Mangle, Boys, Mangle!

Just To Be Clear

Those are metaphorical, allegorical 'boys' who can also be girls at the same time, and let it not be misconstrued that we are talking about doing the laundry as of about 1907, when they used apparati such as this.  Art!

A clothes mangle

     I believe the practice was to take your clothes out of the wash tub, then stick them in the mangle, ratchet down that top crank, and then spin the wheel, which would brutally squeeze the water out of the poor hapless clothing.  It would very obviously not do to get any loose clothing or hair en

     ANYWAY I bring you another tale of manglement, where the incompetent get the chance to prove that yes, people are indeed promoted to a level above their ability.  And there they stay, to the detriment of all around them.  Art!

     The Original Poster had been hired as an office manager, responsible for account receivables, sitting on-site at one of his company's biggest customers.  FYI, 'account receivables' are the monies that a business owes to another party for goods or services provided.  Typically you want these reduced to as little as possible, because all that money needs to be sitting in your corporate account; the other parties, however, will seek to delay these payments as long as possible, because that money earns them interest if they keep it in their hot sweaty hands.

     When OP took over, the A/R stood at over $5 million, and indeed ballooned to over $8 million.  One major, irreconcilable problem was that company and customer used completely different billing systems, and refused to change to the other's system.  Art!

     Kind of a clash between these two.  OP, being a smart cookie, created a program that converted one to the other, and vice-versa.  Clever OP!  This allowed his department to reduce the A/R to zero.  He was promoted out of that department into another position.

     Then, post 9/11, business tanked.  The department OP had worked in was cut from 14 staff to 2,including the person replacing him.  OP offered to compile a manual on how use his translation program even as he and his department was being laid off.

     "No need, we're good!" blithely replied the idiots in power.  They also ignored OP's warning that, once he was gone, he wasn't ever coming back.  Art!

     Manglement continued cutting staff, regardless of the consequences, with the end result that half their local customers walked and, when OP called them for a reference, they pleaded with him to come back.

     The business closed down 6 months later.  What a surprise!  Once you get into that sack-slide spiral the business is toast, because as you lost customers you can't afford to keep the staff on, which poor performance leads to more customers walking away, and so on.

Donnie Brass Co

No, nothing to do with the film starring Johnny Depp, which was based on a book I've read, back in the days I was haunting libraries.  Art!

     No, it's my latest epithet describing Citizen Trump, whose posts on Truth Social are beginning to sound like the ravings of a street-corner nutter.  He keeps posting about the 'Hard core Marxists and fascists" who have it in for him, yet somehow, unaccountably, he can never bring himself to name these sinister people.  A South Canadian Marxist in a position of power?  I think we should be told!

     Also, apparently those three new charges in the superceding indictment are very much more challenging than appears at first sight.  Because DJ Tango has been caught trying to destroy evidence held on Mar-a-Lago security servers, this is proof of intent and that he knew he was doing wrong.  Art!

You can't deny he has a brassy hue to him

     I did tastelessly suggest that his safest legal tactic to deflect punishment may be to suffer a stroke; this may not now be enough and he'll have to die to avoid prison.

The Curious Case Of The Dog In The Night

Yes, the old saw from Sherlock Holmes about a dog not doing anything was a vital clue.  Because it recognised the villain, you see, meaning that the crime was an inside job.

     ANYWAY as you may have heard, a Mysterious Drone Attack took place in the Potemkin town of Moscow City in the small hours.  Art!

     Ruffian state television's response to this was telling; they completely ignored it.  Very dog in the night!  They were obviously waiting to get their steer from the Kremlin and didn't dare speculate until told what to say and how to say it.

     The thing that will be making Putin On The Fritz change his underwear at regular intervals is that it is highly unlikely that these drones came from Ukraine.  More dog in the night!  It's 500 kilometres from the Ukrainian border to Moscow, and the city has seen a visible increase in the number of anti-aircraft missile systems and radars.  These ought to be able to protect it yet plainly cannot.  What Dwarvish Dimya will be worrying is whether these drones are being sent by Russians, from inside Russia.  That way, they'd only need to be a few tens of kilometres from the capital, consequently cutting down on their flight time and reducing the window of interception for all those missiles.  Art!

Grimly deadpan Budanov.  All he needs is a white cat.
(And a deerstalker hat)

"City In The Sky"

The Doctor has had a guided tour of Arcology One and is now pondering why the madness has broken out on Earth below.

