One To Free Four

Forgive Me If I Mutilate An Old Pink Floyd Song

Technically it ought to be 'Free Four', a track from 1972's 'Obscured By Clouds', which has an opening line of 'One Two Free Four!' as the band count themselves in, mis-pronouncing 'Three' most fearfully badly.  Tut tut, chaps, must do better.  Art!

     What am I whanging on about now?  O I thought you'd never ask!  

     You see, I've been using numbers as inspiration for Intros, thanks to my 'Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable', from which we went over the number Nine.  Once all the creative juice had been sucked and squeezed from that, we moved onto Three.  Art!

     Unfortunately this example of Three, being 'THREE GOLDEN BALLS', is the exception to the rest of the Three definitions, since it's interesting and they aren't.  The tailings of wh - excuse me?  It's the symbol of a pawnbroker, IF you must know.  Supposedly the sign of bankers and moneylenders from Lombardy who set up shop in England in late Medieval times, commonly held to indicate that whatever was pawned had only one chance of two in being redeemed.

     ANYWAY the residuum of Three either consists of things that are already exceedingly well known - 'THREE CHEERS 'for example - or stunningly dull, such as THE THREE GRACES OF LIVERPOOL and THE THREEFOLD MAN.  We've already covered the triple essence of man, and the Graces are merely buildings.  Art!

     You might, with considerable reaching, consider the "Dreikaiserbund" asa being under Three, even if it is in Teuton.  It translates as the 'League of Three Emperors' and was a coalition cobbled together by Bismark in the late 19th century: the Teutons, Hapsburgs and Ruffians.

     ANYWAY AGAIN we are now moving onto Four as an inspiration, and, as ever, BOOJUM! simply cannot go any further without a definition, as per my 'Collins Concise English Dictionary'.

     'FOUR': 'The cardinal number that is the sum of one and three (why not two and two?), from the Old English 'Feower', itself related to Frisian 'Fiuwer' and in Greek it's 'Tessares'".  Art!

     This is a 'Four', a type of racing shell for - you may be ahead of me here - four rowers, plus the cox.  I like to keep you informed.

     What follows will be a concatenation between CCED and BDOPAF as I seamlessly move between the two.  Just so you know.

FOUR-ALE: No, not how many glasses Conrad consumes at once.  Traditionally, a cheap beer sold at fourpence a quart, or one shilling and tuppence per gallon, and no I'm not converting that to metric.  I'd never heard of it myself, but it features as a line in 'Under Milk Wood'.  Art!

A bottle of beer and a-bed with Liz Taylor.  What a trauma.

FOUR-BY-FOUR: No, not a pair of two-by-four planks.  A vehicle with drive to all four wheels, making it much more powerful in traversing cross-country.  Also known as a 'Chelsea tractor' as beloved by the denizens of that locality.  Art!

FOUR CORNERS OF THE EARTH: Meaning to the very remotest places on Planet Earth, and rather inaccurately implying that globe is in fact flat.  In 1965 John Hopkins University, having more funding than they knew what to do with, defined these four geographical areas as: Ireland (not very precise!), south-east of the Cape of Good Hope, west of the Peruvian coast, and between New Guinea and Japan.  Art!

FOUR-FLUSH:A term from poker, which I have heard referred to in South Canadian idiom without knowing exactly what it is.  What is it?  Art!

     It's a hand of four card of the same suit and an odd on, being completely valueless.  In South Canada a 'four-flusher' is a despicable cand and an utter bounder.  

FOUR-IN-HAND: Nothing to do with cards or poker.  Rather, we're talking about a carriage drawn by four horses, controlled by a single driver.  Art!

FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE: Continuing the horsey theme.  Not that you'd ever try harnessing this quad to your wagon.  They are part of Revelations, Chapter 6, being variously Conquest, whom rides a white horse - nice touch in the details there, Bible - and wears a crown; War, whom rides a red horse, very martial and all that; Famine, on his black horse - I think he won the coin toss to see who got the most 'alli' horse of all; Death, on a pale horse.  Art!

