Money!

 No!  Not The Pink Floyd Song

Nor yet that one by the Swedish group whom I shall not name as I cordially detest them.  Think more along the lines of "The Wall Street Shuffle", one of my favouritest 10cc tracks.  

     Here an aside.  Yes, already! because I've only just remembered it.  Art!

     I distinctly remember thinking of this memoir whilst watching "Slow Horses" because, if MI5 are trailing you, you will never know.  That middle-aged housewife with a shopping bag?  MI5.  The cocky Asian lad with a line in patter?  MI5.  The slobby-looking bloke with five-o'clock shadow?  MI5.

     ANYWAY in my dream I was about to cross the road with a colleague and caught a glimpse of an electronic billboard, which had malfunctioned and thus only showed a small part of the above image.  Nevertheless, Conrad is a pretty sharp customer, even asleep, and I immediately realised that they were doing a television series based on the book.  "That's great!" I exclaimed.  "He comes from Manchester and a couple of times even worked there.  I bet I recognise the locations."  Turned to locate colleague and he's vanished as if he was never there.  O well.  I never liked him anyway.  Art!

     There you go, three birds with one stone, as we reference one of the better spy films, " - Soldier Spy" and Gary Oldman (impeccably dressed this time).

     Where were we?  O yes.  Money.  And, as promised, the further financial adventures of Sam Bankman-Fried, this time about shares rather than crypto-currency.  Okay, once upon a time there was a digital trading platform called 'Robinhood', who were set up in 2013 and very successfully.  Art!

     They also included crypto-currency amongst their trading options, which caught the attention of SBF, and late in 2022 he acquired a 7.5% stake in their shares, worth $540 million at the time.

     Straightforward, right?

     WRONG.  There are now five separate entities chasing these shares, stating they are the righteous owners.  SBF himself, predictably; the South Canadian Department of Justice; FTX Bankruptcy practitioners; BlockFi bankruptcy practitioners; Emergent Fidelity Technology liquidators.

     The DoJ disputes SBF's right to claim the shares, and of course Uncle Sam would love to get their hands on half a billion dollars.  This is where it gets complicated, because SBF purchased the shares through EFT, a company he owned 90% of, which itself had used funds borrowed from Alameda Research, one of the parent divisions of FTX.  Art!

     Lest we forget, SBF's girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, was the CEO of Alameda Research, which is kind of a conflict of interest in flashing neon letters ten feet tall, except FTX had nobody to investigate, caution or warn about this.
     To egg the pudding even more, there is very little official documentation about any of SBF's financial transactions, because see the paragraph above.  Don't forget, this is the man who insisted his corporate messaging system app delete any message instantly after reading, thus no messaging trail either, because see paragraph above.

     But hist!  There's more!

     The problem for whoever ends up with these shares is Robinhood itself.  It was valued at $50 billion when at it's most successful, a value which has dwindled to $18 billion today.  Their shares were traded at $56 each at that height, and are now down to under $9 each.  The company is also in severe financial trouble of it's own, having been fined $30 million for non-compliance, laying off over a quarter of it's staff and closing offices.  SBF's original holdings are now worth $435 million.  So, the risk is that resolving ownership will take so long that the shares will be worthless bits of paper.

     Money!

     We've not yet covered the Silvergate crisis.  I tell you, as a content creator, FTX is an absolute boon.

HOLUBTSI!

This came up on Operator Starsky's vlog feed as an idea for raising money for Ukraine.  I know, I know, it sounds like an angry Ukrainian pointing a gun at you and telling you to surrender, but hear me out.  His mate had suggested a cookbook of Ukrainian recipes, which readers commented very favourably on, also adding that they should add in photos of Ukrainian soldiers cooking these recipes.  Conrad, whom as we all know thinks with his stomach, was onside straight away.  Art!

Holubtsi in their natural state

     They are stuffed cabbage rolls, cooked in an oven in a tomato sauce.  I've got the recipe (from an Assyrian cook's website) and a constitutional stroll into Royton is required for a couple of ingredients.  Your Humble Scribe suspects that the real skill is in wrapping the filling.  We shall see.

Tattoo

No!  Not the practice of painfully inserting permanent markers into your skin.  I refer to the military tattoo, the most famous of which is the Edinburgh Tattoo, which is also the best.  No arguing, the Remote Nuclear Detonator stands ready.

     It comes, unusually, from the Dutch "Tap Toe", which in English means "Turn off the taps".  The taps in question being those on barrels of beer.  In other words, when the Taptoe bugle or drum got played, those who were in uniform had to stop drinking and get themselves back to barracks.  Art!

"The Sea Of Sand"

The Doctor is going to create a diversion in order to sneak into the supply depot, now occupied by the bio-vore invaders.

‘You’re not kidding!’ said Tam, with feeling.  ‘There must be ten tons of shells in that stack.  If they got heated up they’d fly everywhere.’

‘He’s exaggerating,’ said Roger, drily.  ‘It can’t contain more than a ton.  I don’t see how you intend to set it alight, ten tons or one.’

Hefting the four-gallon tin full of petrol, the Doctor pointed to the container.

‘With this, Lieutenant, with this!’

He tied the tin loosely to one end of a plank taken from the cargo floor of the Bedford.  The plank pivoted on the machine-gun pintle of one Sahariana, the gun removed and the plank lashed in place with cable.  At the other end of the plank a nail had been knocked through the wood and more cable tied to the nail.  This cable led to the rear axle of the second Sahariana, both rear wheels jacked clear of the ground.

After making pages of pencilled calculations in his diary, the Doctor  had fussed and shifted the vehicle orientation several times, to the exhaustion and bad temper of all involved. 

‘That tin won’t smash when it lands, not like a bottle,’ pointed out Davey.  ‘The stack won’t catch fire.’

‘That’s why I need a Lee-Enfield and a tracer bullet from one of your Bren magazines, Lieutenant.’

He's being a tad theatrical here, frankly.

A Right Pother

This will be almost the last in a series of images culled from a BBC News webpage, about the James Webb Space Telescope, because it's a handy way to generate content quickly.  Art!

     In case it's not clear - because it isn't - this is the asteroid Dimorphos, after it was hit head on by the DART kamikaze probe at high speed: 14,000 miles per hour.  Don't quibble about the focus, this is 7 million miles away.

     In case it's not clear, the deliberate collision was a stunning success, producing an effective change in the orbit of Dimorphos 3.6 times larger than expected, thanks to blasting out a thousand tons of debris.  This is a real insight into the practicalities of asteroid interception, because now smaller, more numerous interceptors could be used, or the danger zone for interception decreased.  Art!

Dimorphos before 're-modelling'

Finally -

A story came up on Bing that is so daft I'm going to have to wait to publish about it until I can get corroboration from another source.  Yes, it's about Ukraine.  It also recalls echoes of BOOJUM!s stable of killer animals, not the least of which is Clarissa Che Cannibal Combat Chicken -

Flee!  Save yourselves!