Greed Is God

No, That Is Not A Typo

I know exactly what you're thinking, and which film and actor you're thinking of, not because of the D.A.R.P.A. Telepathy Helmet which I returned from it's long borrow last year and it's not my fault if they lost it again, rather because I'm cleverer than a pack of wild weasels.  Art!

     Only up to a certain point, Gordon, you know, moderation in all things.  Except gin snifters.  Conrad's not going to moderate them.

     Let's do our usual BOOJUM! schtick, as I believe the young people say, and define 'Greed': "Excessive desire as for wealth or power or gin".  What happens when your greed becomes all-devouring and leads you astray in it's service? which is when you elevate it to deity status.  Art!

  This sad sack is John Robert Rush, aged 56, who has just been convicted and sentenced to 4 years in prison for an archetypical 'white collar crime'.  Over in Texas.  Good.  Don't want to have to rub shoulders with the likes of him.

     Today's Intro is an upshot from a Youtube Reddit I bookmarked, where the question asked was "What's the fastest way you've seen a CEO ruin a company?" and one person posted an item about JRR, without naming him.

     Challenge accepted!  Normally the people who post this kind of info are very coy about it and won't name names, for South Canadians are a litigious lot and love to lawyer up.  Art!

     That was enough detail for me to locate news articles about the case.  The précis above is quite inaccurate, because Ol' Johnny was quite sophisticated about his defrauding his employers, possibly having learned the hard way from his 1994 conviction.  All the news sources seem to be working from the same press release, with no details about his prior sentence, which was for wire fraud and counterfeit cheque fraud.  Nobody is naming the Dallas-Fort Worth logistics company he worked at, either, because South Canadians are a litigious lot and love to lawyer up.

     For Your Information, "CFO" is one of what are termed the "C-suite" of job titles at major companies and businesses.  It means "The Fox Is In Charge Of The Chicken Coop" sorry "Chief Financial Officer".  He would be serving alongside the Chief Executive Officer and probably a Chief Operations Officer and Chief Technology Officer.  Art!

     The sordid story is that Ol' Johnny used his position to divert funds into accounts that he either controlled or owned, and he knew to disguise the fraud by using the names of vendors that the company really did business with, and by covering his tracks using the business's internal accounting software.  He got away with it for FOUR YEARS, during which time the embezzlement caused one of the company's businesses to collapse and resulted in mass layoffs.  But Hey!  Ol' Johnny was paying off his debts and piling up the moolah!

     Such criminal activity ought to have been caught earlier, because a company like this ought to have outside, independent third-party audits in order to, O I dunno, PREVENT FRAUD!  Wise after the fact.

     Conrad, ever the cynic, wondered if HR had ever done due diligence with Ol' Johnny before hiring him, and if there's now a bitter Texan HR officer unable to get a job except at MacDonalds, lurking in the background.  Or - did they decide that what the heck, give the white-collar criminal another chance?  Art!

Conrad unsure if Ol' Johnny would agree right now

     The Judge in this case not only sentenced Ol' Johnny to 51 months in a federal prison, he ordered that he pay over ONE MILLION DOLLARS <Doctor Evil pinkie smirk> in restitution.  You recall I mentioned working at MacDonalds?  Yeah, Ol' Johnny will be lucky to manage that when he gets out, and if he does I bet they don't let him work the cash registers.

     Just to put this in perspective, Your Humble Scribe did a bit of quick and dirty Googling, and found that a Chief Financial Officer can pull down between $200,000 and $350,000 per annum.  So matey would have earned between $800,000 and $1,400,000 during his fraud timeline, which makes Conrad wonder what in the holy heck he was blowing his money on?

     I suspect a follow-up story in a few months might have further juicy gossip.

Jake's Joke

If you have been reading BOOJUM! for the last two years, you'll know we refer every so often to truth touchstone Jake Broe, and his Youtube channel of the same name.  One of Jake's earlier identities was as a Nuclear Missile Operations Officer in the South Canadian Air Force, so when he posts about nukes and missiles and Things Exploding, one pays attention.