     The Doctor felt he’d seen enough of Arcology One to decide it was a stable, well-organised environment capable of operating for decades.  It wasn’t as if he couldn’t see it all; simply by leaning back slightly a person could witness everything across the inner surface.  The only thing he’d not seen up close were silent, bulky tracked platforms that moved bales of processed hemp on the opposite side of the sphere.  Doubtless electrically-powered; no use of toxic hydrocarbons in a closed environment.

     ‘I said - ’ began Virginia again, louder, getting annoyed at the feigned ignorance of Doctor Smith – who suddenly looked up with an apologetic smile, tipping his hat in acknowledgement.

     ‘I’m sorry, Mizz Branson.  Miles away.  Your colony up here seems perfectly viable.  What makes me wonder is why, after decades of reasonable stability bar the Little Crash, the nations of Earth abruptly decide to wage war without reason.’

     The woman sat down heavily on the bench next to the little man.  His short speech encapsulated hours of worried debate between crew members on that exact subject.

     ‘You wonder!  So do we all.  If politics was going to break down or war break out, I always expected it in the Far East, between China and Taiwan or, perhaps in a very unlikely circumstance, China and Russia.  This behaviour from Pakistan is insane.’

     He's very obviously not the only one.

You What?

Conrad had to read the item twice to make sure I'd understood it.  Apparently people in the Populous Dictatorship were questioning whether a 'sun bear' was actually a human being wearing a bear costume.  Art!

     They'd have to be a very small person, because sun bears are very small bears.  And I strongly doubt that other bears would tolerate anyone copy-catting them.  Nor do I think any member of Hom. Sap. would fare well on a diet of plants and insects.  But, you never can tell.  Mealworms for the win!

Finally -

The shades of night fall early (20:08).  For one thing the monsoon clouds are back again, and we passed the equinox over a month ago.

If Only Ol' Tolky Had Spoken True

I Refer, Obviously - Of Course! - To J.R.R. Tolkein

Ol' Tolky, to encumber him with BOOJUM!'s distressingly colloquial nickname, had quite the imagination.  You'll find his inspirations amongst the literature of Nordic nations and languages, which is why he was hot stuff on different alphabets and tongues amongst Middle Earth.  These are either pre- or post-Roman alphabet, which is why Conrad has such a fascination with those of the Caucasus.  Art!

     That's one iteration of Treebeard, one of the Ents, who might best be described as dendrogens, or anthropomorthic trees, who acted as shepherds for all the other trees who couldn't move or speak but who made excellent firewood.  

    Why do I lead into this Intro with such a reverence for tree shepherds?  O I thought you'd never ask!

     Because Devin Stone, 'Legal Eagle' over on Youtube, has brought up a genuine legal case for 'Tree Law', which he serenaded with a ticker-tape parade down Main Street with a mariachi band and fireworks.  Art!

     If the Ents were real, none of the following would ever have happened.  Art!

     ANYWAY, for those of you who live in the Outer Darkness and are unfamiliar with TL, let me explain.  It is EXTRAORDINARILY costly to interfere with, violate, de-branch or <shudders in horror> cut down trees in South Canada.  You can end up on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars PER TREE.  Yes, really. We have covered this in the past on the blog, and the costs of replacing a White Oak that you cut down in a drunken chainsaw session can mean selling your house to pay compensation.  This is probably better than having an Ent turn up and destroy your house with you inside it, but not by much.  Art!

     These are Ficus trees on the pavement ('sidewalk' for our South Canadian readers) outside Universal Studios.  The picture to port is where they are untrimmed and that at starboard is after the studio had given them a bit of a snip, which is where the issue occurs, as these trees' shade was where union pickets were taking shelter from the ferocious Californian sun.  

     At this point Devin proves his legal chops by explaining the background of pavement trees in Los Angeles.  There is a Bureau Of Street Services in LA, whom are responsible for maintaining the pavements, and one of their subdivisions is the 'Urban Forestry Division', who are responsible for - gasp! - trees.  Art!

     

     Conrad is willing to bet that 100% of his non-South Canadian audience had never heard of this organisation, and that 99% of his South Canadian audience hadn't heard of them, either.  They deal with a portfolio of trees that include street trees, park trees, residential trees and native trees - to the tune of 700,000 trees total.  This is the largest urban forest in South Canada, and possibly globally, and a prime example of hiding in plain sight, because who associates the tree on the street corner with 699,999 others?  Art!