     If they were invented nowadays they'd have to constitute at least 50% females and observe all relevant HSE and OSHA regulations, with full management oversight and KPI targets.

     I think that's enough of Four for today, there are oodles to come.  I bet you can hardly wait.

One Shudders To Think -

Of the thought-processes going on in whoever's mind dreamed up this combination, as it's something not even Your Humble Scribe would have imagined.  Art!

     If you're not familiar with the title, it's one of H P Lovecraft's, concerning a doomed Antarctic expedition from Miskatonic University, which uncovers vast subterranean cities previously populated by the 'Elder Things' and their hideous Shoggoth slaves.  Whoever thought it would be a hoot to render this morbid tale in the style of a children's book - well done!  We call that pushing the envelope.

    No, I've not watched it yet, it musters over 23 minutes and I'm still typing up this blog.  Perhaps tonight.

Get Thee Behind Me, Clickbait!

Once again Conrad is presented with a come-hither advert that fails to identify the film it is pimping, so that the viewers have to click on it in order to be enlightened.  Art!

    They're not kidding about how good the film is.  

     What is it?

     O I just felt like keeping you in suspense.  Art!

Best depiction of urban combat ever

     It doesn't star Sir Michael, he's one of the supporting cast, being almost unrecognisable in his ratty blonde wig.  Clive Owen's finest moment, and Julianne Moore looks delicious acts well also.

     Just to get my own back, I'm not naming the paper that put this clickbait up.  Tee hee!

Call Tree Of Doom

Nothing to do with wood or lumber, this is the name given to a phone menu with options when you ring in to a business.  We have one at my Still Coyly Mysterious employer, which gets randomly changed in order to annoy and inconvenience callers and have them on the back foot.  Art!

     The story is narrated by BAnk Drone, hereafter BAD, and concerns the deployment of a new credit card signup system, which he and his compatriots on the Service Desk would need to support.  

     12 hours before rollout, there was a final plenary meeting with the heads of departments involved, and the manager BAD denoted 'Jackbottom' piped up and informed those assembled that the documentation 'was being worked on'.

     Cue blank and black looks all round.  Art!

     This is verrrrry bad, because the Service Desk would be operating blind with nothing to refer to, meaning lots and lots of irate callers frothing with rage.  Going ahead with the rollout was highly unprofessional and BAD's manager, RAzor SHarp, hereafter RASH, decided to take action.

     The first BAD and his team knew of this surreptitious sabotage was when there were exactly NIL calls from irate clients on the first morning.  None.  

     BAD went in to see RASH, who rather gloatingly admitted he'd rerouted the call tree, directing any queries about the new sign up system to Jackbottom's company phone.

     By mid-morning Jackbottom had over 50 calls with more in the queue.

     

     Jackbottom had previously stated that documentation would take take two weeks to arrive.  Instead it took two days.

More Rocket Art From the Fifties And Sixties

A bit of filler material here, the better to reach the Count total that I want.  Art!

Boasting in front of the Sinisters

     Courtesy 'Vintage Space Art & Graphics' on Youtube.

     The abbreviation stands for 'Air Research and Development Command' dating from 1951, and was responsible for all research and development for the South Canadian Air Force, which is - you may be ahead of me here - why they make a point about air weapons.  ARDC located itself at Edwards Air Force Base, and if Art will do the honours -

Finally -

Now beginning the other Marvel Avengers jigsaw.  I like to keep you informed.

If I Were To Say 'Synthesizer'

You Might Expect One Of Two Things

First, if you were a sci-fi saddo (a badge you ought to wear with honour!) then you'd immediately jump to the conclusion that Your Humble Scribe was talking about the technology as seen in 'Starry Trex: The Next Iteration', which, if Art will put down his bowl of coal - 

     This is a 'replicator', although it's really a synthesizer, which can make anything in terms of food, drink, clothing, etcetera, where 'etcetera' has hard limits.  They cannot synthesize any living matter, so no chance of a spare kidney, and certain extremely complex compounds cannot be replicated.