     Usually.  Art!

If you’re a guy in your early 20s, buy an abandoned Titan II Missile Complex. Go into debt if you have to. This is not satire. You can get a 60-year old missile silo for $749,000. Having a launch control center communicates status. And a missile silo will be a desirable location for people to flee to once World War III starts.

     I think, having come across a couple of similar satirical Tweets, that he was spoofing another Tweeter.  Which made my sincere, if misguided, response look extra silly.

     ANYWAY it did allow me to capture this coooool picture.  Art!

     The Titan II was a single-warhead ICBM of the Sixties, said warhead having a whopping nine megaton yield, meaning that if you hit Moscow with it, Saint Petersburg would also fall down.  The Titan II also had the most ter

     ANYWAY what is the song that plays out at the end of "Dark Star"?  None other than 'Benson Arizona'.  

Benson, Arizona

Blew warm wind through your hair

My body flies the galaxy, my heart longs to be there

Benson, Arizona

The same stars in the sky

But they seemed so much kinder

When we watched them, you and I

     Have we covered this before?  I have a feeling we have.  It's quite profound and we may come back to it again.  You have been warned.

Can You Do That?

Conrad, as you should surely know, is watching the first season of "Lost" and came across that scene where Sawyer, the bottomhole everyone likes to hate, shoots dead a polar bear with a 9 m.m. pistol <hack spit Metric>.  Make that a charging polar bear.  Art!

No bares were harmed

     I ask the question because the Royal Danish Navy's Sirius Dog Sled Patrol - the special forces unit you never knew existed - are armed with intent to kill polar bears on Greenland when they threaten Hom. Sap.  However - hello again! - they use an M1917 rifle firing armour-piercing ammunition.  Whether this stand is realistic or not, you have to admire the testicular fortitude of Sawyer, facing down a metric ton of teeth and talons travelling at twenty miles per hour.

Look What I Found

They are challenging Conrad, whose love of cheesy old zero-budget horror films know no bounds?  Art!

     I may have to break this down and do an in-depth analysis, but first of all I need to go use up those Posh Dogs, for the fridge is calling.

Finally -

I think I used a couple of different charts to show how badly the Ruffian ruble is faring at the moment.  Well, it's gotten worse.  Art!

     It's lost ₽5 overnight and look at the angle of that latest drop.  Dimya must be sweating and there's still three weeks until the Orange Land Whale ascends to the White House and begins to play golf for four years.  Prove me wrong.

Anchors Away!

I Did Kind Of Warn You About This

Because we are returning to a precis about the Ruffian tanker "Eagle S" and it's deliberately cutting an undersea cable with an anchor, details thoughtfully explained by the very well-informed Sal Mercogliano of "What Is Going On With Shipping" Youtube channel.

     Sal used several open-source internet resources that Conrad never knew existed in order to track the Eagle S, including administrative ones.  Art!

     That's the United Arab Emirates, for your information.  Why is it here?  Because Sal tracked down the licencing behind the Eagle S, which is registered in the UAE.  Not Ruffia.  This is to make it harder to track down members of their 'Shadow Fleet' and Sal is pretty sure that if the Finns and Estonians were to send police to that address, all they'd find is an empty room.  Art!

     Sal also explained, for those of us with no merchant marine training or experience, that ships as big as the ES don't simply winch their anchors back in whilst static; what they do is 'walk' along the anchor chain, reeling it in as they proceed under way.  Doing it this way means less effort - and fuel - is needed to haul in the anchor.  Art!

     This is another of Sal's videos on WIGOWS, this time about the very high-profile transit of the 'Newnew Polar Bear' using the trans-Arctic route that has been opened up thanks to global warming.  Very high-profile with a lot of attention being paid to it, meaning that the lost anchor was probably an accident, as it's unwise to commit sabotage whilst under media scrutiny.  The fact that it damaged an undersea pipeline and power cables cannot have gone un-noticed by the Ruffians, though, and they were clearly up for creating another 'accident'.  This incident occurred in October last year, and the Finns have since recovered the errant anchor, as will be the case with the ES.  Art!