     We will allow them the mis-spelling of 'Neighbourhoods' for the moment.

     ANYWAY Universal claimed that they need to trim trees in July, because this is ahead of the stormy season where trees are vulnerable to high winds, at which the LA office responsible called a foul and fined them -

     $250.

     This is the fine for a first offender.  It might go as high as $1,000 on subsequent fines.  The problem is that the Universal Ficus' are not heritage trees, being instead only mere mundane everyday 'Parkway' trees.  This is bad.  This is VERY bad, because LA is a signatory to the American National Standards Institute's Pruning Standards, which is why there's a $250 fine in there.  Because you cannot idly carry out Topping, Lion's Tailing or Rooster Tailing without consequences, baby.  Art!

     Inevitably, Devin takes advantage to throw out bad puns, which we will not devolve to, as we are oak so much better than him.

     Excuse me!  I need to go shift a ton of cardboard that is surplus to requirements.  The aftermath of 'Cut Price Barry's'.

     There, one load of soggy paper pulp re-positioned.

"The War Illustrated"

Allow me to illuminate here.  TWI was a fortnightly publication that put forward the Allied version of the Second Unpleasantness, bigging-up their successes and either downplaying or ignoring their failures.  For one thing, the desperate condition of the Allies at Anzio had been completely ignored, with only a few photo shoots being published.

     This charming young lady is one of the Partisans waging war on behalf of Tito, who was the far-left Bolshevik supported by the Allies.  They had sampled how the Mihailovic paramilitaries favoured the Teutons, and went for Tito. This led to embarrassing circumstances when Tito vanished to go chat to Stalin, but it also meant that the Yugoslavs liberated their own homeland absent Sinister 'help; and they remembered who their friends were. 

Conrad's Corneas Counsel Caution

Or, perhsps, Eye Eye Eye.  One of the pluses of having Netflix is being able to re-play old sci-fi shows, which includes "Star Trek", an old Greek-cum-Boer title if ever there was one.  Your Humble Scribe re-watched "The Naked Time" last night, which featured the image of Mister Sulu 'Sweating like a brine mussel", upon this appellation he picks up an epeé and threatens everyone one within range.  Art!

    Hmmmm yes.  

    I mean no.  NO!

     If a nutter like this suddenly appeared in the corridors of an interstellar starship, do you seriously think they wouldn't Tazer him into a coma within seconds?

"City In The Sky"

One's favourite peripatetic time-traveller is getting a worm's-eye view of the workings of Arcology One, the premier Bernal Sphere in Earth orbit

     Five minutes walk brought their gentle meandering to an enormous pond, that the Doctor knew would be relatively shallow thanks to the restrictions of the sphere’s construction.  A nearly transparent film suspended on ribs set into the pond’s perimeter hung over it.  Mysterious small ripples broke the tranquil surface.

     ‘We have a small fish stock in the major ponds, Doctor Smith.’

     ‘Oh.  Any other animals?’

     ‘If you look over there - ’ and she pointed at a diagonal ‘ – that’s where the cows and chickens are located.  Dairy and egg basics.’

     He pointed at the pond.

     ‘The aerial film is to restrict evapouration?’

     Virginia nodded emphatically.  Thanks to the sheer size of the sphere, unwanted internal weather conditions that included cloud formation might take place if allowed.  There were dew collectors grooved into the inner walls of the sphere to cope with condensation, which was as much as the crew wanted to happen, and air-conditioning plant to monitor and control the amount of vapour in the air. 

     The Doctor discovered a bench made of extruded polystyrene foam facing the pond and sat, leaning forward in that characteristic pose he had, both hands resting on the handle of his vertical umbrella, his chin resting on his hands.  Virginia, slightly taken aback, sat down next to him.  She’d not seen an umbrella for years and nearly laughed at it – when you didn’t have weather, who needed personal rain protection?

     ‘Don’t you want to carry on with the look-and-see?  There’s our embryo bank, Infrastructure, and the seed vault -’

     A silent shake of the head was the only answer, at first.

     Here, you see the Doctor not being coy.  Or <ahem> McCoy.

Finally -

Better get taping those boxes together, Conrad's Mancave contents aren't going to put themselves into cardboard containers!

Բարի երեկո

Which Is, Of Course - Obviously! - Armenian For "Good Evening"

Here we are on another Sunday evening, when all the legions of Hades ride forth on sulphurous winds in order to look over each other's shoulder and see what scrivel BOOJUM! is posting tonight.

