The Tale Of The Fox In The Night

Be Grateful That I Avoid Bad Puns

Or even good ones.  I refer, obviously - of course! - to both Conan Doyle and Ol' Tolky.  If you don't get the connection, Sherlock Holmes once remarked on the intriguing behaviour of the dog in the night, to which Watson replied that the dog did nothing, Holmes point entirely; it did nothing because it recognised and knew the villain of the piece.  Art!

     If he'd been a stranger, then Fido would have been all barks and growls.

     As for the fox, early on in 'Lord Of The Rings' our group of hobbits are traversing the countryside, and are encountered by a fox.  Hobbits wandering around the lands at night is clearly unusual, and Mr. Fox recognises something odd is going on - and then he moves on out of the story and is never encountered again.  So he never gets closure or clarification, poor chap.

     ANYWAY I wanted to set the scene about definite oddness in the air, without a concrete explanation, for we are going to venture into what looks, at first sight, as TREE LAW!  Art?

     That, gentle reader, is a pepper tree.  Originally an import from South America, these are hardy trees that can thrive with very little water.  

     So! the narrator of this tale claimed to be an arborist, and defined their trade as being the cultivation, management and study of wigwams.  NO! only joking.  Trees.  The study of trees.  We shall dub them as Suspiciously Apposite Person, hereafter SAP.  They owned a pepper tree, aged 30 years old, that stood on their property and which they called 'Clyde'.  There is no explanation as to where or why this name came from, let's just take it as read and move on.  Art!

     Being a large, healthy tree, Clyde sent roots out across the neighbourhood, including the local pavement.  Which 'he' broke.  Consequently the local city council decreed that Clyde was a menace to society, or at least it's pavements, and needed to be be removed from this world.  Not only that, SAP had to foot the repair bill for the pavement and the execution of Clyde.  Which rankled.  A lot.  Art!

     I am now introducing Mayor Steve Aspel, as he was at the time, being in office from May 2013 to March 2017.  As Mayor of Redondo Beach, SAP focussed on him as being responsible for the Clydcide.  

     There matters rested until, supposedly, SAP came back on social media two years and seven months later to reveal their cunning revenge plan.  Art!

     SAP claimed to have seeded 45 Californian Redwoods and 82 Giant Sequoias on the grounds of public and state properties, including the home address of Steve Aspel.  The reason for waiting so long was to allow these seedlings to take root and grow appreciably.  SAP gloastingly stated that their root systems would be 30 PROUD IMPERIAL FEET across and would take a major effort to remove, costing in the region of $1,500 per sapling.  Or about as much as they had to pay for Clydecide to be executed.

     What a jape!   The opposite of the usual TREE LAW case -

     Except remember that fox, and the dog.  I have to drag them back in, they took up hundreds of words.  So, what is the unsettling bit about this case?

     IT'S COMPLETE FICTION.  Art!

 

Any excuse to invoke the Comsats

     Conrad dug up an investigative report from 'The Daily Breeze' that poked  into the matter and confirmed the truth of things.  The story originated on Reddit, posted by 'GoblinsStoleMyHome', whom is a Biology student living in dorms.

     Art!

Dated 22nd June 2017

     The the pay firewall kicked in and that's all you're getting from the Breeze.  Luckily I took detailed notes, tee hee.  The Director of Public Works in Redondo Beach checked with his employees whom worked outdoors in parks and suchlike, and - no rampant sequoias anywhere.  

     The 'Breeze' did more digging and discovered another absence akin to that dog - nothing on the agenda of the City Council about removing excess trees planted by a vengeful SAP.  Art!

     

     That's Steve again, whom the 'Breeze' contacted for comment.  No, he does not have a Redwood or Sequoia growing in his yard.  No trees at all, in fact, so he would have appreciated a free one.  He also added that nonsense like the SAP saplings saga is one reason he doesn't miss being mayor any longer.
      

     BOOJUM! - being a buzzkill since 2013.  You're welcome.

King Piggy Doesn't Get Jiggy

The item after this one is going to be a longish one, so I intend to put up an item heavier on pictures than text.  Emphasis on 'Heavier'.  You'll see.  Art!

