From A Whisper To A Steam

Bear With Me, This Will Make Sense Eventually

Or else it won't, in which case I will refund you exactly as much as you paid to read it in the first place.  Bargain!

     First off, this is not about the Elvis Costello And The Attractions song,  If anything, it references the original one done by The Icicle Works, thanks to part of the lyrics.  Art!

The source material

     Namely "Birds fly", because in British vernacular, ladies or women or gels are deemed to be 'birds', and 'To fly' means 'To Flee', because haven't you seen Gandalf's last speech in the Mines of Moria?

     ANYWAY yes their lyric also reads "From a whisper to a scream", not "steam" but I wanted to get steam in there as a method of cleaning, used where there are layers of encrusted filth to be gotten rid of.  Art!

A mystery to Steve

     Let us now jump from domestic duties to the jolly and amusing subject of abusive relationships, because that's how they start: jolly and amusing, and then by degrees they slip into mental and physical manipulation and confrontation.

     "But Conrad!" I hear you wibble.  "What is subject matter so dark and forbidding doing in the light and frothy pages of BOOJUM!?"

     You clearly avoided those items about thermonuclear weapons, didn't you?

     It's here because it begins so innocuously - the whisper part - and ends up with the destruction of all life on Planet Earth the Original Poster making a daring escape, complete with her frogs, which is the steamy or screamy bit, according to your lights.  Art!

OP also the proud possessor - or posssessssssor - of a snake

     OP had been living in the same apartment as her boyfriend, 'Slimy' - sorry, let's be grown up here - 'Steve', for 8 months and discovered a note at the back of a cupboard when she was cleaning, left there by his ex, 'Natalia'.  The note cautioned repeatedly that Slimy Steve would never clean up, ever, and that he'd gaslight whichever girlfriend was reading this and make everything her fault.  You can read this note as being the Warning Whisper.

     Well! OP took the note and read it out to SS, who loudly railed about his crazy, abusive, manipulative, untrustworthy, gold-digging ex-girlfriend, who also passed the port to the right.  OP citrically pointed out he'd not found the note in 5 years.  Also she was doing 70% of the cleaning.  Cue argument.  Art!

"What's the problem?" asked Slimy

     After taking stock, and also advice from Reddit, OP tried to bring up cleaning as a subject, which got her the cold shoulder and being initially dismissed as a silly little girl and then ignored.  As warned by Reddit, the red flags started to go up.  When OP realised the argument was in fact a closed circle she attempted to leave, at which point Slimy tried to physically block her.  More red flags than the Chinese Communist Party's anniversary parade!

     She got out and spent the night away from Slimy - I think he deserves this moniker by now - and decided to both empty her stuff out of the apartment and LEAVE ANOTHER NOTE FOR NEXT GIRLFRIEND.  Because Slimy Steve would never, EVER bother to do a steam clean.  Art!

Yes, I'm listening to "Tourist" again.  Sue me, I dare you.

     SURPRISE!  Guess who got in touch with OP?  'Natalia' the allegedly crazy ex, whom Slimy had rung - using a friend's phone as she'd blocked him - to shriek abuse at, about her malevolent interfering influence and how she was an entire lesbian witch coven rolled into one.  Well, maybe not that last, I may have been channelling 'Robothead' and his review of "The A

     ANYWAY They met for coffee and Natalia proved to be eminently sensible, down-to-earth, and worried for OP, sans psychopathy.  She informed OP that Slimy got violently destructive when angry, so it would be prudent to remove both snake and frogs from the apartment asap.

     With a bit of finagling, they got what property of her Slimy had left intact out of there, including the snake and frogs.  Art!

     Twist In The Tale: Natalia had actually left THREE notes in the apartment, 5 years previously.  One in the cupboard, one on the bottom of the hoover, and one in the toaster's crumb tray.  They checked and the crumb tray note had gone, a discovery Slimy had never mentioned.  Conrad suspects that the toaster's electric elements probably set the notepaper alight during use.

     To end with a line from OP, " - reflect on the subtle ways abuse starts".

