Bear With Me On This
NO! that is not a typo. It is an hilarious joke I tell you, hilarious! Laugh or your descendants are guaranteed to go slave in the uranium mines when I take over.
This Intro is going to concern a catalytic cake causing celebratory catastrophe, to coin a phrase. Art!
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| THIS IS NOT THE CAKE IN QUESTION |
Conrad no longer bakes much, but what you're looking at there is his 4-layer carrot cake, which had later to be held together with bamboo skewers when being transported. As is visible, it had an awful lot of sugar frosting in layers and on top. Picture taken when BOOJUM! was in it's infancy, 2013.
So, how much does this cost and how much would Conrad charge a paying customer? The glib response is "How much do the ingredients cost - there's your answer."
WRONG.
The ingredients don't assemble themselves into a cake, do they? No, for those of you confused about that. Art!
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| Mingle, guys, mingle! |
It might take two hours to create a carrot cake like the one you see here, and if you charge labour at £10 per hour, that's £20 before you factor in the cost of ingredients. How much gas is consumed in baking it? How much did the baking tins cost? What price the food processor you used, the measuring spoons, the measuring cups, the dishwasher needed afterwards? Charging £25 might only break even.
Here the Reddit via Youtube conflict about a wedding cake begins. Mary, the fiancée friend of Baking Poster, wanted her to bake a wedding cake. BP only rarely baked at this point but agreed. Mary wanted a 4-tier wedding cake, each tier of a different flavour, with sugar flowers and fondant decorations. Art!
Well, Mary wanted a gift from her registry from BP as well, because apparently a 4-tier wedding cake was merely a 'favour'. Really? Conrad has looked up the price of a 4-tier wedding cake and here in the UK you're talking £700, so say $1000 for South Canada. BP then puts her foot down and says, okay I'll get you a gift from your registry. Meanwhile the cake will cost you $700, with a $350 deposit by Friday and the balance 24 hours before the wedding. Mary is agog at how costly this is, so BP explains that this is not merely the ingredients, it's the transportation, her hubbo's help, the cake size, the decorations, the late order and most of all TIME (see two paragraphs previously).
Mary tries it on by saying 'forget the gift just supply the free cake' to which BP responds that this is now the deal and she's not budging. Art!
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| Artists impression of BP's shiny spine |
There is radio silence from Mary after this convo, so all BP gets back is third-party from her friend Pam, who is one of the guests.
It seems that Mary had blown $60,000 on the wedding so far on, when the budget was $30,000 (oopsie): her dress ($5,000), flowers, decorations, photos, catering, an open bar, entertainment, a mansion venue and flying her family in to stay at an hotel. Frank was unhappy at all the expense - or so it is claimed. Pam and BP agree that Mary is normally frugal and can't understand why the Budget-Blowing Bridezilla. Art!
Pam contacts BP and says that the cake appears to have been a catalyst between Mary and Frank. She claims that it was Frank (and his family) who wanted all the expensive options when Mary wanted the cheaper ones, and that she was dead set on the cake because it was the only thing chosen that was 100% her choice. Frank disagreed because he expected the cake to be free -
Here an aside. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense if he'd splurged $60K on the wedding and was jibbing over a $700 cake, but we have to go with what we've got.
Remember "Frank was unhappy at all the expense"? His complaining had been very unwisely done via text, meaning there was an explicit trail of his whining, and you're probably ahead of me here because Mary got hold of the texts, which she felt portrayed her as 'a greedy bitch'.
Here another aside. How was she the villain when Frank and his family were the ones demanding ever more expense?
The wedding was subsequently 'postponed' which meant cancelled. Mary posted a long apology text to everyone, cancelled her 'Relationship' status on Facebook, moved in with her parents, and was incommunicado from then on. No word on what Frank did next, apart from complain about the written-off costs of the no-longer-happening wedding.
'4-Tears'? 'More like 4-Thousand-Tears'.
An Hideous Embarrassment
Or, a caution not to jump to conclusions. Art!
What's this? Well, people were instantly announcing that it was a Ruffian 'friendly-fire' incident with an Su-35 shooting down an Su-25. You can see the moment the AAM hits the target in the first photo, and the second shows the firing aircraft looping away, with the damaged target careering on.
More cautious counsel pointed out that Su-25 is a ground-attack aircraft that operates at very low level. Later on, it emerged that both aircraft were on the border with Ukraine, and that the intercepted aircraft had crashed 6 miles inside Ukrainian territory. Art!
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| Before |
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| Very definitely after |
Here is where things get realllly interesting. The crashed aircraft was rapidly identified as a Ruffian Su-70 Okhotnik B, which the orcs call a 'Heavy Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle' which is supposedly stealth-enabled. A very large drone, in other words, although how stealthy it really is given the very low build-quality is open to question. Art!
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| Rivets the enemy of stealth |
The Ruffians have only built 2 of these and they are costed at about $18 million each. Quite what they were doing so close to the front lines is a bit of a mystery, but perhaps testing in a live environment, with the Su-35 being the one controlling the drone 'wingman'. One can see why it got shot down, since it was heading deeper into Ukraine. Kyrylo Budanov probably cracked a smile at seeing this present delivered, second-hand, to the GUR. After about 48 hours it will be airlifted to South Canada and diligently taken apart.
Expect none of this news to ever, ever, ever be broadcast in Ruffia, because it paints them in a bad light.
The Green Reshoots Of Discovery
I had a bit of data left over from lambasting "Snow White" so you can believe it's going to see the light of day here. "All The Money In The World" spent 10 days re-shooting the scenes featuring the disgraced Kevin Spacey, replacing him with Christopher Plummer, for a cost of $10 million. Quite reasonable, to be honest, and Plummer's performance was praised by critics. Art!
Then there was "Geostorm", which I've not seen, nor do I intend to. Their reshoots cost $15 million, taking 11 days to manage, and they didn't save the film from losing lots of money.
"Justice League" went in for 2 months of reshoots, which seems rather greedy, and which added $25 million to the total. Art!
I have another FYI about the difference between Likes and Dislikes from the official Disney trailer for "Snow White".
Or, in other words, for every person who liked it, 28 did not. SW, the film that nobody asked for, nobody wants and that nobody is going to see. Disney will plunge ahead regardless, because of the Sunk Cost Fallacy. I also noted that they finished original shooting in June of 2022. What's been keeping them for the past two and a half years? Reshoots!
Who's Been Poaching My Titles?
If you've followed the blog religiously over the past year, then you will recall that Conrad shamelessly included a fan-fiction he wrote years ago in the regular blog, split into 200-word instalments. The title was "City In The Sky".
What did I espy on the BBC News website this morning? Art!
I shall be contacting my solicitors*.
Finally -
Can't go for my constitutional into Lesser Sodom yet, as I am alone with Edna. I have been watching the clouds roll in and smother the sunshine for the past three hours. Hopefully the monsoon rains will abstain until I get back.
Pip pip!
* Only joking, I don't have any. As if!
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