Ol' Roj, lest ye be unaware, made a killing in Hollywood back in the Sixties with adaptations of classic South Canadian literature, alongside cheap and cheerful exploitation fare such as "Attack Of The Giant Leeches", which features actors wearing foam onsies, pretending to be the villains of the title. Your Humble Scribe did a critical analysis of same waaaaaay back when, possibly on "The Agony Booth" website when it still accepted member reviews. Art!
ANYWAY I am sure you want to know what, exactly, this Intro is about. Well, what I am going to regale you with would earn Conrad a fifteen-year prison sentence in Sinister Union 2.0 because it's a whistle-stop tour of just how badly things are going in the Ruffian economy as regards their primary exports: oil and gas. Art!
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| Oldest know animal fossil discovered in Ruffia |
RUFFIAN FOSSIL FUELS: Pre-Special Idiotic Operation these product's revenue stood at €775 million per diem. They now stand at €450 per diem, a loss of 42%. In case you are wondering, a 42% loss is bad. Very bad.
PIPELINE GAS: This was the cheapest and most convenient way for Ruffians to ship energy supplies to the West. After the SIO, this dropped from €400 million per diem to <ahem> €30 million per diem. Lest you be unaware, this is not good. Not good at all. Art!
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| Because I can! |
CRUDE OIL: The amount of such that the Ruffians export is almost the same as in January 2022. However - a word you probably expected to see here - the same amount of exported crude brings in far less revenue. So they get a lot less for their magic black goo than they used to, especially as China and India won't purchase anything with less than a 25% discount.
THE CAP: Eeeevil Western powers hostile to Russia - yeah yeah Crimea a river - have resulted in a 50% drop in daily revenue thanks to the price cap imposed on both crude and refined oil products. Crude exports went from €250 to €125 millions per diem, and refined went from €150 million per diem to €75 million. Art!
Even those readers not gifted with a degree in economics can presumably realise that a 50% drop in your income is Not A Good Thing.
TRADE PARTNERS: To be blunt about this, China and India are not friends with Ruffia. They are taking advantage of the market to gouge Bloaty Gas Tout as much as they can. What they are doing, as I have mentioned before, is taking advantage of cheap crude oil to buy it at a significant discount, refining it themselves and then selling the end products on the world market - in direct competition with the Puffy Petrograd Petrol Pimp.
This is only one facet of how the Ruffian economy resembles a slow-motion train wreck. Their total revenue across 2023 is now looking to be $140 billion, down from $310 billion, which is very definitely BAD. I will, at some point in the near future, explicate how their demographics are as bad, if not worse, than their energy export figures. Provided, of course - obviously! - that the Pest In A Bullet-Proof Vest doesn't have me abducted to the land of Ice And Woe.
Bit of a nihilist, Eddy was. Of course, this was in the days before antibiotics and vaccines, which equally of course, the Ruffians cannot currently afford either.
The Last Hurrah
Well - not so much a 'Hurrah' as a splenetic 'Ouch', because we are dealing with those wacky Poles again, and their film posters before the fall of Communism, when they had to be all allegorical and metaphorical and, incidentally, as barmy and scary as possible. Art!
I have Snipped this image rather than simply copying it, because it continues well below nipple level and into NSFW territory. Which, combined with the upper part of the poster, makes absolutely no sense. The film is "I Like Bats" and I defy you to link the poster to the film title in any way. Go right ahead, I'll wait.
O I Say!
Just in case you were wondering, "Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning" appears to have hit the $235 million mark after 4 days box office figures, being not merely a big hit in South Canada, but also globally, which is as important if not more so in today's market. Art!
This is the metric that you see in a successful release; the gross outside South Canada betters by a factor of two or more.
A certain film about an aging archaeologist hasn't managed to make it's budget back yet. Just saying!
"City In The Sky"
Ace and the Doctor are now faced with incontrovertible evidence that the Big Crash is not only coming, it's due to arrive within minutes. A Big Crash that will reduce Hom. Sap. to the Stone Age.
The torn paper
stopped there, a ragged edit . Both
could fill in the details after that, from what Tom had told them.
Well, he’d seen and heard enough. With the world poised on the brink of a
catastrophe that all could agree was the Big Crash and no mistake he couldn’t
do anything to slow down, let alone prevent, that catastrophe from happening.
‘Time to move on, Prof?’ asked Ace.
He nodded without speaking.
Setting the TARDIS controls, he carefully
selected an azimuth reading that would put them in orbit alongside the
artificial environments of the future.
When you can't prevent the accident, at least try to contain it, as best as possible. This is a tad tricky when you're working in four dimensions as opposed to the usual three.
"Zombie Apocalypse"
I should also point out that in the opening scenes post-montage - props for having a 747 destroy Big Ben in a death dive chaps - the initial trio are what I formally call "Too Stupid To Live". We are informed a few seconds earlier that this action is "Six Months Later" which I seriously doubt, as these lunkheads would have trouble surviving six minutes post zombie-apocalypse. They attack a vending machine inside a shop, making an enormous racket - make that an Enormous Protracted Raket, and are taken COMPLETELY BY SURPRISE when the walking dead show up. Art!
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| "Conrad is to cruel to us! Console me against your manly chest, Ving." |
Yeah well the truth can hurt.
Finally -
You might not get screenshots until tomorrow, but Your Humble Scribe has done a Ukrainian recipe that he wanted to utilise in order to use our recently-acquired great big brown casserole dish. I had to improvise a tad, as they mentioned half an onion in the recipe but didn't explain what you did with it. Don't worry, I've got plenty of photos of the whole thing being assembled and baked. And I shall now go to sample what I've baked.
Pip pip!
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