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Friday, 22 April 2022

How Many Leaves In The World?

There I Was

Wondering how to replicate the atypical yet welcome phenomena of very high traffic figures as of yesterday, when I realised it might have been the title 'One Trillion Lions Versus The Sun'.  Spectacularly silly stuff, even if the original Youtuber went to a lot of effort in working out how to create a mass of lions so large it creates a singularity that destroys the sun.  Yes, all very well in theory, much less so in real life.  Art!

An ooopsie moment

     Okay, I thought to myself; what new, spectacularly silly topic can we come up with? as I stared at out neighbours trees getting severely blown about by the near-hurricane winds up in our hill country.  Then the thought came: how many leaves are there in the world?

     Here an aside.  Nothing to do with leaves.  If you Google "Exploding Sun", as I did to get that photo above, you also get "Exploding Sun", which, if Art can put down his plate of coal ...


     It sounds dodgy as all get out from the IMDB synopsis, doubtless done on the cheap with horrid cheap CGI and a has-been C-list celeb to hang it from, plus it only gets 3.7 in the IMDB ratings, so bad, only not bad enough to be enjoyable after a snifter of gin.  The blurb has it that "A historic space launch triggers a solar-storm event -" which is when I stopped paying attention.

     ANYWAY back to leaves.  It's not a question that you can frame easily, because - Art?


     It depends what time of year you ask the question.  Furthermore, are we going to exclude leaves of grass?  I think we will, just to be capricious, because you can estimate leaves per square yard quite handily and then just scale up.  So we won't.  Restricting ourselves to trees, I think we'll also exclude evergreen trees with needles instead of leaves.  Just because.

<weeps softly>

     On the other hand, we'll include hedges, because those neighbours over the road have them.  So, the best estimate of how many trees there are in the world - okay, I think we'll exclude hedges because capricious - is about three trillion.  Then we have to plump for an average number of leaves per tree, so I shall pluck a number by scanning these handy goat intestines, and that number is 100,000.  

     So the number of leaves on trees comes to 300,000,000,000,000,000.  For the moment, anyway, although the number is likely to decrease thanks to the winds up here in the mountains.  And it will fall dramatically in autumn, of course, when the trees shed.

     BOOJUM! - educating you one factoid at a time, whether you wanted it or not.

     Motley!  we need to nip down to Royton and purchase a cheap second-hand dictionary, then cut all the words out and put them in a bucket.  Then we have to hire a specially-trained penguin to pull three words out of the bucket, and that's the next silly topic we'll cover, okay?

BOOJUM! means employment for penguins

Back Into The Blue

Yes, another selection from the BBC's theme of 'Into the blue', and thank you Auntie Beeb for helping lighten the creative burden on we, the editorial staff.  Art!

Courtesy Laura Boot

     This is described AND I WARN YOU TO WASH OUT YOUR FILTHY MINDS as being a Blue Tit on a branch during a cold winter's day.  Blue on blue, you might say.   I saw one yesterday morning whilst walking Edna, along with the ever-present magpies, who are always bobbing about.  There are pigeons, too, whom Edna looks longingly at.  Dream on, Edna.


The Biter Not So Much Bitten As Bludgeoned, Brutally

Sit down and sip your cuppa as Conrad regales you with a tale of Revenge from a Reddit Youtube recounting; the Dog Buns things are entirely too addictive, so if I've spent much too long reading them, you are getting the benefit.

     The Original Poster worked in a South Canadian NGO, where they drew up contracts for working with other government agencies, and believe me there are a lot of South Canadian government agencies, and their IT requirements.  Art!


     Now we know more than we did five minutes ago.  The OP made a habit of scrutinising every contract she dealt with, which might vary from $10,000* up to $4,000,000, because if a government agency was impressed with a well-executed small contract, they could well become a repeat customer with a considerably greater dollar value attached.  This review process could take hours, even for a small contract.  OP's diligence and scrutiny annoyed the heck out of her Sales Director, because it slowed everything down and prevented his staff from generating bonuses for themselves.

     You can probably see where this is going.

     Eventually SD ordered OP to stop checking contracts for less than $10 K, and confirmed IN AN E-MAIL that Sales would carry out due diligence and review contracts.  The process sped up.  Then in came a small contract where the client was offered a 30% rebate, which OP immediately recognised as an error; this level of rebate was no longer offered and 5% was the usual.  However, Sales should pick it up, right?  Art!

Servants being civil

     Wrong.  They didn't.  Next thing, back comes the client with a $40 million contract, same as the earlier one just with this enormous sum at the end, and for three years, not three months.  Sales were clapping themselves on the back, seeing million-dollar bonuses in their next paycheck.

     Three months later the contract has been signed off and a conference of all the directors and leads takes place, Sales rubbing their grimy mitts with glee, until the Finance director states that the NGO is going to lose $8 million on the deal.  It's not clear in the narrative if this is going to be annually for three years or is the whole three-year deal.

     Faces drop.  Next up are Legal, who say the contract cannot be amended now that both parties have signed it, so the loss just has to be endured.  The Sales Director, red-faced with rage, tries to throw OP under the bus and tells her to get her things and leave.

     Instead she brings up The E-mail Of Doom where he orders her to stop checking contracts under $10 K, at which he still froths in rage, until she scrolls down to the bit where HE commits to due diligence and review.  

     Not only was he fired on the spot, he had to pay back his previous year's bonus thanks to a claw-back clause in his contract - $300,000.  He tried to sue for unfair dismissal and lost, having racked up legal costs of another $200,000.

     The devil's in the details.


After That Amusement, Let's Have TORMENT!

Three minutes later, he bounced up the steps to Angela’s front door, noticing splintered wood around the lock.

               ‘Forced physically,’ he announced.  Yvonne, travelling alongside, stopped to look at the damage.

               Dave Hargreaves, looking ill, paced up and down the small, bare front room.  His shoes made a hollow clacking on the parquetry floor.

               ‘Before you do anything, put your hand on this,’ warned Louis, holding out a bible.

               ‘Are you ******** barmy?’

               ‘Your hand, or this knife,’ threatened Louis.  The Sabattier knife had been a wedding present fifteen years ago but still held a wicked edge and was fifteen inches long besides.  Dave slowly put his hand onto the bible, having eyes only for the long knife, wondering what else Louis had in the briefcase.

               ‘What?  Do I have to swear an oath or what?’

               ‘No.  You pass.  What did these ******** want?’

               Dave hesitated before replying.

               ‘You.  They said Ange is the hostage.  If you go out to Dovecote Park they’ll swap her for you.’

               Dovecote Park ran along the main road into Manchester, a long narrow strip of parkland with plenty of trees and shrubbery to hide amongst.

     O noes!  Luma in peril!


Finally -

Conrad heard an interesting commentary on Youtube between a few South Canadian ex-naval personnel, who were commenting on why the 'Moskva' was so badly damaged and then sank.  Art!

All perfectly according to plan

     It seems that in Western navies, everyone aboard ship, with no exceptions, has to do damage control and fire drill, daily or at least weekly.  Train train train.  More trains than Euston Station.  The Ruffians, it seems, simply don't bother and leave internal doors open all the time, so any fire spreads rapidly and you cannot flood compartments to extinguish it.  How shocking!  Ruffian military being inept!  Once again, let's hear it for Dimya's 'Special' Military advisers -

Brought in to replace the old ones -

     - who have mysteriously vanished.  How peculiar.


*  We will temporarily suspend our Imperial values for this item.

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