A Park For The Middle Aged

Sounds Terminally Dull, Doesn't It?

By design it would be completely flat, without any forms of entertainment at all - no swings or slides or adventure playgrounds - and a shallow pond sporting a single plastic duck.  To accommodate the aged and infirm, there would be a bench every 10 yards.  YARDS not metres, none of the johnny-come-lately Metric nonsense.  There would be a small, well-appointed café serving tea and cake, without any wifi and with a phone-signal jammer.  They would have a monitor screen playing DVDs of all the classic detective programs from the Sixties onward, because once you hit middle-age, your Murder Mystery genes activate.  Art!

Nedry is about to get &

     Fooled you.  Ho ho.

     You see <preens moustache> 'Jurassic' is a period from the Mesozoic era, and what does 'Mesozoic' mean but Greek for "Middle Life".  Hence the initial Intro intro.  There might be a bit of mileage in just such a park, perhaps patrolled by a contemporary of The Child Catcher, who would be armed, not with a net, but a cattle-prod and a Tazer and authorisation to impound errant teens in his Mobile Mortification Machine -

     ANYWAY enough of Conrad's sordid imaginings.  Let us move onto cold hard facts, for I have been doing a bit of data-digging.  Art!

     Righhhhhhht.  A ten-ton thirty-foot dinosaur is able to tiptoe up behind people completely undetected.  Or - is it their loyal pet?

     Conrad hopes the estate of Michael Crichton is getting royalties from the "Jurassic" franchise, because the whole field has made in excess of $6 billion at the box office over the space of 31 years.

     HOWEVER! (that word again) remember, gentle reader, that 'Box Office' does NOT mean 'Profit for the studio' since said studio (Universal in this instance) gets back 50% of B.O. at best.  Now, let us look at the films in chronological order.  I have fudged the figures for Promotion and Distribution since these aren't easily accessible, working on a sliding scale of between 16% and 10%.   Art!

JURASSIC PARK 1993

     Who's your great-great-great grandaddy?  On a mere - as it would be nowadays - $63 million budget (+ $6 mill for Prom & Dist), this one clocked up $1,104 billion at the box office, which translates to $552 million for the studio.  Thus a profit of $482 million.  The good lord aloft only knows how much they made in merchandising.  With a bottom line like that they were doomed to have sequels.  Art!

JURASSIC PARK: THE LOST WORLD 1997

     Conrad may have seen this.  There was a van falling off a cliff with a shattered windscreen and Peter Stormare was a villain, a role he seems to be rather typecast in nowadays.  That's it.  Obviously not that memorable.

     ANYWAY on a $73 million budget (plus $8.5 for P & D) it hooked in $618 million at the box office, thus earning $309 for the studio, and thus a profit of $227 million.  Probably a disappointment for the suits as they spent probably $20 million more than the original and got but half the return.  See above paragraph and lack of novelty for reasons why.  Art!

JURASSIC PARK III 2001

     Definitely haven't seen this, nor did a lot of people.  The budget had increased, as they do over time, to $93 million (plus $10 million P & D), for a collapse in box office to $368 million, netting Universal $184 million and thus a profit of (!) only $80 million.  Or, one-fifth of the original's profits on a budget grown by a third.  Not a good ratio of return-on-investment.  The suits seemed to have realised that, in the words of the old aphorism, you can take the pitcher to the well once too often.

     So that was the end of the "Jurassic Park" franchise, which is fair enough, how do you expect to attract paying customers when there's a significant risk of being ripped apart for dino-dinner?

     But the story is not over.  Not by a long way.

More Of Hex And Vex

As we all know by now, Conrad is a dinosaur himself, who uses pens to inscribe on processed tree - 'writing' as the ancients knew it.  Thus I have been able to dip back into "The Great War In Europe" thanks to my notes.  We are now at Move Seven, October of 1915 on the Italian Front.  Art!

     The front in all it's glory.  Let us have a more detailed look.  Art!

     This is the Trentino Front, where you can see the mountains severely constrict movement; those black-bordered hexes are impassable, meaning that in real life they were unscalable mountain peaks.  The Italians don't have the numbers or firepower to mount a successful attack here, and the Austrians don't have the numbers to do anything but defend.  Art!

     The Isonzo Front.  This is how it looked in real life; constant Italian battering against Austrian defences in the mountains, with consequent heavy casualties.  Because the rules allow for the reconstitution and re-use of divisions previously destroyed, I cannot see the Italians (or Austrians) making a breakthrough here, just as in real life.  Unless a Teuton Army suddenly and secretly arrives* .....

Ladle On The Venomous Invective!

Not really.  I am referring, of course - obviously! - to "Joe Blogs", whose Youtube channel is eminently safe for work, and the strongest term Joe uses to excoriate the Ruffian economy with is 'interesting'.  That seems to be an euphemism for 'ALL WILL END IN FIRE AND BLOOD!' and here's another reminder of the ruble being rubble.  Art!

     As Joe pointed out with a great big cheery smile, the ruble has dropped from ₽84 in June to ₽100 today, and it's been hovering around the 100 mark since last week.  When the Toilet Paper Limit was reached in early October last year, the Ruffian Central Bank started throwing liquid funds at the problem and had the slide reversed within a week.  This doesn't seem to be happening now.  

     Joe speculated that the ruble's demise as a global currency may result in Ruffia having to use other internationally-traded currencies, which will make the ruble even more worthless.

     So much for BRICS supplanting the dollar, hmmmm?  Art!

"No, no, I just have a bit of dust in my eye," lied Dimya.

"The War Illustrated Edition 197 5th January 1945"

I think we're coming to the end of this edition, so perhaps the next one will be allowed to cover the Battle of the Bulge, as by 19th January the Teuton offensive had definitely failed.  We shall see.  In the meantime - Art!

     They gloss over the fact that the design is pinched wholesale from the Teuton jerrican, which was much prized as a trophy in the desert war.  Eventually Perfidious Albion began making their own, and I bet they didn't pay the Teutons for patent infringement, tee hee!

     What you see here is a forward filling-point, where the cans will be filled from tankers, then loaded up to be taken to dumps behind the front lines for fuelling the vehicles there.  The acres of cans you see here are one reason why Allied vehicles didn't get abandoned thanks to running out of fuel.

Mystery MacGuffins Return

Since I unsubscribed from "The Daily Beast" you have had to go without all the Temu tat they had in their advertising sidebars, which featured gadgets and gizmos utterly baffling to the average Briton, as they were all made in The Populous Dictatorship and aimed at South Canadian consumers.

     Pine no longer!  Art?

     I've no idea what it is and suspect you don't, either.  Answers in the Comments, ta very much**.

Finally -

Better get downstairs and see about that Gingerbread Mug Cake.

*  A happened in real life.

**  In case you were desperately keen to find out.

     Not that I feel any more enlightened.