     Yes, we are on about the festering fartfest again, and as a result of the picture above I've updated his nickname to: Swollen Sweaty Senile Sepia Sackbutt.  I swear this chap looks worse every week and doubt he's going to make it to the end of this year, never mind his bloviating about running again in 2028.  A strictly metaphorical 'run' as he can barely manage a palsied waddle.  Art!

     Plus, what on earth is up with his Hair Helmet?  Is it wearing mourning colours ahead of the midterms?  Enquiring minds want to know!

     

 More Of 'How To Not Die'

Continuing with their list of 'Everything Zombie Movies Get Wrong About Survival' and this trope is one that happens in EVERY SINGLE HORROR FILM, never mind the ones about the walking undead.

SPLITTING THE GROUP

Art!

     They quote the line 'We should split up to cover more ground' as the embodiment of a bad idea, quoting statistics WHERE IS THE SOURCE! that groups of three to five people have a 60% better survival rate than individuals.  However - that word again! - splitting up into individuals is verrrrry common in zombie films and apocalypses in general.  HTND gets it right on the money when it lists the failings of splitting up.  Art!

     Being alone means NO protection from the group.  You have only one set of ears and eyes, and you can only look in one direction at a time.  Plus, you need to sleep.  With nobody to do stag, you're extremely vulnerable.  When in a group you can make use of other people's skills, experience and abilities.  If you're solo then do you have the woodcraft skills to survive alone in a forest?  Or know which buildings to stay out of thanks to erosion or damage?  Or how to field strip and maintain an assault rifle?  Don't forget Dave Gilmour's stance on how Pink Floyd created music:"Being in a group, most of the rubbish gets ironed out'.  So with your raggle-taggle survivors.

     Again, WITHOUT QUOTING SOURCES, HTND blithely state that solo scavenging survivors are between 40 - 60% less efficient than groups also scavenging.  Individuals also needlessly duplicate what they salvage.  Who needs seven axes and nine buckets?  Art!

     HTND make another SOURCELESS CLAIM that a scattered band of survivors going out scavenging will take up to 48 hours to reassemble, and if any don't turn up then a rescue may need to be mounted, or they may already be defunct.  

     WHY do films and television serials continue to use this tired tired tired trope?  

     They want to generate drama.  Lazy screenwriters.  Bah!

Back To That List Of 20 Classics

Don't weep so, we're getting near the end, being into the nineteenth century.  Art!

     I have never so much as touched any of Nietzsche's works and have no intention of breaking this duck.  One gets the feeling that reading one of them would be like wading into a swamp made out of custard whilst being beaten about the head with cricket bats wielded by nuclear-powered robots.  The blurb didn't explain what Ol' Friddy wrote about, but I Googled and it sounds fearfully high-minded guff.

     You can't deny he grew a splendid moustache.

     Next up seems to be Franz Kafka.  I bet you can hardly wait.

Finally -

The abandoned van has finally gone.  Wonder Wifey came beetling out of the lounge to tell me, and at first Conrad thought she was going to inform that the BOOH had dropped dead - but no.  O well small mercies and all that.

Doubling Down On Doomsday Difficulties

Ol' Tolky Is Proven Right Again

His assertion that calamities and malfeasances take time to tell, and engage the reader no end, versus pleasant times that frankly bore people, is expounded herewith by BOOJUM!  Which is a long-winded way of saying that I'm back on 'How To Not Die's 'Everything Zombie Movies Get Wrong About Surviving' and I'm going to roll Headings 6 and 7 together, as they are closely linked.  

     Okay, I'm returning to edit this intro to the Intro as there isn't really an Intro, for what you see in front of you is a whole blog.  Art!

     On an associated theme, I just finished watching Season One of 'Paradise', a title of immense irony.  We are told of the approach and execution of the apocalypse in flashbacks, and how the 25,000 survivors live.  I may come back to this.

     ANYWAY on with the headings.

LIVING IN THE WOODS WITH NO SKILLS

As 'How To Not Die' has it, a rag-tag group of survivors, fleeing the urban hellscape overrun by the living dead - they don't make this explicit so I've added that in for context - come across a clearing in the woods and assume they can live off the land.  Cut to a scene where they are happily roasting game over an open fire.  Art!