     No word on whether Slimy Steve is still single or no.  One can only hope.

Conrad Is AMUSED!

It does happen.  

     At present I am reading an excellent work on military logistics in the Second Unpleasantness, written by <GASP!> a woman.  Art!

     It really does explain the sheer number of military involved in supporting a modern army in the field, where the 'teeth-to-tail' ratio can b

     ANYWAY Janet does endeavour to include the odd anecdote to leaven what is a potentially very dry subject.  Art!

      In North Africa, the Allies needed equine transport, which they obtained by trucking in donkeys and their Bedouin owners to Tripoli in Western Libya.  Not knowing any better, these donkeys, both male and female, were collected in a single large enclosure.

     As Janet mutedly explains 'a battle royal commenced'.  It is spectacularly unwise to keep donkeys of both sexes together, which the Bedouin knew and their Allied employers did not.

     Even after separation into different enclosures, unisex deliveries were consistently made, resulting in the same mayhem being repeated.  Again, quoting Janet: "All of this was observed with great amusement by the watching Bedouin."

     Intelligent does not mean clever.

Trees Trees Please Me

A nod to The Beatles there.  Yes, I managed to read the BBC News item about the 'Tree Of The Year' competition, which, rather disappointingly, lacks any puns.  It's a competition mounted by the Woodland Trust, which makes sense, as a competition mounted by the Seaweed Trust would be rather fish-out-of-water.  There are three oak trees from Scotland nominated: The Michael, Skipinnish Oak and The Capon Tree.  Art!

Skippy

     Before you sneer, as I did, understand that each of these oaks is over 1,000 years old, meaning that they can claim an awful lot in back-payments of their pensions.  And - do their grandkids come to visit?

Berni's Right

Right back to #2 of Bernie's epic 90-card collection of macabre artwork for FPG, this one entitled 'Foul Harvest'.  Art!

     Welllllllll not strictly true, Bern.  In the vast bulk of zombie lore*, destroy the brain and the shambling corpse stops shambling.  Besides which, if it's been in the ground so long that it's eyes are gone, how does it know to attack Doug?  Not only that, it's brain will have turned to black oozy gunk.  One also has to ask what Doug was up to, as digging up a corpse long dead is not typical Friday-night entertainment.

     No mention of media used here, so I presume this is pen and inks, with colours added.

Sanity Is Restored

Booooh!

Just to recapitulate the traffic figures for Blogger, which have now returned to what seems to be close to reality.  Art!

     It may not be as flattering but reality has a cachet all of it's own.

Finally -

I've been listening to some of my older CDs whilst typing this, as it is far, far easier to type whilst listening to music than it is to try it when playing a DVD or having a Youtube vlog playing in the background.  This time round it was 'Bon Iver' by - you may be ahead of me here - Bon Iver.  And it's 13 years old <shudder>.  

*  Trust me on this.  I've read the book, the comic, seen the film and all the television series, and written two novel-length manuscripts to boot.

Icke, Icke, Baby!

There's A Couple Of Things Going On Here

First of all, as I keep having to remind you tardigrades, NO! that is not a typo.  If it's spelled like that then there's a reason for it, said reason being me creating an hilarious pun HILARIOUS I TELL YOU!  HILARIOUS!

     Ahem <pause to regulate blood pressure>.  No, I am not going to post a picture of Vanilla Ice, because the twod mods are forever on the lookout for BOOJUM! spamming people.  Conrad firmly believes they've been egged-on by UNIT and MI5.  Art!

     That, gentle reader, is a tardigrade.  They are incredibly tough and adaptable micro-organisms that will probably inherit the earth when Hom. Sap. (and successors) are but a vague memory, with only crumbl

     ANYWAY allow me to prod Art with this handy electric-cattle-motivator.

"Then my head exploded.  But it grew back."

     To those unfamilar, David Icke is an utter bampot who believes in all sorts of woo, including that the elite of British society are shape-shifting lizards from Theta Reticuli, here to steal all our truffles, since truffle skins are the only things that their sinister alien replicators cannot replicate *- or similar.