Who's been a naughty boy then?

     The cable will be repaired, which might take weeks or months, Conrad not being an expert on underwater cable construction and remediation techniques.  Meanwhile that tanker's not going anywhere, nor is it's cargo, and the Ruffians now have to judge whether it's worth losing a tanker full of fuel to damage a cable.  Urals crude comes in at $570 per ton, so if this puppy is carrying even only 1,000 tons, that's well over half a million dollars of revenue not going anywhere.  Unless the Finns auction it to recover repair costs.

     Sal then moved onto the administrative background of the ES and other ships in the Ruffian 'shadow fleet'.  Art!

     Since it's job is to move cargo to India, then it makes sense for it to be registered there.  The lower entry, the "Protection and Indemnity Club' is more interesting, because this is how vessels get insurance.  Sal used the ES' IMO (International Maritime Organisation) number, which is unique to that vessel, to search the website for 'UK P&I CLUB'.  Art!

     No entry.  No details.  OMG, the Ruffians were lying!  I'm shocked!  Shocked, I tell you!  Well, not that shocked.  Actually not shocked at all.  As if a UK business would sanction insuring a Ruffian vessel.

     Wait!  For there is more.  As mentioned in our last "Anchor" themed Intro, the Eagle S fits the profile for a 'Shadow fleet' vessel, being over 15 years old - 18 in fact - with registry in an obscure and unusual location - the Cook Islands waaaay over there in the middle of the Pacific - and an obfuscated insurance history, which was shockingly unshockingly revealed above.  Art!

     Sal then jumped on the "Equasis" website, which lists further data for international shipping, and found that the Eagle S had been issued a 'Black Flag' from the Japanese, meaning it had been found to be non-compliant with various nautical rules and regs.  It was last given a safety inspection in September 2023 in Ghana, and - more red flags than a Chairman Mao appreciation society.  Art!

     There were another 22 'Deficiencies' listed.   I dunno, maybe the Finns will sell it to a breaker's yard after they flog the fuel.

     Extra brownie points awarded to Sal for mentioning the Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939 - 1940, which the Ruffians only won on points.  Yes yes yes, it was the Sinister Union then, which is still Ruffian.  Prove me wrong.  That, and the Continuation War after the Teutons attacked the Bolsheviks, is one reason Finns and Ruffians are not bestest mates.

Whilst On The Subject Of The 'Paficic'

Which means 'Peaceful', ho ho hollow laughter.  I just came across this clip on the BBC News website.  Art!

     Very definitely 'Before'.  Note that large breaker in the background, because pretty soon it's going to be in the foreground.  Art!

     When it's powerful enough to move a car around, you know you're in trouble.  Somewhat amazingly, only 8 people suffered minor injuries.  The cause of this sudden monster wave is storms out in the Pacific Ocean, which bring high tides and monster waves with them.  Art!

     No, Dougal, that is flotsam and jetsam thrown up by the big waves.  It did not grow there*.

Our Journey With Bernie

Mister Wrightson, that is.  Allow me to conduct due diligence and see if the latest FPG trading card from 1993 is available on teh Interwebz.  Aha, it is.  So, this is #54, "Distant Thunder".  Art!

     Yessss hmmmm no.  This is not a spot one would loiter in, whether you liked cats or not.  Very atmospheric rendering, mind.  With all that lightning, you might want to re-think your umbrella choices, too.  Unusually, Ol' Bern doesn't bother explaining about what media he used in order to obtain what effect.

An Horrifying Revelation About Time Travel

One of my Christmas presents to me was the boxed collection of "Lost", which I picked up for a song in a charity shop in Shaw, and which I have patiently waited to watch, because order and routine is the basis of civilisation.  Art!

     Must be a few years old, right?

     Try TWENTY years old.  The first pilot was broadcast in 2004, when Darling Daughter was still cute, at primary school and knew nothing about mortgages.  Your Humble Scribe was rather gobsmacked at this revelation.  I mean, twenty years ago my hair was still merely grey instead of the snowy thatch I have now.  Conrad did check to make sure he's not going senile or that the occasional snifter of gin or ten hadn't had an impact and - Art!