     HTND boldly states that half the people reading this heading would be dead within a week, were they ever placed in such a situation.  Why so?  Well, according to EXACTLY NO SOURCES WHATSOEVER between 70 - 80% of the plant-life "depending on the region" - a very big proviso - are either toxic or inedible.  Really?  Hmmm.  

     Trust me, I did a bit of digging here.  I don't know where they get their statistics from, as asking Google reveals there is no official tally of toxic or inedible South Canadian plants in percentages; there are up to 700 species that are definitely poisonous and will kill or cripple incautious Hom. Sap. whom dine on them.  Art!

     That still leaves about 40,000 other plant species which may be only slightly toxic or without any nutritional content. Globally, the statistic is that about one-third of all plant life is inimical to human consumption, a very long way short of 70% or 80%.  Naughty HTND!  Egging the pudding, to use a relevant metaphor.

     They also overstate the risks to 'Unskilled Amateurs', hereafter UA, as being between 25 - 50% risk of suffering toxic poisoning from plants.  That contradicts their own earlier statement about the 70 - 80% inedibility, which implies a 20- 30% chance of poisoning or a waste of time.  Neglectful HTND!  Art?

Lords And Ladies berries

     They describe potential symptoms of plant poisoning, including vomiting, nerve damage and organ failure.  This invokes what Conrad would call 'latency', that is, how long the symptoms take to develop, which they state occur within 30 minutes to 6 hours.  However - my my that word again! - they neglect to mention that multiple toxic plants, such as the LAL above, taste so disgustingly awful that you'd spit out the first mouthful you took.

     ANYWAY they then move on to shelter and temperatures.  The UA face death from exposure in 3 - 5 days, without reference to which season we're talking about, presumably not high summer.  Or even high summer if we switch locale to This Sceptred Isle.  If temperatures get below zero then death from hypothermia can arrive from one to three hours from onset to exposure.  Art!

     As proof that they're generalising wildly, here's a 'Winter Severity' map of South Canada.  Winter in Nebraska would be baaaaad; winter in Florida would be barely noticeable.  So! we shall anticipate that they're talking about the blue areas on the map above.   Once more WHERE ARE THE SOURCES! HTND asserts that the UA would take between four to six hours to construct a shelter, and so might well be dead before it got finished.  A trained shelter-builder - one pauses to ask where they got such training in the middle of Chicago? - can do it in between 45 to 90 minutes.  Art!

     The fetching and canny  'Wildbeare' showing how to construct a single-person basha.  Despite her Youtube moniker she lives in the UK, and thus does not have to worry about <ahem> wild bears, a topic HTND avoids altogether.  Conrad thus states that the UA had better have at least one can of bear spray with them, plus a shotgun or two for defence against packs of wolves, or feral dogs, or for hunting game.  

     For this heading they end with two statistics: death from starvation may take from three weeks to two months.  Death from dehydration will arrive in three to five days; presumably quicker in the hotter regions of South Canada.  So, does this forest clearing have access to sources of water, barring rainfall?

IGNORING BASIC WATER SANITATION

In films, asserts HTND, survivors regularly drink from streams and pools they come across, with absolutely no consequences.  In what we call 'real life' this behaviour can have extremely serious consequences, such as dysentery, cholera or cryptosporidium.  Plus death.  Just thought I'd throw that in there.  Art!

      'Flavour Trip' cooking a meal alongside a stream.  Note that they don't use the river water as anything but a backdrop, as they aren't stupid.  Plus it has a greenish cast to it that would put off any but the most desperate.  Art!

     Rather oddly, the single instance HTND uses is from 1854 and the Broad Street cholera epidemic that killed 127 people in three days.  Evidence that necking nasty water will, indeed, do you in, and in quick order too.  One supposes that they needed to use an outbreak this old because modern sanitation, plumbing and water treatment have rendered cholera almost unheard of in South Canada - 20 cases per year from a population of 330 million.  A drop in the bucket, to use an apt metaphor.  Art!

     Cholera is treated by using Oral Rehydration mixtures, which require - you may be ahead of me here - water.  Potable water, not that green stuff flowing behind Amii and Jimi.

