.  In late 1980, the baseball player Gary Thomasson was bought from South Canada by a Japanese baseball team for an enormous sum, hopefully to big up their scores and win lots of games.

     In fact he proved to be a complete dud, who spent his entire career on the bench, not playing.

     Enter, stage left, artist Genpei Akaegawa, whom began noticing architectural oddities across the Tokyo metropolis, as the Japanese indulged their fondness for tearing down old buildings and structures and putting up new ones.  Bricked-up doorways, stairs that led nowhere, handrails with no purpose, all that kind of artefact, which he dubbed 'Hyperart', decided that wasn't descriptive enough and added in 'Thomasson' as the archetype of having no purpose.  How cruel!

     By the early Nineties, HT had pretty much run it's course.  More recently it has been dug up and resurrected on teh Interwebz, meaning it will now never die and instead circulate endlessly.

     Perhaps an example.  Art!

 

     When a building hasn't been demolished quite enough, or someone ran out of funds, or the workers knocked off early and never came back.  There's a story behind these Hyperart Thomassons, though we'll never know what it is in many cases.  

     Aha!  Apparently what we see above is part of the 'Winston Churchill Bridge' in Strasbourg, where all but the stairs were demolished in 2006.  The stairs remained until 2014, thanks to the civil engineer losing the sign-off chit or similar.  Art!

As constructed in 1968

     There are other revenants to wonder and ponder at across the globe.  Art!

     From the background, this one is in an hideous Seventies housing estate.  I tried a reverse-image search but that only came up with 'Echtenerbrug'.  However, a trawl of Reddit confirmed this is in Holland.  One can speculate if there was ever a water feature this bridge crossed in the first place, or whether it was put there as decoration.  Given that there are rails only on one side, and a treacherous trip-rail on the other side, I wonder.  Art!

     Another French building revenant, this time in Paris.  These giant metal staples are hammered into the bricks to allow egress to - the chimneys?  Perhaps so, although I would have expected them to be off-set in order that you don't get blocked in by said chimneys when you go up to maintain or repair them.  Also, when going back down, you'd be frantically swinging your feet around to get purchase on the topmost rung.  Surely it would be a lot safer and easier to gain access via a trapdoor in the roof?

     As for the large gap between ground level and the first rung; security.  You don't want any thieving footpad to be able to gain access to the rooftops by climbing up rungs that conveniently reached the ground.  No, anyone needing to access the roof needs a ladder.  Art!

     One hopes this door's interior has been plastered over, lest someone try it out of curiosity to see where it goes.  Pretty obviously there used to be a structure that the door opened onto, but no longer.  The other purpose it might have is as a burglar-deterrent: the interior door has a large sign upon it declaring 'JOOLS AND PRESHUS STOWNS', so any aspiring thief boldly opens it and -

     Plummets.  Art!

     There is a shot of Tom Campbell, played by the splendid Bernard Cribbins, doing exactly this in the film 'Dalek Invasion Of Earth 2150 AD' but can I find a still or clip of it?  NO I CANNOT!  So you'll just have to make do with Tom looking rather nervous and out of place.  Art!

     I guarantee there's a few Hyperart Thomassons in there somewhere.

     Er - we seem to have gotten somewhat off-track, don't we?  Back on track!

     From the exotic climes of - ah - Holland and Paris, to the provincial backwater of Chelmsford, Essex.  Art!

     Steps and a ramp leading to a blank brick wall.  The blurb says that this was an Odeon cinema in Chelmsford, fallen on hard times and with access revoked.  Don't be fooled by the 'windows' that are bricked over, they were originally designed like that.  Art!

     I think this is the cinema when it was thriving, due to the similarity of the brick facing, meaning Conrad also believes the HT picture is of a rear exit that got closed off.

     I shall have to close off this Intro, too, as the HT were only supposed to be a short introductory piece for architectural follies, which will now have to be broached at a later date.  I bet you can hardly wait.

Here's Something You Don't See Every Day

Conrad would like you to cast your mind back to Spring of 2022.  The lark was on the wing, the snail was on the thorn and the orcs were invading Ukraine.  Thanks to dreadful maintenance, ill-trained crews, a distinct lack of willingness to die for Putinpot and a lack of fuel, there are hundreds of clips of Kozaky farmers salvaging intact Ruffian tanks that had been abandoned.  Art!

     A Chieftain main battle tank, yes, but - what is it doing in a farmer's field?  Surely British farmers haven't 'salvaged' NATO equipment that belongs to the army?  Art!

     The caption claims that an ex-army Chieftain costs just the same as a tractor.  Maybe so, but I guarantee the mileage is going to be a lot worse!  On the other hand you could hire it out for novelty rides.

