Flavoursome Crow And Humble Pie

I Shall Take That As Said

For Conrad has never tasted crow and is never going to rectify this culinary absence.  My 'Brewer's' has a long and incomprehensible tale of how ''Eating crow' as a metaphor for "Being humiliated" came to be.  The claim is that in the War Of 1812, a sideshow for Great Britain whilst they were waging war against Napoleon in Europe, a Yankee trespassed into British lines whilst a truce was ongoing, to lay claim to a crow he had shot.  Art!

     Why he did this is open to question, as crow is supposed to taste horrid.  The end result is that both he and a British officer had to, at gunpoint, eat the crow.  

     Whatever.  This was in the time of flintlock muskets, which took twenty or thirty seconds to load so the 'at gunpoint' is highly suspect, and no, I don't propose to go through the routine.   Brewer's also points out that phrase isn't recorded before 1870.  Art!

     Then there's the phrase 'To eat humble pie', another metaphor for humiliation, which is derived from hunting deer.  Once Bambi's mum had been sent to the kitchens, the lord of the manor would dine on the venison garnished from her carcase, since being privileged meant he got the best cuts.  Lesser rabble who constituted the rest of the hunt got to dine on the deer's offal, known as 'Umbles', which were made into a pie.
     Now, let us relate another example of "What's The Worst Decision You've Seen Someone Make?" which combines hubris, accountancy, the federal grant system and <drum roll> manglement.  Art!

     You might sub-title this tale as "There is no short-cut to experience", because the person you see here is Sam, the Most Valuable Player accountant in a Canuckistanian branch of a South Canadian company, back in the days when this sort of arrangement brooked exactly nil rancour.

     Sam had spent years and years working in the South Canadian federal government system, and being a bright chap, he knew it inside out, back to front, upside down and removed into the 99th Dimension with lemon juice as a garnish.  Art!

(Pre-Elong Tusk)

     He was especially able in applying for federal grants, because he had previously managed these programs when in federal service, an ability totally novel to the Canuckistanian branch but very, very welcome.  In fact the funds he was able to acquire constituted 200% of said branch's annual budget.  Wowsers!  What a pearl!

     You must be wondering what could possibly go wrong here.  Look above and pick out that word 'Manglement', because that's what went wrong.  A new Bottomhole Manager was appointed, and in the way all insecure jackass bosses do, he set out to prove his manliness.  Art!

     He berates Sam for a couple of months and then fires him, claiming a surfeit of accountants at the branch.

     Sam is instantly hired by a competitor and gets to enjoy his lucrative severance package.

     Three months later it's tax season.  The parent South Canadian company calls the Bottomhole Manager and wants to know what funds they'll be getting from their grant applications that year.  You know, the applications that Sam did.  That Sam, alone, knew how to apply for.  That the BM had absolutely no idea about.

     Oooops.

     This is when "What's The Worst Decision You've Seen Someone Make?" hit the fan and BM realises he'd made it when firing Sam.  Art!

     BM tried to get other staff to do the application.  There was nobody else who had the slightest idea what to do.  An outside consultant would have required immediate big bucks to take on the job and taken weeks if not months to work the data out.

     Eventually BM bites the bullet - more like a whole magazine of bullets - and asks Sam for help.

     Sam, revealing a modest streak of sadism, forces BM to grovel a bit - okay, a lot, which is where the title about crow and humble comes from - before telling him that the funding request can be inserted with all due speed up BM's nether fundament.  Art!

     With nil funding acquired, the branch was promptly closed down by the parent company and put everyone out of a job.  I wonder what Bottomhole put on his resumé about the six months it took him to destroy his branch?

Annoying Adverts

Conrad has noticed a trend on his feed wherein they keep pushing a particular item, to wit - Art!

     This one is about whisky, but it can be about <insert tat or gadget of the day here>.

     Now, you know Conrad by now.  He cannot let a thing alone if his sense of curiosity or mischief is aroused, and so I took a look at whisky barrel 'investments'.

     First of all, they are not cheap and can run from £1,500 to £5,000.

     Second, there are a lot of potential pitfalls along the way.  Allow me to post a short summary of these.

typically, a good-quality liquid will become more valuable over time, simply because there is a strong correlation between age and value with maturing whisky – something that doesn’t really exist in fine wine.

However, this is a complex and specialist market that can be beset with pitfalls for the unwary – meaning that wise investors lean on the skills and experience of experts in the field. For a start, every maturing cask follows a different path as it ages, meaning that a rise in quality (and value) is not by any means guaranteed

     They feature my favourite word.  I've highlighted in red where there might be issues, because 'Typically' means there are exceptions to the rule.  'Correlation' because this is not an automatic link; 'experts' are going to need to be paid, either a retainer or when consulted, and they are going to gouge gouge gouge at every opportunity; 'not by any means guaranteed' means this is a GAMBLE.  Art!

     There's more to this speculative whisky cask purchase than I feel happy putting in a single very long item, so rest assured we will come back to this.

"The War Illustrated Edition 205 29th April 1945"

I took a lot of pictures from this edition as they seemed particularly relevant and on point, concerning the conquest of Nazi Germany by physical occupation.  Art!

     This is the usual montage that TWI features in it's central pages, which we will examine one at a time.  Carpet and keyboard included at no extra cost.  Art!

     Here we see a self-propelled gun (an Archer) being ferried across the Rhine on a self-propelled raft, which is how beachheads were built up and reinforced before bridges had been constructed.  

     In the accompanying blurb, it states that 10,000 Royal Engineers were involved in bridging, rafting and ferrying operations, using 5,300 feet of bridging equipment, and that their first bridge across this last great water barrier into the Reich took all of twenty-one hours to construct.

     One can imagine the time, energy and explosives it took the Teutons to destroy all their bridges across the Rhine, all rendered redundant in less than a day, thanks to sappers going like the clappers.  Art!

     That's an Archer up close.  It was an ambush predator, very useful in defence, as the 17-pounder it mounted would make a colander of any Teuton tank that showed up.  Since the gun pointed backwards over the engine deck, it could shoot-and-scoot in an instant.

O I Say

When the Serbs get riled up, they certainly get riled up.  Their nation has been cautiously moving away from their traditional pro-Ruffian stance over the past couple of years, going so far as to make money by selling artillery shells to Ukraine, which I think we can agree is not really in the best interests of the Kremlin.  Art!

     Whilst this protest is ostensibly about a collapsing railway station that killed 15 people, it reflects Serbian ire at corruption and incompetence, and goes to show you what a mass Slavic protest looks like, probably much to the discomfiture of Charlie Chipmunk Cheeks.  After all, the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014 began like this .....

Finally -

I don't plan to walk into Lesser Sodom today, having done it yesteryon.  So I can dedicate hours and hours to the laundry that so evokes my rock and roll lifestyle.