     The solution - do you see wh O you do - to this problem of potability is to boil your stream or pool water before drinking it, for all of 60 seconds, which kills off 99% of any microorganisms lurking in it.  Of course - obviously! - that requires making a fire and have a cooking utensil to put the water into.  Otherwise, HTND recommends 8 drops of bleach per gallon of water, which I checked and is valid, although it might not kill off cryptosporidium.   Art!

     Another item that HTND completely ignore, so Your Humble Scribe has added it in.  You can dose water in the wild and be able to drink it within 30 minutes, which is a lot easier than boiling a bucket over a fire on an improvised tripod, and far lighter than a dozen bottles weighing a stone total.  Art!

     That's a point HTND makes as well.  TWD never shows what they call 'water discipline', despite being set in a region of South Canada that is - hang on let me dig - set in Georgia, where heat, humidity and standing water all breed scads of water-borne diseases.  Boiling a pot of water over a campfire might not be riveting enough for the audience, perhaps?

     Being hydrated also loops back to the first heading we covered, where HTND emphasised the importance of drinking enough water to be able to function effectively physically.

     

Being Self-Referential

Don't Run For Cover

We're not dising anything heavy like the trans-substantiation of souls or exactly how small a black hole can get before it's emitted radiation dwindles it to nothing, or how to knit a reallllly long multicoloured scarf.  Art!

      No, it's a lot more prosaic than that.  For Sunday breakfast I've been consuming the other half of my Full English Breakfast Pizza, because it turns out that loading a plain pizza base with rashers of bacon, sausages, black pudding, mushrooms and extra cheese renders it quite a feat to eat.  In one sitting.

     ANYWAY let us lay out the links, methinks.

2025

BOOJUM!: A Star Is Born

2024

BOOJUM!: Will O' The Wisp

2023

BOOJUM!: If I Were To Say "Talus"

2022

BOOJUM!: Tree Law Lore

2021

BOOJUM!: There Go The Wolves

2020

BOOJUM!: Our Look Back In Unger

2019

BOOJUM!: See Italy And Die

2018

BOOJUM!: Conrad - STILL Hates All Musicals!

2017

BOOJUM!: Real Life Intervenes

2016

BOOJUM!: A Slightly Chuffed Author Here

2015

BOOJUM!: The "Enterprise" Is Telling Lies

2014

BOOJUM!: A Knight On The Tiles

2013

BOOJUM!: Eeh By Gum* BOOJUM!

After Doomsday

Yes, Once More Unto The Breach

We'll eventually get to that 'How Not To Die' vlog about 'Everything Zombie Movies Get Wrong About Survival' but we're going to take a couple of detours en route.  Firstly, I had to get my Acer laptop's touchpad working again, as it suddenly stopped working mid-file transfer.  Conrad, ever ready, has an emergency mouse I can use instead, clunky but it works, although that meant moving all the glasses and cups off my mobile desk - 

      ANYWAY Art!

     From the depths of darkest Mordorvia, allow me to illustrate what happens when a <ahem> 'civilisation' runs short of petrol.  Brawls, scuffles, tyre-slashing and window-smashing, bring your own popcorn.  The Ruffian state is now running a two-tier system verrry reminiscent of the old Sinister Union, where state employees can get coupons for petrol, whilst the serfs have to do without.  

     Here an aside.  Art!

Putinpot rocking the khuilo* look

     I recall Bunker Grandad bloviating a couple of months ago about how Ruffia had something like 1.7 million tons of petrol in reserve at the beginning of the Petrol Problem, which I politely poo-pooed as him spouting nonsense -

     Except that there was suddenly an abundance of petrol in late July and into early August, partially explained by the fall in demand as petrol stations were selling 'donkey urine' that destroyed engines.  AND, possibly, the release of that strategic reserve, which did exist after all?

     Here mathematics enters the chat.  Ruffian demand for petrol in summer is about 120,000 tons per diem, meaning that 1.7 million ton reserve would run out in two weeks.  Which is how long the abundance lasted.  Join the dots.  Art!

Open containers plus a spark from static 

 

     I need to add in the hilarious detail that my Google search term was originally 'Ruffians fighting over petrol', which brought up suggestions about 'Mad Max 2'.

     Which film was heavily influenced by 'Mad Max', amongst others?  O I thought you'd never ask - Art!

