Brown Alert!

Let Me Explain

It doesn't matter if you'd rather just crack on, it's my blog and I insist.

     Okay, what has a brown pelt, great big chisel-like incisors, webbed rear feet and a large flat hairless tail?

     No!  Not the Capybarya.  Mind you, not a bad guess.  Art!

Autonomous tank.  Smokin'!

     No, the animal we're talking about here is the North American Beaver.  You never know, the autonomous tank above might end up being called a 'Beaver', especially if it's amphibious.

     Why do I mention one of the staple fur-bearing creatures that propelled the fur trade in South Canada to economic heights hitherto undreamed of?

     Because of that YouTube warrior with a rake, Post 10.  You may recall that his major occupation is to drive around his part of South Canada and unclog drains and culverts with his Mighty Rake.  The bloke doesn't get paid to do this, his monetary compensation comes from his YT videos.  Art!

     

     This is a small lake where the beavers have cut down all the shoreline trees as raw material for constructing dams and clogs.  Said clogs have blocked the culverts draining the lake, meaning it now overflows onto the roadway, and given that it's now winter and very, very cold, the road now has a sheet of solid ice as a decorative overlay.

     Not a problem you experience here in the Pond Of Eden.

     The ice is so thick that you'd need explosives to clear the culvert entrances, not the kind of kit our hero totes around with him.  Let's look at a Brown Alert! from a more temperate time of year.  Art!

     This mound of crud blocks and obscures from sight a culvert, which means that water is going to back up and eventually flood the road.  This is the second time Post 10 and his cameraman have been to this pond, and the beavers clearly remember.  Art!

     Here you see Ol' Po unblocking the culvert, keeping a wary eye around for angry beavers, who have him under observation.  Note how big that beaver dam is, because he's still got a firm foundation to stand on whilst clearing the culvert entrance.  He informs us, the audience, that the brown perils will return and block the entrance again very quickly - their construction material is being left on the bank, after all - but by then the water level in the pond will have fallen significantly.  Art!

     By this point water is now flowing freely into the culvert.  The amount drained away means that the road won't get flooded immediately a storm arrives, so it's okay for a couple of months.  Art!

     That's the culvert outlet; from stagnant to streaming.

     Now you know the reason for today's title.  Conrad wonders what beaver tastes like when roasted?

You Know You're Getting Gouged When -

You end up paying 60x what an item is worth.  OTOH, if there's nobody else who can supply that product, and you're desperate, what choice do you have?

Weep salty tears for us, Dimya

     The inimitable Jake Broe, over on his vlog, brought to my attention a story about the Ruffians doing 'deals' with Iran.  I say 'deal' when in fact it's more akin to Blatantly Taking Advantage.  Let's come up with a picture, Art.

     The Su-35, you see (and I apologise for using dollars) comes in at $85 million each.  Not to mention the air defence systems, which we'll ignore in the interests of brevity.  So, the Ruffians are swapping $2 billion dollars-worth of aircraft for Shahed 136 drones.

     Which cost $20,000 each.

     This tells us that the Ruffians are paying 60 times the market price for these drones, of which about 80% get shot down.  It also tells us that Ruffia cannot manufacture this quite basic drone, thanks to sanctions.  What next - swapping an ICBM for a mangonel?  Art!

     Thanks for the update, Jake, bro.

Speaking Of Manglement ...

This one comes from Quora, where the Original Poster worked in the photo lab of a pharmacy, the lab being a Kodak franchise.  When he started the lab made between 10 to 12% of overall profit.  Over time he and his colleagues, by working their collective bottoms off and going all-out for quality, raised this to over 80% of the whole store's profits.  They were based in London and had business coming from the Midlands, because nobody else achieved quality like theirs.  Art!

     The inevitable happened.  They were bought out by a bigger firm, who decided that cutting corners was the way to go.  Cut cut cut!

     But but but!  There are consequences to actions.  The new owners fired the two counter staff.  Then they fired OP's assistant.  Then they fired OP.  Their idea seemed to be that the last counter assistant could do all the printing of photographs with the scanner.

     Except no.  He wasn't trained to work in the photo lab AT ALL.  He knew nothing about the chemicals or the technical equipment involved, plus he was colour-blind.  Not only that, the scanner's software had been disabled and the motherboard disconnected.  OP was the only person who knew how to remedy both.  Work standards and output plummeted because the two counter staff had done all that work, manually.

     Sooner rather than later, word got out to the customers that OP and his staff had been sacked.  Traffic instantly fell off a cliff.  Six weeks after OP was sacked the shop closed for good.  You can picture the new owners clutching themselves with greed and glee: "Sack four out of five staff and we reduce our wage bill by 80%!"  Art!

"And go out of business shortly after!"

More Of Brighty Lighty

Just as a counterpoint to spectacularly dim managers.  Let us see what the BBC has for us on this one.  Art!

     Courtesy Ulrike Myller.  This is a shipyard on the Kiel Canal at dawn, where you can contrast normal daylight with the actinic lights of artificial illumination.  Bright indeed!

"The Sea Of Sand"

Murraycol is about to be overwhelmed by the bio-vores, who seem adept at manipulating silicon dioxide in ghastly inventive ways.

Showing discretion and sense, the remaining black tanks, three of them, began to reverse.  Not before the second armoured car fired three shots, one hitting a victim squarely in the middle, splitting it in two like a lightbulb.  Bodies, living and dead, tumbled from the shattered halves.  Tracer rounds from the Daimler’s BESA machine-gun began to fall amongst the scattered survivors, bowling over several.

‘Excellente!’ muttered Torrevechio.  Roger felt a brief lifting of his spirits – maybe the column could hold off the aliens!

Unfortunately not.  Once again a great ripple of hot air went up from the column, merely from the rear this time, and the watchers saw both armoured cars completely submerge in a pool of liquid glass that focussed only on them.  The other vehicles of the convoy, with their limp occupants, remained where they were.

Tam broke into an unbroken stream of curses, whilst Torrevechio looked pale.  The gunner looked into Roger’s eyes and the young officer felt the other man’s pity.

‘Sorry,’ said the Italian, in English, shaking his head.

‘Hsst!  Those bloody monsters are coming on again!’ hissed Tam.

The two remaining bio-vore transports disgorged dozens of infantry, who moved forward in widely-dispersed lines.  By the time they reached the lake of glass it had cooled sufficiently for them to cross it.  The unconscious bodies of the helpless British soldiers were unceremoniously dragged away, to be stowed aboard the transports.

     -as mobile batteries for their captors.

Finally -

Conrad is back in the office tomorrow <sigh> another eleven-hour day, and with the weather as it has been, probably a long wet journey down Queensway, to say nothing of the 409 bus stop first thing.