- Then His Compatriots Would Not Bewail
And any other doggerel you can think of that ends in '-ail', except for 'Jezail' for reasons we will get to later.
Okay! Let us cast our minds all the way back to this time in 1961, when a 'caper' war-time thriller based on a novel was doing especially well at the box office. Art!
Adapted from the novel by Alistair Maclean, this had it all; tall, rugged South Canadian star in the lead, British thesp to add acting chops, ethnic South Canadian actor to add salty realism, a couple of women, pretty-boy South Canadian actor, brutish-looking Brit for an air of menace, and Anthony Quayle as Major Roy Franklin. Art!
I can assure you that David Niven and Anthony Quayle were quite experienced in the use of the Sten gun; note how Tony holds his by the magazine housing NOT the magazine, as that would cause misfeeds.
TGON was shot on a budget of $6 million dollars, and made $29 million at the box office (plus another $13 million when it came out on video). A critical and commercial success, then. Conrad rewatches it occasionally to scoff at the Greek army kit dressed-up as 'Teuton', which is jus
ANYWAY what I have only recently discovered is that Anthony Quayle, during the Second Unpleasantness, was also a Major. Fancy that! And after doing various military jobs in This Sceptred Isle, he volunteered for the Special Operations Executive. You know, the people that Churchill wanted 'To set Europe ablaze'. Art!
On the plus side, you get lots of fresh air
On New Year's Day 1944, Major Quayle and a radio operator were parachuted into -
Albania! So while a lot of Perfidious Albion's population were nursing headaches and hangovers (whatever they are), the Major was endeavouring to survive in the mountains in winter. This would be bad enough on it's own, but he also had the added frisson of Teuton and rump Italian soldiers conducting anti-partisan operations and doing their best to kill everyone they caught. Plus, the Albanian partisans he operated with had their own private feuds and fought an internal civil war in addition to their resistance duties. Art!
Make no mistake about it, this was risky and dangerous work; 470 SOE agents were executed during wartime. Tony never discussed his wartime work in public, taking a note from the pages of David Niven, who refused to publicise his exploits, too. If, however, you want to read a thinly-disguised account of Tony's wartime work in Albania, try "Eight Hours From England", a post-war novel that he wrote to some acclaim. Conrad was unaware it existed until thirty minutes ago <wallet squeaks in anguish>.
Major Quayle would have been doing his best to live off the land, alongside the partisans, eating whatever they could find or trap (no shooting for obvious reasons) and, do you know what? The quail is found across the whole of Europe, so he might well have ended up eating stew with quail. Just a thought. Art!
A Little Laundromatting
No! Nothing to do with laundry. I refer, of course - obviously! - to the practice amongst oil importers of -
I'm getting ahead of myself. For Lo! this is yet another daunder through the carcass of the Ruffian economy, especially as regards refined fuel products. Art!
This schematic shows the different types of distillates that come from crude oil. These are premium, value-added products that the Ruffians used to be able to charge top dollar for, the market for which has collapsed in the aftermath of sanctions. Prior to the Special Idiotic Operation, this market accounted for $150 billion in trade annually, a total that has fallen to $75 million. China and India, let me repeat, are not Putin's friends; they are gouging the Ruffians by demanding big discounts on their purchases of crude oil - which they then refine and sell on, undercutting and competing with Russia. This has led to the term 'laundromats' being used of them. Yeah, throw the soap powder, Vanya, the profits go back to China and India, not to Puffy Petrol Pimp's piggy bank. Art!
Refined Ruffian oil production has collapsed from $250 million per day to $80 million per day, which now means they have excess refining capacity thanks to having over 30 mega-refineries, whose capacity could be cut by a third.
This is bad news for the workers there, who are now looking at both redundancy and wage cuts, and the grim prospect of no longer being in a reserved occupation. Well, you can still get oil out of sunflowers, chaps!
A Glutton For Punishment
Not to mention food, as well. Which goes without saying. Art!
Now that Johnny Weirdo and his frenemy Norro are out of the way, I've got these two to attack. TKOTK dates from a charity shop binge about two years ago in <insert name of South Manchester upscale village that I've forgotten>, and I did "Mansfield Park" for English Literature 'A' level decades ago, so it'll be interesting to see how it fares all this time later. I have, obviously - of course! - ignored the Introduction, which is over thirty pages of pretentious pseudy waffle.
"City In The Sky"
Our intrepid travellers in the fourth dimension are moving forty years ahead of their current timestamp, in order to find out when Arcology One was abandoned. Other, less beneficent viewpoints are also in play.
‘Alright, alright! Spare me your silent condemnation! I merely intend to return to Arcology One in
the near future. Forty years into the
future, to give us a decent margin of error.
Once we arrive in a deserted sphere, I will move backwards one year at a
time, until we discover when the occupants return to Earth.’
‘Sounds pretty straightforward,’ agreed Ace.
‘Simplicity itself!’ beamed the Doctor, hugely mistaken if innocently
sincere.
INTERPOSIT TWO:
It had taken the Lithoi a great deal of covert effort, planning and hard work, but their plans had finally come to fruition the year before: nuclear war in the north, followed by an artificial plague. Their brief was to cull the local population back to a maximum of fifty million whilst ensuring that the planet remained fit to occupy. Yes, their contract had been very specific about that part “fit to occupy”.
Of course no plan went exactly to expectation. Far too many humans had survived, certainly
far more than predictive modelling had calculated, although that could be
remedied at any suitable time in the near future. Nor had the arcologies been destroyed. Hardly a concern, since the space colonies
had no means of returning to Earth anyway.
Ah, always worthwhile getting the Evil Alien Perspective, one feels.
A Collective <Insert Rude Gesture Here> To The Critics
Conrad, who has taken to doing box office and budget analysis of films rather than the more subjective (and amusing?) description based on their title and poster's colour palette, noticed that "Insidious: The Red Door" is still bringing in the bacon, to the tune of -
And all this on a budget of only $16 million. Who cares if the critics sneered at it, Joe and Jo Public are quite enamoured. That's over eleven times the budget recouped, and as a relatively low-budget film one would expect it to move into profit with anything above $30 million.
Whilst this is good news for the studios, it's a bit of a downer for fans, because a film this insanely successful is DOOMED TO SUCCESS, in that it will have numerous sequels, not simply another single one. Art!
It most certainly does not!
Finally -
I am busy plotting and writing and plotting Chapter Six of "The Annals Of Urquelomplangia", which now totals over 20,000 words. Conrad has managed to include real-world events of the late seventeenth century, whilst still remaining coy about the exact date.
There is one thing I'm not sure about if I hit the @ 50,000 word target for a short novel. What do I do with it?
E com isso terminamos!
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