 - and so does PETROL!

     This is Neil Marshall's 2008 opus, and it's a classic example of a director having far too large a budget and going wild with it.  Why is it here?  Well, yes, it's a post-apocalyptic film, even if absent zombies, but that's not the point.  As was pointed out by critics at the time, the car action and stunts were supposedly being done in the enclave of Scotland, devoid of any new petrol since the Reaper virus got it enclaved in 2008.  The film is set in 2035.  Any petrol lying around would have become useless decades earlier.  Art!

Sorry not possible

     Here is where I add that the fuel in 'Mad Max 2' is supplied fresh from the well, even if we don't see the crude distillation units that convert crude into petrol.  Possibly a bit too hair-splittery.

     ANYWAY AGAIN we now get to HTND's vlog heading of -

USING GASOLINE YEARS INTO THE APOCALYPSE

(See above for illo).  The scene they describe is a survivor siphoning the contents of a derelict car's petrol tank - that title above uses 'gasoline' in the only entry it will make here on BOOJUM! as we stick to the real name - into a jerrycan, then filling his own car's petrol tank and driving  off into the sunset.  Or sunrise, depending how metaphorical the director was feeling.  Art!

     Hmmmm yes they may be zombie rats, Art, but I was hoping for something with more cars in it.  Try again.

Better!

     HTND reckons this scenario takes place five years after the zombie apocalypse (except not in Ruffia).  However - ah that word again! - petrol starts to degrade between three to six months after production.  South Canadian petrol infused with blended ethanol degrades even quicker.  If we go for the latter date, petrol at the pump has lost 50% of it's octane rating, a decrease that directly affects engine performance.  Thus, petrol from 2020 would be completely engine-inert by 2022 and even diesel would be dead matter after 24 months.  Ooops.  Art!

     However - again! - HTND's assertion that ALL vehicles will become useless once petrol and diesel degrade does NOT take into account the diesel vehicles adapted to run on bio-diesel; these can run on recycled cooking oil.  A normal petrol-fuelled engine can, in a pinch, be run on Polish Pure Spirit, which is 120% proof, or any pure ethanol you can scrounge from laboratory or industrial stockpiles.

     However - thrice! - it's best to learn how to use horses instead for motive power and transport, especially since oats and carrots are easier to source than liquids the alkies may have already plundered.  Art!

     A picture from Mordorvia where they have already adopted this transport method.  Which is where we came in.

Progress Report

I like to keep you informed.  Yes, Conrad Your Humble Scribe has finally finished annotating 'The Great War', meaning I have 46 pages of A4 notes (not all complete pages, mind) and 321 photographs.  As evidence - Art!

     Having acquired all this I am not sure quite what to do with it.  Altogether it would probably make up twenty complete blogs on it's own, without any additional background info I felt like adding.  Conrad pretttty sure his audience wouldn't sit still for that long.  Work an episode per time into the blog?  A possibility, and the Word Count would only double.

     We'll see**.

Back To Brucie

More art from the - you may be ahead of me here - artist Bruce Pennington, collected from the slideshow that 'Sci-Fi Art' put up on Youtube.  Art!

     Hmmm.  More illos pushing the idea that Nostrildamus was a credible source, which he most definitely is not.  Typically, his followers use one of his quatrains to describe an event that has already occurred.  Useful predictions about winning lottery numbers or start-ups to buy into is singularly lacking.  This particular illo is about the dangers brought on by not returning your library books on time.  Art!

 - annnnnd the followers will all be chorusing about how this one predicted Wildberries getting schwhacked.  Conrad is unsure how late returning causes nudity as in the first illo.

Getting High

I AM REFERRING TO PLANES NOT DRUGS.  Drugs are bad, okay, especially the legal ones tobacco and alcohol.  

     ANYWAY AGAIN the 'Flavour Trip' I had playing in the background earlier was apparently at an airbase in Croatia, according to one of the Commenters.  Art!

     Yes, that's a derelict Dakota DC-3 in the background, covered with hundreds of stickers, outside the Zeljava airbase which is now in Croatia but was originally in Yugoslavia.  Art!

Very deri

     Hmmmm.  That airbase sounds interesting.  We may return to this subject.  I bet you can hardly wait.