     Conrad, ever the cautionary cynic, wonders what would happen if you ordered it to make you a kilo of diacetyl morphine - better known as heroin - or trinitrtoluene - better known as TNT?  It would probably jib and request whatever passes for the law in STTNI.  Art!

     Pink Floyd's Rick Wright setting up his keyboard and synthesizer rack for their live tour of 'Wish You Were Here'.  Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Dave Gilmour in the background.  They revolutionised prog with their use of the EMI Synthi AKS on 'Dark Side Of The Moon'.

     BUT NO!  For we are instead in this Intro going to look at how fuel shortages influenced the strategies and operations of Nazi Germany during the Second Unpleasantness.  I realise this is a long way from prog and sci-fi television, but bear with me and we'll get there.  Eventually.

     For this Intro I've drawn upon 'Out Of The Trenches', 'History on Youtube', 'Plain Folk Homestead' and 'British Pathé News' and my own calcified memories.  So, Art!

     The Teutons knew that they lacked the fuel resources for a long war, so whatever conflict they began needed to be short, which went well in the conquest of Eastern and Western Europe.  It began to break down in North Africa and completely collapsed when they invaded the Sinister Union in June 1941, because they imported 70% of their oil from - you may be ahead of me here - the Sinister Union, and Romania.  Once Operation Barbarossa began, oil from the Sinisters ended, leaving only the Ploesti oilfield to carry the load, which was simply not enough.  Art!

Zollverein mine, the Ruhr

     The Tuetons had vast coal reserves but almost no oil.  Nor could they import it via tankers, as the Royal Navy took a verrrry close interest in shipping travelling to Germany.  What could they do about this?  Well, one thing was to aim for the oilfields of the Caucasus, deep inside the Sinister Union, and there were oil drilling equipments accompanying the Teutons in their march on Stalingrad and environs further south.  A few of their reconnaissance unit got to see Baku in the middle distance but that was as far as Sinister oil supplies got.  Therefore, industry had to come up with artificial substitutes for oil and rubber.  Art!

     They had tried 'spring wheels' in the First Unpleasantness and found that they gave an hideous ride and destroyed the road surface.

     ANYWAY by start of 1944 - the fifth year of the war, which rings a distant bell about contemporary matters - the Teuton fuel situation had been partially alleviated, thanks to the efforts of Albert Speer, Reich Minister for Armaments.  He had put in place an enormous industrial effort to synthesize oil from coal, using the Bergius process.  Art!

     By late 1943 these plants were producing 30% of Germany's overall fuel requirements, and 90% of aviation fuel, which is quite impressive yet not nearly good enough.  Speer himself admitted that they needed at least three times the industrial capacity to manage, preferably four times.  Art!

     Behold the Leuna Werke, the largest oil synthesis plant in the world, which at peak in early 1944 alongside the other plants was producing 400,000 tons of fuel per month.  

     Here enter the Giant Flying Mallets of the RAF and USAF, intent on executing their 'Oil Plan', which meant blamming the synthetic oil plants off the map, which they did very effectively.  By May of 1944 monthly production was down to 156,000 tons, and by July just 20,000 tons.  Leuna was eventually bombed 22 times, and any Ruffian refinery manager getting to read this will be nodding in sympathy.  Art!

     Increasingly, from mid-1944 onwards, Teuton tank crews began to abandon their panzers if they ran out of petrol, only pausing to sabotage them if pursuit was still safely distant.  Luftwaffe pilots had to put up with a severely truncated training schedule thanks to insufficient aviation fuel to permit them to be properly trained.  During the Ardennes offensive, part of the Teuton planning was based on capturing enough South Canadian fuel to continue their advance.  Hot tip: they did not capture enough SC fuel to advance.  Art!

