Yes, We Are Focussing This Intro On The Mundane
Rather than dealing with world-shaking events and the collapse of empires and trillions of specie, Your Humble Scribe has decided to bring in a story that will surely resonate amongst all of us who have had to work in an office, as well as those of us who have had to deal with basement-dwelling troglodytes unfamiliar with those mysterious compounds known as 'soap' and 'water'. Art!
Sorry but 'mundane' is hard to motivate with, so have what appears to be a non-tanker's view of what a 'Super tank' ought to look like. Circa 1935.
Here an aside. YES ALREADY! <ahem>. 'Mundane' in today's world means 'Everyday, ordinary or banal' according to my Collins Concise. It is from the Old French 'Mondain', which is itself - INEVITABLY BAH - derived from Latin, 'Mundus', meaning 'Of the world'. Which is pretty close to 'Mondas', that being the home planet of the Cybermen in
ANYWAY in this tale of woe, Original Poster explained that they worked in a small office with only 7 other people and a manager who was the proverbial slug in a salt factory when it came to dealing with problems. The real problem here was Stenchy Sam, aged 55 if that helps set the scene, who wore a sweater in the office, and who left it there overnight.
'After a month -' explains OP, the smeater - sorry, sweater - began to smell, a distinct and unpleasant odour. Even Conrad, who has no sense of smell, knows better than to wear an item un-laundered for a month. OP tried being subtle about the issue. Art!
Subtle tends not to work with men. She then told him the sweater was stinking up the place, which he denied point-blank and walked off. Going home. Minus sweater.
OP then took matters into her own hands and binned the sweater in a skip outside, although, bless her, she called it a 'dumpster' in that quaint way South Canadians have of using the wrong name for items.
Problem solved, you might think. You'd think wrong. Art!
Predictably, a lot of Redditors (for this was a Reddit thread) went completely hat-stand, accusing OP of theft and wilful destruction of property, and they should have consulted HR and why didn't they approach the boss - when OP specifically stated their small office had NO HR (some people's reading skills are a bit below par, it seems), that the boss had suggested Stinky Sam only wear the sweater three days a week and that this was an office squabble, not <and I laughed> Grand Theft Sweater. O and the person saying OP should have taken the Offending Object home and washed it could gae bile their heed. Which I quite agree with. Art!
Stinky Sam upped the game days after his sweater vanished, although if he'd brought in a bloodhound it would have led to the Offending Article in short order. Instead he brought it up as Other Business at the Monday morning meeting, and stated, demonstrating what we in This Sceptred Isle call 'brass neck' and the South Canadians 'chutzpah', that he was concerned about his sweater going missing, but that he had so many suspects, because so many had complained, that he couldn't identify the culprit.
So he wanted a full confession. Or he'd be taking it further. O no! What wooldn't he do?
At this point Stinky Sam has a wild and crazy look in his eyes, so OP keeps quiet. Stinky storms out of the office. Boss, as per jellyfish backbone, does nothing.
Well, now you know why there's a picture of plain-clothes police up there, because Stinky Sam returns with a man he claims is his cousin, who is a police officer.
"He's going to be interrogating people all day," states Stinky Sam.
O NO HE ISN'T as per panto chorus. Because this finally made Boss grow a shiny spine; he called Stinky into his office, there was a loud - ah - 'discussion' and -
Stinky Sweater Sam got fired. Which kind of solved the Offending Article problem. Art!
More Mordor Misery
In what seems to be an hilariously ironic switch of circumstances, the residents of Moscow are experiencing horribly bitter winter conditions, with temperatures hitting -30ºC. Make no mistake, this is the kind of temperature that Co-Op Funerals used to rub their hand with glee at, since it saw off lots of people. This has been taking place in towns like Podolsk, a satellite of Moscow. Art!
BroSINT69 on Twitter is now saying that he's had messages from Ruffians living in Moscow itself, not outlying towns but actual city-dwellers, complaining about being without heating for weeks. He put the question up as to whether this was due to no funding for two years*, all the maintenance workers being sent off to You Know Where* or deliberate sabotage? Art!