So That's Why -

You are probably unfamiliar with Maria Bartiromo, unless you live in South Canada and watch 'Fox News'.  This organisation famously lost a lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, where they tried to hide behind the 'It's entertainment not news' tactic, and lost.  $740 million dollars of lost, all because they pimped the Saggy Senile Sepia Sackbutt's claims to have won the 2020 election.  Art!

     Bartiromo was removed from broadcasting in August and abruptly fired a couple of days ago.  The reason?  Not given at the time, but it has now emerged.  She was passing on internal FN e-mails to Donnie Dorko, in pursuance of his silly insistence that he won in 2020 - that claim senior management at Fox told employees to not go near, or far, ever ever again.  Ever.  To steer clear, forever.  Did I say 'ever' enough?

     Thus the firing.  There is now speculation that she may be appointed Press Secretary at the White House, thanks to her advanced boot-licking skills.  After all, what could possibly go wrong appointing a person given to leaks?  Art!

Donold, looking as if Melania punched him in the face

Finally -

I need to get my trainers on and take Edna trotties whilst the rains hold off.  CYA!

*  Far too rude for me to translate!

**  Threat?  Promise?  Only you can tell!

Treece Lore

NO! That Is Not A Typo

It's an hilarious pun, hilarious I tell you and the beginning of the Intro is to prove to you how hilarious it is, and it's the Remote Nuclear Tormentor if there's no laughter.  Art!

Remote, nuclear and, above all, tormentory

     ANYWAY we will be getting onto Tree Law later on, this intro to the Intro is by way of getting there, tangentially, eventually.

     SO!  Let us begin with Art!

     If you say 'Treece' quickly it sounds like 'Trees', hence today's title.  The 'Lore' part comes from young Conrad having that box set as a much, much younger version of himself.  It got read ragged, and I can still recall parts of the prose and the illustrations within it.  The Trilogy consists of 'Viking Dawn', 'The Road To Miklagard' and 'Viking Sunset', which concern the life of Harald Sigurdsun.  The tale follows him as a young - you may be ahead of me here - Viking, then into adulthood and finally as an old - but still dangerous - man.  I can still recall Hen's dedication at the front of the first novel - 'For Gary Fashaw, who told me of the longship prow'.  Art!

     There are Viking settlements in South Canada, yes indeedy Ally Sheedy, BUT no longship prow has ever been discovered.  Dunno what young Gary had been smoking, though it did give us a splendid final novel in the trilogy.

     Enough of Treece Lore, time for TREE LAW!  Which is what you came for.  Hopefully.  If not, please skip the entire Intro.

     Now, you and I are aficionadoes of Tree Law, canny in the ways that the law works, but for many hapless incumbents the disastrous felling of timber is their first encounter with TL.  As with this first tale.  Art!

From 'Markee's Youtube channel

     Okay, to set the scene, Mournful Arboreal Newbie, hereafter MAN, lived behind what he calls a 'development', meaning a lot of cookie-cutter houses being built on a large plot of land.  Art! 

A development in Massachusets

     Not the nicest vista to wake up to.  Fortunately his back yard had two large mature trees that blocked his views of 'Builder's Cleft', as the polite term has it.   A four PROUD IMPERIAL FOOT stone wall separated his property from the building site, and take note of that since it's not a notional or enfeebled partition.  

     Another relevant factor that brought MAN to Reddit and then Youtube was his status as a first-time houseowner, with no previous experience of Tree Law.

     Whilst at work he got a call from his girlfriend, who was at his home, bright, breezy and worryingly concerned about the builders who had crossed over the boundary wall, then cut down both of his screening trees.  Art!

     She, being bright and breezy as aforementioned, had filmed and photographed the felling being carried out.  Conrad, cynical realist that he is, reckons the tree-killers noticed her being all evidential, since they then left an apologetic voicemail confessing to chopping both trees down 'thinking they were part of the development'.

     MAN outlined the above and asked for advice from Reddit.  He got it.  No, not in a nasty way, just good solid advice.

     1)  Save the voicemails.  These are an admission of guilt that can be used to hammer the developers o'er the head with.

     2)  Save the videos and pictures.  Save them in duplicate at least, in case of accidental corruption or deletion.

