Or, More Correctly, Car Trouble
I used the British spelling for the ₽ this time, because it's an hilarious pun YES IT IS and if things go on the way they are then Ruffians will indeed be travelling in horse-drawn carts. Although I bet this is still a common method of travel in the depths of the taiga and the tundra, where the tr
ANYWAY let's have a picture of a Ruffian car factory in the good old days. Art!
Back in the good old days, when Ruffia had a car industry. The thing is, this industry was predominantly Western, creating Audi, Mercedes, BMW, KIA, Ford, Nissan, Toyota and so on. Art!
This is Konstantin, of the Youtube channel "Inside Russia", an economist by trade I believe, who decided to leave Ruffia with his wife and two kids in September last year, when the mobilisation orders were flying around. His take on the Ruffian automotive industry is prettttty scathing. As he pointed out in one of his shorts, this industry made $Billions and employed hundreds of thousands of workers, who were consequently paying their taxes and boosting the government coffers*.
Until February 2022, when all these Western (and Asian, as I think KIA is a Sork business) businesses promptly left Ruffia.
Ooops.
This leaves exactly TWO car manufacturers left in Ruffia: Lada, the native car maker, and the Chinese. Art!
 |
| "This piece of deviltry, Misha, is black magic made concrete. We call it an 'Engine'." |
Here an aside. Konstantin had a longer vlog posted, in which he mocked a Ruffian minister's plea to their fellow countrymen about jeans. Don't buy new jeans! Jeans are the underpinnings of NATO's Satanic mosquito warriors, or something. Wear them until they wear out, she recommended, and then they'll look all trendy thanks to mimicking distressed denim trousers.
ANYWAY Konstantin had the final say. Art!
"Well done, Russia."
Car production is useful as a metric for monitoring economic performance, and the Ruffian statistics tell a rather bleak tale: down 98% from pre-Special Idiotic Operation, with cars lacking things like air-conditioning, anti-lock brakes and airbags.
Of course - obviously! - the Chinese are not complaining, because now they have hardly any car manufacturing competition, and all those lovely juicy profits are making their way back to Beijing, not Moscow. O, and Chinese official cartographers are changing the names of Ruffia's Far Eastern towns and cities from their Ruffian name to the old Chinese version. Art!
The Ruffian national nightmare
Conrad Is ANGRY!
As per usual. Yes, we are talking about Codewords again, because the Dog Buns pikers compiling them continue to test my patience. For example:
"CHI": Well fortunately for me, Conrad is pretty up on the Greek alphabet, as this is one of the letters involved in the same. Art!
There you go, uppercase and lowercase. Incidentally, since the Cyrillic alphabet is based on the Greek one, "X" in Ukrainian is pronounced "Kh", as seen in BAXMYT, which you would recognise better as 'Bakhmut'. And there was some nonsense in my Collins Concise about energy currents in the body.
"AMOK": O sorry, I forgot to rant about WHAT ARE WE ALL EXPERTS IN ANCIENT GREEK NOW?! thanks. This word means "A state of murderous frenzy" according to the CC, and hails from the Malay word "Amoq", which means "Furious assault". Art!
I had no idea he wrote the script. You learn something new every day.
"PANACHE": They do seem keen on using foreign words, don't they? This one had me bothered as it might also have been GANACHE which is a mixture of chocolate mixed in with cream used i
ANYWAY my CC defines it as "A dashing manner, swagger" and it comes via French from Old Italian, namely "Pennacchio", meaning a feather. A feather in a cap, that is. Art!
Not Sure How To Classify This
As you should surely know by now, Conrad ends up in some strange places on teh Interwebz and is unsure exactly how he got there in the first place. Take this Youtube short as a case in point. Art!
That's a cat in the transparent carrier. Here is matey, blithely skidooing along a road in either South Canada or British America, so his cat can go for a wander. Art!
The cat's collar has a camera in-built, so he and we can see where Mister Moggy gets to. He stops the vehicle, then opens up the carrier and lifts MM out, placing him on the ground well away from the road. Art!
That's the cat in dead centre of the picture. Off it goes. Matey follows to make sure MM doesn't fall into the stream or through the ice of a puddle. Art!
After a while, and MM getting snow on the camera lens that has to be wiped off, we get back to the carrier. Art!
It all had an air of being faintly bizarre. Why not just open the back door? O well, matey's cat, matey's rules.
"The Sea Of Sand"
The Doctor has ensured that the Farmer's revolution on Wastelandworld is not going to be confined to one location but will cover the whole planet and eliminate the 'feudal fascism' that had reigned for millenia.
TOWARDS AN AQUEOUS ECO-RETRIEVAL
OPTION
1)
Recall your amphibious past. Your long-distant ancestors came from the
sea. Currently, the land is not
conducive to long-term survival.
2)
Ergo, treat the land as an occasional
resort. You currently harvest and crop
sufficient algae to sustain your population from a single level.
3)
Create other such levels by marine inversion
manipulation. This will increase algae
harvests by a factor between 5 and 10.
4)
Using the trans-mat Infiltration Complex on
Target Fourteen, you can irrigate the desert hinterland by importing millions
of tonnes of water. This would be a
long-term project.
5)
By using the same Infiltration Complex, you can
acquire alien piscine life-forms and re-populate your oceans with marine life.
6)
Heavier than air flight is possible.
‘Seeds,’
explained the Doctor. ‘From the TARDIS’
life-science laboratory storage. Date
palm, coconut palm, saguarro cactus, yucca, various succulents. Take good care of them.’
The
big alien made a nodding gesture in compliance.
‘We
have one request to make of you, Doctor.’
The three-syllable name had been shortened to two by all who spoke to
him, out of respect. ‘We do not want to
be tempted by the Infiltration Complex on Target Seventeen, the world you call
“Earth”. Can you destroy it when you
return?’
‘Absolutely!’
said the Doctor, with entirely unfounded enthusiasm, returning to the TARDIS
and waiting for the trans-mat to send him back to Earth.
Things ending well on Wastelandworld. Now all he has to do is pluck victory from the very gullet of defeat back on Earth!
"Dad's Army"
Your Humble Scribe has been watching his DVD of the Fifth Season, which were originally broadcast in 1972, a Biblical age ago. Okay, okay, fifty-one years ago. What a different time it was then! And the program was set at least thirty years into the past at that point. You couldn't make a series like this now: the cast is all white, and there are very few female roles, and Private Walker always has a fag hanging from the corner of his mouth. It would probably be seen as hideously ageist and ableist, too, and, since a lot of it is set in the hall of a church, there would be sucking of teeth about a lack of religious diversity. Art!
Conrad wonders - did any other nation ever create anything similar for television? You can probably exclude the Sinisters as their version of DA would have each episode three hours long with at least sixty minutes of 'Worker Education' included. The Teutons might have created an equivalent about their last-ditch Volksturm units, except they saw actual combat, which isn't a great basis for comedy.
Perhaps the Swiss?
And with that we are so very DONE!
* After the siloviki had stolen 50% of it
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