But First, A Completely Different Tack
Ha! Do you see what I d - O you do. Yes well, Conrad is back working in the Dark Tower which means being at the mercy of First Bus again. We shall come back to this topic again, don't you worry!
Usually en route Your Humble Scribe has his nose in a Cryptic crossword or a book, which means the world passes me by to my utter indifference, yet today I happened to glance up and saw this. Art!
Just by the old Sainsbury's site, if you want a location.
'Interesting!' mused, silently, for it is bad form to upset fellow passengers. 'What makes it a 'Machine' Bakery? How is that different from a 'Human' Bakery? Are there Terminators?'
Or, perhaps, Anderton invented a gadget that he then patented, calling it 'Anderton's Machine' in order to conceal it's mysterious operating method from other bakers and bakeries (for it is a cut-throat business). And in the secret recesses of his Bakery, sweating bakers toil beneath it's grinning Satanic maw, offering up the odd slacker as both fuel and warning*. Don't forget, if you were to buy it and employ a workforce there, you could stand at the entrance and loudly announce "Welcome, to The Machine!"
Hmmmmmm well there you go. There is precious little information out there about it, apart from a real estate website that states it was built in 1988. Looks more like 1888 to me. Trust Conrad the Architectural Scholar. Art!
A machine in a bakery. Close enough.
Allow me to return to my theme of First Bus-bashing. Whilst waiting for the Oldham-bound 83 or 84 in Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell, I noticed that the double-decker behind the 83 had the lying, mocking, cynical "Sorry Not In Service' excuse up. Then it turned off before heading into Piccadilly Gardens. Given the size of the massed hordes a-waiting, it was the laggardly 84 and the driver executing a bit of sharp practice. Conrad has overheard bus inspectors commenting on this behaviour, and has seen it happen before. Art!
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| What's wrong with this picture? |
THERE'S NO DOG BUNS BUS! Typically the 409 only turns up when there is a harmonic convergence in the pistachio fields of the Sanjak Of Novi Pazar. Probably. A gentleman next to me was keeping track of it's arrival on a phone app. "Ten minutes away," he announced. "Three minutes away." O goody, our bus is due to - "Twenty-one minutes away." Hey what say what?
Then, as I alighted from the metal chariot, ANOTHER 409 goes sailing past. What timewarp had it been stuck in? Then as I entered the Sekrit Layr mere minutes later YET ANOTHER 409 goes mockingly past. Then I had a rage attack. Art!
"A First Bus mysteriously exploded in an apparent nuclear detonation, police confirmed."
Perhaps the kicker to all this is that the 83 was not only rammed with hot sweaty bodies, the day was warm and sunny and yet they had the heating on. Idiots! You're only putting pennies in Putin's pockets!
Hmmmm
Of late, and for no particular reason bar that my mind resembles a dynamited skip - yes a little more extreme of an analogy than the dropped one, I had to better and build on that - the word 'Plappergeist' has been playing on my mind. You won't be familiar with this word unless you're into obscure Seventies sci-fi novels. Art!
A cover that has 0% to do with the novel
Well well well, would you credit it, a little over 6 years ago I wrote about this very same book, bemoaning that there were no pictures of a 'Plappergeist', which was an invisible dog-ape minion. Art!
Courtesy Bill Rogers
Not sure how you do a character study of an invisible creature.
BOOJUM!: Abracadabra! (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)
And there's the link to the original, should you feel the urge to review.
Meanwhile, Back In 1943
We have now moved on to the next edition of "The War Illustrated", Number 153. Art!
This is the crew of a British Lee tank, one of the most excellent reliable versions of South Canadian TANK that the Eighth Army had. You can tell it's a Lee because there are seven crew: Commander, driver, gunner, loader, upper gunner, machine-gun operator and radio-man. It needed all these crew since it had a 75 mm gun, a 37 mm gun and four machine guns. When it arrived it gave the Axis a very unpleasant surprise, because the big gun could easily outrange enemy tanks and anti-tank guns. Plus, what the Brits like most of all, it was RELIABLE. The Ruffians were sent lots, and complained about it ("A coffin for seven brothers") because of Not Invented Here syndrome and you know Ruffians, ingrates to the last. Monty had one for his own personal use, so it can't have been that shonky.
Kreplach! That BBC page of links still refuses to load. Not only that, if I check for 'Magnum' on their News website, it brings up links to articles from years ago. Art!
And that's from only a couple of weeks ago. Conrad smells treachery in the woodwork**.
Finally -
Pre-Dimya's 'Special' Military Operation, Ruffia was one of the prime sources of hacking across the globe. They hacked the Ukranians, they hacked the South Canadians, they hacked whomever they pleased. The culprits were a mixed bag; government agencies, free-enterprise hackers and criminal gangs. Their only operating rule was; no funny business against Ruffia or it's allies.
However, after February 24th ... Art!
Courtesy Jake Broe
The gloves have come off. Rather than sitting back and smugly hacking the world, the world is now hacking Ruffia. Hacktivists like Anonymous are waging cyberwarfare, as well as criminals greedy for roubles, and the Ukrainians have their own 'IT Army', an official government-sponsored hacker army.
Ruffia has been taken very, very much by surprise here. Again, in their malice and arrogance Dimya et al decided that they would interfere, bully and destroy, and that nobody else would respond in kind.
Ooops.
Jake also points out that neither Western (and elsewhere) law enforcement nor NATO are going to pay the slightest attention to these hackers. Tee and indeed hee.
Let's hear it for Dimya's SMO Planning Advisers!
* I've worked in a bakery. It's exactly like this.
** I can mix metaphors if I want. Once again, whose blog is it?
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