     By the end of August 1944 the Sinisters had over-run Ploesti, meaning no more oil for the Teutons.  There was one last fillip for the Nazis: Hungary's own domestic oil production, which amounted to 850,000 tons per year, and which was so crucial to Herr Schickelgruber that he ordered a desperate offensive in March 1945 to keep them out of Sinister hands.  

     On top of all this, the Teutons were obliged to send fuel to Italy whilst it was still under even partial Fascist control, as it had absolutely no oil of it's own.

     There you have it.  Synthesizing.

     

More Gentle Shoeing

This time, however, just to be different, we're going to be mocking Peter The Average rather than his bloated zeppelin-ego protegé.  We are now entering the fifth year of the Three-Day Special Idiotic Operation and the stress is telling on Ol' Putin Khoilo.  Art!

     He looks pretty haggard, as he has done so since his visit to tug the forelock and lick the shoes of Xi, absent flattering lighting and makeup.  He's probably overdue for another round of botox to render him Charlie Chipmunk Cheeks the Puffy-Phaced Petrol Pimp.  Just imagine the stress he's under, the poor dear!

Pump It Up

Or, more appropriately, down.  Art!

     I don't expect anyone under the age of 60 to recognise this from first time around, when Elvis rather burst upon the scene out of nowhere and is still around and relevant.

     HOWEVER - a word you surely knew was coming - that has nothing to do with the next images I am going to post.  Art!

     Another queue in Mordorvia, where the orcs optimistically hope that there'll be some fuel left when they get to the pumps.  Plot twist: this isn't Krim, it's Sankt Petersbug, the official second city of Mordovia where there are now limits on the amount of fuel you can have, a total of 20 litres per car.  Conrad is somewhat bemused, because Putinpot would normally ensure the Buggians are able to get as much petrol as they want, them being second city citizens and all.  Art!

     An orc posting from Novorossiyisk, where he visited 7 petrol stations and none had any petrol.  The handwritten sign is Cyrillic for 'No'.  

     To quote him: "Novorossiysk has learned to live without water, electricity and internet. But how do you live without gasoline?" which is editing out all his swearing as every other word is 'Blyat'.

     Time to get a bicycle, mate.

You've Got To Be Flipping Kidding!

OR

Peter Gabriel Was Right All Along!

I happened to be perusing posts on Twitter and came across one that I will blatantly copy and paste from.

Sosnovsky's hogweed — a toxic plant introduced across Soviet agriculture in the mid-20th century — is quietly conquering Russian territory at a rate no NATO alliance has managed. The numbers: → 93,000+ hectares of Russian agricultural land currently infested

     Art!

     We've covered the Hogweed before, since it was introduced to Great Britain (Ha! take that, Lavrov!) in the nineteenth century and has no natural competition here in This Sceptred Isle.  The chap above in a NBC protection suit with goggles and stout gloves is merely being sensible, as the sap and stem and flowers and in fact every part of this proto-Triffid can cause severe chemical burns, only slightly less intense than mustard gas.

     One has to wonder what on earth the Sinisters were thinking, introducing it into their countryside.

Finally -

Going out with a Biercism.

"Witch, n: 1) An ugly and repulsive old woman, in a wicked league with the devil; 2)  A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a league beyond the devil."

Our Retrospectacle

As Usual, We're Looking Back At BOOJUM! Over The Years

Talking of years, today is the Big Orange Oaf Himself's birthday, when he hits 80 years old, emphasis on the 'old', and as a celebration the Ruffians of Mordorvia have begun burning a birthday bonfire especially for him.  Art!

     A bifurcated bonfire, even.  Conrad is tempted to say '80 with a bullet' but suspects this will upset the FBI and HS.

     ANYWAY time to lay out the years.

2025

BOOJUM!: Behold The Sharehold

2024

BOOJUM!: The Seven-Year Hitch

2023

BOOJUM!: Triple Travel Terror Thunder Trauma!