     Now, imagine that Ol' Dave had gone into politics, not entertainment, and had risen up the ranks until he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, one of the most powerful appointments in This Sceptred Isle's establishment.  He manages this by keeping his - ah - 'peculiarities' under wraps.  Mostly.  Art!

Ol' Heinie

     Meet Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer SS and Chief of Police of Nazi Germany, and one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich.

     If HH got a bee in hit bonnet, or a bat in his belfry, then you humoured him because i) It got you a guaranteed salary and ii) It kept you out of 'protective custody' in a concentration camp.  Ol' Heinie had enough self-awareness to keep his more eccentric beliefs out of the public sphere, especially since Herr Schickelgruber had no patience or time for the occult or supernatural and would have given his minion a very hard time if these esoteric interests came to light.  Art!

Hail the hair of Hans Hörbiger!

     Enter Hans Hörbiger, an Austrian engineer with absolutely no knowledge of astronomy, cosmology or eschatology.  In the early years of the Twentieth Century he dreamed up the 'Cosmic Ice Theory', which was superlatively - what's the word? - O yes: stupid.  His theory held that the explosion of a small star over-burdened with water, after clumsily tripping over it's own corona and falling into a larger star, led to the creation of the Milky Way.  The Milky Way galaxy was, in his reality, made up of blocks of ice.  Art!

Now runs a very successful construction business

     Keeping an awful lot of blather edited, Hans reckoned that our solar system had been created with planets and ice blocks, and the more ice blocks a planet absorbed, the bigger it got.  This made Jupiter the glutton of the Solar System.  Contrarily, if an ice block hit earth, rather than causing an apocalyptic Armageddon, it instead triggered hailstorms over a wide area, because the pistachio crop in Novi Pazar, which makes quite as much sense as he did.

     Ol' Heinie, of course - obviously! - fell in love with this <ahem> theory.  Art!

No, it's a telescope, not an artillery piece

     I remember reading one of Sir Patrick's works many decades ago, and he took a critical swing at 'Welteislehr', remarking that it was so popular in Nazi Germany that various pronouncements were made that you could believe in Cosmic Ice Theory and still be a good Nazi.  Art!

     

Designed by a Dalek

     I believe this to be Grünwald Observatory, where Ol' Heinie set up a dedicated 'Research Centre for Astronomy', whose sole purpose was to prove Welteislehr correct, which is a mighty tall order.  Not satisfied with this, he also set up a 'Centre for Meteorology' to also prove Cosmic Ice Theory correct.

     HH constantly pestered his scientists with queries about Welteislehr and how - not if - it interacted with day-to-day events and phenomena.  Queries included: How the migration of butterflies from South Africa to Iceland was affected by CIT; whether the effects of fog (presumable caused by ice) on the sun could affect human genetic material; did the discovery of frozen mammoth carcasses in Siberia constitute proof of the CIT in remote times?  Art!

Less woolly mammoth than shaggy dog, I fear

     You think this is odd?  Feel sorry for Robert Longenrich, the author of Himmler's biography that I cribbed this info from, because the daftness is not over yet and he had to make sense of it all, poor bloke.  He couldn't have icked that much.

Our Journey With Berni

Okay, I am now going to delete that link to "Print" which I was using to select Bernie Wrightson's illustrations.  For one thing, they don't bother with any information about titles or date of publication or even what medium was used.  Bah!

     HOWEVER - O however, my favouritest word - I am now going to try and go through the list of 'FPG Master of the Macabre' card illos, which numbers about 90.  Being inexact there as we've already featured a few.  Art!

     So there you have it, Card #1 from the first collection, 'Lazarus Syndrome', done with sponges, towels and steel wool.  And paint, one presumes.

"The War Illustrated Edition 193 November 1944"

Once again I remind you about this publication's adherence to OPSEC.  Although I haven't seen the censor scratch out any unit markings on aircraft or vehicles so far.  Art!