     Well, the usual retrospective, going back over ten years of this stuff.  Just imagine that, over 3,650 days posting utter nonsense.  Art!

     - it's a sure sign that you've not paid your electricity bill.  That, or there's a brownout thanks to the power company making a muck of things.  And no, I'm not going to enlarge the image, you seedy perverts.

2022

BOOJUM!: Consequences (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

BOOJUM!: Twenty Past One! (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2021

BOOJUM!: The Bronks (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2020

BOOJUM!: We Fear Change (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2019

BOOJUM!: A Backlog Of Bilious Belabouring (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2018

BOOJUM!: Shark Versus Crocodile (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2017

BOOJUM!: Apprehension (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

1874

No, only kidding.

2016

BOOJUM!: Do You Get What You Pay For? (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

BOOJUM!: How To Scare Cats - The Mark Kermode Way! (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2015

BOOJUM!: No Pub Quiz Tonight! (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2014

BOOJUM!: Hello And Cheerio (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2013

BOOJUM!: End of The World, Ma! (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

WFH

No!  That's Not A Swear Acronym

O and WASH OUT YOUR FILTHY MINDS whilst you're at it, too.

     No, it simply means 'Working From Home', which  is what Your Humble Scribe has been doing since late June.  Whilst we were still in the office Fallon said she liked interacting with people and being around an office worker environment.  Not so for Conrad!  He, being a surly and truculent cove, is quite happy working in splendid isolation - which I had to explain away during the Covid crisis as nothing at all to do with avoiding infection.  Art!

Atom-bombing the Moon.  Hah - take that, Moon!

     What did you expect?  WFH is inherently dull stuff.  Unless it saves one money; Conrad would regularly fork out £18 for a weekly bus e-ticket, and another £7.60 for a couple of Metro tram trips.  That makes a saving of £128 to date from late June, which is nothing to sniff at.

     Then there is travel time.  Conrad aimed to get into the office early, in order to get a cup of hot Marmite and a bit of stale bread to dip in it, so he'd be at the bus stop at 06:07, and would be lucky to get home for 17:30 if finishing at 16:00.  Spending three hours a day travelling eats up your day and then some.  Now I can choose to roll out of bed at 07:50 and be on-line for 07:59.  Catching a late phone call and not finishing until, say, 17:15, holds no fears for me now, because at 17:15:01 I am at home, rather than the 18:45 that a commute from Gomorrah on the Irwell has.  Art!

Sometimes it's in the Irwell

     Interestingly enough, WFH has also been an issue in Ruffia, because they tend to be waaaaaaay behind the curve on things like work culture.  In Ruffia, they value face-to-face when it comes to the workplace, because that way the boss can keep an eye on his idle work-shy minions.  Thus, during Covid, Ivan and Katya had to come into the office, because no manager worthy of the name would trust them to actually, y'know, work if they were working from home.  The (probably correct!) universal assumption was that they'd be skiving.  Art!

"I'm an engineer.  You can tell because I'm missing three fingers."

     The thing is, thanks to demographics, Ruffian employers are now having to accept working from home, because there's such a shortage of working-age men and they need to recruit people who refuse to move for work.  Their recent Economic Forum in Sankt Petersburg was big on talk of remote working, whereas a couple of years ago such talk would have been frowned at.

    Then there was a case on Quora about a female media sales manager who suggested that she work from home, with couriered mail and telephone messaging to keep up to date - this was the early Eighties with no e-mail or Zoom - with once-per-month visits to the home office to touch base.

     Nope, said the management.  In fact they disliked her attitude and suggestion so much that they sacked her.  Art!

     

   

     This proved to be a staggeringly stupid move, as she was instantly snapped up by a competitor.  Not only that, she took one of her major clients with her.  Not only that, another three major clients deserted her ex-employer.  Not only that, within two years her ex-employer went bust, thanks to the less than stellar performance of their senior managers, who would subsequently have trouble finding work - "I destroyed a company  with a hundred-year history".  WFH - Witless Foolish Heads.

     And with that strained pun, this Intro is over.

Big Bang Battle Buggy

Conrad has maintained that the Ukrainians are not only courageous and clever, they are good at improvising, as has been seen in their responses to the Special Idiotic Operation.  One rather ominous development is their creation of a kamikaze ground drone.  Art!

