I'm Counting On You

 Yes Yes Yes I Know What You Expect

For your thoughts are transparent to me.  And NO I do not have that D.A.R.P.A. Telepathy Helmet any longer, I keep on telling you it was only on a long-term 'borrow'.  It's just that I'm so perceptive and you are so predictable.  Art!

Before and After his morning cuppa

     Go on, admit it, you were expecting some harried pun about Count Dracula, weren't you?

     Well, you are WRONG.  This Intro is instead about numbers.  Art!

ART!

     No no no - "Numbers" where the letter "B" is pronounced, not bottled anaesthetics, you bafune <sorrowful sigh and sounds of a Tazer being charged up>.

     ANYWAY back to numbers.  If you're a big fan of Citizen Trump, or even a little fan, you may want to skip  the rest of this Intro, as we are shockingly unkind to him.

     Donald Buck's ego is rather like a cut-crystal chandelier - very large but also exceedingly fragile, and it needs regular feeding with flattery and unction.  This is why he hated getting intelligence briefings; they were proof that he wasn't the smartest man in the room, so he would interrupt with comments like "Get me ten Big Macs!" or "Didya see that Lakers game?".  Thus we come to his claims about attendances at his rallies.  Art!

Behold ONE MILLION people!

     This is from June 2020, when Donald was due to address a rally at the Bank Of Oklahoma stadium, where the less sensible members of his entourage were floating numbers of one million attendees, and an 'overflow' stadium had been erected outside the main stadium.  What campaign managers try to do if attendance is as low as above is cram everyone into the seats behind the podium, so that it looks as if the stadium is crammed.

     If you want the cold equations, the BOK stadium can accommodate 19,000 people, rather than the 6,200 the Tulsa Fire Department calculated.  The TFD is in the business of having to know total attendance figures for professional reasons, so one can trust them.  Art!

One for the ladies

   Unsurprisingly, Brad Parscale, campaign manager for the Donald, was sacked after Tulsa.
    Now, Conrad has a very low opinion of Darth Marmalade's intellect, and you may already have guessed this from various subtle hints and insinuations across BOOJUM! over time.  In fact, if it came to a battle of wits between Donald Buck and a bag of potatoes, I'd give the potatoes odds-on of winning.  I know of one Quoran - greetings Matt! - who put forward an hypothesis that Citizen Trump is an undiagnosed dyslexic, which may be so.  He also seems to be wilfully innumerate to boot.  He famously overstated by several orders of magnitude the crowds attending his inauguration*, and this trait has not left him.  Art!

Yeah.  Right.  Keep your hand on your wallet.

     At a recent rally in Pickens, South Carolina - yes really, I'm not making these names up - he was gloasting about having 75,000 attendees.  Since he has to take his shoes and socks off to count beyond 20, Conrad is puzzled as to how he came up with this total.  Local law enforcement estimated that 50,000 might turn up.  Event organisers expected 30,000 at most.

     Remember the Tulsa Fire Department?  Well, there's another body of professionals whose job it is to count attendance at rallies where DJ Tango is ranting rambling speaking, they being the Secret Service.  When they made their count, there were 15,000 attendees.  Bear in mind that this is South Carolina, which is broilingly hot even in September, and 15K is a quite respectable total in a town of only 3,000 souls.  But not for the Donald!  One gets the impression that one of his aides rolls a dice - Donald's hand-eye co-ordination is a bit spotty which is why he cheats at golf - and then they multiply attendance by whatever number comes up.  Fortunately none of his staff are wargamers or they'd be using a duodecimal dice**.

      Imagine that.  They roll a 15 and suddenly the attendance is 225,000.
      Well, you might be interested to know that, up to the full-stop at the end of the previous sentence, we were up to 696 words.  Which is a lot of improvising about a single line in a news article - which was by Maggie Haberman, a frequent guest on various Youtube newsclips from CNN and MSNBC.  Art!

     BOOJUM! salutes brave Vanya and Katya, because given the level of invective levelled at Tsar Putin, not to mention the terrible economic data, that we deliver here, reading this blog is openly cocking a snoot at the Ruffian government.

Speaking Of Iceland

Conrad seems to remember that the amateur part-time ballfoot team from everyone's favourite Hot Geyser Land gave Europe a surprise in a ballfoot tournament a few years back.  Ah! found it.  Art!

     Har har they beat England!  And  Austria, and they drew against Hungary and Portugal.  Yes, they lost to France but they went down fighting and I think France eventually won the competition, so theirs is no disgrace.  Remember, this is Iceland, with a national population smaller than the capital cities of these other nations alone.  335,000 versus 56 million in the case of England.  Minnows versus pike.

Yee-Haa!

Forgive me, I couldn't resist.  This is another in the set of photographs the BBC put up for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition.  Art!

Courtesy Marcel Dreschler

     This is the star YY Hya - again, I'm not making these names up - surrounded by a previously-undetected nebula.  The blurb states that there are, in actuality, two stars within the gas cloud, so Conrad is unsure if they mean YY Hya is a binary or that there are two entirely separate stars there.  I shall let you Google it out if you feel curious.

"City In The Sky"

The Doctor is doing what he delights in; showing off his intellect to an audience.

From the corner of her eye, Ace caught a huddle of crew leaning in towards each other and whispering, with expressive shrugs and hand gestures.  One of these people stood up to speak.

     ‘I don’t know how you knew, Doctor Smith.  You’re absolutely correct.  The great cities are still heavily contaminated, yes.  Over the steppe and the tundra and prairie the radiation has been steadily declining, for the past sixteen months.  There are dangerous hot-spots in the Urals, the Ruhr, and Pennsylvania – all mining areas.  Don’t tell me you know why!’

     ‘Microbots,’ explained the lecturer, adopting a pedagogical stance.  ‘My best guess is that, were you to analyse soil samples from anywhere in the low-radiation zone, it would be thoroughly enervated by millions of microbots.’  Seeing looks of partial bafflement, he clarified.  ‘Nano-technology.  Miniature processing robots that scavenge any radioactive particles, seal them in a protective lattice of boron or silicate, then ferry them for disposal to a nice deep hole.  Not exactly speedy but highly efficient.’

     Looking stunned, the audience speaker sat slowly down, beginning a hasty discussion with his colleagues.  At the press of a button the displayed hemisphere showed a widely scattered overlay of green pixels, an emerald blizzard denoting radioactive fall-out.  Clusters hung around the capital cities, particularly dense in Western Europe, and tailed-off further away from urban environments.

     "I'm a genius" as the Second Doctor stated, matter-of-factly

Finally -

Don't worry, we've not finished with Iceland just yet.  I bet you can hardly wait to read more about Hot Geyser Land.  Oh, and I need to go read up on sharks a bit more, for reasons that will become abundantly clear later this evening, with pictures, even.  Because, don't forget, sharks are our friends!

     Yes, really.

*  I put it down here because - Politics

**  That is, a 20-sided dice.