Norks With Forks

No, Not The Norwegians

Can't you tell from the sneer with which that title was written?  Look again, it's positively vitriolic.  So, of course - obviously! - we are talking about the North Koreans.  With killing irony, Norkland used to be the industrialised and prosperous part of the country, until Communism really got hold of it.  It is kind of low-hanging fruit as far as satire goes, which is it's own fault.  Art!

Nork's premier armoured division on parade

     Like the Ruffians, those Nork formations do nothing but practice for parades all year long.  They are really, really good at making their vehicles look nice and shiny, and that's it.  

     Conrad has long maintained that the Norks will never dare invade the Sorks (Political correctness?  What's that?) because the loudly-proclaimed illusion that Norks live in paradise would be immediately shattered.  The Nork army is, it has to be said, not very good.  At all.  Remember, the last time they fought as an army is nearly seventy years ago.  Art!

Atomic-powered super-warriors?
Hardly

     Jumping abruptly to Quora, poster RJ - who is supposedly retired and no longer works for the South Canadian Air Force in intelligence matters yet who seems very well-informed - posted up a fascinating item about the 750 Nork commandoes who were sent to Syria at Putin's request, to help train Assad's troops.  These were the very best that The Only Fat Man In Korea had.

     Translated into real-world English, this means they were really hopeless dunderheads who were worse than useless.  Really.  Because they were all riddled with internal parasites, they passed said infections on to the Ruffians and Syrians.  They all had cholera and hepatitis.  They were malnourished, hence significantly smaller than the troops they were there to train.  None of them spoke Russian or Arabic, they refused to follow orders where these were actually understood,   None of them knew the first thing about modern weapons; the concept of 'body armour' was utterly foreign and 'night vision devices' scared them because they were obviously the product of black magic.  Art!

A member of His Brittanic Majesty's Satanic Forces shows off NVG

     When they were sent out on a military operation, they killed more of their own men in blue-on-blue incidents than they did the enemy.

     The Ruffians, realising that these chumps were helping the opposition far more than themselves, tried to send them home.

     Ooops.

     The Only Fat Man In Korea didn't want them back.  This may be because they have tasted the forbidden fruit of life outside the worker's paradise, or because they were useless failures, or both.  At any rate they are seemingly still stuck in Syria.  Where they probably manage two square meals a day, which is 150% more than they'd get in Norkland.  Art!

"Why?  Why is Conrad so cruel?"

     Funny, Peter The Average says the same thing, too.  Well, the two can console each other, as Dimya weeps into his salty borshcht and Kim cries into his kim chi.

A Touch Of The Surreal

Your Humble Scribe was walking Edna this afternoon down Tandle Hill Road, since I try to divert her from being fed until after walkies, as she still hasn't gotten either her head or stomach around the clocks going back.  Art!

Yours for a million quid

     Walking down the road I could hear the distinctive sound of cars passing, a power tool being used in the distance and -

     Bagpipes.

     The house next to the one above had a piper playing, probably in the back yard.  I've never heard this before in 20 years of living here and walking dogs up and down the road.

     Fortunately for the neighbours the piper only piped for 10 minutes.  Conrad could listen to the pipes for 10 hours and not mind, but they are an acquired taste and suburban Royton probably feels they're a step too far.

Khersong And Dance

Unless you live on the Moon, or are Ruffian, you cannot fail to have seen the Ukrainian's ecstatic response to the Ruffians running away from their city and oblast.  It's an important achievement because it means no DIBUA/FIBUA (Defending/Fighting In Built-Up Areas) in Kherson City as the British army used to call it.  Such fighting is slow, costly and immensely destructive.  Art!

     That bit north of the Dnepro is now all in Ukrainian hands.

     This is a significant gain of possibly another 1% of occupied Ukraine.  It's also a major kick in the teeth for Peter The Average, who declared that this land was 'eternally Ruffian' less than seven weeks ago.  He has been notably absent from television broadcasts of late because he doesn't want to be associated with failure.

     Since the Ruffians blew up all the bridges when they retreated, they cannot now cross the Dnepro.  This means the cities of Mykolaiev and Odesa are both safe.  It also means that a great swathe of Ruffian-occupied territory south of the Dnepro is within Ukrainian artillery and HIMARS range.

How to strangle cats the Shoigu way!

     The Russian trolls on Quora and Youtube are all parroting the line they used after the Kharkhiv counter-offensive: "It's all a trap!  It's all a trap!".

Meanwhile, Back In South Canada -

We head back to Kyle, the Geography King, who was illustrating examples of poverty-stricken regions in South Canada that resemble the Third World in some cases: he calls such places "The Other America", locations that are never going to appear on glamourous television shows.  His next location is north-west Mississippi and south-eastern Arkansas.  Art!

     As Kyle points out, this area has been poor 'since forever', going back a couple of centuries.  In many ways it's grinding rural poverty mirrors that of the Appalachian region, with a different geography, being flat and humid rather than mountainous, with no visible sign of improvement.  Art!

     Again, many people here live without running water or electricity.  Sombre stuff.

"The Sea Of Sand"

Sarah, bless the girl, had been feeling a bit down.  You can understand it - a prisoner at risk of alien attack, and with the Doctor having been gone for hours.

"Oh, he's safely out of the way," reassured Roger.  "Entirely out of harm's way at the dig.  There's no Italians there."

     The Italian sentry at the door opened it, leaned in and ordered "Silencio!" loudly, before darting back outside again. 

     "Hey!  He's worried about something," whispered Tam Mickleborough.

     Sarah, comprehending thanks to her TARDIS-inherited ability to understand Italian, rapidly understood that there were enemies approaching the depot from the direction of Makin Al-Jinni.

     Tenente Dominione wondered if the whole God-forsaken world wasn't going mad whilst he alone stayed sane.  One of the cars on patrol had intercepted a British lorry driving towards the depot.  Except this lorry wasn't driving along normally with it's lights on, not expecting trouble.  No.  Nor was it sneaking along with lights extinguished, expecting trouble.  Oh no.  Instead it was flashing it's headlights as if it wanted to attract attention.

     Now he had the drivers in front of him, a big middle-aged academic and a twitchy undergraduate.  They told a story, different this time to the tales related by the Martuba garrison, of monsters emerging from the archaeological dig at Makin Al-Jinni.

     Monsters!  He jumped down from the command car, stretching his legs and working off some of the frustration he felt.

     Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, hmmm Tenente?

Finally -

I have all the ingredients assembled for Korean Fried Chicken Burgers, which is a recipe for four people.  There's no way I could manage four of these, so I've only got three chicken thighs out to fry, and doubt I can manage more than two, but we'll see.  Rather than use a giant pan of sizzling hot oil, I am going to use the air fryer and we'll see how that copes.