     The first pair of pictures show British soldiers moving through Overloon, a Dutch town only a couple of miles from the Teuton border.  Close enough, in fact, for the Teuton locals being able to hear artillery and possibly small-arms fire if the wind was in the right direction.  Note the extra improvised armour of surplus tank-tracks added to the Churchill's hull and turret armour.  Note, also, the two tommies carrying The Soldier's Friend - a stout spade, indispensable for digging a shell-scrape, foxhole or field latrine.

     The lower photographs show South Canadian troops of their 1st Army battling inside the Teuton city of Aachen, which got a severe dose of what other non-Teuton cities in Europe had experienced; which is to say, large-scale destruction.

     The caption had the GI hiding alongside a tank as a 'sniper' which I doubt; he'd have rubbish vision of anything lying prone like that, and you'd have to be very much on your toes if the tank moves.

     O and that South Canadian anti-tank gun?  British, actually.  It was their variant of the 6 pounder, which they dubbed the '57 mm' because they don't like Imperial measures since we burned down the White House.  

Maudlin Maths Again

O dearie me, the stock value of "Trump Technology and Management Group" has fallen again, here's a hankie to dry your tears Donold.  Art!

     $19.50 with - what's the opposite of 'with a bullet'? - with a lead sinker.

     I don't think the markets trade over the weekend, which means nothing new until Monday 2nd September.  September being the earliest Donold Judas Trump can dump his stock before it declines any further.  We shall see.

You - WHAT?

Conrad had to check the calendar to make sure we're not approaching April 1st.  To what am I referring?  Art!

     This is the first I've ever heard of such a competition.  I haven't read the article because it's nine minutes to midnight and I'm off to bed soon.  What do you bet, it's a source of awful tree-related puns?  If it's not then the item that covers it here on the blog most certainly will be!

*  The truffle stuffle I stole from a Philip K. Dick short story.

Gimme Page

I Know What You're Thinking

No!  Not at all, I keep telling you, the D.A.R.P.A. Telepathy Helmet got returned to them ages ago, and they never knew I'd done a - ah - 'long-term borrow' of it.  No, I can tell what you're thinking because I'm so perceptive, not to mention fond of ambiguous titles.  Art!

     Now, this is a bit of a lightning conductor for the Facebook twod mods, as what I'm going to be talking about in this Intro is, indeed, a breakdown in communications.  However - my favourite word back again!- it's nothing to do with Lez Zeppelin, and everything to do with an obsolete piece of technology.  No!  Not 'The Gizmo'.  Dog Buns, how obscure can you get?  Art!

A pager.  You use it to page.

     There's today's title explicated.  A little explanation is due here, as the pager is an endangered species nowadays.  It was a small, portable device that a person carried around on their person, which would be accessed by anyone calling it's number.  It would vibrate and/or bleep, and thus the carrier became aware that another party wanted them to call back, with the number to call and perhaps a brief message.  Art!

     Having set the scene, I am now going to save progress and carry on watching "Godzilla Minus One", which looks verrrry impressive for only $15 million.

     Back again!  Not exactly bright-eyed and I don't have a tail, bushy or otherwise, yet here I am.

     Right, we are now detailing a tale of both Malicious Compliance and Petty Revenge from a Youtube Reddit re-telling, featuring DBA.  Art!

     No!  No - 'Data Base Administrator'.  DBA.  O I give up.

     To set this part of the story's scene, it took place in 2004, when pagers, being paged and carrying a pager was still a thing.  DBA was part of a department of 30 DBAs, who were cut back to 7 thanks to financial troubles.

     Of course - obviously! - this being South Canada, where the employees are treated like helots, management still expected these 7 to do the work of 30.  DBA's team of 7 got a new manager, whom he described as a 'Toxic Butt Kisser' which we will use as his BOOJUM! title.

     I should explain that DBA and his team had all carried pagers, and were contractually obliged to respond to pages even when not at work.  This rarely happened, because it had to be an Ass On Fire emergency for them to get a page.

     That is, until TBK arrived.  He insisted that they receive every page sent, in case one of them happened to be a DBA issue, so the total went from 0 or 1 per night to 50.  Art!

     DBA resorted to re-writing pager codes so he and his 6 compatriots only got relevant WARNING pages, which again cut the total back down to 0 or 1 page per night, allowing them to sleep.