     3)  Source any pictures of the trees before felling as evidence they actually existed in this condition. Art!

Akin to this

     4)  Search the county records office for the exact location of your boundary lines, in order to determine that the developers really were trespassing and the trees were indeed yours.

     5)  Get a professional arborist to assess the value of the trees, and what the cost of replacing them with those of equivalent size, age and species would be.

     6)  Approach your state's Law Board and request the details of lawyers who specialise in property law, or arboreal law, if possible.  Art!

This guy if you can afford him

     The advice ends with a caution that MAN is very likely entitled to money, although the amount will vary dependent on the trees themselves - how old they were, how slowly they grow and how scarce they are.

     What they omit to say is that the events take place in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and Conrad, your resident pedantic hair-splitter, checked on that state's statutes and YES! they invoke triple damages for tree law cases.  Thus if an arborist estimates at $10,000 per tree to replace, the developer is out $60,000.  Art!

     The other factor is the developer themselves.  As a legal entity they are bound to have insurance protection against accidents and mishaps such as this, which means the insurers coughing up compensation, rather than MAN having to sue a shady cowboy operation with two men and a pick-up truck.

     Given that this vlog is 6 years old with no Updates, we cannot, sadly, know what the eventual outcome was <sad face>.

A Higher Form Of Shilling

I mean a person being a 'shill', that is, pretending to be independent and unbiased and neutral, when in fact they are as partisan as can be.  Not a piece of pre-decimal currency, either.  Just to be clear.  

     What am I yarking on about now?  O I thought you'd never ask - Art!

Nice view of Europe

     Another attempt of Ol' Brucie (Pennington), that I've shamelessly lifted from the Youtube channel 'Sci-Fi Art', to persuade the buying public that the works of Nostradamus were credible.  Well, they are plainly not and I'm not brooking any dissent here.  The artwork is wonderful, mind, although heaven only knows what fearful guff Brucie is promoting.  Art!

    Hmmmm.  An asteroid, meteor or comet impact?  It's a rather sparse painting.  No coral churches, nor flying craft receding into the background, nor mystery skeletons.  I've not embiggened it as I'm not that struck with it.  Unlike Planet Earth.  Ha! Do you see - O you do.

Back To More 20th Century Classics

Another Ruffian festival of laughter in print.  NO!  Only joking.  The only Ruffian of classical literature that ever cracked a smile was Anton Chekhov, before he graduated from Star Fleet Academy (it says here).  Art!

     I actually started reading this and gave up perhaps a fifth of the way in.  It concerns a serial killer with an axe and a grudge, and stolen money, all the typical tropes of life in Mordorvia since 1587 onward.  One to wallow in when you're depressed, since after finishing it everything will look wonderfully rosy by comparison.  You could try the Ruffian Literature Drinking Game, where you take a shot every time you read a depressing sentence, but your liver will protest.  Was there a film?

I Left You Hanging With This Question

Because I'm horrid that way.  Also you have had time to ask ChatGPTFL or whatever about it, or Google madly for answers.  Art!

What's Wrong With This Picture?

     I shall explicate.  Art!

     That unprepossessing looking tin is the Condenser Can.  You can see a screwed-in plug on the gun's water jacket, directly behind the muzzle and normally a pipe would go into there, leading to the CC.  Steam coming off the water jacket would expand into the CC, cool, and be sucked back into the water jacket by the vacuum left there.  It thus saved water, always an issue in the desert, and prevented a cloud of steam giving the gun's position away.  Art!

     The sights are down flat, not erect with a range selected, which means the Teutons are a mere three feet away - or they didn't think to make it look realistic.  Art!

How it's done

     Art!

     A good thirty rounds fired, yet there are no expended bullet cases present.  It's almost as if the whole thing were staged as a publicity shot.  Art!

     With this shot you can see the pipe connected to the Condenser Can, the sights upright and a lot of expended brass lying around.  This is the way.

Finally -

David Pakman had an hilarious clip of King Piggy falling asleep - standing up!  He was presiding over an event for the Artemis II lunar fly-by, so any speeches given were full of science and long words he didn't understand, and if the spotlight isn't on The Nodfather, he dozes off.  Doing it upright is another level, though.  Art!

Sadly, he woke up