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Sunday 25 September 2022

RICO RICO RICO

There Is A Reason Why That Title's In Triplicate

Firstly, because it resembles - however faintly - that sung phrase from "Total Recall", "Recall Recall Recall" and thus allows me to legitimately open with a picture from said film.  Art!

Terrible likeness of Ronny Cox

     Okay, a poster image about said film.  There.  Happy now?

     Incidentally, Ronny Cox's character, Vilos Cohaagen, sounds kind of Dutch, which is quite possible as the director (Paul Verhoven) is Dutch himself.  Conrad cannot verify this as various sites on the internet merely babble on about how often it turns up in South Canada.

     Also!  The title can refer to Rico Dredd, Joe Dredd's clone brother and a thoroughly bad lot, going far beyond a cad and into dirty cur territory.  Art!


     You see, Rico was a Mega-City One Judge, who broke the law and did all kinds of very bad things.  The sentence for breaking the law as a judge is a twenty-year stretch on Titan, one of Saturn's moons, and as you can see above, the Big Meg thoughtfully adjusts criminal's bodies to cope with the toxic atmosphere.  Nice of them to retain a skilled hairdresser, though.

     ANYWAY of course - obviously! - that's not what this Intro is about.  No.  It's about a South Canadian law titled the "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisation" law, which was introduced in the Seventies to deal with organised crime and the Mafia.  Hence the acronym RICO.  With hilarious irony it was signed into law by Richard Nixon, which is as close to Politics as this Intro is going to get.  Let me boost the word count by a copy and paste job from Wiki:

Under RICO, a person who has committed "at least two acts of racketeering activity" drawn from a list of 35 crimes (27 federal crimes and eight state crimes) within a 10-year period can be charged with racketeering if such acts are related in one of four specified ways to an "enterprise."[1] Those found guilty of racketeering can be fined up to $25,000 and sentenced to 20 years in prison per racketeering count.[2] In addition, the racketeer must forfeit all ill-gotten gains and interest in any business gained through a pattern of "racketeering activity.

     Art!


     Here we have Mr. Donald Trump, a mere citizen of South Canada, who is currently in extremely hot water in legal terms.  So much hot water that one of his lawyers now needs a lawyer of her own.  So, why do I have his mug featured here when we could have a winsome and charming picture of an attractive young lady not wearing a lot?  Art?

Annette Peacock

     "But - but - the 'not wearing a lot'?" I hear you quibble.

     AS IF!

     The reason we have Mr. Donald Trump here is that one Jim Walden was being  interviewed as he is a former Assistant Attorney General - a big legal whizz to you and I - on MSNBC about how Mr. Donald Trump might be indicted.  Art!


     Jim - I can call him that as we're such terrific chums - put together a diagram that was turned into a graphic by the MSNBC production team, which I append here.  Art!


     Let me list the crimes here: Insurrection (Jan 6th riot); Witness tampering; Fundraising fraud; Felony murder (yikes!); Fake electors; Money laundering; Obstruction of justice; Voting systems and Murder conspiracy.  

     Jim made the point that it's not legally viable to charge Mr. Donald Trump serially with each of these crimes and go to court about it, probably because it would take a decade to get through them all.    The people in the middle are the ones who could be charged under RICO; except there are others, just that they couldn't fit all the names into the graphic.  

     O and note that name 'Rudy  Giuliani'.  When he was a prosecutor in New York he rose to fame because he hit the New York mafia with huge prison sentences -

     - under RICO law.

     Isn't irony wonderful!


Conrad Is Still Angry

So what's new?  Water remains wet, the sky is still blue, and Your Humble Scribe is still righteously wrathful and rancourous.  There was more about bears but it was indelicate so we'll move swiftly on.  Codeword solutions!  The bane of my existence now that I don't have to work Saturdays.

"EXFOLIATE":  Right, "X" and "F", two of the least-used letters, and both in the same word together.  Conrad thinks it's to do with gardening or weeding or somesuch.  Hang on, hang on, let me check my Collins Concise.  "To peel off in layers".  Bah!  Art?

John Peel.  Close enough

"KORUNA": ARE YOU DOG BUNS KIDDING!  This is a unit of Czech currency.  It's so obscure it isn't even present in my Collins Concise.  WHAT, ARE WE ALL NUMISMATISTS NOW?  Now you understand my evil temper.  ART!

No puns about 'check', thanks

"DACTYL":  Conrad is aware of the Pterodactyl, but this?  This is apparently to do with verse, being three syllables of which one is long and the following two short.  Derived from the Greek 'Daktulos' for 'Finger' <bites tongue and refrains from vulgarism>.  Art!



"The Sea Of Sand"

The Doctor is sneaking around getting background information on the alien bio-vores, after sabotaging their trans-mat.

Without access to more sophisticated instruments he couldn't tell with one hundred per cent accuracy that the planet so depicted was in the Pavonis system.  The suns looked similar to that in the Solar System, if redder, and the background star systems looked right.

     The home of these aliens did not look healthy.  Vast deserts covered most of the major land masses, with tiny spots of green dotted about the hinterland.  Long, shallow urban areas sprawled along the coastlines, occasionally linked across the desert wastes by roads.

     What the Doctor found interesting were the absences - no ports or harbours, nor any signs of marine activity.  No airports or aircraft.  No satellites or rockets or any orbital activity, either.  No launch pads or landing grounds or spaceports.

     Yet this was a sophisticated culture.  They had matter-transmission technology, and deep-sleep technology, and the ability to create useful - and dangerous - artefacts from plain, humble sand.

     "Chicken and egg," he muttered.  "How did they get here?"

     That answer might be delayed.  The why was more obvious: these creatures were bio-vores, living off the energy of living matter.  They had progressively denuded their homeworld of all such sources, reducing it to a lifeless wasteland.  Those dots of green on the representational globe must be a kind of plantation project, an attempt to stave off complete ecological collapse.

     I bet he's already thinking of ways to solve that crisis.


More Astronomy Picture

This one doesn't appear to have a title, merely that it was runner-up in the Stars and Nebulae field of photographs.  Art!

Courtesy Peter Feltoti

     This is the centre of the Heart Nebula, a stellar dust cloud over seven thousand light years from Earth, and you can judge the scale of that above when told that the nebula is 165 light years in diameter. 


Aha!  I Might Have Got This One

You know, that Lord Peter Wimsey crossword.  The clue here is: "Have your own will, though here, I hold; The new is not a patch upon the old (9)"

   And the solution?

    Hmmmmm I wonder, should I tell you or be a swine and leave it until tomorrow? 

     <checks word count>

     And we're at the Ton.  Tomorrow it is, then.


Chin chin!

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