Dog Buns!

We Are Out Of Milk

I had to top up my porridge with water this morning.  Conrad foresees a visit to Lesser Sodom in the near future.

     ANYWAY on to other meatier matters.  Art!

     Yes it's a giant killer robot.  No, it's not a carton of milk.  Because that would be boring.  Come on, when's the last time you got excited about pouring semi-skimmed onto your breakfast?  Or even skimme

     ANYWAY I have been watching "All Quiet On The Western Front" in the latest iteration, and am up to the first week or so in November 1918.  Let me jar Art into consciousness with this white-hot pitchfork -

     This is where the French army counter-attacks with first, tanks, and then massed flammenwerfers.  Props to the studio for coming up with convincing St. Chamond tanks, which in real life were a bit rubbish thanks to being far too long for their tracks.  Art! O stop whining and put some Sudocrem on it.

CAUTION!  Close proximity is hazardous to health

     I don't suppose that's any comfort to you if you've just been perforated by machine gun fire.     

     The thing is, by this point in the First Unpleasantness the Teutons didn't have any elaborate field fortifications as shown, because they were constantly retreating.  What they did was halt on river or canal lines and defend those, unsuccessfully.  Which would be complicated to stage and film, one supposes.

     O and the tanks would more likely have been the Renault Ft17, which the French army fielded in large numbers in 1918, which were light and relatively nippy, just not as imposing as the St. Chamond.  Art!

     Ft 17s in South Canadian service, with puny humans for scale.  Those flamethrowers you s

"The Thing?  Flamethrowers?  R J McReady ever steady!"

     <Conrad shakes head>  - ah - no, RJ, it was simply an expression, no roasting required.  The door is that way.

     Now you understand why I said 'Flammenwerfer'.  What I was going to say <pauses until front door is heard to slam shut> is that these were a Teuton invention, that the French reverse-engineered and took great delight in using against their inventors.  

     One of the characters in the negotiating Teuton party also makes a salient point; that there are 250,000 South Canadian troops arriving in France every week.  The Teutons couldn't do anything to interrupt or retard this process because their High Seas Fleet cowered in it's home ports and the U-boats had been foiled by the convoy system.

     I have to say that this iteration of AQOTWF doesn't stint on what a ghastly and dehumanising business war is, there's no glory here, only tragedy.  Art!

     I shall stop blathering here or the whole blog will be about whether the tunic buttons were the right size or not, because wh

The Fine Art Of Manglement

Most of these stories tend to be about South Canadian employers, because they seem to have the attitude that anyone working for them is a slave without rights or entitlements.

     Okay, so Original Poster was Contracts Manager for a large construction company, who were working on a large project.  Whoever had done the initial estimates had made an utter bodge of them and quoted a price far too low, which was compounded by management at the very top shaving even more off the budget.  The company was losing tens of millions of dollars on the project.

     The plan was to hire a consultant used to dealing with Federal agencies, and file a 'Total Cost' claim, which was essentially a 'Desperate Plea' for more money.  They ran it past OP, who pointed out that the private company they were dealing with was not a government agency and that the whole plan could backfire appallingly by enraging them with 'Attempted Extortion'.

     So, they did the obvious and - fired OP.

     He found out a couple of months afterward that the customer did indeed explode with rage, threaten to end the contract immediately and demanded exclusion from all claims since the start of the contract.  The board capitulated immediately because they couldn't afford to pay $500,000 per week to their construction workers if the contract was ended.

     The company went bankrupt six months later.  OP vindicated!

"The Sea Of Sand"

The Doctor has finally admitted that he and Sarah are travellers in time, which has led to some incomprehension amongst their audience.

Torrevechio shrugged his shoulders fluidly and spouted a stream of Italian, mimicking an elephant with one arm flapping against his face.

          ‘Quite,’ replied the Doctor, drily.  ‘He says belieiving Sarah and I come from the future is less difficult than believing in column-like creatures who drain life.’

          That riposte stopped Roger dead in his rant. 

          Damn it, they had to be lying!  Except why would they make up such a bizarre, not to mention insane, story and expect people to believe it?  Then there were those coins.  And the nose-goblins.  So far, in fact, neither of the two had been caught out in sabotage.

          Albert and Templeman were arguing with each other over whether time-travel was possible in theory.  Albert held that it was, the Professor denied the slightest chance.

          ‘Suppose we accept your story?  What have you come to the past to do, or see, or get?’

          That took a little explaining.  The Doctor, drawing on historical knowledge rarely needed and a bit rusty in the recall, informed his audience that the Afrika Korps would be here by the beginning of April.  If the bio-vores were not dealt with by then, the arrival of thousands of humans would simply provide the aliens with thousands of victims.  Nor could they assume the bio-vores would be vulnerable in the future as they were in the past.  They might lack the wheel, petroleum and aircraft, but they were still highly advanced; their recent encounters would have been analysed and studied, with countermeasures devised.

     No wheels?  I'd forgotten that fact.

More Of The Prof

Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, that is, of Yale University's School Of Management, a stellar economist who was interviewed on the DW Youtube vlog.

     The Prof pointed out that Ruffian oil is difficult to extract, both because their technology is outdated and the oil fields are in hard-to-reach places in Siberia.  Art!

     It costs them $45 per barrel to extract Urals crude oil, and an additional $10 to $12 per barrel to transport it by tanker, so at the current price of $55 per barrel the Ruffians are actually losing money on oil exports.  If they'd signed up to the EU's price cap they'd be making a few dollars profit per barrel, but Peter The Average won't do that as it makes him look weak, so weak he might suffer from fenestrophilia.  Overall, according to the Prof, Russia is losing $500,000,000 PER DAY in it's sales of oil and gas.  That's a $180 billion annual black hole that's not going to get fixed.

The Death Ray Is Real

Suchomimus put up a short Youtube clip of a Ruffian ARK-1 mobile counter-battery radar vehicle being destroyed - by a Ukrainian artillery battery <insert joke in poor taste here>.  Art!

     Here's one in running order.  What impressed me was Sucho's reading off a salient fact about this equipment; the radar emits radiation in such amounts that it's unsafe to be within 600 yards of it.  Presumably the crew are shielded by the hull, or this is where the Ruffian equivalent of the Fantastic Four comes from.

     So, the next time you play 'Red Alert' don't scoff quite so much at the technology you see.

Finally -

A bite for lunch and then I think a trip into Lesser Sodom is called for.  Can't have milkless porridge tomorrow!