Bubbling Over

SIT BACK DOWN!  This is nothing to do with 'Dictatoritis'.  We invite you to cast your mind back to the Intro we did on a fire-fighting foam incident in 2016 at Santa Clara, where a massive foam discharge took place by accident.  Art!

     Obsolete fire-fighting foams contained polyfluoroalkyls, which take forever to break down, resulting in their contaminating everything and everyone, and which have now been replaced by F3 - 'Film Forming Foam' - which is a whole lot safer for the environment.

Make The Orc Walk

Krim continues to suffer chronic shortages of fuel, as the occasional tanker gets through and a petrol station can supply go-juice for perhaps eight hours until their tanks run dry.  

     Orc drivers have been queueing up in single-file car parks for days, until they run out of the smidgeon of petrol they had.  What happens then?  Art!

     Take off the handbrake, put the gears in neutral and push it.

     The chap filming this was humming a happy tune and snickering at the sad procession above, leading me to believe he's one of the original Ukrainians enjoying the giant vampire schadenfreude chickens coming home to roost.

     More seriously, Conrad had to resort to public transport to do the shopping last week, as our car is in for repairs.  Being on the bus meant being able to carry a lot less, spreading it out over two days.  The benighted orcs of Krim don't even have public transport to go and do their shopping.

     Better get walking soon, it's a long way to the Kerch Bridge.  Art!

       "Benzina nyet" = "No Petrol" in 'Krim'.

     Depending on how much less than 2,000 tons of food daily that Barad Duh can arrange to transport to Krim, food supplies are going to run short, even with rationing.  'Trent Telenko', logistics sage on Twitter, said that fuel shortages are going to prevent ground water from being pumped up the boreholes drilled to provide potable water.  This would also kill whatever agriculture is left in the peninsula, and cripple any industry still extant.

Song To The Siren

No!  Nothing to do with The Cocteau Twins - are they still going?  Hang on - no, they had a very messy breakup in 1997 - but rather an enormous honking great siren.  One of my Bookmarks I'm using up.  Art!

     The not-so-little friend here is the Chrysler Air Raid siren, powered by a 180 horsepower V8 engine and capable of being heard 35 miles away thanks to an output of 138 decibels.  Which is like standing next to a B-52 taking off, and will cause instant deafness if you are next to it when turned on.  The cameraman here wisely decamps well away from it when it gets cranked up.  Art!

     They are both still too close and I bet they spent the next day going "WHAT?  WHAT?  I CAN'T HEAR YOU."

Finally -

Going out with a Mopey Dickism.  Art!

     Jowly and scowly.  O dear that's me banned from South Canada for the rest of his term, how will I cope.

Unsure What Metaphor To Use Here

Snowball Or Avalanche?

By 'Snowball' I don't mean the cocktail, I mean a small ball of snow being sent downhill from the very top of the piste, accruing more and more snow along the way until it becomes a positive behemoth.  That kind of snowball.  By avalanche I mean a few pebbles displaced at the highest col on the mountain, which, by the time they reach the valley floor, are the initiators of one hundred thousand tons of rock travelling at sixty miles per hour.  Art!

     For in today's Intro we are going to be dealing with the trifling sum of $0.75, seventy five cents in the South Canadian currency, in a tale as old as greedy managers trying to steal staff wages, so from a century ago in Europe but tomorrow in South Canada.  Art!

     We are told that the eatery involved was 'Café Donuts', which is a way of avoiding being sued, as there is no such chain in South Canada.  The likeliest choices are Dunkin' Donuts, as above, or Krispy Kreme or Randy's Donuts.  

     ANYWAY the tale is related by a friend of the protagonist, whom we shall call DOnut Dan, for he worked in the donut and coffee place.  

     Here an aside about franchises.  Dull but necessary, I'm afraid.  'Funkin' Donuts' licences their brand to a franchisee, who has access to their training materials, operating manual and large-scale advertising promotions.  In turn they have to adhere to the rules and maintain the brand, also running and financing things on a day-to-day basis.  They also have to turn over a certain percentage of their profits to the franchisor - 'Funkin' Donuts' in this case.

     Any franchisor will keep a verrrry close eye on franchises being run, because the one thing they ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT TOLERATE is damage to their brand.  Art!

Brand damager manager

     This is Mike Coupe, former head of the Co-Op, who was caught on an open microphone singing 'We're In The Money' before an interview.  It went down verrrry badly and it took a couple of years before the Co-Op managed to put it behind themselves.  Conrad knows, I was working in HR for them at the time.

     ANYWAY back to 'Funkin' Donuts' and DOD.  FD was run as a franchise, along with another location, by Jim.  Which we will say is the acronym for 'Jackass Idiot Manager', hereafter JIM.  Art!

     Because JIM was a penny-pinching bottomhole, he kept telling DOD to total the till amounts after clocking out, thanks to - see 'Bottomhole' above.  When DOD protested that this was still working, JIM promptly fired him.  Well, he is JIM after all.

