I Put That Hyphen In For A Reason
Mostly to forestall those who would immediately jump in and bang on about how there's actually many, many expressions, both in writing and on your face. To these people I say that distant location on the far horizon is where you need to be.
ANYWAY there is an expression about "Cutting off your nose to spite your face", which implies stupidly self-destructive behaviour being carried out by an Arch-Numpty. No pictures of that, it would be ghoulish. Art!
Instead, have an Australian Boomerang Grenade
Yes, this was a real thing. Moreover, if used in the hands of a skilled boomerang thrower, it was quite effective. The thing would go out and, as boomerangs have a habit of doing, loop back, the weight and drag of it's design meaning that it rapidly lost height and (hopefully!) impacted the enemy. There is even a helpful illustration. Art!
What does this have to do with the expression about noses and cutting? Nothing whatsoever, it's just a cool item.
Conrad's version is a little more gory: cutting your throat to spite your neck. Nope, definitely not going to illustrate that.
Which leads us to the actual Intro, a tale related on Quora by Original Poster, who got a job working in a large company that sold garage doors; he'd been recommended by his mum (actually 'mom' as this tale is South Canadian) who was the office manager. He was a quick study, clever with it and got promoted twice by his boss, with a pay raise each time, ending up as the shipping manager. Art!
An insight into the world of garage doors
Business was booming. Until the boss vanished for two weeks, returning to the job a completely different person, ranting and tanting all the while, interfering and trying to micromanage everything and everyone. Yes, rehab will do that to you.
Shortly after the Now Straight Yet Unbearable Boss fired OP's mother, for no good reason. You might call this the Nose-Cutting Face-Spiting bit of the tale. OP could see the writing on the wall and took stock of what he was doing at the company: shipping contracts, billing, phone services, pricing - all done by OP not by NSYUB. Art!
Not long after mom got her marching orders, OP did as well, getting only enough time to clear his desk, including a thumb drive with all his custom Excel files and digitized archives of stuff previously done by hand. You can call this the Cutting-Throat Neck-Spiting phase of the business process.
There was considerable fall-out from what the business world calls a 'double-whammy'. For one, OP and his mom had been doing all the admin tasks and nobody else knew what to do or how. Only OP had the data for pricing for their biggest and most important customer, and he was on the system for access to lots of other information and databases.
Oooops.
When it became apparent how badly they had shot themselves in both feet after firmly placing them in their mouth, one of the more senior managers called OP and asked him to come in and show the new temp how things were done.
"I don't work for you any more and it's none of my business," was his reply. This, you see, was the interface of Nose-Cutting and Neck-Cutting combined.
Ooops multiplied by Ooops. Art!
One of the firings was OP's old boss, who had been part-owner of the business and was the strategic mastermind behind this disaster. The business is barely afloat at present and could go bust at any time.
I think the moral of this story is that you can Nose-Cut or you can Neck-Cut but it is hugely unwise to do both at once. And being an NSYUB can <ahem> boomerang on you.
Thunder And Lightning Part 4
The saga of Storm Shadow (and Scalp) continues. The Ruffian Black Sea Flotilla - they no longer have enough ships to constitute a Fleet - was aware of the threat posed by Stormzy and chums and, since they had no way to intercept or jam them, adopted passive security measures. Art!
The idea is quite simple; painting the bow and stern black will confuse the targeting systems of Perfidious Albion's hot ticket export item, causing them to - I dunno - go home in a sulk?
You can judge how effective this camouflage scheme, introduced in June, has been. Art!
Not very
That's quite apart from trying to camouflage a building, e.g. the Black Sea Flotilla's HQ. The Ruffian state media has decided that this attack never happened, and that all one-hundred and twenty seven Storm Shadows and Scalps that were launched were shot down, along with two Death Stars and five Enterprises.
"City In The Sky"
The unlovely and unlikeable alien 'squatters', sequestered on the Nullarbor Plains, are reviewing how their manipulation and extermination of Hom. Sap. has been going.
More cheerfully, besides that, their
Contract was nearing completion. The
number of microbots had decreased exponentially as less and less fall-out
remained to be collected, which meant less chance of detection, just as the
number of human settlements increased
exponentially, meaning a greater chance of detection. It balanced out, to Harken’s relief.
He, along with Mirskan, hadn’t been able
to explain adequately the sheer increase in numbers of humans across the
Northern Hemisphere. They had been
starting from a greatly reduced baseline in terms of population and so should
have been increasing very slowly; a graph of human repopulation that Biology
used as a predictor showed a long, gradual increase that took over three
millennia to reach pre-Crash levels. The
reality was that in less than five hundred years the humans would be back to
their original six billion.
Well, let them breed! he told himself, looking at
plans of the central particle beam cannon. A suggestion was abroad that
they ought to be able to dismount it and use it against ground targets, which
meant he needed to see if that was possible or practicable. He rotated
the three dimensional display on the scanner.
If only they knew.
Har Har! I Don't Care!
As you ought to know by now, Conrad has absolutely no interest in the ballfoot game, although he does relish the Have Your Say Comments when the Beeb rashly opens them up. Here's a sidebar item on the BBC's News website. Art!
"VAR" is not a person, rather a technological solution to seeing if the pig's bladder crosses a line or not thanks to video cameras and recording. It seems that it's inclusion in the game merely means another thing that can go badly wrong because it's still Hom. Sap. using it.
Best Comment of the lot.
Aha! They're Back
I refer to the bewildering array of tat that "The Daily Beast" features in adverts on their website. For a couple of weeks they've been having more normal promotions, until today, when - the tat returned! Art?
We now know the blue plastic thing that looks vaguely rude is actually a portable bike chain cleaner. The under-over optical device is quite pricey at £46.69, so it has to be more than just a vertical binocular. As for the first and last items - answers in the Comments section, thanks very much.
Finally -
I now have to box up the Sunday Stew, which will need a big box, as there's tons of it. First world problems, hmmm?
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