More Of Bridges

I Know What You're Expecting Here

An Intro all about Lloyd, Jeff and Beau Bridges.  Well NO.  I mean, having mentioned them I now have to dig up a photograph featuring them or the Facebook twod mods will be here, slavering like wolves at the prospect of punishing a perpetrator.  Art!

     That's enough for the moment.  You see, I was pondering on other versions of bridges whilst typing up the Intro about Bailey and Inglis and Portable Boat Equipment bridges, and what immediately jumped into my mind was one of James Blish's more megaconstructs, namely "The Bridge".  I'm not sure how good an image we can garnish of this structure, but I will impel Art into action with this cattle-prod that just happens to be lying around - 

Bridges plural

     These are depictions of 'The Bridge', a gigantic structure being constructed within the atmosphere of Jupiter, because only a planet of Jupiter's size can generate the data needed for the secret research being conducted, which is to create anti-gravity.  The Bridge is thirty miles high, eleven miles wide and fifty-four miles long, it's foundations being a flotilla of spaceships that were all incidentally destroyed when placing them.  The whole structure is being erected and maintained by remote-control vehicles and assemblages - what you might call 'drones' today.  It's present in Blish's novel "They Shall Have Stars", which was it's UK title, and in South Canada it was - Art!

Mind you, it was published 68 years ago

    Conrad was convinced he'd used the following bridges previously, but I've searched the blog and it never came up, so I am obviously imagining things.  Art!

     Yes, this is a still from "Kelly's Heroes", that rather gory satirical war film located in Yugoslavia pretending to be France.  Here you  can see the original bridge, still burning after being bombed by the South Canadian Air Force, and the damaged (though not flaming) pontoon bridge, which is merely one of two pairs of bridges, because - Art!

     This is the catchy song that plays over the end credits, sung by the Mike Curb Congregation.  Art!

     Behold the BRICS!  This is supposedly an alternative economic array of nations, that will supplant the EU, the Global West, Uncle Tom Cobley and all.  They are: Brazil, Ruffia, India, China, South Africa, Ethiopia, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia.  Good luck with that: China and India have been skirmishing along their common border for 60 years and waged a brief war there in 1962.  Dozens of soldiers have been killed on either side since June 2020.  South Africa is an economic basket-case and Ethiopia remains one of the poorest countries in Africa.  Iran and Saudi Arabia hate hate hate each other.

     What does this have to do with our title today?  O I thought you'd never ask!  Because the proposed common currency for this amalgamation of ambition is the "BRICS Bridge", possibly named because they want to bridge differences between nations.  Again, good luck with that, trying to get agreement between 10 different nations with wildly different currencies and economies, four of them being dictatorships that all want their currency to be the benchmark.  Art!

     There you go, 'bridges' plural.  I'd heard of this album yet never heard it, so I booted it up on Youtube and played it.  It was released in 1979 and was done on a budget that makes a shoestring look like a steel hawser, recorded in a hurry on borrowed equipment and home-made electronic effects boxes.  From my first listen, it definitely has a post-punk feel about about it.  For the life of me I can't see where bridges come into it.  Art!

     This shows the aftermath of the Zeebrugge Raid of April 1918, during the First Unpleasantness.  The bally Hun, you see, were using Zeebrugge as a base for marauding destroyers and U-boats, and the Royal Navy did not appreciate this AT ALL.  So they decided to stick their oar in, to keep to aquatic metaphors.

     "But Conrad, what has this to do with bridges?" I hear you plaintively call.

     You're never going to successfully integrate with our Continental cousins, are you?  "Zeebrugge" is Belgian for "Sea Bridge".  The arrow that points to 'Exploded Submarine' is where there used to be a bridge.  Art!

     Then there's the game of bridge, which is so boring I'm going to end this Intro.

More Mockery Of Modern-Day Mordor

Things are getting worse in the Ruffian economy by the day.  They will continue to get worse - the Kremlin is publishing projected income via fines from 2025 to 2027 of ₽600 billion, as well as increasing taxes on everything taxable, including gravity and air.

     Now they are doing a deal with Pakistan, which also has a parlous economy, in which barter takes place rather than, you know, proper money.  Art!

     The terms are that Ruffia will supply 15,000 tons of chickpeas and 10,000 tons of lentils, in return for 20,000 tons of rice, 15,000 tons of mandarins and 10,000 tons of potatoes.

     It's accepted that the barter economy began to die out with the introduction of real, hard, physical cash in Mesopotamia.  Three thousand years ago.

     Doing a deal like this makes things even harder for Ruffia, because potatoes and mandarins are both perishable goods with a limited lifespan, liable to attack from insects and disease unless properly stored.  Nor can you pay your employees in oranges and potatoes, though some employers will surely try; they need money to be able to afford things like rent, food, gravity and air.  This will probably introduce a middleman or broker, who will sell the fruit and veg for a handsome profit, pocket the profit and a % of what's left as commission and pass on 66% of the actual value to the employer.  Art!

Some hapless orc's salary has gone putrid

What Can Possibly Go Wrong?

You ought to know what Conrad and the BOOJUM! staff overall - Steve, Oscar, Art, The Guard Hog and the Hard Hog and the rarely-mentioned Messenger Mice - think of cryptocurrencies by now, thanks to the portmanteau word we dreamed up for them: 'scamble', that being a combination of 'scam' and 'gamble'.

     You ought to also know that we trust Donold Judas Trump slightly less than his middle name.  Art!

     He has now launched his very own cryptocurrency, 'World Liberty Financial', details of which are very limited indeed.  One of his sons, Paint Licker, tried to paint it - do you see wh - O you do - as being for people who can't get money the traditional way, which sounds peculiarly like loan-sharking.  

“It’s very young and very growing,” Trump said of the cryptocurrency industry. “I do believe in it.”

     Proof that this bumbletuck has no knowledge of the rules of grammar.  Or business, either.  Abandon all hope ye who invest here.

     You've been warned!

Art Reflecting Real Life

Conrad has been laying out the counters for the Italian Front Scenarios of "The Great War In Europe", which I ought to have started with, instead of the far larger Western Front 1918 Scenario.  Art!

     Those black lines mark Impassable hexes, and the fluffy white ones are Alpine hexes, which can only be traversed by Mountain Divisions, of which both sides have limited numbers.  The dark green hexes are mountains.  That dotted line is the Italo-Austrian border, and one hex beyond is the Isonzo River.  You can tell how constricted the area for campaigning was by the fact that there were TWELVE Battles Of The Isonzo River.  Simply because the other parts of the front were so unsuited for warfare.  Art!

     The Italians have the advantage in numbers at first, and then later on, too, because all they have to do is concentrate on their own front, whereas the Austro-Hungarians have the Italian, the Serbian and the Eastern front to contend with.
     I did check the countermix for 1917, and there is no inclusion of Teuton Stosstruppen nor British or French reinforcements, possibly because it was deemed un-neccessarily complex to replicate historically.

Finally -

Need to get cracking with the Himmler Homework, 660 pages in.

     Chin chin!