   As you can see, it's an anti-tank mine on a simple chassis, with a small camera on a mast to allow steering.  It's very low-profile and almost silent when operating, meaning that it can sneak up on a target without being spotted.  Art!

     The idea is to drive it beneath a vehicle and detonate, because the floor of any armoured vehicle is the weakest point with the thinnest armour.  And imagine they come at night ...

     Conrad is unpleasantly reminded of a John Wyndham short story, where the Sinister moonbase is destroyed by South Canadian robot bombs, which use a wheeled chassis to get to target.  In that story they are completely autonomous, so it doesn't matter that the South Canadian moonbase has itself been destroyed.  Of course - obviously! - nobody is going to be daft enough to allow an autonomous AI-driven suicide bomb, are they*!

     Life imitating art, hmmm?

Answers In The Comments, Please

Once again Conrad is baffled by an advert sidebar on "The Daily Beast"'s webpage, much as he was by that 'Portable Bike Chain Cleaner', which looked distinctly suggestive and seedy.  This time - well, they are definitely tools, because the title is 'Axminster Tools', yet what their function is escapes me.  Art!

     Yes yes yes, I could just click on the advert, but where's the fun in that?

"City In The Sky"

In a carefully choreographed info-dump, the Doctor is being shown around Arcology One, getting to know the lie of the land, so to speak.

‘Yes,’ replied Virginia.  Without an uphill or downhill the water would only ever evapourate if they didn’t keep it moving.  She indicated low-rise structures on their right that spread over a hectare, all made out of a rigid yellow stressed polythene.  To the casual eye they looked like a child’s construction kit enlarged a thousand times.

     ‘Living quarters for crew.   This is New Hampstead.’  She turned to look at him directly.  ‘Er – you didn’t want to look inside, did you?  As private quarters - ’

     ‘Oh, no, no.  Just the exterior.  You group living quarters according to whatever specialism their crewmembers practice?’

     ‘Yes!’ replied the Founder.  ‘How did you know that?’   Hardly any of the VIPs and experts lofted for a tour of Arc One after the Little Crash understood that.  New Hampstead sat around a set of medical suites and laboratories, the inhabitants being doctors of different specialisms, nurses and  paramedical trades – opticians, dentists, physiotherapists and others.  Their offspring would probably be gently inclined towards following in their parent’s footsteps.

     None of the inner-surface of the sphere was wasted.  If there were no structures, no paths, no crops or paddies or water features, then long-leafed grasses grew on hydroponic sod, or big storage bins with dates marked into the far future stood, containing who-knew-what essentials for the coming generation. 

     He knows because he's the Doctor, of course.  

And Again -

Yes, two articles referencing TDB, because they can jolly well generate blog content if they're going to take out a repeat subscription.

     As I have long maintained, the South Canadians have a morbid fascination with the British monarchy, probably because they don't have one of their own, and TDB is no exception.  Art!

     One has to wonder how and why TDB comes about this information, because I don't think their budget allows a Royal Correspondent.  There is the long and honourable press tradition of Making Shizzle Up to fall back on, though.

Finally -

Time to wrap this up, don fresh underwear (DO NOT ASK) and skip the light fandango into Lesser Sodom to see what's going cheap.

Pip pip!

*  Mind you, we are talking about Hom. Sap. here, so who knows?

Anti-Ruritania

The Hyphen Is Important

Because who on earth could possibly harbour ill-will towards the tiny Central European nation ?

     Of course - obviously! - it doesn't exist, but waaaay back in 1894, when the miscellany of Central and Eastern European nations was pretty much a closed book to inhabitants of This Sceptred Isle, it could have existed.  I am speaking, obviously - of course! - of "The Prisoner Of Zenda", which came out in the year thus named.  Or numbered.  Choose which you wish, I really don't mind.  Art!

     The novel was immensely popular and has been filmed at least three times.  It prompted a trend in the arts for fictional Central or East European nation states, including BOOJUM! because the Sanjak Of Novi Pazar has long been subsumed into first Yugoslavia, and now Serbia.

     Well, hopefully that sets the scene for Ruritania, a place one would enjoy visiting with it's dramatic forested heights, unspoiled scenery and medieval castles, not to mention the local apricot brandy.

     We now come to Anti-Ruritania, land of the Norks, and from the bitter, twisted smile that I type that word with, you know we're not talking Norwegians.  No, we are talking North Korea, the impoverished bottom-hole of Asia.  It recently hosted Shoigu The ****, who was sent there to hopefully acquire Nork weapons.  Art!