     TBK, with his lips firmly glued to the posterior of his superior*, went off on a rant that this was unacceptable and The Department - note capitalisation - needed to be up to speed on ALL pages.

     So, DBA ever so thoughtfully re-wrote paging codes so that TBK's pager got all the calls.  All of them.  All the time.  All night long.  He stepped back to admire his handiwork and waited for TBK to wilt under the endless barrage of pages of pages.

     This never happened, and he soon realised that TBK simply turned his pager off at night.

     You can probably guess what happened next.  An Ass On Fire emergency happened - overnight.  Art!

A metaphor

     To detail a little.  The database that had died was one dealing with federally-mandated information.  In South Canada, you maintain targets, deadlines and Key Performance Indicators associated with federal data - or they will swoop in and fine you down to your white corpuscles, and then fine the fine.  DBA's business was riding close to the deadline on this network problem, so they called EVERYBODY in that Sunday night.

     Except TBK.

     His 'communication breakdown' didn't dawn until he wandered into the office at 08:00 next morning, seeing everyone already there.  DBA, when asked in the small hours of the morning why TBK wasn't present, casually (with a grin a mile wide on the inside) informed the CIO that TBK never answered his pager after work hours.

     TBK was called into a private meeting with the CIO and CTO which lasted 10 minutes, which was the rest of his career, because after that he was fired.  Art!

Actually 20 years.  It was 2004.

Less Mount Doom, More Mouth Of Hell

Yes, we are back to pointing and laughing at Modern-day Mordor, where what isn't flooded is on fire, either via natural accident such as forest wildfires, or mice with matches.  Or Ukrainians with drones, one of the two.  This time it's a landfill site at Shakty in Rostov oblast, which is really earning it's nickname of "Roastov".  It's been burning for days and the locals cannot extinguish it.  Art!

     Why no massed fire-engines?  Because it's only a provincial landfill.  If it were a fuel depot there'd be hundreds of firefighters; they may all be still in attendance at Proletarsk and Atlas, with none to spare.  Whichever reason, the place stinks appallingly, as the normal bouquet of rotting landfill is considerably enhanced by it being on fire.  A 'dumpster-fire' of colossal proportions.

     In our typical utilitarian and practical style, we do have a suggestion.  Put up signs and attract the tourists to the Ruffian equivalent of that Kazakhstan flaming pit.  Art!

Buzz Biffs BSer Bart

For some reason not easy to explain, an old video clip )from 2002) came up on Twitter (which I refuse to call 'X' because I know it annoys Elong Tusk so much), featuring stage left Buzz Aldrin, his granddaughter and a loathsome conspiranoid scammer called Bart Sibrel.  Art!

Dateline 2002
Buzz here is 72

     Loathsome Bart Sibrel used to work for a television company, and got fired from them when he committed trespass on the property of a NASA astronaut, which left him with a chip the size of a California Redwood on his shoulder, and an axe to grind (probably used to chop down that tree).  His schtick was to harass an ex-astronaut by telling them to swear on a Bible that they went to the Moon, because Bart didn't think NASA had the collective smarts to get out of bed.

     He kept harassing Buzz and grandaughter, until he actually got in front and obstructed Buzz, who - Art!

Buzz biffs

     The transcription goes: "You're a coward and a liar and a WHACK -".

     At which point Loathsome turns to his camera chap and asks if he got the shot.  Well, these people aren't smart enough to get out of bed because no, he didn't.

     The case that Loathsome brought never even made it to court.  Which probably stoked up that incoherent rage even more.  Way to go when you get your bottom handed to you by a man half your size and a third of your age.

     Tee hee!

Is Sanity Returning?

It's greatly over-rated in human civilisation, true, yet one expects the machines to exhibit a considerable degree of comfortable interaction with it.

     Yes, I'm talking about the Blogger tracking algorithm, which has been higher than Donald Trump Junior for August.

     Today, we see a smidgeon of sensibility appear.  Art!

