Time To Address The Herd Of Elephants In The Room
So, if everything goes according to plan, you'll be reading these lines as of Wednesday 4th June, which, historically, is when 'Operation Dynamo' ended. You know, the evacuation of the BEF and assorted French from Dunkirk. Art!
Time to address another operation, this one more recent and which goes by the name of 'Operation Spiderweb'. The Ukrainian drone strikes on multiple Ruffian airfields, in case you were asleep for four days.
Conrad does not propose to go into any detail about the planning and execution of this operation, as there are other people better-qualified than I who can do that. Rather, BOOJUM! will look at the aftermath, which is telling. Art!
The howling irony of a newspaper title
From a long-time observer of the Ruffian media, one can tell that this strike has gobsmacked and horrified the orcs in charge, who have been uncharacteristically silent about what happened. Charlie Chipmunk Cheeks, for one, has been utterly absent from media since Sunday. Not a word on what happened. None of his minions have been holding forth about it, either, which is a sure sign that they're all waiting to see what line to take, as is Ruffian state media. There was an official Telegram post blaming Ukrainian terrorists, saying that all drones had been intercepted, and doubtless we'll be told that 'debris caused grass fires'. Art!
'Grass' burning like aircraft
Pro-Ruffian bots on teh Interwebz have also gone very quiet. A few have been mainlining copium, saying that 'Ruffia was looking to retire it's Tu-95 fleet', or fantasising about the nuclear response to come, and yes, the fables about grass fires were trotted out again.
Here's the thing. Allow me to introduce a chart from Bluesky, created by the inimitable 'Prune60'. Art!
More directly associated with June 1st is another consequence of Ukraine using a set of 'Trojan Horses' to smuggle the drones into deepest Mordorvia. Art!
Mile after mile of 18-wheelers, stuck in a queue in order that they can be checked and found drone-free, which of course they are. The Ukes only outfitted 5 artics but inevitably the orcs need to check the other 500,000, just to be on the safe side, and because Cover Your Bottom is a holy principle there. Expect a clutch of Ruffian generals to try flying out of seventh floor windows.
Another facet of silence is that the Tangerine Toad and his lickers-of-boots were not informed about this operation by the Ukes, which is verrrry wise. Mopey Dick, senile as he is, would either have promptly warned Putin, or boasted about it on social media, probably both.
Where does the 'Gold' come from, I hear you ask, and NO! it shouldn't be 'Golden'. Conrad means what he types. Art!
From Prune60 on Bluesky to 'Joe Blogs' on Youtube via Twitter, how eclectic are we.
ANYWAY the grimness of Joe's vlog is inversely proportional to how cheerful his greeting is. Except perhaps for this vlog, as he looks rather mournful here and the news for Mordorvia isn't especially pleasant, either. You see, one of the two sources of liquid funds for Modern-day Mordor is gold, the other one being Chinese Yuan. The dollars, pounds and euros have long since been spent. Art!
From the illuminating bar chart at bottom you can see that Charlie Chipmunk Cheeks was hoarding gold before the start of his Special Idiotic Operation, to the amount of 700 tons of the stuff. By the beginning of 2024 this had been reduced to 500 tons, and is now down to 200 tons. Conrad notes a particularly large drop at year's end, and suspects this is gold being sold to pay off the December deficit, which is always huge compared to the other months of the year.
Now, Conrad is not an economist, yet even I am aware that, if you dump large amounts of a commodity on the market, you will drive the price down, and I've mentioned this risk on a few blogs already.
What has Ruffian dumping gold done to the market value? Why, it has dropped from ₽1.7 trillion per ton to ₽1.2 trillion per ton, a drop of 30% over the space of two years. Told you so! From the looks of it, there won't be any gold left by the end of 2025. Imagine that, burning through 700 tons of the stuff with absolutely nothing to show for it bar a gigantic scrap heap of rusting metal. What d'you think of that, Puffy-Phaced Petrol Pimp?
<silence>
Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown
A Matter Of Pronunciation
You may be aware, as I've yarked on about it a few times, that Conrad decides how stupid products that try to use gimmicky names are pronounced. If your advertising agency comes up with a nonsense name, it shall be pronounced nonsensically as rebuttal and revenge for crimes against the language. Art!
Take this brand of bafunes. Conrad has christened them "Reeeve - Oh- Lutt" instead of their pronunciation, which I'm not even going to put up here, because I'm horrid that way.
"The War Illustrated Edition 209 22nd June 1945"
We continue with TWI's chronological trip of pictures dating from the start of the war, in their central pages montage. We have gone from September 1939 to mid-1940, when things were not going well for the Allied powers of that time. Art!
You can't really put a positive gloss on this one, can you? The Teutons entering Paris, whose government had fled to the spa town of Vichy. Probably the high-water mark of the Third Reich, when Herr Schickelgruber expected Britain to capitulate, too. However -
Here's One Conrad Can Get Behind
I stumbled across an interesting item on my news feed, which, if Art will put down his bowl of coal -
That grotesque little dummy is apparently linked with the 'Saw' franchise, and the article details how we'll never get to see 'Saw 11', which is no great loss to Your Humble Scribe, who has managed to avoid seeing any of these films. Some of YOU are guilty of seeing them, mind, because you don't trot out 10 films if they make a loss.
ANYWAY here's the item that made me pause for thought. Art!
For those of you unaware, that's Guillermo Del Toro, an excellent director with real flair. For those of you also unaware, "At The Mountains Of Madness" is a novella by H P Lovecraft. GDT confessed back in 2011 that any film of it was unlikely to be made, as it 'has a tough ending with no love story'. Also, it's set in Antarctica, which probably means filming in Alaska in wintertime, not a fun experience; ask anyone involved in filming "The Thing". GDT was still mildly optimistic as of 2022, so perhaps it's more 'if ever' rather than simply 'never'.
Rara Avis Gets Rarer
Sorry for referencing Operation Spiderweb again. You see, one of the aircraft destroyed was an Antonov A-50, possibly the last working one the Ruffians had. Art!
These things cost $350 million each and cannot be manufactured any longer. Reportedly, Putinpot soiled himself with rage after the Ukrainians shot one down last year in an 'air ambush', because they lost not only the airframe but the crew as well, who are an elite amongst Ruffian aircrews, and so important that they are commanded by a general aboard the plane.
Well, an incautious widow has just confirmed what many suspected, and which Ruffia denied - thanks to complete silence about it, surprise surprise - at the time and afterwards: Ukraine shot down an A-50 over the Black Sea in January, killing all the crew.
These things were like gold dust, if you'll pardon the phrase, and since Mordorvia was reduced to a single one, the Ukrainian air force has gotten a lot cheekier.
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