Feeling Fine With A Keelivine

No!  Nothing To Do With Viniculture

Here Conrad would like to clear up a little confusion that has persisted in the dim, attic-like spaces of his memory, thanks to watching cartoons with Darling Daughter back when she was still cute.  Art!

     That's Jayce to starboard.  He and his 'Lightning League' (gotta have alliteration for your heroes, folks) were out to clear the galaxy of the scourge of the Monster Vines - or so I heard it.  A reasonable assumption, because the MVs travelled across space on vines, in order to infest new planets and - actually I'm not sure what.  Establish superior vineyards and destroy the basis of French agriculture?  

     ANYWAY The whole series was a blatant French (of course it was French, who else worships vines?) attempt to flog toys. Art!

     Alas for Conrad's long-held misappreciation, the enemy were actually the 'Monster MINDS'.  Jayce's quest to track down his father, Audric, and finally join the two halves of the Magic Root NO SNIGGERING AT THE BACK in order to defeat the MMs never reached a conclusion; toy sales were disappointing so the series ended.

     Back to the title.  Conrad still remembers a quote from "Para Handy Tales" where The Tar is musing over a quizzical conundrum and opines "If I only had a lump of keelivine ..."  Art!

Pronounced locally as "The Fital Sperk"

     'Keelivine' is Scottish dialect for 'lead pencil', although nobody seems to know exactly how the word came about.  Attribute it to the Gaelic and move on.  

     What you and I know today as a 'lead pencil' is nothing of the sort.  Art!

This is very good news for those of you given to chewing the pencil end, which is a signally disgustrous habit I shall ban when I take over.  The core of these pencils is in fact graphite, one of the allotropes of carbon, and the source of an amusing anecdote on Quora.

     The OP had to truck a consignment of graphite powder, on a two thousand mile journey from Georgia to Los Angeles.  The powder was securely sealed into bulk bags, robust pieces of kit that nevertheless were porous to a degree.  Sufficiently that graphite powder oozed out over the course of the journey and contaminated the whole of the trailer, very thoroughly.  Art!

     That gives you an idea of the problem's scale.  Cleaning by OP proved to be problematic; the graphite powder had been fine enough to leak out of the bags; it had absolutely no problem penetrating into the walls of the trailer.  Further to that, graphite is an extremely effective dry lubricant, which made moving on the trailer floor extremely hazardous.  Art!

     

     The poisonous cherry on top of the toxic cake was that OP's next cargo was food, which meant the trailer had to pass an inspection.  It failed.  He informed his dispatcher, who merely scolded him and told him to Git 'R Done.

     Getting the trailer cleaned out by a professional washing service took two hours, so the delivery was late in being collected, loaded and delivered.  OP's company took the hit for several hundred dollars in subsequent fines; he didn't suffer a single cent's loss as he had ALREADY WARNED THEM IN TEXT WHAT WOULD HAPPEN.

     Graphite*.  Seal it tight.

Cunning Gunning

Yes!  More tales of power tool terror.  We've already covered the lethality of the pneumatic nail gun, and I've seen a vlog where some bloke goes up against a ballistic-gel and innard-filled human torso with a PNG.  The injuries were not inherently fatal, but they were very serious; the green dye used as an analogue for blood could be seen pretty plainly.  Art!

     Then he tried again with one of these.  This is a Powder-Activated Nail Gun, so-called because it uses an explosive cartridge to propel the nail.  Rather than nailing a fence together, you'd use these things to nail planks to metal.  That ballistic-gel dummy suffered what would have been fatal wounds, including one that went right through the plastic 'sternum' and penetrated to the back of the dummy.  These wounds would have been fatal, and in pretty short order.

     If you ever have recourse to use a PANG, treat it as if it were a real firearm.

Throwing Bad Money After Worse Money

O boy, the Ruffian ruble is doing a good impression of a yo-yo.  Just out of spite, Conrad had a look at the dollar-ruble exchange rate earlier today, and it stood at ₽91.73 to the dollar.  I checked again just before creating these words of wit, wisdom and wonder and - Art!

     "It has miraculously recovered!  Hail HYDRA and Putin and Elvira!" I hear you chorus.

     Er - no.  Sorry, just no.  The Ruffian Central Bank has been spending it's foreign exchange reserves on propping up the ruble.  This is kind of robbing Peter to pay Paul, because these very same reserves are needed to pay off the huge budget deficits Ruffia is accumulating.  You can do one, or the other.  Not both.

     This obviously kicks the can down the road a few months, which is what Tsar Poutine intends.  He is hoping for a miracle in the meantime.  Hope away, Fun-Sized Foot Fiddler.

"City In The Sky"

Ace has been metaphorically rolling her eyes at the Doctor's cautioning her about walking around on the inside of a Bernal Sphere in orbit.  She'll learn.

     The sky was full of ground, not sky.  There did seem to be a few thin clouds up there, in between, between there and here.  The sky consisted of ground, in it’s entirety.  There were thin skeins that might be roads or streams, narrow reflective threads interspersed between larger glossy areas that might be ponds or lakes or seas, depending on scale and perspective.  Overall the view was that of an enormous sky falling in upon the lower dwellers.  There were multi-storey buildings made from what looked like giant plastic Meccano, clustered in small groups, there were big patches of greenery and allotment-sized garden zones.  From her position she could see a black circular well at the far end of the sphere, and a similar monochrome cap at the opposite end.  Running in a complete circle along the “equator” of the sphere were more giant black tiles.

     The Earth came into view and spun dizzyingly through the black tiles, and Ace realised she was looking out of transparent panels, looking down at the beautiful blue planet from a high orbit.  Her knees wobbled.

     ‘Don’t panic, Ace, you’ll adapt quickly enough,’ soothed the Doctor.  He put up his umbrella and held it over both of them.  Cutting out the sky enabled Ace to cope with the bowl-shaped view thus visible.  

     You see, there are one-hundred-and-one uses for an umbrella.

Conrad Is - Apprehensive

As you should surely know by now, Your Humble Scribe's blog exists in a delicate state of flying under the radar, where legal entities are unaware of it's existence, since a fair bit of what goes on here is both libel and slander at the same time, not to mention breaching copyright laws.

     So - if BOOJUM! gets too popular, the hackles start to rise.  Art!

     Ignore last month's results, they were completely hat-stand.

     What bothers me is that the total this afternoon was 189, so only 8 more viewers have been added since then.  This is actually quite reasonable in terms of visitors.  Has the tracking algorithm gone semi-senile in sympathy?  Are my whimsical musings so popular in South Canada and Singapore?  And what will be the dollar-ruble exchange rate tomorrow?

     Tune in tomorrow on the same rat-channel at the same rat-time!

* Not to be confused with carbon black.