2022

BOOJUM!: Neck Your Crane

2021

BOOJUM!: A Pig In A Pike

2020

BOOJUM!: Them Crazy Czechs

2019

BOOJUM!: Microbothered

2018

BOOJUM!: A Radiation Summation

2017

BOOJUM!: A New Map Of Well

2016

BOOJUM!: Whoops!

2015

BOOJUM!: I Say! A Statistical Start To The Day

2014

BOOJUM!: You Worry When It Goes Quiet -

Getting Abridged

Also Truck Offed

Nothing NSFW, I hasten to assure you, and for this blog Intro, I'm not sure how far to go.  We may get to 900-odd words or the whole of the blog, as we're covering a topic dear to my heart, which may induce rigor mortis of the intellect in other people, mind: logistics.  SIT BACK DOWN!  This is interesting and the first to exhibit signs of boredom will experience the full Remote Nuclear Tormentor experience.  Art!

RMT by night

     Going back all the way to the Second Unpleasantness, I am drawing on Kenneth Macksey's 'Why the Gerrmans Lose at War' and one prime reason is that they seriously neglected logistics in courses taught at Staff College.  In May 1940, during their successful conquest of France, they had to mobilise thousands of Dutch and Belgian trucks when their train logistics broke down.  This reliance on a motley assemblage of foreign trucks persisted throughout the war as the Teutons never had enough of their own trucks.  Art!

French trucks in Teuton service

     It might work as a temporary expedient but if continues you need spare parts and tools and experienced mechanics for every new truck variant.

     Four years later in May of 1944, the Allied air forces had turned their attention to Teuton rail logistics and were giving them, to use a technical term, an absolute malleting in the Normandy and Pas De Calais area.  Only 32 trains were making it through, instead of the necessary 100 daily, a statistic you need to remember.  Then bridges across the Seine were attacked, in addition to locomotives, severely limiting the Teuton ability to supply their forces in Normandy.  Art!

Stick a pin in this one

     The Allies had total control of the skies, so much so that Teuton supply convoys had to travel at night to avoid being blammed apart, which meant only being able to transport logistics for 8 hours instead of 24.  One especially perfidious tactic the Brylcreem Boys had was to knock out a bridge late in the daylight hours, knowing that this would bottleneck Teuton transport overnight.  Then they'd turn up in the small hours with flare-dropping Mosquitoes and blam apart the queued vehicles.  Perfidious Albion is - perfidious.  Art!

Someone is about to have a bad hair night

     Let us now jump to another work, "Gunships" by Wayne Mutza, which is an exhaustive listing of the South Canadian transport planes that were armed to the teeth with miniguns and cannon.  The 'minigun' is one of the worst-named weapons of all time, as it was rotary-action six-barrel machine gun spitting out up to 6,000 rounds per minute.  By the time you count 'One-two-three' that's 100 bullets fired.  Art!

     Wayne described what constitutes a follow-on from the attacks on Teuton transport above, where the AC-47D 'Spooky' gunships were tasked with interdicting the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the primary supply route - more correctly routes - from North Vietnam via Laos to South Vietnam.  Art!

     That's the tracer output of a 'Puff The Magic Dragon' firing, and what you see are only one-fifth of the rounds being sent onto target.  They were effective for a brief while until the NVA moved in scads of anti-aircraft guns, and the Spooky's moved out.

     In 1969 they literally moved out, being transferred to the Vietnamese Air Force whilst the new 'Shadow' AC-119 gunships took over.  Art!

Flying gun park

     Over a period of 9 months, to 31st May - that month does keep cropping up, doesn't it? - in Cambodia, where they were not supposed to be, the Shadows notched up 609 vehicle kills (and 237 sampans) which breaks down to 67 trucks per month, or just over two per day.  The 18th Special Operations Squadron claimed a total of 302 trucks (and 26 sampans) destroyed in February 1970 alone, and Wayne gives the ammunition expenditure: 1.4 million rounds of minigun rounds, and 600,000 20mm cannon rounds.  In March, thanks to the invasion of Laos by the South Vietnamese and South Canadian, the truck count skyrocketed as the Ho Chi Minh Trail was cut and huge bottlenecks occurred: 3,361 vehicles destroyed was the count.  Art!