     Let us be malicious and hope that he succeeded.

     Here an aside; the Ukrainian General Staff, as well as the SBU, get down on their knees at night and offer thanks to the good Lord aloft that their second most effective weapon in the war is still running the Ruffian war effort (Putin being the first).  Shoigu is an incompetent of the first water, with no military background, no military training, no sense of shame and whose only talent seems to be embezzling 50% of the Ruffian defence budget.

     What did I mean by that crack about him succeeding?  Well, that means another aside.  Is that okay?  Thanks.

     It seems that the Wagner Group had been supplied with Nork weaponry and ammunition, which the Ukes over-ran.  In a Greek-meet-Greek scenario, they are now firing Nork-supplied Grad rockets at the Ruffians, whilst standing well back, as the rockets are forty years old and very unreliable.  They frequently misfire or fail to detonate on impact.  Still, the irony is amusing.  Art!

You're a bit close there, matey, if anything goes wrong

     Back to the Norks.  They have recently lifted the total blockade imposed because of COVID, thus allowing Shoigu to visit among much pomp and circumstance, and to make himself look slim and trim by standing next to The Only Fat Man In Korea.  Honestly, he looks like a broom-topped beer barrel.  Maybe that's a bit harsh?  A polishing-brush topped beer barrel.  There, fixed it for you.

     You can't say that people are trying to get into Norkland, unlike Ruritania.  Far from it.  From Conrad's extensive two minute research, it seems that 7 South Canadian soldiers* defected to the Norks, with perhaps that many civilians.  That's about one every six years.  Not surprising, really, the whole country is a miserable slave labour camp that suffers periodic starvation, famine and cannibalism.  That embarrassing hotel, the Ryugong, in Pyongyang, is still to open after 36 years.  Art!

A Ruritanian castle would be better

     Or it may not.  That was eleven years ago.  Given their shoddy quality assurance with military technology, I wouldn't trust the lifts in this thing.

     O and another thing - Shoigu turned up during the Norks 'Victory' celebrations about the end of the Korean Unpleasantness, another load of bloviating guff which avoids mentioning that the Norks didn't win in any meaningful sense - although the Chinese propped up their war effort - because the two countries are still technically at war.  Art!

     Talking of propping up, the Populous Dictatorship tries to keep the Norks afloat, because one of Xi Jinping's (a.k.a. "Winnie the Pooh" due to the beer-barrel wearing a suit factor) least favourite events is a general collapse of the Nork regime, which he presumes would send 30 million starving Norks across the border.  It probably wouldn't be that bad; if they were starving they'd not be able to walk very far, would they?  And a lot would be closer to the Sorks than China.

     So, then.  The land of Norks.  Where it is equally as hard to get in as to get out.  What does Ruritania have that the Norks don't?

     Hope!

Unhappy Bunny Is - Unhappy

My my, it's not shaping up to be a good week for Darth Marmalade.  He had, with high pious hopes, sued CNN for defamation, because they used the phrase "the Big Lie" about his claims of a stolen election.  He wanted $475 million in compensation, in a case which a judge dismissed on Friday.  The judge said Trump's case was a  "stacking of inferences that cannot support a finding of falsehood."

     Or, in plain English, a bruised ego does not equal defamation.  Tee hee!  Art!

     Conrad confidently predicts that DJ Tango will refuse to pay his legal team because he didn't win.

The Death Of A Thousand Cuts

An interesting cultural moment occurred on Friday, which has gone un-noticed amongst most Western media; Ukraine officially legislated that Christmas will now be celebrated on 25th December.

     Why is this newsworthy?  Because it marks a move away from the Ruffian traditional celebration on 7th January, and is a measure of how much the Ukes want to look westwards, rather than follow the traditions of their repellent neighbour.  It follows on other traditional days being moved from the old Ruffian date to a new one.

     Mark Conrad's words, within my generation the Ukrainians will be using the Roman alphabet, not the Cyrillic one.  Art!

Dimya daydreams about getting up close and personal with Prez Zed.

It's Official

I did warn you.  "Sound Of Freedom" has hit the $140 million mark, thus making back ten times it's original budget.  They only get a percentage of the box office (40%?) but if so then that's still $56 million, or four times their budget.

     It's still popular - 'legs' in the trade - and will rack up even more.  Art!

