BOOJUM!: LET ME POUNCE!

Like A Stealthy Panther In The Forests Of The Night

There I was, bemoaning the fact that it's already 19:14 <insert First Unpleasantness joke here> and I'd not come up with an Intro -

I'm sorry if you can't unsee an elderly white-haired man prowling in the jungle on all fours and gnashing his mandibles

ANYWAY I popped along to "The Daily Beast" website to see if there was anything I could either mock or steal, and there they were. Art!

They don't seem to be legalised instruments of torture, as the brand 'Axminster Tools' was over at extreme starboard.

But what are they? These are indeed the very devices I was wondering about earlier in the week, before TDB's webpage updated and disappeared them. I did a little more digging and - Art!

Ah. A 'Sanding Plate'. I see.

Actually no I don't. This is one of the problems of being completely impractical. As I have maintained in the past, God invented mechanics so I don't have to bother about what lies beneath a car bonnet.

That's not all, either. Art!

What on earth is it?

Not what you're thinking, I assure you. Conrad clicked on the advert and discovered that 'Solidworks' is 3D Computer <whatever the 'A' means> Design. So, presumably that above is a computer-created McGuffin that doesn't exist in the real world?
O and just to prove that my assertion about TDB and the British monarchy is correct, allow me - Art!

I think we'll end the Intro right there. Let's be succinct for once.

Your Ruble Won't Purchase Much Of A Chasuble

If you recall AND YOU CLEARLY SHOULD, Conrad detailed Big K and his analysis of Ruffian official figures about their economy, which were very bad.

I shall now pontificate about the value of the ruble, thanks to a presentation by Joe Blogs. Joe pointed out that the value of the ruble has been in decline for at least the past 25 years. Art!

Originally you got ₽5 rubles to the dollar. When Joe did his analysis, a week ago, there were ₽85 to the dollar. The vatniks and fanbois were all crowing last summer about how sanctions weren't working because the ruble had stabilised at ₽50 to the dollar, yah boo sucks.

The reason it stabilised then was because the Ruffian Central Bank was burning through $50 billion to keep the ruble pegged artificially high. Art!

With the Ruffian economy running up a $47 billion deficit last year, and the same amount in the first five months of 2023, the Central Bank cannot afford to keep propping up the ruble; it has to commit reserves to pay off the deficit. The ruble has now lost value against the Euro, the Yuan and the Rupee as well, with it's loss of parity with the Rupee accelerating over the past 6 months.

Today, just a week after Joe's vlog, the ruble now stands at ₽89.50 with no sign of any slow down in it's devaluation. This drives up the cost of imports; remember, Ruffia doesn't produce finished goods, it has to import them.

British Fighter Planes In Ukraine!

Just not how you expected. The Ukrainians have just uncovered the wrecks of 8 Hurricane fighters, unceremoniously stripped, broken up and dumped in a ravine outside Kyiv. Art!

They were part of the 3,000 Hurricanes sent to the Sinister Union when their bezzie mates turned out to be stab-in-the-backers. Sinister pilots, typically, didn't like them because 1) They weren't Ruffian and 2)They still weren't Ruffian. Admittedly by 1943 they were obsolete as a fighter aircraft, being used behind the front lines for defensive patrolling. Art!

The Sinisters didn't feel like paying for these Lend-Lease aircraft at the war's end, so they were stripped of anything valuable and dumped, then covered with earth. The Ukrainians, possibly to annoy the Ruffians as much as anything, are carefully renovating what they can, so the aircraft can be put on display.

George The Lightweight

I refer to George Santos, of course - obviously! - whom you may know as That Liar From New York. George seems to have decided that becoming a congressman was the perfect way to round off a career of non-stop lying and crime. Art!

"This is how much integrity I have"

He has now been charged with seven counts of wire-fraud, three counts of money-laundering, theft of public funds and lying to the House Of Representative twice.

Pshaw! Must Do Better. George, Donnie Dorko has over SEVENTY indictments against him.

Mind you, George has lied about attending two law schools, attending an expensive preparatory school, working at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, running an animal charity, being Jewish, having a mother who died twice - the list goes on. He's got imagination, this guy, but he needs to get another twenty or thirty indictments to be considered true political material.

He also said he'd rather go to jail than reveal who put up $500,000 bail money for him, so that he could stay out of jail. It was revealed to be his dad and aunt. George, pretty obviously, is not in jail.

"City In The Sky"

The first and second rounds of nuclear missile-slinging have been undertaken and Arcology One is looking on with undisguised horror at the strategic lunacy going on 'Downstairs'.

‘Um – don’t know if anyone is interested or not, but still no – oh, hello mum! – no official broadcasts from the Iranian generals,’ said Davy, catching sight of his mother, who looked appalled and scared and quite angry. Not at him, he hoped.

‘What the devil is going on here!’

‘Quite possibly the end of the world, Mrs. Haritanian,’ said Kouroush, very calmly. ‘A nuclear war in the Middle East.’

Davy’s mother clutched her chest for a second. Her earnest expression remained in place, only shading into a fearful one.

‘What can we do?’ she asked earnestly another second later. ‘Can we help them at all?’

Virginia Branson felt a small flush of success when she heard this unselfish sentiment coming from the Armenian woman. A repository not a refuge indeed! The sphere was only up to a quarter of full capacity, all those people added since the original pioneers being added slowly – or as the planners liked to say, slooooowly – to a total of less than three thousand. A quarter of their total capacity. She bit her cheek in hatred of the political maelstrom Downstairs, a mess that might prevent all her relatives from arriving Upstairs thanks to nuclear disaster Downstairs.

‘We can’t transmit to anyone Downstairs, mum – they’re all too mad with worry to pay any attention to us.’

Hmmm, that looks like the classical definition of 'Going pear-shaped' to me. Don't forget, Bonnetti predicted a Little Crash that would be so bad it looked like the Big Crash, except that the Big Crash, when it comes, will not be debatable. At all.

Tilly

The Tillamook lighthouse, affectionately known as "Terrible Tilly", was a tough gig back in the day, being what you might call isolated, certainly in the days before helicopters. Conrad came across a Youtuber who took a helicopter flight out there to have a nosy around. Art!