If I Were To Say "TMDR"

You Would Doubtless All Castigate Me

For mis-spelling "TLDR" which does not mean "Turbo Laser Destructo Robot" but instead the far more prosaic and boring "Too Long Didn't Read", meaning that what has been posted violates the laws of brevity.  Art!

     Yes yes yes, I know what it looks like, but this is what the AI Art Generator drew up on the prompt text "Turbo Laser Destructo Robot".  It's not my fault the idiot likes to plagiarise.  Perhaps I should have used "Turbo Laser Destructo RAY" instead and see what that might have produced.  Art!

     Hmmmmm.  Perhaps.

     ANYWAY you'd be completely wrong, "TMDR" is not a typo.  It is, in fact, a song-writing credit, which Your Humble Scribe came across back in the Eighties, when he was listening to a particular album.  Art!

     It's an absolute banger of an album and if you're not familiar with it YOUTUBE AND SPOTIFY ARE THAT WAY.  "Thomas Dolby" is a shortened version of the artist's full name: Thomas Morgan Dolby Robertson.  Fun fact: one pence from the royalties from this album went to the "Venice In Peril" charity appeal.

     Here is where we swerve slightly and bring up the lyrics to one of the best songs on the album, "One Of Our Submarines".  For Lo! we are going to do a Little Musical Critique, except a bit longer than little.

One of our submarines is missing tonight

This autobiography was possibly an inspiration for TMDR.  I've chosen this illo because no, Dougal, those are not dustbins being dumped into the ocean depths, they are depth charges intended to crush the hull of that there submarine

Seems she ran aground on manoeuvres

A very real problem in the old submarines of the Second Unpleasantness.  You had sonar and ASDIC to guide you but travel too fast over an uncertain area on a map and yes, you could run aground

One of our submarines

A hungry heart

To regulate their breathing

Ah, this is TMDR waxing poetic, because one thing a submarine lacks is a heart.  It does have an engine, perhaps this is a sly  artistic allusion.  Art!

This equipment is the 'regulate their breathing' kit.  It used scrubbers to remove CO₂ from the air whilst the submarine was submerged, meaning that people wouldn't asphyxiate thanks to no fresh air.
One more night

The Winter Boys are freezing in their spam tin

"Spam tin" refers, in typical insouciant British style, to their sub.  Art!

Rated for fifty fathoms

The Baltic moon

Along the northern seaboard

This is interesting!  If we are talking Second Unpleasantness then a British submarine would have a very very hard time getting into the Baltic.  Geography, you see.  Art!

And down below

The Winter Boys are waiting for the storm

Maybe so, except for a sub at depth any storm on the surface ain't going to bother them very much.  I will forgive TMDR as he's not a sailor or submariner.

Bye-bye empire, empire bye-bye

Shallow water - channel and tide

Yes, shallow water.  The threat to every submarine

And I can trace my history

Down one generation to my home

In one of our submarines

One of our submarines

TMDR's uncle was lost aboard the British submarine P48 when it was lost with all hands off the Tunisian coast in late 1942.  There's more to this that we may come back to, if you're good.

The red lights flicker, sonar weak

Air valves hissing open

Half her pressure blown away

Flounder in the ocean

None of this is particularly good, if you're wondering.  'Red light' is used as illumination for those working in darkness as it doesn't take the eye as long to adapt as with white light if they then have to use their night vision.  'Sonar weak' is bad, because this is how you detect underwater obstacles.  If the pressure is down then there's a serious leak in the hydraulic or power systems.  Nor do you want to ever 'flounder' because capsizing or swamping is a real risk.

See the Winter Boys

Drinking heavy water from a stone

Pure nonsense!  Heavy water was only available in vanishingly small quantities in the Second Unpleasantness, you don't get it from a stone and it's not potable.   More poetic licence, one suspects.

Bye-bye empire, empire bye-bye

Shallow water - channel and tide

Bye-bye empire, empire bye-bye

Tired illusion drown in the night

And I can trace my history

Down one generation to my home

In one of our submarines

One of our submarines

One of our submarines

     I'm not going to reprise previous critique over repeated verses.

     There is more to this story, so be good!

A Little Bit Of Gloasting

Conrad came across this sidebar item on the BBC News website and felt like kicking Dimya in the teeth with it.  Art!

Ah yes, the poster children for "Inflation".  Or something

     Now, unlike the 'official' figures in Ruffia, you can actually trust the ones that come out of This Sceptred Isle, so when this report says the inflation rate for December was 2.5%, then it was 2.5%.

     I can tell what you're thinking: 'Gosh, this is but a fraction of the 9.3% inflation rate in Modern-day Mordor!'

     Indeed, and then some.  The Ruffian's real inflation rate is three times what their headline figure is, so between 24% and 27%.  In the region of 10 times higher than the UK.  It's a lot higher for certain food items; 75% for potatoes, for example.  As I cruelly posted on Twitter, 'Ruffia - where the potato is a luxury food item'.

     Don't get me started on Stagflation .....

"Everything will be fine!  Fine I tell you!  FINE!  FINE!"

Our Journey With Bernie

Okay, due diligence time, and on this one I may also check the quality of what's available on teh Interwebz.  No, I am not going to buy the FPG trading card collection  in order to get pristine imagery for the blog- a quick Google reveals that people are asking £1 or $1 per card, and this cheeky swine wanted - Art!

     Say hello to #63 "Soft Soldier".  Art!

     Hmmm.  I've not enlarged it as it's still unrecognisable.  The first word might be "American".  Then again it might easily not.

How To Make A Goldflake

Yes, I am hearkening back to that OPERATION GOLDFLAKE (that's how they write these things) where 60,000 Canuckistanian and British troops were moved in February 1945, from Italy to Leuze in Belgium.

     It might need re-telling, but there is an awful lot of staff work involved in an operation of this magnitude, all the more so as the transit has to be covert.  Art!

No snowflakes on this Goldflake

     Here I shall append a picture of just a paragraph from one page of the whole 23-page document about this operation.  Art!

"A.F.H.Q." stands for "Armed Forces Headquarters.  "S.H.A.E.F." stands for "Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force" which is where Eisenhower held court.

     If you read this Snip AND YOU OUGHT TO, you can see it deals with the outline of rations, personal equipment to be carried by the soldiery and accommodation en route - probably tents.

     The document also mentions an "Instruction" that will have been drawn up by whole companies of staff officers consulting march tables, railway capacity, freight tonnage and meteorological charts as well (if they were being thorough).  "Dress" is mentioned before "Security", which matters because Canuckistanian soldiers had a shoulder badge with "Canada" upon it, which might have given the game away.  Art!

     A small matter in itself, rather more significant when you're moving over 40,000 men wearing such a give-away.  You see?  You see what careful staff work pays attention to?

Meanwhile In Modern-day Mordor -

There's a Ruffian on Quora whom I follow with interest, who used to go by the handle "Misha Firer" because that was his name.  He would post long articles with photographs of life in Ruffia, revealing the incredible corruption inherent in the land.  Conrad was surprised he remained in the land of the living, and then realised that all his posts were in English, which seems to keep him under the FSB radar.  Art!

     His handle on Quora is now "Brutalsky", so the FSB may have been on the trail of Misha Firer.  He recently posted a long article about the M-1 highway between Moscow and the Polish border, which is far too long to add in here even in edited form.

     Conrad is glad he's still alive and kicking.  Proof there are a few decent Ruffians.

Finally -

IT at work is up the spout again.  This will happen if your software is 25-years old and a North Korean knock-off of a system with so many patches it looks like a recycled inner-tube.  Bah!