Let Us Be Clear Here
Ha! Do you see what I di - O you do.
Now, you know we here at BOOJUM! typically wend our meandering way across a landscape of verbiage before getting down to what we really want to cover, and this Intro is no different. Art!
Notice that the use the definite article and there's no separation between 'Glass' and 'House'. What you're looking at here is the historic British Army prison at North Camp, Aldershot, which was established in 1844 for naughty soldiers who had passed the port to the right. Since then any military prison has been known as 'The Glasshouse'. Art!
This is also a house made of glass - you may be ahead of me here - and is known as a 'glasshouse', again with no separation between the words. This one seems to be big enough to raise a family of five in. Art!
This one is definitely a glass house. The bathroom and shower is probably in the basement, you dirty-minded perverts.
Thus we come to that proverb: "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones".
Why not? After all, if you travel eighteen miles away to a disused quarry and chuck rocks, your delicate and friable residence is not going to be threatened.
Conrad, ever one to parse the living lemon-juice out of an aphorism, suspects this is actually an evocation of Good Neighbourliness*, meaning that you ought not to throw stones at your neighbours* because, should they retaliate, you are in a terribly vulnerable position.
Which - and you may be ahead of me here - brings me to the trials and tribulations of the petrochemical industry within Modern-day Mordor. Art!
Military and intelligence officers within the Kremlin will be looking at this map with horrified disbelief, because it's an (approximate) display of all the Ukrainian drones being sent on kamikaze missions as of the night of 30th January. To be clear, these are not the little FPV 'Mavic' drones that act as intelligent artillery shells on the battlefield; these are their much larger cousins like the 'Paliantsyr', which carry an explosive warhead in the tens of kilos. Art!
Pali with puny human for scale
The Ukrainians have spent 2024 ramping up drone production on an industrial scale, and for the past week have been launching HUNDREDS of this and other types deep into Ruffia. The results have been spectacular, in an apocalyptic way, as at the Kstovo oil refinery, Ruffia's fourth largest. Art!
This looks like Hades has come to pay a visit. We may not know how many drones hit it, but there were plenty of them. Before the Special Idiotic Operation, this refinery handled 15 million tons of crude per year. Now? Trending towards zero.
Further, the refinery at Novoshakhtinsk has 'suspended operations' as they coyly put it, without giving a reason. Occams Razor suggests it got the living daylights droned out of it. Art!
Sorry if this is getting repetitive, roll with it, that's how we cope with it round here. That above is the refinery at Ryazan, which was out of action for two months in 2024 after the Ukrainians hit it. This is the third largest refinery in Ruffia, so the Ukrainians hit it again, and - more repetition - it has had to 'suspend operations'. Art!
That's the Druzhba pumping station going up in a blaze of glory. This was (past tense) the pumping station that made oil flow into Europe. Conrad is unsure if it was still pumping oil as of 2025 or not. Either way, Fico and Orban, Putinpot's European bootlickers, will be incandescent with rage about it, tee hee! I don't have a picture but the Andreapol pumping station was also droned into ashes and vapour.
We have a technical wrinkle about the attack on Druzhba and the drone and ordnance used. Art!
It was one of these microlights kitted out as a drone, carrying 250 kilo bombs, which is over 500 pounds in proper weights. This is a quarter of a ton of explosive payload, much larger than a drone itself could accommodate. Art!
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| "For Mikolaiev" |
Anton Geraschenko, a Ukrainian politician I follow, put up an interesting Tweet, reporting a news item from Bloomberg. Apparently the Ruffian oil terminal at Ust-Luga in the Baltic, near Saint Petersburg, had zero oil flowing through it on 29th January. This port handles 20% of Ruffian oil exports and the flow of oil through it had declined sharply in recent weeks. Occams Razor again; the Ukrainian drone strikes have cut the supply of oil completely. This is probably only temporary, yet if 20% of Ruffian oil exports go offline at all, this will impact their coffers.
The Ruffians response has been interesting, certainly in contrast to last year. Then it was 'All the drones were shot down but some debris set nearby grass alight, which was quickly extinguished.' It's hard to believe this drivel when you can still hear ammunition cooking-off in the background as they lie to camera. Now? Radio silence, probably on the principle that if you say nothing then people can't tell you're lying and if you ignore the problem it will simply go away. Hmmmmmmm.
Not very convincing, is it?
Then there's the lack of air defences. True, the Ukrainians very probably, with the help of NATO intelligence, know exactly where the Ruffian radars are, and can avoid them. BUT these refineries have no close-in air defences from cannons or MANPADS - none whatsoever for the third and fourth largest refineries in the whole of Modern-day Mordor? Not even humble orcs armed with AK-74s? Plainly, the cope cages erected around some of these targets have been a complete waste of time and resources. Art!
"They confiscated my fifth Italian villa!"
That's a very angry Solovyev, ranting on television about who's responsible for defending these refineries and why aren't they being defended, and I'm going to throw my toys out of the pram.
Conrad's considered opinion: Tee hee!
Wowsers, that took up a lot more space than I realised. Plus there was even more bad news to add in, which will have to wait. You lucky people.
"Sugar Sugar"
Nothing to do with Lord Sweetie Alan, this one popped up in my mind earlier yesteryon, but I'd already finished the blog so couldn't add it in.
Conrad remembers the fuss and fury about 'manufactured' bands back in the Nineties when you had bands like <thinks> NW17 and Boysown (sp?).
I can raise you manufactured and give you completely fictional. Art!
They didn't exist in reality, yet this single was their third (!) and was one of the biggest ever 'bubblegum' pop records ever, being a huge hit on both sides of The Pond. I used to get sent "Archie" comics sent over from South Canada when smaller and cuter, so I had a bit of background my compatriots lacked.
No "TWI" today, we've had quite enough of things exploding.
Using The Tube In Paris
We recently did an Intro that went into the subject of pneumatic postal delivery, using vacuums to propel small cylinders over short distances within capital cities, including Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell. Art!
Meet the Parisian pneumatique. This was one of the more elaborate, large-scale and successful pneumatic tube systems, originating in 1866, and reaching it's peak in the Thirties, when hundreds of miles of vacuum tubing connected the burgers of Paris. The picture above looks positively cathedral-like in it's complexity. Art!
An instrument of wind?
The system went into a decline after the Second Unpleasantness, when telephones took off, yet it soldiered on until 1984, so well over a century's innings. Not bad. Art!
More Misery For Military Moochers
If I can borrow a picture and headline from today's latest feed. Art!
The military has lost control of 79% of the country, only retaining the big cities, despite having uncontested command of the skies. The patchwork of rebels and militias have become progressively better-armed, trained and organised. Things are looking bleak for the military junta. For one thing, the Ruffians are critically involved in Ukraine and cannot spare anything to help, not even Wagner. The junta's leaders must be uneasily looking at the utter collapse of the Syrian regime, and keeping a few private jets stocked with gold bullion, diamonds and yuan in great big bundles - just in case.
Finally -
I did take a photo but haven't uploaded it yet, so you'll have to make do with a stock photo from teh Interwebz. Art!
Behold the Boot, Shower. I plan to test-drive it tomorrow.
* Note CORRECT spelling.
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