Black Swan Events, If You Like
The mention of 'Black Swan' has a verrrry long history, going back to the Roman satirist Juvenal, who came up with the aphorism "Rara avis terris nigroque simillima cycno" yes Latin Hack Spit I know, I know. .It means "A bird rarely seen on the earth, like nothing so much as a black swan".
Incidentally, the real, live actual black swan was utterly unknown to Western civilisation until the late eighteenth century, when they were encountered in Australia. Art!
Natalie looking as unugly as possible. Conrad hasn't seen the film and is in no hurry to do so, as it concerns ballet. Not one of my interests.
ANYWAY a Black Swan Event is described as a 'phenomena or prodigy, something quite out of the ordinary', which is where I want to bring in 'Roger The Dodger', one of the fixtures of the 'Beano' for many long decades. Art!
Of course - inevitably! - when I want to find the story I remember, can I find it on teh Interwebz? No I can not! So you'll have to use that atrophied organ of imagination, your brain. Roger, you see, was ever one to take infinite pains to get out of doing work, often expending far more effort on his dodges than the work would have required.
So, picture the scene. Roger has taken to wearing spectacles in the classroom. He has cunningly taken two photographs of eyes, cut them out and pasted them on the inside of his spectacle lenses. Art!
Absent mascara and eye-liner, one presumes. This is the best I could do after AI Art Generator and Google fell through.
Why does Roger do this? Why, so he can doze off behind his glasses and still seem to be awake and aware.
He comes a cropper, mind, when their class teacher tells everyone to close their eyes and imagine a scene. Roger, fast asleep behind his lenses, is caught out. Ooops. A Black Swan Event he couldn't have predicted or planned for.
We now move on to the real part of this Intro. Art!
This is the narrator of our next tale, Database Administrator, hereafter DBA, who - you may be ahead of me here - administered a database. He was one of the 7 survivors of a 30-man team that got slashed in order to cut expenditures on fripperies like salaries. They still had the workload of 30 people, which involved that colossal Pain In The Bottom, pagers. These were carried by all 7 staff, and would routinely pick up as many as 50 pages per night, 49 of which had nothing to do with DBA. The pagers still had to be checked for any potential emergency messages that might come through.
None did. Art!
Their new manager, Steve - that's what DBA called him, I think we can christen him 'Bottomhole Bob' because he was one - refused to stop the un-necessary and unwanted pages coming through, stating that their section needed to be informed at all times. AT ALL TIMES! so, DBA being creative and malicious, routed all the INFO pages to Steve's pager, and only the ALARM pages to his and his colleagues' pagers. Art!
Pager traffic for the minions servicing the database dropped to one or none per night. DBA expected Steve to either come in sleep-deprived or ragingly angry, or both, at having 49 pages across his eight interrupted hours sleep.
Nope. Bottomhole Boss, they discovered, turned his pager off when he went to bed.
Cue the Black Swan Event. One of the federally-mandated databases their business maintained collapsed, which meant huge swingeing fines if it wasn't gotten back into operation via a very tight deadline, and we're talking about tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.
Ooops. Once again, not a problem BB could have predicted or anticipated.
EVERYONE was called into the office to work overnight on coming up with a solution, from the Chief Information Officer down to humble DBA, without exception -
Except Steve. With his pager turned off, he had absolutely no idea of the crisis unfolding. His absence was noticed by the CIO and the CEO, and they were predictably purple-faced with rage when informed by BB's minions that he turned his pager off overnight. Art!
You can tell that BB was a despised and loathed manager, otherwise his staff would have tried calling him on his mobile or home phone to warn about what was occurring. Instead, the first inkling that Steve had that he was in trouble came when he sauntered into the office at 07:45 the next morning, to see everyone else who had been there for 12 hours already.
Ooops again. The CIO and CEO took Steve aside into an office and he was fired in the space of 10 minutes.
Connrad's Cooking And Chef-ry
I have now made the first recipe tried from my Ukrainian cookbook, which is their version of 'Bigos', which I am familiar with as a Polish recipe a.k.a. 'Hunter's Stew', which we have mentioned and pictured here on the blog before. Art!
It involved pork loin, rather than the called-for pork ribs, as I had pork loin and no ribs. Art!
Lots of cabbage and onion. Further to these recipes, I have not been able to purchase any sauerkraut, not at the Co-Op, Lidl nor Morrisons, which is a shocking state of affairs, and the only 'Polski Sklep' shops I know of are in Roch-on-the-Ur, so not exactly convenient. However - first use of that word today - Art!
Here you have home-made sauerkraut. Shredded cabbage currently picking in brine, where it will sit for a week at least. Next time, if there is one, I shall use a much larger cabbage, or two small ones.
"T.B.D."
An acronym I came across today, which you out there might misconstrue as "To Be Determined", a phrase of two definitions. For one, it means an issue has yet to be resolved and will be dealt with at a later date; for the second, it means a personal attitude that brooks no equanimity or vacillation: that sauerkraut IS going to be made! Art?
Also, one of these, a 'Torpedo-Boat Destroyer'. A vessel intended to - you may be ahead of me here - destroy torpedo-boats. A torpedo-boat, you see, was a nippy little vessel that mounted several torpedoes, one of which was enough to sink a capital ship. Given how fleet and manoeuvrable a torpedo-boat was, capital ships didn't have the chance of a nitro-cellulose dog in Hades of intercepting them, so the TBD came into use. Over time the title was shortened to just 'Destroyer'. It was in 'Sapper's War Stories' and the frankly contrived short story 'Retribution'. Art!
Ein Torpedoboot
Here's An Unusual Video I Did Not See Coming
Once again, Conrad ventures down the mean streets of teh Interwebz, so you don't have to, even if he has no idea where he'll end up. I cannot remember how on earth I got to this particular part of the rabbit warren. Art!
I think they are referencing 'Foggy Mountain Breakdown', a tune made famous by the 120 m.p.h. banjo playing of Earl Scruggs. As for this trio, if Art will put down his bowl of coal -
They can get away with 8 banjos, a drum kit and a banjosynth because The Doors were always adding on extra musicians when they needed more instruments. Not sure if Ray Manzarek ever pictured the banjo and synthesiser ever having musical offspring.
Just imagine, you now know what a 'Banjotron Acoustikit 2000' is, which is more than any of us knew five minutes ago. Conrad is unsure why a banjo only has 5 strings not 6, nor why not 4 strings. Musicians, am I right?
Finally -
Finished binge-watching Season 3 of 'The Boys' last night, have now embarked on Season 4. Hopefully Season 5 will be the last, there's only so many changes you can ring on Homelander The Biggest Bully In The Schoolyard.
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