One BILLION -

Nope.  Nothing To Do With Austin Powers
So you can put away that naughty little finger gesture, thank you very much.  This is not really about a billion dollars, rather about the concept of "a billion", in the South Canadian sense of the term*.  As you must surely be aware, a billion of anything is an awful lot, and is rather hard for the average human mind to grasp, bar a series of noughts on a monitor.  Can you envisage how big a bundle that $1 billion would constitute?  Especially if it were all in one-dollar bills.  Art?

probably not in $1s

     That's the relatively simple concept of money, which is a nice tidy medium, thin, flexible and generally flat.  What about volume?  How big would a billion cubic tons of rock stack up to?
     Well, there is an answer to that, although it does involve going round the houses a bit.  Allow me to introduce the Kennacott, or Bingham Canyon, Mine, in the South Canadian state of Utah.  Art?

A monstrous great hole indeed!

     This is one of the world's biggest open cast mines - them South Canadians like to do things on a large scale - and yields up silver, copper and molybdenum.  And one of the biggest landslides evah.  Art?

A landslide (but you probably got that already)

     This, you see, is about a billion tons of earth gone walkies.  Now can you better visualise?  To better get a sense of scale, here's some of the dump trucks they use to haul mined ores away with.  Art?

Trucks on a track

     And to further give you a sense of how big these trucks are, Art will wow you again.

No!  It's not a very small car!  Yes!  It's a very big cat!

     So there you go, BOOJUM! helping you understand your place in the scheme of things.

What Do You Think Of That?
You should be aware by now that The Mansion comes equipped with barbed wire, mines and a sneaky sentry cat by the name of Jenny.  Art?

     Here she is gloating smugly at having sneaked her way into my Sekrit Layr.  Anyway, yesterday she was sat on the sideboard, looking through the kitchen window and making an odd sound, one which your humble scribe has come to know as "I'm going to GET you!", meaning she can see one of the neighbour's cats.  Conrad checked and, yes, one of our next door's cats was sunning itself on a wall, back to Jenny and utterly oblivious to her evil scrutiny.
     Which, of course, brought on a fit of wondering from your modest artisan.  She couldn't smell the other cat, being locked up in a kitchen with all doors and windows closed; which meant she couldn't hear it, either.
     So how did she know it was a cat?
     What if it had been a cat-shaped dog?  (are there such things? - goes to check)

The closest I could find

     Not an easy thing to determine, thanks to Photoshop.  That above is the best I could do.  However, let us imagine a model slightly closer in form to Felix.  What would jenny do?  Continue to hiss and spit, until the creature in question got up and barked?  And if it had been a dog-shaped cat (are there such things? - goes to check) 

Some people are seriously twisted.  Twisted!

     Would she ignore it until it wandered under her nose and hissed at her?
     These are questions that need to be answered**!

Bean Counting And "Vera Cruz"
I refer, of course, to the film, which is an interesting work in it's own right.  Directed by that most manly of male directors, Robert Aldrich, it follows the fortunes of a group of American "adventurers" in Mexico, directly after the Civil War has finished.  I say "adventurers", for which read "mercenaries".  It features fading star Gary Cooper, and a hungry younger Burt Lancaster, with lots of character actors.  Well worth watching, for the scenery alone, especially the scenes shot amid Aztec ruins; some carping Mexican critic explained in detail that these were the other side of the continent from Vera Cruz - well, poetic licence to you, mate!

Burt with a 10,000 candlepower grin

     The Mexican authorities had given permission for it to be entirely shot in Mexico, and were horrified by the portrayal of Mexican peasants as grubby and unwashed.  This is quite beside the point, as the Mexican peasants are models of fine upstanding citizenry compared to the South Canadians, who are morally-deficient money-grabbing rumpots - except for Coop.

Coop is wearing the White Hat

     None of this has anything to do with what follows, of course.  No, what I want to point out is that when the two groups of South Canadian "adventurers" meet up, there are seventeen of them.  Joe (Burt's character) promptly kills two of them.  That leaves 15.  We see one of them get killed in the rebel ambush - well, he falls off his horse, he might still be alive, except his 'friends' don't bother to check - and when Burt and Coop find the emptied carriage, there are 7 left besides them.
     WHAT HAPPENED TO THE OTHER 5!

The Not-Very-Magnificent Seven

     You know what this means, don't you?  DON'T YOU!?  Conrad now has to go back and watch the whole of that rebel ambush in slow motion until he can account for all the missing.
     Bean-counting.  It's a way of life.


*  Yes, there was a British billion, which was bigger, hence better.  Says I.
**  You cannot invoke hologrammatic camouflage.  Not just yet.