     Still watching the first of seven disks, and that's only the First Season.  You may be getting a bit of an update about this series in real time as it gets watched.  Fair warning.

"Konflikti"

Yes, this time this is Finnish: "Conflict".  It's a Finnish miniseries showing contemporary Finnish armed forces fighting on the ground in Finland, and probably draws on Ukraine's experience today.  Art!

     Features an aerial assault and capture of a passenger vessel, as done to the Eagle S in real life.  Art!

    Finnish artillery barrage.  The Finns have an awful lot of artillery, and this is what a real artillery barrage looks like - not a hated Hollywood flamepot anywhere to be seen!

     Just to be clear, if Dimya is reading this and seething quietly to himself, the standing Finnish army is quite small.  BUT in flashing neon letters ten feet tall, they have 870,000 reservists who can be mobilised as quickly as you snap your fingers.  A ticked-off Finn with an assault rifle in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other is not going to take being invaded lightly.

Finally -

The Sunday Stew was actually cooked on Friday, so that's out of the way.  I've got my breakfast eating tackle sorted, all we need now is to get rid of that frozen pizza that's taking up valuable space in the freezer.

* Dougal and Art.  What a pair.

Head Pühapäeva!

No, It's Not Finnish

Good guess, though, because that's Estonian, which I am told is mutually intelligible to the Finnish-speaking citizens of Suomi (as the Finns call Finland).  It mean, pretty obviously, "Happy Sunday!" which I'm not feeling at present because I shall be back at work tomorrow.  So much for all the stuff I was supposed to do and never got done <sad face> but it does mean more money put away to increase the size of the Book Mountain, Comic Hill and DVD Column.  Art!

Estonian architecture with puny humans for scale

     Righto, time to lay out the links methinks.

2023

BOOJUM!: The First Order

2022

BOOJUM!: LOTHER

2021

BOOJUM!: A Rabbit Hole Ten Miles Deep

2020

BOOJUM!: Absolutely Nothing To Do With Aircraft Carriers

2019

BOOJUM!: Today I Was Out Of My Comfort Zone

2018

BOOJUM!: I Harp - About LARP

2017

BOOJUM!: Exile On The Main Street

2016

BOOJUM!: Conrad: Still A Bit Seethy

2015

BOOJUM!: Primus Inter Pares

2014

BOOJUM!: DEATH HERRINGS FROM HADES!

2013

BOOJUM!: Hello Fans!

Merry Manglement To You!

If This Tale Had A Title

It would be along the lines of 'Don't diss the digger of graves, since he knows where the bodies are buried, so behaves!"*

     It's a symptom of bad management that they cannot see beyond the ends of their noses, view the bigger picture or realise that are people they either report to or are under the aegis of, including law enforcement.  They also tend to get shot of good managers, whom they see as being a potential threat due to being good at their job and not back-stabbing, brown-nosing or conspiring.  Art!

     I used the text "Self-propelled gun made of diamond" because "Manglement" created what looked like the entrance to a nightclub - Art!

     Yes, moody and atmospheric, and nothing at all to do with the subject, wh

     ANYWAY our Put Upon IT Guy, hereafter PUITG, was working in what sounds like a government agency, quite possibly in South Canada.  Things had been running smoothly for him since his immediate boss was a Good Manager, who  deflected what PUITG called 'nonsense'.  Then in came a new Capo De Tutte Capo, whom simply had to put his own stamp on the organisation.  First step was to force the Good Manager out due to work-related stress, which brought on a heart attack.  Art!

     They then set their sights on PUITG, and paid a consultant tens of thousands of pounds to carry out an audit of his job and role.  The intent had been to find enough dirt to sack him, except that backfired, as the insignificant details the audit picked up were resolved by the next day.  On the other hand, PUITG discovered that the audit reported on his managers and what they had to do within a 6-month timescale.  He made it emphatically clear that if their responsibilities had not been addressed in 6 months, he would leave.  Senior managers suck teeth, clench fists, tug ties and agree.