     It's good to see Jim Caviezel doing well in a film.  I remember him in "The Thin Red Line" aeons ago.  O, that distant weeping?  Phoebe Waller-Bridge crying into her G & T that Indy 5 hasn't made the equivalent $3.5 billion.

     

"City In The Sky"

The Doctor is having a guided tour of Arcology One, less officially known as the 'Branson Mansion'.

     ‘Lots of greenery,’ commented the Doctor, drily.  He knew the reasons why.

     ‘Yes, for three reasons.  First, as you know, they absorb carbon dioxide.  Secondly, even more importantly, they photosynthesize and produce oxygen.  And lots of them are edible food crops.’

     There were stands of trees, small copses, pines, firs, shrub oak, maple – all engineered to grow to an apparent maximum height of three metres.  Apple orchards, pear trees, cherry and olive trees in neatly-maintained clusters.  Virginia pointed these out across the inverted hemisphere.  Bamboo, hemp and alfalfa grew in dense, fenced-in areas with only a narrow cruciform of tracks leading into them to allow access for harvesting or irrigation . 

     ‘Harvested for textile and construction?’ guessed the Doctor.  Virginia nodded and began to walk slowly onwards, leading her “guest”.  The path beneath their feet looked like cork, and yielded.  When he bent to peer closely at the material, it turned out to be a treated plastic.  They used a lot of plastic here.  Doubtless recycled it, too.

     To their right, a small stream ran along a dark-grey artificial bed.  The Doctor craned to look at it, and asked if they could span a small bridge that reached the other side.  He spotted occasional dark holes in the stream bottom.

     ‘Let me guess – those holes lead to a pumping system that circulates the water, preventing stagnation?’

     Conrad is unsure why you'd need scrub oak or pines on an orbiting space station.  Yes, I did write this, but ages ago, so you can't blame me.  And even if you do - whose blog is it?

Finally -

I think I am fated to walk into Lesser Sodom tomorrow, as we are running short of Discreet Doggie Doo-Doo Disposal Devices.  Which is probably bordering on too much information.

*  One 1963 defector turned up in 2005 in Japan with his wife.  He was given 25 days in jail, probably because living in Norkland for decades was punishment enough.

Yellow Sun, Green Grass And Red Snow

To Be Painfully Honest

The 'Red' bit would have been glowing radioactive ash, not snow.  Although when both fall from the heavens it can be difficult to distinguish between them, until you try making and eating an ash McFlurry.

     For Lo! we are back upon the subject of bombs, including the hoohoodillies that make the biggest bangs ever.

     Before we begin that topic, a confession from Your Humble Scribe.  My debit card expires next week, and I've not had a replacement.  These are sent out four weeks ahead of expiry date, and I know this because I checked the Nationwide website.  Art!

Bank cards are boring.  Have a nuclear explosion instead!

     So, I sojourned into Babylon Lite this morning, mosied up to the counter clerk and informed them of the missing replacement card.

     The young Asian lad behind the counter gave Conrad a pitying look and agreed that the card did indeed expire in July.

     July 2024.

     Ooops.

     'Twasn't a wasted journey, as Sainsbo's is up at that end of town, so I went and got cardboard storage boxes.  Unhappily for Conrad, the small ones I wanted were out of stock, so I got the next size up.  Art!

     These come in Small, Medium and Awkward.  Try holding a package like this with a bag of shopping, a rucksack and your mobile phone with it's e-ticket for the bus.  Still, it did boost my step count.

     ANYWAY Conrad was standing at the bus stop in Lesser Sodom after a quick trip to the Co-Op to get a reduced cauliflower, wondering what to put in today's Intro, and it struck me that the word 'Retarded' has become out-of-bounds in polite society.  Conrad, not having a PC bone in his body, has no idea when this became a thing.  It did, however, remind him of the eccentric design of This Sceptred Isle's 'Yellow Sun' nuclear bomb.  Art!

     No, there's nothing missing; no detachable aerodynamic nose-cone or shield.  What you see is a deliberate design choice, because the lack of a pointed nose retards the bomb's descent, sufficiently to allow the bomber that dropped it to escape without harm.  This is simpler and more efficient than having a parachute deploy, and it also eliminates any of the shock-waves that accumulate around a pointed bomb as it drops.

     The 'Green Grass' and 'Red Snow' were what the RAF coyly called the 'Physics package', meaning the actual warhead inside the casing.

     Retarded bombs were widely used in the Vietnam Unpleasantness, both to allow South Canadian aircraft to drop them at low level, and also for accuracy reasons.  Art!

