I'm Being So Frightfully Clever Here
That I need to explain about it, lest you be unappreciative enough.
Okay! For starters, 'Honey badger' is another name for the 'Ratel', a ferocious beast that hails from Africa, being carnivorous and related to the badger family, although the well-mannered and bucolic British badger would jib at being considered amongst said company in a photo portrait. Art!
This is the South African 'Ratel', an Infantry Fighting Vehicle, because having the honey badger itself in frame first thing would be too obvious. Art!
There you go. More akin to the South Canadian badger, who looks as if it would come at you out of a dark alley wielding a cut-throat razor.
ANYWAY we are here to carry on with Part 2 of "My Mother (In Law) The Car", about the insane exploits of Melissa Major Mooch, her parents MIL and FIL, who were both ill, in the sense of 'being bad', and Abused Targeted Man, her ex.
'Melissa', you see, is derived from the Greek for 'Honey bee', and 'badger' begins with 'B', which is the convoluted explanation for today's title.
We pick up the threads of the story 6 months after the divorce, where MMM had been forced to move back in with her parents, because she got very little money in the divorce. She was now working two jobs to be able to make a living and to pay off ATM's garnishments to repay the $42,000 she effectively stole from him. Art!
Things got worse for all three of them. Her parents had to sell their apartment and move to a smaller one, because their daughter's ability to give them handouts had vanished. Thus MMM had to find somewhere else to live, and ended up sharing with three roommates.
Conrad will help you keep track of her criminal activity by indicating with a big red number, thus -
1 Rashly, she tried to re-open the divorce case, hiring a lawyer whom, in the immortal words of Petrocelli, had 'scabs in his knees from chasing ambulances' and who came cheap.
The courts shut her suit down instantly. Ooops.
ATM next updated events that transpired over the next six months. His ex-Brother In Law, whom he'd had little involvement with, rang to caution him that 2 MMM had managed to lay hold of his client list and was ringing them up and lying to them about ATM being charged with fraud. Art!
Up pops ATM's lawyer, who immediately fires off a Cease & Desist letter, ending the traducing. There is another, very apt, word for actions of this variety - 'badgering'.
3 MMM then persuades three 'friends' to band together and raise $65,000 in order to acquire dental equipment going up for resale, which she claimed inside knowledge of thanks to her dental hygienist background. She also claimed her ex was acting as a 'consultant' on the investment, which was more utter bunk.
Surprise! it was all a scam, there was no resale kit. Instead she blew the money on paying off her credit card debt - I did wonder when that elephant in the room would be addressed - and down payments on a big fancy car. Art!
Don't ask what marque, I have no idea
However - nice to meet you again, however - one of these friends hired a Private Investigator, who proved that there was never a business investment opportunity, and all three friends took her to the Small Claims court. MMM was ordered to pay all the money back, so she immediately filed for 4 bankruptcy to avoid having to part with money.
Bad move! The court appointed a trustee to investigate her finances and did so forensically, discovering that she'd been 5 hiding income by doing cash-in-hand jobs and sending monies to her parents to avoid garnishings. Not only was the bankruptcy declared null and void, 6 she was referred to the District Attorney for potential criminal charges. The story ends before any verdict came back about this, but given her extensive criminal background, which we've not finished with yet, a custodial sentence is likely. Oooops. Art!
Whilst doing his shopping, ATM bumped into one of MMM's former friends - in fact that should be 'friends' - who had lent MMM $15,000 for what she vaguely termed 'Legal Fees', none of which loan had been repaid. 7 Yes, said former friend had sued and was now a plaintiff in another case. It came out that MMM had also been planning to baby-trap ATM once the $42,000 had been stolen, in order to lock herself into his finances and end up with $$$.
8 It gets worse. MMM had been caught by her law firm creating fake internet reviews of rival law firms, in order to traduce the opposition. She was promptly fired. This led to missing payments on her big fancy car and it was repossessed. Now she makes ends meet by working in a call centre and doing food delivery. Art!
Bet she's a lot less smiley than this
It got worse for MIL and FIL, too. They lost the apartment they had, and got kicked out of MMM's uncle's house when he caught them trying to take out a loan in his name, and ended up living in a motel that rented week-by-week. Not only that, their by-now suspicious church pastor contacted ATM to get background on them, since they were always asking for handouts. When the horrid truth about them was revealed, they were told to find another church. Ooops.
I hope you enjoyed this tale of hubris and karma combined, Conrad certainly did.
Sanity Prevails
Nobody has yet told me to stop displaying statistics about, nor pictures of, the blog traffic when Blogger's tracking algorithm goes wonky.
At least I think it's gone wonky. The blog really, truly and actually getting the kind of numbers as in the first two cases below brings Conrad out in a cold sweat. Art!
"The War Illustrated Edition 208 9th June 1945"
Conrad is unsure if he took photographs of the central page montage of this edition, so we'd better check in 'Pictures'. Art!
How are the mighty fallen, hmmm? As the blurb has it, these are some of the more senior Nazis in Germany, now being taken prisoner by the British. At top port you can see Field Marshall Kesselring, nicknamed 'Smiling Albert' because of his permanently sunny disposition. To top starboard, the repellent Seyss-Inquart, Reich Kommisar of the Netherlands, eyes the cameraman with distaste. As well he might, he got his neck stretched the next October.
Lower port has that fat ex-fighter pilot Göring, who surrendered rather than going out in a blaze of gore and glory. Below him is Von Kleist, a bit of a nonentity, and at bottom starboard is Field Marshall Von Runstedt, who had been hired and fired with bewildering regularity. He was getting very long in the tooth, hence his walking stick.
Another One Of Those Leading Articles
I'm adding this in because we need more pictures to balance the wall of text I've written so far. Art!
Conrad unsure who is deciding which is the greatest, nobody consulted me about this matter. No, I'm not going to follow this clickbait article to find out: "Festivaltopia" does not inspire confidence as a literary judge. The 'Times Literary Supplment' or 'Booker' would satisfy, not this lightweight. Let me guess, "War And Peace", "The Catcher In The Rye", "To Kill A Mockingbird", "A La Recherche De Temps Perdue", "Lord Of The Rings", "The Great Gatsby", "A Dance To The Music Of Time" and "Gormenghast" are all in there?
Finally -
Typical. I bottle home-made sauerkraut on Sunday and today Morrison's do have it on the shelves, unlike last week. I have purchased a couple of large cabbages just in case, as you know I like to keep you informed.
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