     THIS IS THE DIGGER OF GRAVES I MENTIONED.  This chap had been working there for years and knew the organisation inside out, upside down and back to front.  Point One: can you afford to lose a person with that level of skill and experience?  Point Two: if you annoy and anger them, can they retaliate?

     

     After PUITG told them he was going to leave, he got called to a meeting, where a random stranger showed those present a laptop that didn't work, and who claimed to have told PUITG about it months previously.  Quite what this had to do with PUITG leaving wasn't clear, apart from trying to muddy the waters and besmirch his good name.  He pointed out that there had been no note about this 'broken laptop', no e-mails, no SMS nor any repair tickets raised, and that matey had been apparently skiving all those months not working thanks to the 'broken laptop'.  Art!

Text prompt "I quit"

     PUITG immediately stated his intention to quit, and the CFTC equally immediately objected, stating he had to give notice of two months.  A future date like that would allow them to either train a replacement or recruit from scratch.

     HOWEVER - ah, old friend, how nice to see you again! - PUITG informed them that he had swung by HR on his way to this meeting, and one of the issues raised by that very expensive audit was - manglement not allowing him to have time off.  So he had accumulated two months of leave.  Which he was going to start immediately.  Art!

     Given the appalled surprise of the managers present, it seems that the meeting was, once again, to besmirch PUITGs good name and hammer them into the square hole, they being the round peg.  

     Oooops.

    Having shown no loyalty, manglement got none in return.  PUITG promptly reported them to their industry ombudsman.  He quotes "I knew a lot of what went on at that place" and "they were telling fibs about how money was being spent".  Remember Point Two above?  British Ombudsmen have an awful lot of clout when it comes to investigating.

     In less than a week this organisation was besieged by inspectors and auditors, who went over everything with a scanning electron microscope.  The CDTC was immediately fired and never worked in the industry again.  All the C-suite managers were fired.  By the time dust had settled, 90% of the staff had been fired and replaced.  They shelled out £50,000 in order to get their IT functions merely running and never got back to the state of grace they had when PUITG was there.

     He fell on his feet, as his old boss hired him and a few of the ex-employees in his new workplace, getting paid half as much again as his old job.  Art!

Tee and hee

A Bit Of A Comparison

As you should surely know, we here at BOOJUM! relish in the schadenfreude that comes from looking at the ruble's exchange rate versus the dollar.  "Bricktop" over on Twitter recommended using the Pound Sterling exchange rate instead, so I've decided to show both at once, and you can judge for yourself which is better.  Art!

     Precious little difference if you ask me.  Except knowing a ruble is worth less than £0.01 or a single penny kind of puts it in perspective.  This plan of Dimya's must be incredibly subtle if currency depreciation is part of it, hmmm?  Bricktop made a crack about the ruble being replaced by potatoes, and it cost two potatoes to buy a single potato.  Which becomes less amusing when one reads that food cards are going to be issued to the poor in Modern-day Mordor, which is most of them.

Tee and hee

"The War Illustrated Edition 200 16th February 1945"

By this date it was obvious that the Third Reich was on it's last legs and Herr Schickelgruber had blown any chance of successfully defending the borders of Germany by expending a whole army in the Battle of the Bulge.  Which had stopped the Allies from advancing for about six weeks.  Art!

     At top you can see why winter camouflage is important when there's snow on the ground, as these British troops stand out very starkly.  They're not under fire, however, as they're not running or crouching.  Below that is a pair of pictures illustrating one of the Allied weapons the Teutons hated and feared above all else - the Churchill 'Crocodile' flame-throwing tank.  The flame-projector had a long enough reach that it could fire upon infantry without being at risk from handheld anti-tank weapons, and only the most fanatical Teutons would stand and fight against a Crocodile.  And at bottom a collection of sensible Teutons have decided that squaring off against a one-hundred and twenty yard tongue of napalm is a bad idea.

