O Boy We've Not Had One Of These For Ages!
By 'One Of These' I mean TREE LAW, which is an entire sub-Reddit all to itself. You probably don't pay much attention to trees unless you're buying a house, in which case the surveyors like to pay attention to nearby trees. Their root systems, you see, are extensive and can grow into and damage building foundations. Otherwise you may regard them as a picturesque part of the background. True, but - how long does it take a sapling to grow to maturity? Decades, not weeks or months. Art!
That's a California Redwood, with puny human for scale. Obviously - of course! - these are exceptional trees that can be up to 1,000 years old, which gets across the point that they are OLD and take ages to grow.
Now for the story. Descendant Narrator - hereafter DN - starts the story about a hundred years previously, with his great-grandfather, who owned a large piece of property out in the sticks. He passed the land onto his children, who in turn passed on the pieces to their children. Thus DN ended up with a plot, upon which he caused to be transported a one-room schoolhouse as a country cabin. Art!
CAUTION! For illustrative purposes only. Reality may not be so idyllic
One of his cousins inherited the plot behind DNs, a chap we will call Mister Bottomhole, because he was one. The important point to note here is that there was a forested area on DN's side of the property line.
MB then proceeded to build his dream house on the plot. Both his house and DN's cabin were viable because, over time, the city had grown ever-closer so that water and power could be plumbed and cabled in.
There was a fly in MB's bespoke ointment: those pesky trees! They obscured his view. He told DN to get rid of them, to which DN responded with - Art!
The next time DN and wife visited the cabin, he immediately noticed the tallest trees on his property were missing, only stumps remaining. TREE LAW!
How do you prove MB did this dastardly deed? Why, you check your trail cameras for footage, which showed MB and his sons cutting down the trees. Art!
Trail cameras were critical in a British tree law case, which showed another awful neighbour cutting down a Redwood and then claiming it had been damaged in a storm. It cost them so much they had to sell their house to satisfy damages. Ooopsie.
Armed with incontrovertible evidence, DN bearded the dragon in it's lair, which is to say he accosted MB with the footage.
'They were diseased and I did you a favour,' claimed MB.
'Show me the cut lumber,' cordially requested DN.
'Er - ah - O! I just remembered I don't have any,' stammered MB (I don't know if he really stammered or not, it just seemed apt).
'I am going to take you to court,' was DN's final sentence.
'Go on then!' rashly dared MB.
DN then contacted a tree expert at the nearest university, which is when he became aware of Tree Law. Said expert came out to visit, checked the ten stumps, said the trees were all perfectly healthy and - TREE LAW! - worth $10,000 dollars each. To clarify, this is what you'd have to pay to get trees of the same species, age and height.
Sadly, at no point in this story does DN say what kind of trees they were. Sorry, you can't have everything. Since we get no location either, I can't even make an educated guess at what species they were. Art!
That's a Red Maple, the most common tree in South Canada and it'll do as a stand-in.
The fun had only begun. DN says the trees were tracked down via DNA, which is bunkum as trees don't have DNA, but Conrad doesn't doubt there are ways to match cut lumber to stumps by virtue of the rings.
It turns out MB had sold the lumber to a company, who immediately refunded the money and agreed to bear witness against him if needed, provided they weren't charged.
MB was in very deep doodoo at this stage. He was guilty of trespass, vandalism, destruction of property and theft, to the value of at least $500,000. The only way he could raise that much money would be to sell his house. Ooopsie. Not only that, his job was of a sensitive nature and a criminal conviction might very well result in him losing that job. Ooopsie again.
Here is where DN chickened out. MBs and his own father came to broker a deal: MB's dad would pay 'some money' - the amount was coyly kept secret - and gift DN one of their family's lots. Then DN would drop the charges. Which is what happened (booh! lack of dramatic ending!). MB's siblings were all furious that their inheritance was going to be significantly less. Art!
A metaphor for MB's situation
Losing part of your inheritance was far better for MB than ending up jobless, homeless and penniless. Swings and roundabouts.
I hope you enjoyed another saga of TREE LAW!
You Don't Get Away That Easily
Conrad has repeatedly said that China is not Ruffia's ally; they share a common enemy, that being South Canada. China has been gouging Ruffia on oil prices these past two and a half years, refuses to trade in rubles and of late has been really tightening up on trade liable to be affected by secondary sanctions. Art!
I cannot readily find up-to-date graphs on this so I'll just have to spell it out. Chinese banks have stopped taking payments from Ruffia because of the risk of secondary sanctions, which get involved if China is doing business with entities or people on the proscribed list. This is catastrophically bad news for Ruffia as 30% of it's exports are to China. The Populous Dictatorship, on the other hand, only does about 2% of it's overall trade with Ruffia, so it has a lot to lose if the sanctions ban-hammer comes down. Taking their lead from China, Turkey, most of the Middle East, Dubai and the 'Stan nations have also started refusing payments, which is going to cripple Ruffian imports.
It gets worse. There is going to be a $30 billion loss by year end thanks to the deficit in Chinese yuan.
The source for the above data is the Ruffian Ministry of Economic Development and the Ruffian Central Bank CEO, our old friend Elvira. Art!
No, NOT the Elvira with a push-up bra. This is Elvira looking a bit sad four years ago, and I can't resist putting up the title. Art!
From September 2020. Nothing to do with China, I admit, but Ooooh! the schadenfreude.
We now need a short punchy picture item.
Our Journey With Bernie
Wrightson, that is. Here we are with Number 15 of the 1993 FPG Card collection, entitled 'Heads Up' and I just knew there'd be a decapitation in there. Art!
There you go.
I Was Going To Take A Picture
Except my phone's battery is dead, so you will have to imagine Your Humble Scribe looking out of the window at a wet landscape, a teapot and strawberries on a tray in the foreground and the susurrus of tyres on wet tarmac. I'm still going to take a constitutional into Lesser Sodom because we need cream cheese and Red Dragon Sweet Chilli Sauce. Perhaps a bottle of soda water, too. Art!
Spicy nectar
Finally -
I'm debating whether to start organising all those loose German counters from "The Great War In Europe", because to get them Blu-Takd to a sheet of A4 in numerical order means arranging them in numerical order first. It could take hours. Mind you, I do have a few very long Youtube vlogs to watch. Art!
Hours of fun for compulsives.
Pip pip!
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