With A Little Help From The Ruffians
First of all, I have to apologise to the spirit of Yogi Berra, whom I first thought was a typo, and then wondered how cruel his parents were, because his childhood must have been a misery. "Where's your Boo-Boo?" his schoolmates would mock, and "Would you like a pic-a-nic basket?" Art!
Neither assumption true. It seems that a team-mate of his compared his sad face after losing a game, and his crossed arms and legs position whilst waiting to go onto the field, to that of an Indian yogi.
Besides that, he seems to have been one of South Canada's baseball greats, if you can use that name for what's essentially a game of rounders.
ANYWAY back to Yogi Bear. I shall have to add in a bit of background here, you young whippersnappers and quite a few of the middling ones, too, won't be familiar with this particular ursine. Art!
Boo-boo to port, Yogi to starboard
In quite a twist, Yogi the Bear is named after Yogi the Baseballer, a secret which was kept from the latter whilst he was alive. Okay, these two bears inhabit Jellystone Park, and Yogi's one aim in life is to steal tourist's picnic baskets. Okay, that's quite realistic, because bears in real life will do just that. However, these two manifest human levels of intellect and can speak. Lest you be unaware, that is not realistic.
'Jellystone' is used instead of 'Yellowstone' because libel. The US National Park Service is an arm of the US federal government, which has no sense of humour and an ever-beady eye.
Let us now abruptly shift focus from a children's television show to the end of all life in the Northern Hemisphere. Yellowstone Park, you see, is actually the surface of a super-volcano. Art!
Freaky-deaky mountain peaky
This volcano blows it's top every 600,000 to 800,000 years and last went pop about 600,000 years ago, so we might have another fifth of a million years or only until next Tuesday. A tad unsettling. Art!
As you can see, it also borders Montana and Idaho. Were this thing to erupt again, the effects on South Canada would be beyond dire, with an enormous zone where people would simply die instantly, then a couple of ash zones where inches of potentially toxic dust would fall.
That's not the worst of it. The ash cloud would ascend into the stratosphere and be carried by winds, primarily to the west. So there would be ash distributed across South Canada to the Atlantic Ocean. Nor would it stop there, because the event would be big enough to affect the whole Northern Hemisphere.
Remember when that single volcanic eruption in Iceland shut down air travel across the whole of Europe? Think of that multiplied by a couple thousand per cent.
I can tell what you're thinking. "What has this to do with the Ruffians?"
Thought you'd never ask! Because, on one of their bonkers chat shows, one pundit states that they ought to use their super-duper Sarmat shooter to nuke Yellowstone Park, because that would destroy South Canada. Art!
There's certainly something 'Anal-' about him. This is typical of Ruffian 'Destroy the West!' television shows, they get so far into their fantasies of nuclear attack that they forget NATO has a pretty formidable nuclear arsenal of their own. Thirty minutes after their Sarmat gets launched, there will be a radio-glass desert where Ruffia once stood.
A couple of days later the ash cloud from Yellowstone will arrive and finish off the few survivors. Ta very much, Yogi!
Off to the rubber-room for poor old Yogi.
Dangerous Toys
No, no, not what you're thinking! Peter The Average's Sarmat doesn't count, as we've no idea if it would even launch when they lit the blue touchpaper.
No, what I refer to is a video put up by Devin Stone on Youtube under his 'Legal Eagle' persona, of "The Most Dangerous Toys", where he takes a legal slant on some truly horrifying children's toys. Number One was a 'CSI Fingerprint Examination Kit' when 'CSI' was a global phenomena. Art!
Surprise! That white powder contains Tremolite, one of the most dangerous forms of ASBESTOS! Planet Toys, who made the kit, refused to stop selling it, which ended poorly for them: they filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. This kind of filing means that the company is just giving up, not bothering to restructure or try to continue going, as Devin explained. They had less than £10 million in assets and were liable for at least £10 million, perhaps as much as £50 million.
Moral of the story: dust to dust, ashes to ashes; negligence causes company crashes.
We'll be coming back to this topic because I'd not heard of many of these cases. Thanks for the content generation Devin! Art?
"The Sea Of Sand"
Our reluctantly co-operating humans are coming to terms with the fact that they aren't the biggest enemy to each other; the alien bio-vores are.
‘The black tanks do not move,’
reported the Tenente to Sarah, who passed the message on.
‘That’s
just it, I don’t think they can move around much,’ interrupted Albert. Everyone bar Templeman stared at him. He clarified the statement. ‘When the Professor and the Doctor and
I were stuck at the Temple, we saw lots of black – I suppose you could call
them bulldozers, really – lots of them excavating the site. They had to go back into the factory building
every half-hour to be re-charged.’
‘They
run on batteries?’ asked Roger, half-amused.
‘No,
no, the Doctor said they used - er – what was it? oh yes! “Geo-thermal energy”. Comes from the ground and doesn’t run
out. That’s how the buildings work, they
run on this geo-thermal stuff, and the vehicles do too.’
‘Oh,
I see!’ exclaimed Sarah. ‘If they move
about too much their energy runs out and they have to toddle off to get charged
up again?’
Albert
nodded. Roger stroked his chin
reflectively. A sensible commander would
rotate the vehicles on duty at the depot, sending a few back to get re-charged
whilst others stood guard. It wouldn’t
do for his little band of heroes to assume the enemy were stuck in place,
unable to pursue.
‘Oh
for a battery of artillery,’ he mused.
‘A few salvoes would turn those black beasts into a shower of glass.’
‘We
haven’t got any artillery, and we’re not likely to get any!’ said Sarah, with a
touch of acid to her tone. ‘We need to
deal with what we’ve got and can get, not pie-in-the-sky.’
She
had to translate that last idiom for the Italians.
Classic Sarah! The Doctor would be proud of you, young lady.
"The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen" By Alan Garner
Purchased this during the week at a charity shop (SC residents just deal with it). Your Humble Scribe last read it at least forty years ago and there's little I recall about it. Art!
It is, mind you, set in Alderley Edge, on the borders of South Manchester, which Darling Daughter and I visited when she was still small and cute. If I can finish it by Monday, when we shall be visiting, I may offer it to her, which will make a change from the Golden Age murder mysteries I try to pawn off on her.
Lord Peter's Crossword
Let us add in a last item, dealing with Ol' Dot's magnum nauseum. Let's trot out the <ahem> 'clue' first. "To smallest words great speakers greatness give; Here Rome propounded her alternative."
And the solution is - ALIENA.
No, I have no more idea than you do, and we're well over count, so the puzzle is not going to be solved today.
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