I Suppose I Must Begin With The Usual Caution
WASH OUT YOUR DISGUSTING MINDS! you filthy perverts. Or should that read "FILTHY MINDS! you disgusting perverts."?
Whichever it is, once again you need to take your minds out of the sewer and aspire merely to the gutter. Art!
I include this utter clickbait because this Intro is going to be looking at "Mansfield Park" and Conrad could think of little that is the diametrically opposed antithesis of MP than FMOOS. You can think of it as hilarious satire if you want, whilst I will restrict myself to saying that you'd never cram in the visitors with an initial picture like this one. Art!
Let us dispel any NSFW illusions you have about today's title. "Knocked up" as parlance in 1807 meant "To be tired", as Fanny is when she has been dancing at a ball. For Your Information, 'Fanny' is a name in it's own right, as well as a derivation of 'Frances'*.
ANYWAY what I wanted to carp about is how long MP is, my edition being 440 pages long, and the plot only really hots up in the last 40 pages. Before that it's all ever-so-subtle allusions about manners and breeding and what it meet and proper. Art!
This is Fanny, looking knocked up, which is a whole lot more acceptable than that other easily-misunderstood phrase, "Fagged out", even if both mean the same thing. Except possibly not in South Canada. She was dancing to the point of exhaustion because this was her 'coming-out' ball - no, no, no, put your Twenty-First Century mores away, it means that she is now on the market for getting married.
A lot of the action occurs 'off-stage', as it were. Sir Thomas Bertram has sugar plantations in Antigua (in the Caribbean) which have been badly mismanaged, and he has to spend nearly two years putting matters right over there. This coincides with the British Empire banning the slave trade in 1807. Do we get as much as a smidgeon of what was an unparalleled event amongst the Great Powers?
Of course not. Art!
Antigua. Not bad if you have to be there for two years.
Then there is his return journey over the Atlantic, where his merchant ship is endangered by a French warship, none of which is seen, only described, and the middle of his story is disturbed by the repellent Mrs. Norris stridently calling for soup.
Soup!
From the novel, you'd barely comprehend that Great Britain was involved with an all-out war against the Napoleonic Empire as part of the Fourth Coalition, that battles were being fought across Central Europe and that Napoleon had very ill-advisedly invaded Portugal. O no. What occupies and horrifies Fanny and all her folk at Mansfield Park is that Maria Rushworth néé Bertram has an affair with Henry Crawford and elopes with him, to the ruination of both. Julia Bertram, sister to Maria, also elopes, but with a previously unmarried bachelor; compared to the sinful Jezebel Maria, this is practically good conduct. Art!
Henry with Mary. Not Maria. Yes it is confusing.
This is one volume I am definitely whanging onto the counter at one of the charity shops in Royton.
A Montage Of Misery
Which always makes for entertaining reading. I have annotated a couple of vlogs done by Joe Blogs, who has been consistently publishing very sombre reports on how the Ruffian economy is coping, which is to say, not at all.
The problem is that their statistics get worse week on week, and you need to publish them on BOOJUM! the day they come out, or else they're obsolete.
Joe points out at the start of his vlogs that he's not making this data up; it's all official statistics published by the Ruffian Ministry Of Finance - which means they could well have been 'massaged' into a rosier-tinted version than reality allows. If so, even this <ahem> 'Putin-vision' version is bad enough.
DEFICIT: The deficit for July alone was $29 billion. Put simply, that's the amount spent that they didn't have revenue to cover. This has been the case since December 2022. Art!
NATIONAL WEALTH FUND: What people have described as 'Putin's Piggy Bank', a slush fund set up to cope with economic crises. Except nobody expected the crisis to last so long and be so hard. The MoF allegedly spent $9 billion on covering deficits this year, which sounds ridiculously low. Especially since the MoF and Ruffian Central Bank are now selling gold and Yuan ($740 million in June) to cover the deficit.
THE RUBLE: The basket-case currency. Raising interest rates to 12% forced it down to ₽93 to the dollar - for three days. It's now depreciating and stands at ₽96.88 to the dollar. What odds that it hits ₽100 to the dollar by this weekend? Art!
It would be cheaper to use rubles
SPENDING: The Ruffian budget for 2018 was ₽16.7 trillion. For 2023 it was to be ₽29 trillion, of which ₽10 trillion was to be spent on defence and security, which has now been increased by ₽3 trillion, meaning other parts of the budget need to be cut. This looks impressive but Conrad cynically assumes only ₽1.3trillion will actually get spent after 90% of it is stolen and embezzled.
Yours for the price of 2 frigates, 12 nuclear bombers or a tank regiment
Buckle up, Bloaty Gas Tout, it can only get worse!
More Mystery Macguffins
Conrad has absolutely no qualms about exploiting "The Daily Beast" (that sly renewal still rankles) and allow me to cattle-prod Art into consciousness.
Number Two appears to be a cheap pocket telescope? Because you're not getting anything of quality for that price. Number One appears to sport a single eyepiece for two lenses; infra-red sights? Number Three might be a portable 3D projector, a modern miniature of the Krell device as seen in "F
"City In The Sky"
The intrepid duo of Alex and Ace are aboard the proudly-created, if still very basic, one-way shuttle as made on Arcology One.
When she did so, the chill was still
enough to surprise her.
‘Wow! Not very warm!’
He grinned back, showing an excellent set of teeth.
‘Not one bit, eh? We keep an
atmosphere in here so the testing can be done without having to wear a
helmet.’ Using the helmet lights as a
torch, he shone the beam over thirty seats made from steel struts, with nylon cradling
and straps.
‘For the passengers. Up front is
the flight area.’
Again, very basic in design. Two
seats anchored to the floor, in front of a display panel that had a radio
microphone, two joysticks, foot pedals and four displays, none of which were
labelled or active. Alex showed her how
it would work.
‘People come in wearing a single plastic coverall with enough air for
five minutes, and they all come in at once.
We don’t have enough spacesuits to allow everyone to wear one. The pilot sits here, the co-pilot there.’
When the skids were freed, the Dart used momentum imparted from the
sphere to coast back into the atmosphere.
The joysticks controlled steam released from nozzles to correct
attitude, and the foot pedals worked a simple hydraulic ram that deployed
stubby canard wings. When low enough the craft would touch down on it’s skids,
which would sequentially fracture and separate after a few seconds, slowing the
Dart down sufficiently to allow it to come to a halt on it’s belly. The
note-word for everything about the Dart was simplicity – and it worked. The first, successful landing proved that.
Call it elegantly refined or just crude, if it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.
The Big Bang Bombs
Let us have another considered analysis by Mighty Greg Spriggs, about how high or low the quality of a nuclear detonation is, as portrayed by Hollywood. Art!
I already have a bad feeling about this
"If it was a large asteroid, breaking it up completely would be hard to do"
Hint: it's the size of Texas.
NOPE!NOPE!
The flash here would last for about 15 micro-seconds, not half a minute. That's 15 MILLIONTHS of a second. NOPE! again. Art!
As Buzzkill Greg notes, blowing up an asteroid creates an enormous debris field. How do you know where those gigantic chunks of rock are going to land? Art!
Weep, Bruckheimer, weep.
* Just imagine if Anne had spelled her surname 'Frances'. Then she'd be Annie Fan
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