Water Falls

DON'T Make The Mistake Of Thinking 'Ooooh, Pretty Landscape Features!"

Since we are going to be venturing down some dark alleyways of human behaviour, where Death And His Blunt Scythe lurk at every corner.  Not to be buzz-kill or anything.

     Okay, I think we need to start off in a fashion completely unrelated as to how we intend to go on.  Art!

     Conrad is unsure how the hydrogeology of this feature works, nor how that road mana

     ANYWAY we are casting our view back over that incident on the - or, rather, off the - 'Disney Dream' cruise ship, as explicated by Sal of "What's Going On With Shipping".  To recap, a 4-year old fell into the water, and her father followed her in to try and save her.  Thanks to the DD's crash-crew in the emergency tender, both were recovered within 20 minutes.  Art!

      As Sal, a former passenger on the DD, explained, those railings are Plexiglassed in, there's no way to get through them.  He further detailed that this is the Deck 4, the promenade deck wh   ich is 'only' 50 feet above the waves.  Put a pin in that number.

     Sal, salty seadog that he is, illustrated the ship's progress with a marine activity chart available online. Art!

     The DD was chugging along at 10 knots, using only 2 engines in order to proceed more economically.  As soon as they get the 'man overboard' warning the ship comes to a dead stop, out goes the emergency tender and the two people are recovered.  The DD then fires up all 6 engines and hammers into the rollers at 22 knots, going flat out until they can reach casevac distance from shore.  One reason being, as Sal wisely informs, that falling into water from 50 feet can cause serious internal injuries.  Art!

     The lower half of this picture terminates at the waterline, and my guesstimate is that this is between 100 - 120 feet from precipice edge to the quarry waters, going by the height of the chap who throws himself in as being about 6'.  Art!

     I say 'throws' because he doesn't dive or go in feet first, and the thunderclap he makes on hitting the water is enormously loud.

     Because I'm a ghoul but not a complete ghoul, I'm not going to post the aftermath, where his body floats face-down in the water for a couple of seconds, twitches a bit and then sinks.  Dead as the woolly mammoth.  This, foolish Darwin Award Winner, is because water when hit from that height has all the tender forgiving characteristics of concrete, all the more so if you hit it spread-eagled.

     It is strongly suspected that the culprit/victim/prankster above was from Mordorvia BUT let me assure you that idiocy is an international phenomenon and we have plenty of them home-grown here in Perfidious Albion.  Art!

     This unusual rock formation is 'Durdle Door' in Dorset, and is regularly used by morons to risk death and injury as they leap from it into the water below.  Which looks dangerously shallow in the first place.  Art!

     This is from 2020, when three people were airlifted to hospital after jumping from the top of the rock formation.  The next year another climber fell off the Door whilst trying to climb down it, and died.  Surprise! a bikini and flip-flops are not suitable as mountaineering gear.  Art!

     This is from last summer, and the helicopter is evacuating a jumper with spinal injuries, thanks to the effects of hitting the water from 200 feet.

     'They should seal it off!" I hear you quibble, querulously.  They - the landowners - have done so with fencing and warning signs.  The signs are ignored and the fences either knocked down or scaled.  Even if they put up electrified barbed wire in coils 20 feet high and patrolled it with robo-dogs mounting flamethrowers, the morons would simply scale the Door from the beach.  Art!

     The 'Mythbusters' team tested an urban myth: that if you are falling into water from a great height, an implement such as a sledgehammer going ahead of you will save your life.  Possibly due to breaking the surface tension or aerating the water.  Art!

     Ummmm no.  This is 'Buster', their crash-test dummy (missing legs for some bizarre reason), about to hit the water after the hammer precedes him.  Art!

     The impact is at 60 m.p.h. and registered 269g, which is enough to render a real person extremely dead.  Without the hammer the g-force hit 270g; there may be a slight mitigation but - you are still going to be a sack of broken bones and blood afterwards.  Sorry.  Also, Art!

     This is how they did it back in 1969, after a fall of 238,855 miles, with braking parachutes and flotation aids.  

A Warning To The Curious

No!  Nothing to do with the M. R. James ghost story, where supernatural vengeance is visited upon an interfering archaeologist who is rash enough to disinter and 'appropriate' an Anglo-Saxon cr

     ANYWAY this is another sterling reminder that data protection laws and legislation exist for a reason, one of them being to stop nosy parkers from interfering with what does not concern them.  Art!

     In this case, the Sister Who Openly Ogled Numbers, hereafter SWOON, stole her elder sister's identity and created social media profiles in her name, registering for a school reunion and - a major RED FLAG - used financial software at her employer to access her bank records.  SWOON then offered un-wanted financial advice, confirming that she had access to financial data she should not have had.

     She continued to access accounts at work that she had no reason to monitor, was found out and fired.  We were warned NOT to access anything without a business reason to in our first week of training.  

     Bah!  Some people.

Be Grateful You Floor-Dwellers At Sheremetyevo

As I posted about all those Ruffians whose flights were delayed or cancelled altogether, the next worrying thing is actually getting aboard one of their national air carriers.  These things are being held together with gaffer tape and Blu-tak and getting aboard one is a gamble.  Art!

     The plane in question was an elderly An-24, of Angara Airlines.  There's no mystery about what happened: it crashed.  There are multiple Tweets about it this afternoon, coming later in the news cycle than the Metro account above.  Art!

     

     We're not gloasting about this, just pointing out that this was bound to happen, and the next time might be a full-size passenger jet carrying hundreds of passengers and crew.

Errr - Quite

This is definitely an advert I did not see on my bingo card this year, or for the next five years.  Art!

     Go on, admit it, you've heard the name, yet you have only the vaguest idea of where it is, haven't you?

     Worry no longer, for here is Conrad and BOOJUM! to explicate further.  Kazakhstan, or 'Qazaqstan' as they like to term it in Kazakh, is one of the former Sinister Union's Central Asian republics, meaning they look Asian, not Caucasian, are mostly Muslim and have been progressively leaning away from alliances or dalliances with Moscow.  Art!

     It's an enormous country with a relatively small population.  Their advert on Youtube seems to be looking to entice investors from the West, proclaiming that it's "The world's most dynamic investment destination".  Art!

Seeking to portray 'swish'

     Conrad wishes them well.  They are no longer under the yoke of Modern-day Mordor, and might well be looking to Turkey as an entrepot for the European market.

     I think a map is called for.  Art!

Rather Dim

An employment tribunal in Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell (it's been dry today) have found in favour of the plaintiff, a web saleswoman who had gone on maternity leave from her £65,000 p.a. job, and had been offered a different job at £24,000 when she returned.  Art!

BrightHR, the employer

     The 'Remedy' will be decided later, which is jargon for 'Compensation', which might take into account the higher pre-maternity earnings and how long the saleswoman had been in post.  A £40,000 difference multiplied across, ooooh say 10 years becomes £400,000, or even more if annual raises and bonuses are included.

     Quite the most stupid behaviour by BrightHR was not taking this woman back into her old role, where she had been generating - waitforitwaitforit - £1.3 million in sales per annum.  Cutting their throat to spite their neck.