Behold The STUMP GRINDER!

There I Was, Looking For Likely Blog Content

And thinking "This is a candidate" when I came across a reference to a 'stump grinder', an apparatus Your Humble Scribe is utterly unfamiliar with, and probably your good selves to boot.  Art!

ART!

A stump grinder.  IT GRINDS STUMPS!

     Now we're all up to speed, let this tale of combined manglement and schadenfreude begin.  Original Poster explained that they ran a machining and welding business out in the wilds of British Columbia.  They don't ever actually say where they're based, so we'll go for BC because it sounds like the back end of nowhere, full of logging and mining industry, so lots of customers.

     One morning OP comes to work to find a ginormous tree grinder parked on a trailer in his yard.  One of these.  Art!

     No note attached as to what's wrong with it, nor even a phone call asking him to look it over, so it sits there, untouched, as OP's not going to strip the whole thing down to see what ails it.

     Five days later Bottomhole Business Owner gives him a call and asks if it's done yet?

     No.

     BBO then - only now! - explains that the rotor drum needs new teeth.  OP estimates it'll take him five days to do the job, because he needed to call in two other people to strip the ginormous grinder down to get the rotor drum out.  Art!

One of these

     OP covered his  own delicate posterior by e-mailing BBO a contract, which was signed and returned.  Bear this in mind later.

     But of course nothing is ever simple and straightforward when dealing with bottomholes, is it?  Because BBO had the rotor teeth welded into place as he obviously had a phobia about his teeth falling out, since these particular fangs needed only to be bolted on.  OP went through a ton of welding sticks removing and replacing the teeth, before giving BBO a call.

     Mysteriously, when the price came up, the phone went dead.  How strange!

     Two days later the driver who'd dropped the STUMP GRINDER! off came back to pick it up.

     "NO" was the loud reply - payment hadn't been forthcoming.

     The BBO called OP and had an argument, which he lost.  The hapless driver was told to load up the grinder, which he refused - OP seems to have been built like a brick outhouse.  He leaves.  He comes back 3 hours later with the police.  They read the contract and then they leave.  Do you see a pattern here?

Once cut down they need a STUMP GRINDER!

     The driver came back next day, assuming BBO had paid the bill.

     Ooops.  Nope.  This led to a screaming match on the phone between driver and BBO, where the driver threatened to quit on the spot if the bill wasn't paid.

     The bill was paid.

     This isn't the end of the story, for a month later another rotor drum for a STUMP GRINDER! turns up with a note and phone number attached.  Guess who answers the phone?  Art!

A STUMP GRINDER ROTOR!

     NO!  Not Lord Lucan.  BBO. 

     OP tells matey to get lost.  BBO gets bent, predictably, because OP's business is the only one within reasonable distance - 3 hours, which is an indication of how remote in the backwoods of British Columbia we're talking.  The next day Driver - he's a part of this story so I'm capitalising him - turns up to reclaim the STUMP GRINDER! parts, and also explains that he's quitting the business, as this pattern of being a bottomhole is an explicit part of how BBO runs his company.  He'd been sued by another workshop for $270,000 and in fact went bankrupt not long after OP related his tale.  How completely unexpected.

     Still, we ought to be grateful for him educating us in the way of the -

     STUMP GRINDER!

Another Day Another $111,000

For a nation without a navy - a phrase that makes a dweller of This Sceptred Isle simply gibber with horror - Ukraine is certainly managing to make Ruffia's Black Sea Fleet also become non-existent.  Giving the incessant shooting down of Ruffian planes and pilots a pause, they varied the news with the sinking of another Ruffian patrol corvette, the Sergei Kotov, by marine drones.  Art!

Before the warranty was voided

          If what I read earlier is correct, the ship was sunk in Novorussiisk, which is a tremendously long way from Ukrainian shores for drones to operate from.  It's also rather chilling evidence for the Ruffians that even their supposed safe haven, which is too far away to be hit by nasty old Stormzy or Scalper, isn't really safe.  Another $70 million bites the briney.  There are clips on Youtube and Twitter of the Sea Baby making Putin an even sadder man if you look under the ship's name.

     Doubtless the Kremlin will only admit that their ship 'intercepted several unmanned drones" and the crew are all enjoying cocktails ashore.

A Hideous Mixture Of Green And Orange

Once again we turn to that lovable rogue Donald Buck to provide a bit of blog content, which he does with consistency.  Don't complain so about us keeping on harping on about him, Conrad is pretty sure he's going to keel over like the Sergei Kotov in the near future as the stress, morbid obesity and alleged drug intake take their toll.  Heck, he's even blowing scripts on a teleprompter at this point.  Art!

     Sorry, I just had to share that picture from "The Daily Beast" since it looks as if his money is all flying away, which it is in real life.  Less than 3 weeks to come up with that total, Donnie! and even less for the E. Jean Carroll defamation money.

     Incidentally, if you see a "Forbes" Youtube vlog with the following thumbnail -

     Go on and give them a Neg.  They baldly state that Trump has $400 million in cash, because he said so.  Firstly, that was a year ago and secondly, you can't take anything he says as being within spitting distance of the truth.  He might have had $200 million, emphasis on 'might'.  And thirdly - you may be ahead of me here - $400 million does not equal $545 million.  The first three Comments pointed out what shoddy reporting this was.  CONRAD IS ANGRY!

     Also, Bah!

"City In The Sky"

The Americans are proving a tough audience about claimed alien interfering and meddling in human affairs for the past several decades.

     No matter how the technical staff processed chlorella they still couldn’t come up with a decent artificial cigar, decided Marty Waukegan.  As Veep he’d been privileged to smoke the last genuine imported Cuban five years earlier; a live video feed allowed seventy or eighty other staff to enjoy his enjoyment vicariously.

     Scowling, he glared at the ranks of cultures that spanned whole curving kilometres beyond his viewpoint.  Ranks of banks of tanks, he sourly dismissed them.  Essential for protein and oxygen, but my God! they were dull and boring.  Oh for the green hills of Earth.

     He turned back into his suite, angry at himself for being angry.  That wild tale Davy Haritanian spun earlier in the cycle had come back to haunt him.  Covert aliens?  As if!  “Pssshawright” as his son liked to sneer.

     And yet.  And yet.  There was that inexplicable decline of the background radiation count of the Northern Hemisphere down on Planet Earth.  The jamming.  Every shuttle-capable site on the planet being nuked.  A disease with no known origin killing fifty per cent of the Great Northern War’s survivors.  The outbreak of the Great Northern War itself, an event of unsurpassed insanity.

     That's it, Veep.  Chew things over and cogitate a tad.

Finally -

Yes, I have studied the plot-line for that Republic serial "Zombies Of The Stratosphere" and can only sadly report that zombies of any description do not feature in this cinematic offering.  Conrad may still do a mocking analysis of it, just to punish them for wasting my time.  I'm not getting any younger and at 127 need all the time I can squirrel away.