Coup Staged! Ruffian Capital Threatened By Mutineers!

Just Not How You Expected It

I know, I know, the whole world is agog at what's been transpiring in the land of the Ruffians as of late Friday evening and into today.  Even Conrad, cynical, worldy-wise and knowing about the current Special Idiotic Operation in excruciating detail, never saw this one coming.  Priggy got jiggy, you might say. Art!

     Those jolly Wagner tourists are now half-way to Moscow, without being stopped or stopping.  What will have The Pest In The Bulletproof Vest sitting in his own faeces, and scaring the living <insert suitable swear here> out of his generals (Shoigu and Gerasimov notably absent from screens) is that there are actually very few troops in reserve in Ruffia; they're all in Ukraine.  Not only that, several low-level units the Wagners encountered have joined them.  So far the only co-ordinated response seems to have been a few strafing runs by helicopters or jets on the Wagner convoy, and a number of ineptly-set up blockades.  Art!

     If you do this, then you slash the tyres to make shifting the trucks harder.  If you have even a few minutes, you topple the trucks onto their sides and chain them together.

     With precious few troops to protect him, Puffy-face Petrol Pimp has apparently fled to St. Petersburg, a risk in itself as you will see shortly.  Further, the Moscow Police and Rosgvardiya units are now having to man checkpoints, barricades and sandbag positions.  The police will probably scatter and run at the first shot; fighting back against a T-72 with a pistol is a losing proposition.  An Interior Ministry source (anonymously of course!) said ""The police are not ready for it, a warm office is not a foxhole."  Rosgvardiya, the so-called 'National Guard', proved to be utter rubbish as soldiers in Ukraine, as (a truism I like to cruelly trot out now and then) their skill set is in beating, imprisoning and torturing unarmed civilian protestors.  Expect them to run away shrieking like schoolgirls.  Art!

Blimey.  He's older than I am.

     Allegedly, a lot of mid-level officials are sitting it out on the side-lines, waiting to see who comes out on top, at which point they will suddenly find their voices and patriotically/cravenly/opportunistically <delete where applicable> cheer on The Winner.

     You may be wondering about my crack regarding Saint Petersburg.  Well -

     What I really wanted to type about in this Intro is the Bolshevik Revolution in October of 1917, which was centred on Petrograd, as the city was called then.  It was the capital, the centre of government and of the Provisional Government, the highly unpopular and only notionally 'democratic' government that had replaced the Tsar.  Art!

     Yes, those are the exact same pattern of rifles that the Ruffian army has been handing out.

     ANYWAY on 24th October 1917, the Bolshevik's armed forces, the Red Guards, moved in to take control of key points in the capital city, thus acting against their own government in what was, indeed, mutiny.  They carefully selected targets that would give them strategic control over the city: railway stations, in order to control movement; telegraph offices, to control communications; government buildings, to paralyse any response the Provisional Government might attempt.  One day later the Red Guards assaulted the PG's seat, the Winter Palace, and arrested the whole government, making them the rulers of Ruffia.

     Notably, and a worrying precedent for The Fun-Sized Foot Fiddler, the military garrison of Petrograd not only failed to fire a shot in defence of the PG, they defected en masse to the Bolshies.  Art!

     With a touch of irony, the leader of the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky, was one of the few politicians able to escape Petrograd.  He claimed to be going to 'rally the troops' and indeed he did, once, before he kept driving all the way to Paris.

     Thus the Bolsheviks came to power.  The situation today is not the same, of course - obviously! - but it does beg comment.

     If you are bad perhaps you'll get the tale of the February Revolution of 1917 in Ruffia.  They like their revolutions over there.

As One Door Opens, Another Closes

Or is it the other way round?  Still drafty.

     Okay, let us spare a moment's silence in commemoration of my ancient Toshiba laptop, which I got from Degsy years ago.  My first laptop, which I was impressed with.  It was showing it's age - the 'L' and 'P' keys and the spacebar and up and down arrows had ceased to work - and it's general health was not aided by Conrad stepping on it and breaking a corner off.  Art!

This is not good

     Note broken corner at mid-starboard.  Also, how grubby it is.

     So I now have a stack of DVDs I can't play.

     However - Art!

     I do have Netflix back, which can only be bad for my Book Mountain and Codeword book.  You see, I finally got to a screen where one could enter a password, that very same password I needed to get my G4S works laptop to function.  And as you can see, it worked.  Ginger!

Donnie Dorko

If you like Darth Marmalade, best skip this item.  Or BOOJUM! altogether, since we do not like the man and make no secret of it.  Art!

     Citizen Trump gave an interview on Fox News, and unusually for them they didn't fawn adoringly over him, and in fact some of his lies got the push back, which is why he responded

DJTRUMP: I don't rate Fox News.

BRET BAIER: Yet here you are.

     Trump's legal team were collectively tearing their hair out as he essentially admitted to all the charges being made against him in the Mar-A-Lago Documents Case, because he is constitutionally unable to keep his flapping gob shut.  That's not a guess or a whimsy, one of them contacted "Rolling Stone" to explain how this interview WILL be used by the government against him.  One of his ex-legal team was equally blunt: "It was a disaster, if you were his lawyer" opined Ty Cobb. 

     The thing is, he had absolutely NO need to go on air and say anything.  Art!

"If I shout, my hands will look bigger!"

"City In The Sky"

The crew of what is officially "Arcology One", less officially "The Branson Mansion", are keeping a way eye on matters Downstairs.

     With a high-pitched ping, one of the Deputy Controllers broke into the Suite’s internal speaker system. 

     ‘Is that Davy?’ asked the female voice.  He paid close attention; it was Virginia Branson, one of the heaviest hitters aboard the orbital environment. 

     ‘Yes, Mizz,’ he replied.  ‘Can I help?’ he added, wondering why she bothered calling. 

     ‘Just a warning.  I’ve told all the staff working in the Comm Suite, apart from you.  When I was Downstairs, a lot of the blogs were focussed on Taiwan and China and how they were snarling at each other like a pair of angry dogs.’

     Yes, he pondered.  Mizz Branson could pop Downstairs and Upstairs as often as she liked.  Arc One had been unofficially dubbed “The Branson Mansion” a few years ago, on completion.  Being one of the founding daughters, Mizz Branson could use the Black Knight’s lifting body the way folk back in Yerevan used taxis.

      ‘We’re not due to cross the Far East for another ninety minutes,’ he explained.  ‘Current plot is – let’s see – over Cyprus.  Do you want me to try and scope out both of them?’

      The young woman laughed briefly.

     ‘China’s bloody enormous, Davy!  No, no.  Keep a check on their radio broadcasts.’

     She broke the connection with another ping and he went back to the radio receivers and set up a software scanner to check on what wavelengths the mainland Chinese would be using, and what scrambling and encryption they might use.  If there was time he might contact one of the Chinese crew and ask their opinion.  After all, they weren’t a spy station, merely eavesdroppers.

     Although that interpretation might be a little strained when looked at by the Populous Dictatorship.

Finally -

I think I might take the monitor's remote control downstairs and give it a scrub.   It looks just as scruffy as the Toshiba.