     A monthly total like that would mean an average of nearly 500 visitors per day.  Whilst flattering, Your Humble And Modest Scribe doesn't believe this is accurate.  Art!

     I cannot even find Singapore on this map.  Conrad is also somewhat surprised at how many Ruffians enjoy BOOJUM! because we relentlessly mock the Fun-Sized Foot Fiddler - or perhaps that's the attraction?  Art!

  
     That should be Singapore right there except it's not.

A Couple Of Gruesome Graphs For You Ghouls

The ruble seems to be about as popular as the Trump Media And Technology Group.  If they were aircraft they'd belong to Plummet Airlines, that's how bad they are.  Art!

     Ooooooh that doesn't look good.  I've not checked today but don't think it will make much of a difference.  Art!

     DJ Tango will be able to sell his 78 million shares in September, and he'll break the speed of light to get rid of his 'meme stock' before it absolutely craters.  That poor man**.
     

Finally -

Getting closer to Wet Saturday, when Dry August officially ends.  I shall pre-empt the beginning of September by about 6 hours, just to let you know.

Chin chin!

* He must have communicated this in writing, right?

**  I know, I know, wildly ambiguous.

The Lying, The Witch And The What On Earth?

As You Should Surely Know By Now -

Conrad is currently reading Longenrich's biography of Heinrich Himmler and is about 1/3 of the way through it.  Go me.  In the past 50 pages or so I've seen the expansion of the SS (Ol' Heinie being the Reichsfuhrer SS, doncha know) to tens of thousands of members, with HH all the while trying to arm them.  What he wanted was a military organisation, not a paramilitary organisation, which meant trying to keep the verrrry suspicious Reichswehr (the Teuton army) off his back and out of the picture.  This enormous expansion of the SS meant all sorts of concomitant re-organisation and administration, with titles being created and responsibility being assigned.  Ol' Heinie, like the consummate pen-pusher he was, excelled at this kind of work.  Art!

I think it's an hideous daub, but the Nazis banned it, so it's here.

     The above will give you an idea of the amount of activity HH carried out to keep his turf free from competitors and expand it where possible.

     HH also had some very odd personal beliefs and biases.  He used to be an ardent Catholic in his youth, but had replaced that religion with the pseudo-religion of Nazism.  Thus, he came to detest Christianity and churches, so he came up with the special project of -

     HEXENSONDERAUFTRAG!

     Which translates as - er - "Special Witch Project".  The idea was to find out exactly how many witches had been burned in the past, not because Ol' Heinie cared about people dying horribly - this was the man running the concentration camps, after all - but because it was a propaganda club to beat the Teuton churches with.  Art!

Heinie's first love?

     This fervent pursuit of mass atrocity as committed by the eeeevil Christians led to equally fervid hyperbole on the part of Ol' Heinie and his carpet-chewing chums like Walter Darré, who paraded the prospect of millions who had been " - murdered, tortured to death and burnt" in possibly the most hideous foreshadowing ever.  HH himself settled for merely tens of thousands, which is actually more realistic.  Art!

     The academic consensus is that 60,000 people, mostly female, were given the small taste of Hades treatment, which is bad enough in itself.  However, it was spread out over three centuries and so equals about 200 roasties per annum.

     ANYWAY HH decided to set up the HSU under the auspices of the Department For Researching The Opposition.  It was staffed by fourteen full-time employees, who worked away for five years, producing an end file of 33,846 pages of data.  It began in 1939, when Ol' Heinie was still expanding his empire, acquiring power and fending off rivals, or, in other words, busy busy busy.  Yet he took time to arrange this peculiar project. 

     It came to an end in 1944, after the expenditure of RM14,000,000 (I calculated on the average salary of RM100 per month), quite possibly thanks to other events in the real world interrupting HH's flagellation fantasies.  Art!

Perhaps this?

     It was a literal white-paper elephant, since Herr Schickelgruber had gone cold on the idea of persecuting the churches, and all excrement in Nazi Germany flowed downhill from his office.  Besides which, if you're whipping up a pro-war frenzy, you can always benefit from patriotic pastors preaching Prussianism*.  And what better to motivate your hapless stubble-hoppers than defending a noble Christian bulwark against the Godless Bolshevik hordes?

