Food Inflation

No, We Are Not Talking About Leavened Flour Products

Conrad ought to know, I've done enough baking in my time, including bread, which is a lot harder than cakes, I can tell you, and am doing so.  In case you are unfamiliar with the baking process, the dough needs to 'prove' after being kneaded.  Commercial bakeries have special proving ovens they use for this, which are hot and humid.  Conrad used a oiled tin tray over a bowl of boiling water.  Art!

Because proving ovens are dull

     This is what the AI Art Generator came up for "Centurion tank".  Of course - obviously! - it resembles a Centurion in no way whatsoever.  The suspension seems right but it's not the Horst-style suspension the Centurion used.  The turret seems to have been put together by a crew of drunks rushing before end of shift on Friday afternoon, from a set of blueprints that were upside down and with large parts smeared with coffee rings.

     ANYWAY I want to get back to the long list of doom and gloom that is impending or taking place right now in Modern-day Mordor, and specifically food inflation.  Art!

     Food inflation, unlike other types of inflation, hits everybody.  You may be able to get by without a car by using public transport, or you may rent an apartment instead of looking to take out a mortgage, but- everyone has to eat.  Even those frauds who claim to live on fresh air and sunshine.  Art!

     You may remember the egg crisis of last year in Ruffia, where the price of eggs doubled.  There were queues and protests and angry pensioners, which seemed to jog the Little Tsar's elbow a bit and - Hay Pesto! there were large imports of same from abroad.  Which were infected with salmonella.  Art!

A proud Ruffian tradition going back to Sinister Union 1.0

     Overall, the prices for food have been rising incessantly since June 2023, hitting 8.2% in January of 2024 and as of May, the last month the Federal State Statistics Service published data for, it had risen to 9.1%.  So, again, these are official Ruffian state numbers, not the evil machinations of MI6 (although I bet the SIS are up to something treacherously sly and subtle).

     Big K, of "Inside Russia" 

     - excuse me, trouble with font colours -

     focussed on a particular food in his tracking of food inflation: potatoes.  These are a staple food in Ruffia, and he remembers paying ₽15 per kilo for them before his - ah - 'departure'.  Art!

Wealth beyond compare!

     He tracked the price increase of spuds week by week, and here are the totals:

May 20th: ₽31.40 per kilo

May 24th: ₽41.15 per kilo

June 3rd: ₽45.63 per kilo

June 10th: ₽49.97 per kilo

June 17th: ₽52.67 per kilo

June 24th: ₽59.98 per kilo

Thus you can see prices have effectively doubled over a mere six weeks, and are up 400% from September 2022, when Big K and Ruffia parted company.  This is sobering stuff for any economy.  One can probably blame sanctions for this trouble, as herbicides and fertilizers are now either difficult, costly or simply impossible to obtain, and the price of fuel for farmers is also increasing.  This latter is more probably due to what are euphemistically called 'Ukrainian kinetic sanctions' a.k.a. kamikaze drone strikes on petroleum infrastructure.  Not food, admittedly, but Big K said petrol wholesale prices are increasing weekly - this week Premium is up 1.4% and Regular is up 1.7%.  Art!

Another 0.1% increase on the way

     Joe Blogs, from the Youtube channel "Joe Blogs", explained that inflation statistics are a hard figure and visible metric that can be compared to other countries and give an overall 'feel' for a nation's economy.  Big K's final point about food inflation in Modern-day Mordor is that prices are volatile but have only ever risen, and that by between 20% to 60%.  He's promising to do a food inflation comparison video in the near future.  Sounds like a plan!

More Of Roy Cross

You know, the Airfix cover art chap, whose responsibility was to take a model as inspiration and make it inspiring enough for people to buy that kit.  Which, knowing modellers as I do, will join the To Be Done Someday pile of 127 other Airfix, Tamiya and Revell boxes.  Art!

     This is a Vickers Wellington Mk. 1/AC, which is in a bit of trouble as one engine is already dead and smoking, and there are two bogeys in the background.  On the other hand, the bomb-bay doors are open, so the payload, which might be bombs or torpedoes, is about to be dropped.  Can they make it back to Blighty on one engine?  Perhaps, one of the Welly's strengths was it's geodesic fuselage design - which is an item for another blog.

"City In The Sky"

The Arc is down!  Yes indeed, and surprisingly successfully, too.

      This shouting was dwarfed into inconsequence as the entire sphere’s surviving population burst into a spontaneous cheer that made the surviving Lexan panels rattle in sympathy.  True, they were canted at an angle of probably thirty degrees from normal, with an oozing ocean of mud slowly coming inside from the broken windows at the lowest level, and they had no water left – but they were Downstairs, and alive.

     There might have been a struggle to exit the sphere with the dozens of injured and dead, had help from outside not arrived in the nick of time.  A  whole convoy of wagons laden with water and sunhats, able and willing to help the “Starmen” out of their ruined environment.  The sunhats proved to be highly useful, allowing the sphere’s residents to cope with a new, comparatively huge and empty environment that didn’t curve upwards at the edges.  Plus they prevented sunstroke and sunburn, two conditions utterly novel to sphere residents.

     When Infrastructure checked the giant fluid gears that the fusion power-plant had once driven, they were found to be shattered by transmitted shock.  The plant itself, carefully powered down and with anti-shock cradles applied, was in fine form.  Within thirty minutes of landfall it was working at half-capacity to replace the emergency battery supply, keeping embryos in storage, maintaining computer systems and all the other electrical equipment aboard the Arc.

     I've no idea what 'fluid gears' are, just that they sound impressively technical.

Very Well Put!

When we mention Old Stony Face on BOOJUM! it may be one of three people: Judge Dredd, Buster Keaton or Kyrylo Budanov.

     Today it is Number Three.  Ol' Kyr gave an interview to an online publication, and touched on the subject of the Kerch Bridge.  Art!

There's a very catchy song that goes with this

     It took them months and months to repair this damage and freight and transport numbers never got back to their pre-attack totals.  As Budanov makes explicit, the Ruffians don't really need the bridge but it remains what he called "part of the skeleton of the empire".  In other words, the Little Tsar's image is tied up with it, so it cannot be allowed to fail or fall.

     Well, we'll see about that.  Sweepstake on when it gets destroyed?

More Of Those 'Atomic Rockets'

Here's a single picture that encapsulates quite a few concepts, and the ethos of the website itself, which is to give any reader a thorough grounding in hard science, get rid of misconceptions and banish the spirit of "Starry Trex" and "Warry Starz".  Art!

     The 'Orbit-to-orbit atomic rocket' requires no streamlining because it doesn't transit atmospheres, merely the space between planets.  The 'Airless planet lander' also lacks streamlining as it only operates on planets with no atmosphere.  Note the long 'legs' that allow landing on rough terrain if need be.  The 'Surface-to-orbit ferry' does have streamlining, because it's going to be operating from Earth and from the design looks like a VTOL model, unless that ventral fin retracts?

Finally -

Now for a trip into Lesser Sodom before the heavens open and I need to resort to a canoe.