     As you can see, these have a cruciform drogue instead of fins, meaning they will drop near-vertically as they approach the ground.  This is a relatively complex mechanism in comparison with simple fins.  Art!

     An alternative is to use a parachute, as the South Canadians did with their hoohoodillies, but then you get potential problems with the chute 'roman candling' or being subject to wind shear.  Art!

     Conrad, as forementioned lacking an inner censor and blithely unaware of what PC means beyond 'Personal Computer', nevertheless avoided titling this afternoon's post as "When Retarded Was Essential" because that might attract the wrong sort of audience, which is to say none.  It would, in fact, have bombed.  Which, confusingly, is the opposite of going down a bomb.  Art!

A bombe.  Close enough.

Guess Who's Not A Happy Bunny?

Here's a clue: he looks like a Tribble-topped beer barrel in a suit.  No!  Not Sir Les Patterson (whom I always found funnier than Dame Edna) - Donald Trump.

     Why so?  Well, he was already under the hammer for 37 offences in the stolen documents case; or, as he would have it, the "Stollen" documents case.  Art!

DON'T TAUNT ME WITH WHAT I CANNOT HAVE!

     It has now come to light that Citizen Trump attempted to get one of his minions to delete security camera footage, who apparently refused and whom is now bearing testimony against Agent Orange, who is probably having one of his worst weekends ever.  Despite claiming that being indicted is 'fun' and that the trials will reveal how he really won the 2020 election.  Presumably they will also find life on Mars, bring peace to the Middle East and reverse global warming.  Art!

Conrad is tempted to read this

A Little Blowing Of One's Own Trumpet

As you should surely know, Conrad does an awful lot of talking on the phone to members of the public.  This does not come naturally to the big fat biffer, said Mister Hand, bec

     EXCUSE ME!  Don't hijack my own item, you treacherous appendage!

     I meant merely to state that a recent caller said my phone voice was 'theraputic', which I will take as a compliment.

     That is all.

Conrad's Plans Went Agley

As you may be aware, Your Humble Scribe likes to occasionally visit regimental museums, and had been planning a jaunt to foreign territory, across the Pennines to the fair city of York, which you can spend a week exploring.  All the stuff worth seeing is in a quite compact area.

     Alas, no, the RMT had other plans.  Art!

   They chose today of all days <sad face>.  Before you cavil at these evil Bolsheviks, remember that if they're on strike they don't get paid.  Conrad cynically wonders how any pay increase is going to compensate for all those strike days.  O and make sure you don't strike next Saturday, chaps.  Thanks in advance.

"City In The Sky"

Our peripatetic Time Lord is looking to find out what's going on in the orbital arcologies above Earth, expecting Ace to go a-nosying too.

     ‘Stay here with the Warden and don’t antagonise anyone,’ ordered the Doctor, well aware that Ace would ignore his instructions and start to nosey around the instant his back was turned – which was what he wanted, without wanting to say so in front of the Warden and the senior Founder.

     ‘Let me show you the inside of Arc One,’ began Virginia, making a sweeping gesture that took in the whole sphere, one which denoted long practice demonstrating to visitors.  ‘We intend to establish a repository of information here, with sufficient staff to implement that information in a practical environment when we return to Earth.’

     Taking advantage of a pause in the conversation, the Doctor jumped in.

     ‘Ah, yes.  Return to Earth. When do you see that happening?’

     For a minute, Virginia hesitated.  There were so many, many variables inherent in that simple question.

     ‘Less than a generation.  Twenty years at the most, maybe twenty five - perhaps even thirty in extremis. No more that that.’

     ‘And in the meantime you continue to practice the best of what Earth has to offer.’

     Virginia passed her hand across the heavens.

     ‘Exactly!  We have a garden society here, Doctor.  Arranged in perfect order, to a definite end, according to exactly specified lines.  A garden society,’ and she threw that arm gesture again.

     Watch out for weeds, matey.

Finally -

The weather has been a bit changeable today, as is the wont with a typical British summer.  Don't get me started on this supposed 'heatwave' we were supposed to suffer/experience/enjoy <delete where applicable>.  When I came out of Sainsbo's there had been a cloudburst, and me in my Skechers.  They are supremely comfortable but dangerously tractionless on any wet, smooth surface, such as the flagged pavements all the way back to the bus station.  My typing this is proof that I was wary enough to not break my neck.  Art!

Still life with pensioner

     And that's all folks!