     That's not all for Ol' Heinie and the unpleasant pong of punishment pyres.  He also got an incarcerated political prisoner, one Herbert Blank, to write short historical fictions about poor persecuted pagans.  Friedrich Norfolk - I'm not making these names up, honest! - one of the staff at the Department for Researching the Opposition, was given the task of writing a novel on the Burn Witchy Burn theme.  Art!

Kyle's Isles

From the essence of evil, to the soothing balm of South Canadian islands.  You can't say we're not eclectic here at the blog.  Yes, this is Number 7 from Kyle "Geography King"'s list of Interesting Islands.  Today we look at Kodiak Island.  Art!

     That's Kodiak Island, and it only looks small because it's next to Alaska, the largest South Canadian state.  In real life Kodiak is the second-largest island in the nation, totalling 3,600 square miles.  Art!

     It's one of those proper islands, without any bridges to the mainland, access being by ferry or airport.  It is home to the largest South Canadian Coastguard base, and the second largest bears there are: the Kodiaks, who are like grizzlies on steroids.  Art!

     The island's population is 13,000, the largest concentration of whom are in the capital of - Kodiak!  You might have guessed that.  Up until 1867 Alaska was part of the Ruffian Empire, at which point the Tsar needed more spending money and he sold it to the South Canadians, who got a bargain.  This explains some of the architecture on the island.  Art!

A Journey With Bernie

Bernie Wrightson, that is, master of the macabre.  Conrad dug up a geek's website on teh Interwebz which was devoted to the artwork Bernie did for FPG, the collectible card people.  There was a lot of stuff in their inventory.  Art!

     Ol' Bern did four base packs of cards for FPG between 1993 and 1996.  The first set, "Master Of The Macabre", consisted of 90 cards.  45 of these were card-sized reprints of older BW work, with 45 being commissioned by FPG, and I can see in the verrrrry long list on the webpage - 

About Hans Scharler – About Things | A Hans Scharler Blog (nothans.com)

    - that they include 'Loggerhead', which we've already featured here.  I suspect that others on the list are present on the "Print" website that I've been taking art from.  Let me try a little experiment.  Art!

     Hmmmmm.  Not what I expected.  O well there's always tomorrow.

Ruffian Art Installation Triumphs Over Decadent West!

Well maybe.  I'm sure you're happy to hear that the oil tanks at the Proletarsk depot are still burning, leaving a wasteland of collapsed, blackened, contorted infrastructure behind.  In fact what's left is inspiring enough to be publicised as Diesel Damien Hurst, so stark and affecting is it.  Art!

     They can't start charging for tourist just yet, as you can see, the fires still haven't gone out, and dead tourists cannot generate repeat custom.  Things flammable seem - only 'seem' - to have quietened down to the extent that you can now stand within 100 yards of a tank and not risk being blown apart or burnt down.

     In case you missed it, the Ukrainians have meted out the same measure to the Atlas oil depot.  Art!

"MIRATORG"

Also Going Up In Smoke

Meanwhile, in Modern-day Mordor, the economy is circling the drain.  Thanks to everything being invested in the war economy, minor fripperies like schools, hospitals, roads, dams, pensions, sewers, electricity generation and eggs are in short supply.  Art!

     These are the intercepted drones and missiles that Charlie Chipmunk Cheeks had lofted at Ukraine on the 26th; 203 out of 236.  Total cost = $1.3 billion dollars, or sufficient to pay off the Ruffian deficit for the whole of the year to date.  But Bloaty Gas Tout can cheer his people on with the declaration "Your mortgage subsidies are now going to into bombing Ukrainian civilians!  Be proud!"

     Bumbletuck.

Finally - 

I am typing this up on Wednesday, which is PAY DAY! thank the merciful lord aloft.  Now all I have to do is avoid all those Dog Buns! adverts on teh Interwebz that are trying to empty my wallet.

Maghelele!

*  No, it's not a proper word.  Yet.