Yeah, Don't Expect Seasonal Homilies And Heart-warming Hellos
This is BOOJUM! you're reading, full of tanks, atom bombs and zombies. You may remember that horrid joke from "Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?" about Santa Claus being gored to death by his reindeer? Today - well today NORAD would probably announce he'd been shot down by a Patriot battery. Ho ho ho. Art!
Putin it to the test ...
ANYWAY in this Intro Conrad is going to tear Michael Crichton's novel "State Of Fear" into small pieces of confetti in the shape of a Dreyer Table, because I finished it last night. Mike won't care, he's been dead these 15 years. Art!
Bear in mind that this was published in 2004, so hence definitely written in 2004, making it almost 20 years old. This will have a bearing and we'll come back to that in later items, because you are dealing with a hair-splitting pedant after all. One reason it's so thick is - well, there are probably two reasons: the first is that no editor dared to trim The Cricke's verbiage; the second is that he pads it out with lots and lots of charts and footnotes, the better to convince you that he knows more than you do. Art!
THERE WILL BE LOTS OF THESE
SPOILERS. There, for the exceedingly literal.
First off, we come across An Incredible Coincidence. You ought to recall that here on the blog we chided, most severely, an Ocker who was tormenting a Blue-Ringed Octopus. Here's the link:
BOOJUM!: The Road To Hell Trip (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)
For some inexplicable reason the bad guys in SOF use a BRO in a jiffy bag as a murder weapon. Conrad recognised this in the first 30 pages. It's far, far simpler and quicker to shoot someone in the head than having to keep a saltwater tank and food that accommodates a clutch of octopi which require extremely careful handling. Art!
CAUTION! Extremely stupid idea!
Then you have renewable energy. As the Crike stated, in 2004 the net energy production of electricity by renewables stood at 2%. He deliberately avoids any mention of this again, because SURPRISE! in 2023 it now stands at 12%, as technology and demand march on. He also repeats the canard that wind turbines kill birds so we should abstain from this eviiiiiil technology. There are few studies on this and he didn't quote any, so let Conrad inform you that in This Sceptred Isle the Spinning Blades Of Death kill perhaps 50,000 birds per annuum.
"Gosh what a lot, Ol' Crikers was right, these terr-"
SILENCE! you snivelling bloviators. Over that same year domestic cats will have killed 50 million birds. Thus the Spinning Blades Of Death are 0.001% as deadly as your average feline. Oddly, Ol' Crikers doesn't lobby for the extermination of cats. Art!
The South Canadian equivalent
In the denouement, our gallant band of heroes make a trip to Gareda by plane, then helicopter, then on foot, encountering leeches, crocodiles, and rebel cannibals. All this in order to destroy a series of shoreline McGuffins that would have otherwise devastated the pistachio harvest in Novi Pazar. Or something.
<Yawn>. Excruciatingly dated. Nowadays the heroes would have a drone on surveillance duties to pick out the shoreline installations. Then the billionaire George Morton would have sent an armed drone in to blow the living daylights out of them. Simples. Art!
There are plot holes, too. The main protagonist, Peter Evans, is a lawyer, who for reasons obscure to me goes along on the various death-defying missions the heroes undertake, despite being entirely unfit for same. The bad guys in the background, Drake and Hensley (both working at NERF), are never mentioned again after Gareda and even before. Presumably they retire with a nice golden handshake? Kenner, another protagonist, is Mister Annoyingly Obviously The Voice Of The Author. The amount of facts that he quotes, endlessly, seems to imply he has a direct line to The Plot. There is never an explanation where the fake body of George Morton came from.
There, I read this novel so you don't have to. You're welcome. Art!
A far superior novel
Stopping Oil Dead
Here is today's critique of Ruffia and it's economy. You may have heard Peter The Average making noises about peace talks recently, which is Kremlin-Kode for "Allow me to keep all that I've stolen", because the Ruffian economy keeps getting worse every month. Besides queues for eggs, there are now queues for fish as the state revenues from oil and gas continue to bump along at 1/3 the pre-Special Idiotic Operation. Art!
Literally dead in the water. Six Ruffian 'ghost' tankers, carrying 5 million barrels of oil, have failed to dock at Indian ports in the past few weeks, without giving a reason. One possibility is that the tankers (and their owners and clients) have been sanctioned by South Canada; this is certainly true of the NC Century and the SCF Primorye.
Note that it takes up to five tankers in transit for weeks and weeks to carry 1.5 days of oil production, rather than the 48 hours maximum it used to take to transfer to Europe via pipeline.
Rather more ghoulishly, people in the West are pointing out how many Ruffian oligarchs associated with oil and gas industries have Died Suddenly Under Mysterious Circumstances. There are a lot, admittedly, but pundits like Mark Galeotti have rather pooh-poohed the idea that this is Chipmunk Cheeks cracking down, because for one thing Ruffians have the third highest suicide rate in the world; for another, this is more likely to be the oiligarchs (Ha! Do you see w - O you do) killing each other off so that the vastly-reduced pie goes further between fewer members. Art!
I know you skeptics don't believe until you get cold hard facts delivered, so here are a few oiligarchs who have been 'helped on their way'.
LEONID SHULMAN GAZPROM SUICIDE METHOD UNKNOWN
ALEXANDER TYULAKOV GAZPROM SUICIDE METHOD UNKNOWN
VLADISLAV AVAYEV GAZPROM SUICIDE/MURDER
ALEXANDER SUBOTIN LUKOIL DRUG OVERDOSE (FROM TOAD)
RAVIL MAGALOV LUKOIL SUICIDE BY WINDOW
VIATSHESLAV ROVNIEKO MAGNATE COMA
VLADIMIR NEKRASOV LUKOIL HEART ATTACK
Yes, be advised that licking venom from a toad's skin is a pretty inexact science.
Hmmm that was pretty grim, wasn't it? You're welcome!
"City In The Sky"
Ace is getting a bit of a grilling aboard Arcology One, since she, unlike the entire population, has actually walked on Planet Earth.
The biologist
turned out to be a very tall, thin Nigerian man with no apparent sense of
humour, who led Ace off on a short, rapid almost-run to Broughton. This townstead followed the usual arcology
pattern of being dedicated to a particular science or trade, grouped around a
central building that housed communal facilities. Ace half-expected to see cages of mice and
monkeys, shelves of petri dishes, lab rats enduring hideous experiments;
instead the area hid itself behind potted palms, ferns and bonsai trees. One wall did have a fantastic array of resin
sculptures of the human body and internal organs, sculptures that looked very
life-like.
Solly, as he introduced himself, sat Ace down on one side of a small
wicker table, produced an electronic notepad and began to scribe. First he allowed her to rattle off her
account of arriving in
An hour's a pretty long time for Ace. Well done that gel!
In deference to the festive spirit I shan't put up anything from "The War Illustrated" but that's as far as we go. Next!
O Go On Then
Here's a GRUDGING nod to Christmas. Art!
Traditionally, Christmas in Ukraine's date mirrored that of the Ruffians: January 7th.
No longer. It's now been amended, officially and in writing from Prez Zed, to December 25th, to distance it from any date tainted with orcishness.
You mark my words, once this war is over, there will be considerable pressure for Ukraine to abandon the Cyrillic alphabet and go over to the Roman one. It's simpler, with only 26 letters as opposed to 32, and would allow better integration with the EU. Also, looking at you, Bulgaria.
Finally -
It being Sunday, I normally take a trot into Lesser Sodom. Not today. If I venture down, it will be in the car, given that we have a minor typhoon raging outside.
No comments:
Post a Comment