The conspiranoids cropped up first, alleging that the Ukrainian SBU will pay $150 to any Ruffians desperate enough to go out with a cocktail. A Molotov one.
Others pointed out the Moscow infrastructure had probably been neglected for decades - refuted by BroSINT as he convincingly said Moscow's municipal budget is enormous, far beyond what other towns and cities have. Art!
Another chimed in with a comparison to New York's city heating system, which uses steam sent via pipes. If there are fractures in the piping, as there seem to be in Ruffia, then the steam condenses and freezes, which causes even more fractures. That's not the end of it. Art!
People are now trying to use electrical devices to heat themselves, which has overloaded the grid, and wiring is now overheating (O delicious irony!) and bursting into flame.
There's an old Scottish curse: "May you live in interesting times". Quite.
"City In The Sky"
Ace and Terry are beginning to understand just what the Doctor has requested they do, which has been couched in terms so abstract that no eavesdropping aliens will know what on Earth is being discussed.
Emilia looked at Ace, who returned the gaze with cool assurance. Cool on the outside; inside she could only
guess why the Doctor had been so insistent on creating a miniature armageddon.
‘Our friend Downstairs has requested an airstrike from the heavens,’
croaked the vet, sipping at her bottle of water. ‘Presumably against the same aliens who are
now jamming broadcasts from Downstairs.’
Sschottsky’s eyes widened to comic effect before readjusting.
‘No, no, he said these hypothetical creatures live in the Outback, not
in the sea.’
‘Maybe they don’t like rain?’ suggested Terry, half-joking. ‘Or they’d have camped out in
No answer from the astronomer, who had produced a weary electronic
calculator and was tapping away on the keys.
Silence reigned for minutes before he looked up again.
‘It can be done. Using solid fuel
boosters from our special supply, we can de-orbit an object of up to about
thirty thousand tonnes. The eventual
impact at sea level would be of the order of fifty megatonnes.’
Terry looked impressed. Ace
looked unconvinced. Her astronomical
training about satellites had been strictly off-the-cuff, picked up from the
Doctor when he bothered to fill her in with details of orbits, mass, inertia,
atmospheres, re-entry ionisation, angle of descent and other arcana. She still felt that Schottsky had been far
too blasé about the prospect of moving anything that massive out of orbit.
Ah, making things explode. That always moves a plot smartly along.
"The War Illustrated"
Let's bring up a few more pictorial assemblages from their July 7th Edition. Art!
This is an example of what the Teutons found to be an unanswerable and terrifying phenomenon; naval gunfire support. That at the top is the venerable and venomous HMS 'Warspite', dropping several tons of ordnance upon a hapless Teuton or two. The only protection against shells like this was to either be under several yards of reinforced concrete or elsewhere when they landed. To starboard underneath is the South Canadian USS 'Texas', also delivering half-ton shells with every bit as much as spite and war. And at bottom, that little landing craft is from the Royal Canadian Navy, a much-neglected force that people really ought to know more about.
Tuff Love
This came from a standby picture brought up on my laptop, which was intriguing enough for Conrad to dig further, in an apt kind of metaphor. Art!
This, gentle reader, is Civita Di Bagnoregio, which as you may have guessed is in Italy. Yes, the only way in is via that long narrow bridge. No, it wasn't always like that. The village used to have a geographical feature known as a 'saddle' that connected it to a larger town nearby, that definitely isn't 'Bagnoregio' as Wiki would have it. Art!
The reason the saddle collapsed, and that CDB is in imminent peril, is that it sits upon a plug of volcanic 'Tuff', which despite the name is friable and crumbly, and the village is gradually disappearing bit by bit. Sic transit gloria mundi, which is where we came in.
Finally -
Off with you now, we're all finished here. Go on, scram!
* Both would coincide with a certain Special Idiotic Operation
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