We Are Living In The Future

I keep emphasising this and here's an incidental to prove it.  Your Humble Scribe was reading an article on the BBC's News website about scientific discoveries of 2024, and I came across an interesting item about the accidental discovery of a lost Mayan city.  Art!

     Lost in the tropical jungles of Mexico.  How did it get discovered?   Aha.  Thanks to 'Lidar', a laser mapping tool, used to 'see' beneath jungle canopies.  Art!

     It's just a hop and a skip from that to the DRADIS system used in "Battlestar Galactica".  You have been warned.

Finally -

I need a shave!

*  Yes yes yes I know it's not a proper word, sue me.

Today We Tell Of Anchors

In True BOOJUM! Style Let's Define What An Anchor Is

"Anchor: a device attached by a cable to a vessel  and dropped overboard so as to grip the bottom and restrict movement."  Derived from the Old English "Ancor", from the Greek "Ankura".  Art!

Ah.  Yes.

     It could have been worse.  It might have been Angkor Wat, which is a whole Intro by itself.

     Okay, so that definition was from my "Collins Concise Dictionary".  Let us now take up the "Brewer's" and see what they have to say.     

     "In Christian symbolism, the anchor is the sign of hope.  It also symbolises security.  In art it is an attribute of Saint Clement, who was said to have been martyred by being tied to an anchor and cast into the sea."  Art!

     Heavy duty punishment if you ask me.

     ANYWAY we are now going to go over the latest vlog put out by Sal Mercogliano, which is to do with events now transpiring in the Baltic Sea, on his excellent channel "What Is Going On With Shipping".  I would thoroughly recommend a visit, as he imparts knowledge to do with marine traffic, which is kind of the underpinning that keeps our world turning, if we did but stop and think about it.  Art!

     That is the 'Turva', a Finnish Coastguard vessel, guarding the 'Eagle S', a Ruffian 'shadow fleet' tanker that is alleged to have cut the undersea power cable between Finland and Estonia.  I say 'alleged' when the evidence is pretttttty damning.  Art!

What is wrong with this picture?

     Yessss there ought to be an anchor chain dangling from that bow on the port side, with an anchor at the end of it.  Sal, with his background in the merchant marine, explained that losing an anchor is 1)  Very unusual and 2) A major event.  Glad we got that sorted out.  Art!

     This is the Finnish Police and Coastguard carrying out a fast-rappel descent onto the 'Eagle S', which seems to have been carried out in a very professional style.  They were thus able to seize control of the vessel before anything could be hidden, deleted or destroyed.  They don't seem to have done this before, so it's a measure of how angry the Finnish government was with the Ruffian tanker.  Art!

     

     This is the data that Sal obtained about the tanker.  It fits the profile of a Ruffian 'shadow fleet' tanker, being over 15 years old, registered in a sketchy skeevy country (the Cook Islands in this instance), with nil transparency about either ownership or insurance.  

     Next is about the Finns right to board and commandeer this 74,000 ton tanker carrying fuel to India.  Well, sorry to inform Dimya but the Finns, under the <deep breath> "United Nations Convention on the Law Of the Seas" have every right to tackle a vessel that has breached the 'innocent passage' part of UCLOS.  Art!

     Here you are seeing a map of the seabed in the Baltic, with the dotted lines being pipelines and the solid lines being cables.  Ships carry maps like this to avoid what Sal called a 'Tonga incident', when that island's sole internet cable was accidentally cut by a ship dropping anchor right on top of it.

     Then comes an illustration of an anchor station, which was educational for Conrad and ought to be for you, too.  Art!

     There are 3 systems here that operate to prevent an anchor being accidentally released.  The 'Stopper' at upper port is a clamp that physically restrains the chain.  There is a clutch mechanism that has to be engaged to drop or hoist the anchor, and there is a wheel - Art!

     -  which can be turned to physically brake the chain.  Also, dropping an anchor is INCREDIBLY NOISY and there is 0% way the crew would not have noticed this happening.

     Then, too, anchors are intended to be used when a ship is stationary, because they have 0% chance of stopping a 74,000 ton vessel moving at 6 knots.  It's an open question as to whether their anchor chain broke under the strain, or it was cut loose - after severing the cable.  The Eagle S did not stop or slow down or communicate what had happened to anyone else, possibly hoping to be out of Finnish territorial waters before anyone realised what they'd done.

