No! That Is NOT A Typo
You should surely know by now that Conrad makes the English language sit up and dance for him, so if there's a particular spelling in the title, THEN IT IS THERE DELIBERATELY.
For this Intro, we are going to be flitting lightly o'er the Atlantic, to Dolton Village, which is a municipality in the state of Illinois. Calling it a 'village' is a misnomer, it has over 20,000 inhabitants and is thus eligible for both a Mayor and a police force. Art!
Except the mayor, one Tiffany Henyard, seems to have picked up her qualifications and experience from Modern-day Mordor, since she used her position to enrich herself and her cronies. Her position has been somewhat fraught for a couple of years, because she started Project Plunder a while back. Take the Police Chief, Acting Chief Lacey, who was incautious enough to stick around and get arrested. Art!
Now indicted on nine charges
Matey here was getting enormous amounts of overtime pay, which is an impressive feat as he didn't qualify for any. Art!
Typically in South Canada, if you're on a salary then you don't get overtime. You had to work twenty hours over the weekend? Tough. You're salaried. Conrad is willing to bet a platinum doubloon that Lacey works to a salary band, not an hourly rate.
There were other pigs with their snout in the trough, too, no pun intended. Two other police officer got almost a quarter of a million in overtime between themselves. Art!
Ol' Tiff herself was very generous to herself with the official village credit card, burning through as much as $40,000 on Amazon purchases.
In one day.
Nothing that was purchased over this timestamp was ever quantified or accounted for.
To exactly nobody's surprise, the Special Investigator brought in by the village trustees declared that the credit card spending was 'out of control'. Art!
<Ahem>
Besides online shopping, there were lots of expensive meals and trips to the seaside, for which receipts were occasionally provided. Usually not. Requests by the trustees for financial statements in February were - refused.
Really, this is not the way to make yourself look good in public, despite having the village bank account pay for your publicity posters. Art!
When the SI held a town hall meeting to explain, it was an event in itself, as Ol' Tiff Who Likes To Stiff had been frantically trying to abort or delay the investigation. She was conspicuously absent at said meeting, which is a good thing as the mood was extremely ugly and she definitely would not have walked out, rather she'd have been carried out on a ambulance gurney.
Okay, the enormously unfunny punchline to the meeting is that the village was in the red to the value of <drum roll> - $3,650,000. Not only had Ol' Tiff run through their operating fund, she had gone below and beyond the call of duty and really sunk them.
It gets worse. A Commenter on the Youtube channel I caught this farrago on said that 'vendors', who are presumably entities selling goods or services to the village of Dolton, are owed $6,000,000. Art!
Dateline May 13th 2024
It gets worse. You see, if you didn't go along with Tiff's criminal cons, frauds, thefts or embezzlements, she would sack you. Consequently there are pending lawsuits totalling $33,000,000 in the wings from people claiming unfair dismissal.
So, where is Ol' Tiff? You know, she who was so fond of splashing her face everywhere and basking in media attention.
Nobody knows. She hasn't been seen since the town hall meeting, her mayoral staff state that she is 'out' and have no idea when (or if) she'll be back. Hiding with your head under the blankets hoping that the nasty men in black suits will go away is not a winning strategy, especially if one of her criminal compatriots decides to cop a plea for a lesser sentence.
Watch this space!
Told You So!
You ought to recall the name 'Jake Broe' because he's probably the best commentator on the situation in Ukraine that I've come across. He did an in-depth look at what the current events transpiring might be, and - guess what? He brought up the "Sunk Cost Fallacy" proposition that we here at BOOJUM! mentioned earlier this month. Art!
There is also another clip from the 'Kyiv Post', where they mention the amount of money the Kremlin has supposedly 'invested' in creating defensive lines on the Russo-Ukrainian border and five miles inside Ruffia. Money you might call 'sunk' in every sense of the word, because the Ukrainians went through these alleged 'defences' as if they weren't there. Which, knowing Ruffia, they might not have been. Art!
There's a couple of possibilities here, which I'm guessing at because there are no pictures or video clips of these alleged defences, so how effective they might have been is a moot point.
Option One: they use the same technique that the Teutons did with the Maginot Line of Second Unpleasantness vintage. Rather than assault it head on, the Teutons simply went around the north-western region where it ended. Art!
Option Two: This is the one where various Ruffian generals spontaneously leap from windows. These defence lines never existed in the first place, because - really, who's going to dare invade a nuclear superpower? - and a clutch of senior officers suddenly have expensive yachts and villas in Tuscany. Art!
Jake also advised that the 'Deep State' maps showing Ukraine's progress inside Modern-day Mordor are deliberately at least four days behind the times, for OPSEC.
Conrad Is ANGRY!
That is to say, angrier than usual. Yes, this is connected with Codewords, which I have been solving over the past few days thanks to being on leave and having time enough to spare. Thankfully my recent experience of reading classical Roman poetry stood me in good stead.
PANEGYRIC: Praise, made in public, which you might also call an eulogy. It derives from the Greek 'Paneguris', meaning 'A public meeting'. Pseuds of the Enlightenment liked to use it in order to sound clever. Had I not read the classics extensively I might never have got this. But I did, and you can now have a panegyric for me. Art!
I know one sepia-toned spurge this will annoy
ENZYMATIC: To do with enzymes. Art!
Enzymes are dull
FASCIA: You may be familiar with the surface of a car dashboard, which is fair enough, yet this word has a couple of other definitions. In biology it can mean a distinctive band of colour; in architecture it can be part of an architrave or a flat surface above a shop window. The sense of 'band' comes from the Latin for 'Bundle', which is 'Fascis'. Art!
"The War Illustrated Edition 192 October 1944"
Here we encounter OPSEC again, as this piece-work deliberately delayed publication of anything potentially important for at least two weeks, so as to prevent the Teutons from picking anything valuable from them. Art!
This is a British armoured regiment I have a soft spot for, as I've got about half a dozen books of memoirs or unit histories. These pictures are supposedly in the Teuton village of Beeck, though I suspect it might actually be Geilenkirchen. You can see a Sherman to port in the top picture, and a much smaller 'Honey', as the text has it. These were South Canadian M5 Stuart tanks, nicknamed 'Honey' by the British when first used in North Africa. These small, very nippy tanks were using in the Ranger's reconnaissance squadron, as their task was to be sneaky and peeky, not bang-bang shooty-shooty.
Excuse Me?
I was looking for a short pictorial item to polish things off and - what on earth is this? Art!
NO! I am not going to click on the link, thanks to being on MI5, UNIT and Spectrum's watch list already. I don't want the SAS abseiling in through the bay window again, because they grind broken glass into the carpet so.
ANYWAY what is Hydrobromic acid?
Hmmm used as an intermediate agent in producing bromine compounds, and as a disinfectant. Contact with the skin causes severe burns and these can be fatal if ingested -
Okay, that's enough, definitely glad I didn't click that link.
Finally -
That's all, meatsacks!
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