     When DOD got his last paycheck, JIM had docked him $0.75 

     BATTLE WAS JOINED!

     JIM refused to pony up the $0.75, so DOD and a colleague contacted Labour Standards - hence possibly this is in New York, as their state labour board is the 'Division of Labour Standards' - who challenged JIM, who in turn refused to pay up.

     Labour Standards took him to court.  Art!

Close enough

     JIM's court preparation amounted to forging fake pay records, which were immediately busted when DOD and colleagues produced pay stubs and bank statements.  Surprise!  JIM had to pay DOD the $0.75, plus hundreds of dollars in stolen wages to ex-employees, a fine imposed by Labour Standards and everyone's legal fees.  Ouch.

     That was just the wage theft case.  Unlucky - or stupid- JIM also got charged with fraud and falsification of documents.

     It gets worse.

     Recall, if you will, that JIM was running two 'Funkin' Donut' eateries as a franchise.  Art!

     Recall that these two eateries were held as a franchise.  'Funkin Donuts' found out about the court case and were highly unamused.  They revoked the licence, which meant JIM lost the restaurants, building and land they stood upon.

     It gets worse.

     FD sued JIM for damaging their brand, and predictably, since they had very deep pockets and he didn't, they won.  The sums involved were so large that he had to sell his house to settle them.

    It gets worse.

     His wife left him.  Presumably being homeless and penniless with no prospect of any income for the near future put strains on the holy bonds of matrimony, or she was fed up being married to a bottomhole.  Art!

     Before all that, DOD responded in court to JIM having to pony up the 75 cents in court.

    'You know what?  It's only seventy-five cents.  I don't even want it,' and he gave it to another ex-employee.  

     Sick burn, as the yoof say.

What On Earth?

My news feed does throw up oddities at times, and today was one of those times.  Art!

     Conrad doesn't have ANY concrete that requires crushing, either in a full-size crusher or a miniature one.  When have I ever, ever, ever posted an item or Intro that suggests I need or want a crushing machine?

Plummet Airlines

You may not care or be aware that the Ruffians have a very limited number of Tu-22 strategic bombers in working order.  These are the airframes that daily send cruise missiles to blow up churches and kindergartens in Ukraine, and other strategic military targets.

     How many they have is open to question.  At least 50, perhaps as many as 60.

     HOWEVER - O that word again! - the number of aircraft actually able to deploy at short notice is likely as low as 27, upper bound, or 9, lower bound.  Art!

     A 'Backfire' in conventional flight orientation.  The orcs stopped producing them in 1993, so the ones currently flying are enabled to do so by cannibalising others for spare parts, and since Operation Spiderweb these airworthy planes have been pushed hard to carry out missile attacks.  Maintenance is poor and erratic, especially since the aircraft technicians have been sent off to Ukraine as meat-wave fodder.  

     Yesterday, one of them carried out a test flight after undergoing maintenance.  How did that turn out?  Art!

     Almost as badly as possible; one engine failed and when the crew turned back to their airbase, the second engine failed, leading to the bird going into a vertical dive and disintegrating on impact.  The aircrew ejected and now have to come up with an excuse not to be sent following their technicians to the Z-line, as they no longer have an aircraft.  Ooops.

More Ungentle Shoeing

Nobody seems to be posting awful pictures of Mopey Dick - I re-discovered this insult whilst looking at old BOOJUM!s - at the G7, for which you may be grateful.  There is the embarrassing Billy No-Mates photograph of him standing alone as everyone else communes and networks - Art!

     One suspects Full Diaper Syndrome.  There's an even more humiliating one inside a conference room.  Art!

     THEN!  I found a wonderfully awful photo of him looking sweaty, bloated and dishevelled, which, if Art will do the honours - 

     You can see the true extent of his baldness.  Thank heavens this is from the side, not the front, and we are spared his hideous turkey-wattled neck!

Conrad Begs To Differ

Rather contrarily.  Here's what Jeff Bezos has to say about AI.

     Nonsense!  Already supermarkets have replaced manned tills with the self-serve ones, where a dozen checkouts are supported by a single staff member, thus cutting back on wages.  Somewhat negated by the amount of fraud going on, as Leon informed me at Morrisons last year.

     I am also convinced that the service my Enormous Anonymous Employer offers to claimants making phone calls will replace you us humans with an AI phone service.  You'll get a call-tree and then a recorded voice reciting our scripts.  Art!

     Although Your Humble Scribe has been told he was assumed to be AI anyway by certain callers.

Finally -

Going out with another Biercism.  Thank you so much Ambrose Gwinnet!

"Mouth, n: In man, the gateway to the soul; in woman, the outlet of the heart."