     I do have more on this topic, as Sal then went into legal details about marine traffic that only a person like himself would have any idea about, but we're already halfway to the Count, so I shall save this for another day.

     Onnea siihen!  Which is Finnish for "Good luck with that"

More Of Staff Work

You may recall that Conrad re-posted a picture taken by "AfricanStalingrad" on his Twitter feed, of the 'March Table' for the 26th Armoured Brigade in Tunisia, for the first week in April 1943.  It was an insight into the administrative work that takes place for large formations to move across considerable distances.  A Brigade of this size mustered nearly 600 vehicles and up to 5,000 men.  Art!

     At full-size, an infantry battalion like this would muster about 1,000 men in peacetime.  On active service overseas, perhaps 800 tops, and more likely 600, thanks to casualties, training, leave and sickness.  The DLI were a famously effective and efficient regiment, which meant they got a lot of the hard and dirty work when it needed to be done.

     Ol Afriy thinks that 'FSMO' means 'Full Scale Marching Order' and if you want to quibble with this, take it up with the man himself.

     The 'Steel Helmet' was the Brodie-pattern British helmet that other nations laughed at as the 'soup bowl'.  Laugh away, it protected the neck and shoulders that other helmets didn't .  Art!

     The 'Respirator' is a variety of gas-mask, issued but never used in anger, a facet of the Second Unpleasantness that thankfully does not mirror the First.  Art!

     This may be an 'Angola shirt'.  Neither Ol' Affy nor I know what one is.

     The 'Field Dressing' was nothing to do with salads, it was a piece of first-aid kit that would be used by the carrier to dress another person's wounds.  Art!

     I don't think there was a follow-up post, but it would probably have had the scale of equipment carried on the battalion's first and second-line transport.  Stuff that was too heavy or awkward for individual soldiers to carry, such as mortar bombs, greatcoats, picks and shovels and so on.

     Enough enough of martial stuff!  No "The War Illustrated" on this blog.

 

Hot Wheels

Ah, that title takes me back.  "Hot Wheels" you see were a make of miniature cars that could be raced on plastic tracks, at relatively high speeds thanks to their suspension.  Art!

     The adverts made them out to be far more fascinating than they actually were, because - sending them around a racetrack for the 147th time does pall.

     ANYWAY I came across a Youtube channel that was portraying the monster mobile kit needed to keep a steel mill functional, and - Art!

Courtesy Aaron Witt

     This is a Kress Slab Carrier, which can carry 200 tons of steel from one part of a mill to another.  Yes, TWO HUNDRED TONS.  Just so you know it's not a typo.  Art!

     That's a lot of moolah.  Wheeling-up a single Kress would take $120,000.  Art!

     Different vehicle, same expense.  The tyres are smooth, with no tread, because to operate they have to be clad in steel chain overlays, as you see above.

I Have Detected A Plot Hole

Whilst walking into Lesser Sodom yesteryon, I was busy thinking about Nevil Shute's novel "On The Beach", and yes I am a very sad man.

     HOWEVER what I wanted to address is that the novel takes place a good three years after global nuclear war has destroyed the Northern Hemisphere.  The surviving pockets of civilisation in the Southern Hemisphere are now waiting to be wiped out by the impinging fallout.  Art!

     That's an illustration from Fritz Leiber's "A Pail Of Air" where the entire planet Earth has been blasted out of orbit.  Do the surviving inhabitants give up?  No they do not!  They don't exactly prosper but they do survive.

     With a lead time of years, would Shute's surviving populations just ignore their fate, shrug their collective shoulders and scoff down suicide pills?  I rather think not.  In "The Purple Cloud", one of the earliest of all post-apocalyptic novels, there is an example - unsuccessful I grant you - of people desperately trying to battle and overcome the apocalypse.

Finally -

We have the technology, and so do I.  We will be hearing more of "Tunis cake".