Are You Bemused?
Ha! Do you see wha - O you do.
First, an aside. Yes, already! I see that there's quite a bit of internet chatter about a certain television program - NO! Not 'Countdown'. It's a conversion to television from a computer game - "The Last Of Us". Art!
Conrad has never played the computer game and probably never will; computer games eat up your time worse than Quora does. The premise is that the parasitic fungi Cordyceps jumps the infection gap from insects and infects humans, who undergo a transformation into fungus-riddled homicidal zombies. The whole world collapses over a long weekend, because it got into staple foodstuffs - wheat flour and sugar are mentioned as infection vectors - that are all delivered to retail outlets at the same time. Art!
EYES ON THE ROAD!
Conrad knows this is not how retail logistics works but we'll allow them a pass on that. No, what I wondered was how NOBODY is talking about "The Girl With All The Gifts", because in that novel (and film) the 'Hungries' are fungus-riddled homicidal zombies, created because Cordyceps jumped the insect-human barrier and infected Hom. Sap. The author hints that this was done thanks to human intervention, without explaining whom or why. "I know, let's create a killer biological warfare agent that doesn't stop at political borders!" said nobody sane ever. Art!
Excellent film, by the way
ANYWAY of course - obviously! - none of that has to do with crude oil, and indeed this Intro only has a passing reference to crude, because 'Refined Petroleum Products' just doesn't scan or fit in a metre.
Okay, cast your gin-addled minds back to early December. A price cap was imposed on Ruffian crude oil being transported by sea, because the G7 and EU and generally The West could audit and control such commerce. The Ruffians huffed and puffed and ranted and tanted, and then quietly complied, because they could still get $60 per barrel, whereas if they tried to sell it at $80 PB they'd get nothing.
Now, I have to thank the outstanding Vlogs that Joe Blogs puts out on these matters, because he can explain in terms non-economists can understand, and reduce complex matters to the readily explicable.
That's the link to his most recent on Ruffia. Art!
You see, tomorrow a new cap comes into place on refined Ruffian oil products, which include fuels such as petrol, diesel, fuel oil and kerosene. These are what you end up with after fractional distillation of crude oil, and the chart above shows purchase volumes globally. The thin red line at the bottom is Chinese purchases, and the equally thin yellow line are Indian purchases. You can see they buy very little refined Ruffian products, because 1) They are expensive and 2) India and China have their own distillation plant and refineries. It's far cheaper for them to buy crude and distil it themselves.
The blue part is European purchases, which will rapidly tail off after 05/02/2023. The cap is to be set at $100 PB, down to about two-thirds of what the current retail price is, so not only will volumes crash, the revenue from same will decline dramatically, too. Art!
Ooooh, someone's not happy
The West and EU and G7 have the Ruffians over a barrel - ha! Do you s O you do - because as with crude oil, they own the marine tankers and nearly all the marine insurance companies that Ruffia needs to use to transport these refined products. They are going to have to suck it up and comply. Nor can Peter The Average blithely say 'O I'll just pivot and sell to India and China', because they don't want or need his expensive refined product, and will continue to gouge him for big discounts. Art!
This is the chart for crude oil, with that barely-visible vertical line at far right being when the cap came in. As you can see, European purchases have dwindled to nil, China didn't increase it's purchases by much, and India has almost stopped buying, since their storage facilities are full. Expect a similar change for refined petroleum exports later this month.
Right, that's a very long Intro, let's move on sharpish!
Lord Peter's Bafflingly Hard Crossword
Conrad might have had a chance at the previous clue, but not this one. The - er - 'clue' goes: "Ye gods! Think also of that godess' name, Whose might two hours on end the mob proclaim (2)."
You what? Is this another acronym? Neither of us are going to get the solution, so let me just add it here: DI
I think this is a reference to the godess Diana, but don't quote me on that, and Your Humble Scribe has NO IDEA what that second sentence means. Art!
Ol' Stony Face herself.
"The Sea Of Sand"
Scavenging for equipment, the Doctor is looking to build an atomic bomb, because every man's got to have a hobby.
The Doctor
explained. He had spotted a tell-tale
square imprint in the desert sands that might have been the result of the
TARDIS landing once the Hostile Automatic Displacement system stopped
operating. A square imprint, appearing
from nowhere. In coroborration, the Arab
caravan travelling from west to east had diverted to investigate the
ground-trace. So too had the bio-vores, only since they won the skirmish they
had retained the trophy.
‘Where is the
TARDIS now?’
‘Probably back
at the dig. Taken there for further
study.’
Sarah chewed
her lip. No TARDIS? That meant she and the Doctor were stranded
here in early 1941, stuck in the contemporary without any means of achieving
the hypertemporary. Well, she was stuck. The Doctor could endure ten times the wait
she could without any ill-effects, given his lifespan. In fact some of his Time Lord mates could
well drop by in a decade or two to see what had happened to him.
‘So
you see we do have a slight dilemma. Cobble
together a crude nuclear weapon and destroy the alien trans-mat complex, at the
cost of losing the TARDIS. Or, find our
transport and leave, only for the invaders to over-run this world and destroy
our future.’
Sarah
recalled an earlier incarnation of the Doctor, and what he’d said – boasted,
really – about the TARDIS.
An unpleasant dilemma to be upon the horns of, to mangle English a little.
The Big Frieze
Forgive the pun. You will recall, unless you're a goldfish with a lobotomy, that this word was a Lord Peter Crossword solution. In contemporary fashion it's an item of interior decoration, yet it's history goes back to antiquity, when it was an architectural feature. Art!
There you have a rather weary frieze on a piece of classical Greek architecture. Technically, it was the central portion of what was an 'entablature', with the architrave being above it and the cornice below. So now we all know more than we did five minutes ago. Go us!
Finally -
Conrad is making a batch of Kim Chee, the Korean staple foodstuff, and now has to go downstairs to de-salt the Chinese leaves, then roll them up with the rest of the mixture as a filling. You may get a picture, you may not - I'm horrid that way. Art!
NOT MINE!
There are about a million different types of kim chee out there, because every Korean's grandma had a different recipe for creating same.
Pip pip!
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