     Then came the Spectre gunship, a Hercules transport hauler converted into a flying arsenal, which featured a 105 howitzer with a range of 6 miles.  They were turned loose on the HCMT, and Wayne provides tonnage figures of traffic from North Vietnam to South Vietnam: to the end of April 1970, 68,000 tons of supplies had been sent south, of which 21,000 reached destination, or less than 30%.  In the same period in 1971, the same amount was sent but only 9,500 tons got through, or less than 1/7th.  This is logistics strangulation.  If you don't have small arms ammunition, grenades, RPGs, mortar bombs, artillery shells, spare parts, medicines, explosives, mines or food, your operations are going to be reduced or halted altogether.  Art!

     Possibly one of the grimmest examples of logistics being trumped by air power, the 1,500 Iraqi vehicles destroyed in a single night by South Canadian aircraft during Gulf War One.  Most of the occupants gave up trying to travel through the giant traffic jams and escaped on foot, absent their loot.

     Which brings us up to the present day, and once again we're looking at Ukraine.  Since March the Kozaky have been ramping up their drone campaign against Ruffian logistics, using Firepoint 2 and Hornet drones, low-cost mass-produced UAVs that deliver enough of an explosive payload to destroy any truck they hit.  Art!

Courtesy 'Euromaidan Press'

     Since March 1st, the orcs have lost almost 21,000 trucks and tankers, nearly  double for the previous three months, which is bad news as their Avtovaz plant can manage, at best, 1,200 trucks per year, or 100 per month, and the average per day loss in June is 463.  Not only that, the civilian truck and tanker drivers who used to crew these vehicles are now refusing to drive them unless they get vast increases in pay.  Remember those Teuton train traffic figures?  Well, Robert -splendid first name, old chap - 'Madyar' Brovdi, head of the Ukrainian Unmanned System Forces, says that Ruffian logistics traffic along their main highways and major roads in the occupied territories has been reduced by 71%.  Art!

Courtesy Jake Broe

     These are only the targets for 11th June in the occupied southern territories, showing that the Kozaky have plenty of mid-range drones to go around and generously share with their orc foes.  

     Remember what I said about Teuton logistics being severely affected by Allied bombing of bridges over the Seine?  Art!

"Telegram channel Oka-Gora"
Again, courtesy of Jake Broe

     The red circles here are where bridges have been attacked, from port: 4 at Armiansk (first one only partially visible), 2 at Chongar and another at Henichesk to starboard.  The Armiansk bridges are kind of redundant, as they cross what used to be the canal that carried water to Krim, but which went dry when the orcs blew up the Kakhovka Dam and the reservoir water vanished.  They can, in theory, dump spoil into the canal bed and allow trucks to cross such an improvised bridge - which they did at Khakovka after Ukrainian HIMARS destroyed all the bridges - BUT such a workaround is going to create bottlenecks and backlogs, which will become a 'target-rich environment' for Kozaky drones.  Art!

     The orcs response to both Chongar bridges being out of action is to put up a pontoon bridge, made out of separate flotation units across the waterway.  Pontoons are far less robust than a proper bridge and have limits as to what can cross and how often, meaning more bottlenecks and traffic jams.  People on Twitter are alleging that the pontoon has already been hit but with no sources or confirmation we cannot assume this to be true.  Art!

     One point I made is that it used to be very difficult to successfully attack a bridge, especially with a manned bomber, as they are very narrow targets, frequently defended by scads of AA guns - see the Bielefeld Viaduct photo above to see how many bombs had missed it - but for the Chongar Bridges, the Kozaky are 4 for 4.

     

     Well, as partially expected, we've done the whole blog and then some on a single topic.  O well.  It's all quality scrivel.  Art!