NO! That Is Not A Typo
It is an hilarious pun, HILARIOUS I TELL YOU, although because it's going to take a while to explain it, perhaps a little less hilarious than I fondly imagine. Art!
The last time Your Humble Scribe was in a McDonald's was a few months ago, and then only to use their toilet, nor did I have any change to leave in their charity collections pot - must remember to remedy that next week. As for actually purchasing their foodstuffs, that would be years and years ago, possibly six? as I remember buying "Fighting Isis" on the very same day. That was when The Works had more books on sale than miscellaneous tat.
ANYWAY Conrad was reading a Youtube Reddit about 'What thing vanished from memory?' and the McDonald's 'Monopoly' scam came up, which I'd never heard of, since it came to light a good 23 years ago and involved McD, for which see paragraph above.
The background was that McDonald's were affixing Monopoly game pieces to their fast-food franchised faff, only a very few of which were winning pieces.
Enter Jerome P. Jacobson. Art!
In a classic example of gamekeeper-turned-poacher, this chap was responsible for the security of the Monopoly pieces, which he simply stole. His organisation, Simon Marketing, had been hired to run the promotion, and JPJ (not to be confused with J.P.L. - "Jet Propulsion Laboratory") had accidental access to the pieces thanks to getting his sweaty mitts on a set of anti-tamper labels supposed to be used for transferring the winning pieces.
So, he would then give the winning Monopoly pieces to his family and relatives, the deal being that they had to split the winnings with him. This scam also involved the Colombo Mafia family, one member of whom JPJ had bumped into at the airport. The Colombos recruited willing accomplices to claim their winnings, taking a split of the proceeds. Art!
The scam ran from 1989 to 2000, with the really lucrative years being 1995 - 2000, where JPJ and his family and accomplices won nearly all the top prizes, and we're not talking about chump change here; they netted $24 million.
However - and you knew that word would crop up eventually - JPJ eventually fell foul of someone, most probably an accomplice who felt hard-done by, or an accomplice whom he'd boxed-in at the car park, or - <invent petty reason here> because the FBI got an anonymous tip-off that he might bear a bit of close scrutiny.
Ooops.
JPJ was one of 53 people indicted in the scam, which went to trial in 2001. He was sentenced to three years in jail and had to repay $12.5 million. This judgement came out and yet was almost completely ignored, principally because the judgement day was September 10th, and we all know what happened the next day at the Twin Towers ...
Upon getting out of prison, JPJ has led a quiet and uneventful life in Georgia, so quiet that the last he was checked upon was in 2018. He is now 81, if he's still alive - probably so, as his death would trigger a notable obituary - in poor health and very probably regretting poaching that parking space in 2000 from Dylan, a man who bore grudges.
The film rights were acquired by Ben Affleck in 2018, with his bezzie mate Matt Damon also being interested, so we may yet see JPJ's sordid yet interesting story on screen.
And thus we have the rationale for this evening's title.
You What?
Conrad, as he is all too willing to admit, is a stranger to this thing called 'Fashion', not to mention 'Style' and 'Skin-Enhancing Products' also 'Male Moisturiser' and 'Sports Grooming Products' (a.k.a. 'Perfumes For Men').
So, when I witnessed this, I was baffled. Art!
This image came up in an advert on Quora, which I couldn't thus trace on the internet, and I wasn't going to click on it to discover the ****** *** ******* aid.
It's only £2.38, so it can't be terribly sophisticated. There appears to be a trigger mechanism, and a metallic nozzle, plus provision to dangle it from a lanyard or belt. I sincerely hope it's nothing sordid or seedy, because BOOJUM! is and remains SFW. Perhaps not SFS*, but definitely SFW.
If you can be bothered, an explanation in the Comments would be most welcome.
Back To The Beeb's Theme - 'Spring'
I think this will be the last picture of this particular theme I post, as all the others are quite banal, being either flowers or birds, neither of which are particularly interesting. Art!
Courtesy John Earnshaw
Here we see more flowers: gorse, in this case, a plant plentifully provided with thorns that discourage intimate exploration. In the background is the far more interesting Dunstanburgh Castle ruins, which look pretty worse for wear. Not sure if that was siege-warfare or the seasons at work. Art!
Without the gamboge gorse getting in the way
The Start And The Stop
For a while (code for 'I can't remember when we started and can't be bothered to check') we've been putting up pictures of Star Wars characters re-imagined as eighteenth-century baroque portraits in the Age Of Reason. I've omitted quite a few as I've no idea who they are or were, or they just look like a conventional painting, but this last one deserves to be up there. Art!
Who would have thought that a film from 1977 would still be resounding down the decades in 2023? Well, apart from me, obviously, because I know a chap with a big blue police box.
"The War Illustrated"
Yes, back to the antediluvian days of early 1944, where print media was the law in the land, apart from radio, which is kind of television-without-pictures for those unfamiliar with it. Here the images being brought to the public would, at the very quickest, be two weeks out of date, thanks to the inherent delays in sending film from the Mediterranean to This Sceptred Isle. The irony of images from Ukraine being on teh Interwebz within two seconds of being taken does not escape me. Art?
This is actually a rather brave and transparent article covering the successful Teuton counter-offensive that recaptured a group of Greek islands the British had occupied previously. It was definitely a setback, more in terms of dignity offended than practical consequences, and the Teutons liked to hide their losses of men lost at sea. Still, it was a British defeat when such things had been unheard of for over a year. Ooops.
More interestingly, it is possibly the genesis of "The Guns Of Navarone", which has been played on British television every year since 1962, meaning that if only 100 Teutons were killed on-screen, then they actually lost over 5,000 soldiers thus meaning this was a British victory, the end.
Finally -
"But screw your courage to the sticking-place -" said MacBeth, in the titular play devoted to him. Hang on a mo - if it's a 'sticking-place' why does he need to additionally screw it in with a Phillips Number Nine? Is MacBeth worried about the transient nature of Post-Its? If so, all he'd need is a tack, rather than the considerably more expensive screw. Nor were sixteenth-century folks averse to boiling down horses to make glue. Conrad suspects poetic licence here.
* "Safe For Sanity".
No comments:
Post a Comment