Be Careful, My Remote Nuclear Detonator Still Needs Testing
We are supposed to observe a 500 yard Minimum Safe Distance between the target and other individuals, except Conrad's got no intention of sticking to that, so your whole street might go up in a cloud of vapour.
Here an aside. Why did nobody ever dedicate a series to the Mirror Universe "Star Trek"? Instead of the namby-pamby Federation version, we would be able to see <thinks> giant space battles, planets being exploded (Remote Nuclear Detonator Industrial-Size), naked force being used to solve problems, phaser fights, the Romulans getting a right shoeing, annoying crew members being punished with torture, no comic moments at the end, AND NO *****Y TRIBBLES.Blame him
ANYWAY what I wanted to comment on in this Intro was a sub-species of Reddit posting on Youtube that comes under the unlikely title of "Treelaw". Which is to say, law about trees.Yeah, baby, yeah!
Conrad is pretty sure you readers out there only think of trees if one falls on your car. However, they are pretty idiosyncratic objects that can take decades to reach full maturity, and which can be around for centuries. They also carry a substantial financial value, all the more so if they are used for making furniture and the like. Art!
Given the above paragraph, chopping down a neighbour's trees illegally can cost the perpetrator £££ in the hundreds of thousands. Sometimes it can cost over £1,000,000 - as in one case where the insurance company dragged their feet and tried to bluff it out in court.Wood you believe it
We shall begin small tonight. Okay, as with most of these cases, this one originates in South Canada, where the Original Poster had two 80-year old oak trees on his property. Art!
That "White Oak" distinction is important. Okay, the OPs next-door neighbour didn't like these trees, as they threw shade over his outside porch, and he cried into his porridge daily about this. He asked OP to cut them down, as otherwise his early-morning Codeword was difficult to do in darkness; OP refused this request point-blank. However, when he returns from a fortnights holiday, he finds 1) Two tree stumps where his oaks used to be, and 2) a 'Venmo' payment of £1,500 pounds sent to him*. Yes, Shady Neighbour had cut the trees down.
'Quercus Alba' the White Oak
OP is seething with rage, quite justifiably. He rejects the payment, then has a county surveyor come out to confirm that the trees were legally on his property. They were. He then has an 'arborist' come out to value the trees as were. It transpires that these trees cannot now be replaced, since the environment is now urban and Quercus Alba won't grow there if replanted from new, and they can be valued for insurance purposes at £750 per year of growth, plus a premium for being valuable timber (that White Oak thing).
Shady Neighbour how has a bill of £150,000 to foot for chopping down trees that weren't on his land. One hopes the uninterrupted daylight on his porch was worth it.
This, believe it or not, is retribution at the lower end of the scale. For those confused about 'arborist', the more down-to-earth description in This Sceptred Isle is "Tree Surgeon".
Possibly not T. Sturgeon. Close enough.
A Skate Over Some Statistics
NO! Not the fish. Dog Buns, what on earth do you think we do here at BOOJUM! but misdirect and mis-interpret Not the fish. We are returning to a topic broached this afternoon, which happens to be: how many troops were there in the UK after Dunkirk, if we imagine the massive evacuation from Dunkirk never happened?
The answer is, quite a lot. As mentioned earlier, almost 200,000 troops were evacuated from eight French ports post-Dunkirk, meaning that they took all their equipment with them, since they weren't being lifted off open beaches. Art!
Thanks to Wiki
If the evacuation from Dunkirk doesn't occur, there are still 1,400,000 troops available in the UK in June 1940. This is an enormous number, although we must remember that a lot were armed with nothing more than the uniform they stood up in. Your Humble Scribe has Churchill's "History Of The Second World War" and seems to remember that there is a chart in there with details of what divisions there were, at what status they were and how readily they could engage in combat in the summer of 1940. Art?
"Chelation"
Not going to apologise here, yet another mysterious word risen from the depths of my mind to trouble the daylight. I did have a vague idea that it was involved in dealing with gas warfare/poisoning/rampant turtle attacks <delete where applicable>.
Technically, a 'chelate' is a molecule of an organic compound that includes a metal ion. Art!
There you can see a Nickel molecule in the middle of an organic array.
"So what?" I hear your callous comment. Well, if anyone is suffering from heavy metal poisoning <insert Blue Oyster Cult joke here> then they get dosed up with chelating agents, which bond to the metal ions, rather than letting them bond to the victim. The subsequent refuse is excreted, rather than being retained in the body for 27 years. It works for lead, arsenic and mercury, the most common heavy metal poisons.
Conrad's septic sewage of a mind throws up useful information - who knew!
CAUTION! This man is now dead
Finally -
I have yet to come back to you about "Military Operations Gallipoli" as the Allied landing commence, but don't worry, we will get there. And yes, "Allied" because there was a considerable French presence there, as well as the near-legendary Ruffian cruiser "Askold", which you could write a thriller about, except nobody would believe it. Seriously, if the West and the Ruffians want to build bridges, they could do worse than make a film (or more probably a mini-series) about the "Askold".
And now I have to go finish off the haggis. A dirty job, but someone's got to do it.The "Askold"
* I convert all dollars values into pounds, because Imperial is best. Also, 1776 never happened.
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