Here we are again, back on schedule, with the Intro I planned to write yesterday before being side-tracked by that wicked font of knowledge 'Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable' and all it's 'Bill's, and be advised that there's a lot of them to get through yet. Art!
Yes, that's William Sikes, from a particularly horrid musical that Conrad is not going to watch, called 'Olivier' or similar, about the boyhood of the actor, p
ANYWAY back to a constellation of woe in narrated form, for Lo! yes it's another of Youtube's Reddit fables featuring a chiselling toad, his wife, their business and an array of sub-contractors.
The teller of this torrid tale was a construction planner, a skilled subcontractor who designed the architecture of domestic homes to be built or remodelled - as in the case of Number 53. Art!
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| GONE! Yet back again |
Since 'Skilled Artisinal Sub-Contractor' is a terminally boring title, I'll call the narrator Thunderchief, whom had been plying his craft for 10 years. He was contacted by Mark, whose wife nominally ran 'Frilly Pink Construction', whose gimmick was that it was a construction company - the clue is in the title - run by a woman. In reality she was the face and name of the business and nothing more, it was all Mark.
Mark got $1.500 worth of planning done from THUNDERCHIEF (it has more zap in capitals, nicht wahr?) and then went radio silent when it came to paying the bill, until THUNDERCHIEF sent him the bill. Whereupon Mark said he didn't get the job so he wouldn't be paying.
This is not how sub-contracting works, lest ye be unaware. Art!
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| THUNDERCHIEF studying the Magna Carta |
Here is the crucial part. THUNDERCHIEF, smarting from being swindled, passed the word around the sub-contractor community that Mark was a dishonest scoundrel and bounder, probably in less flattering words.
The consequences of this turned up 6 months later, when Mark rang up THUNDERCHIEF and acted all pally, as if $1,500 of bad debt wasn't clinging to him like the scent of an unflushed toilet. Sorry if you can't unsee that.
Mark got played about his 'surefire big project with a tight deadline' with falsely pally THUNDERCHIEF going along until the next day, when he submitted a bid 50% higher than his usual rate, added on $1,500 and said he wanted it all up front. Nothing like being petty and vindictive to make the day great! Art?
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| Phone not ringing |
It transpired, after a little digging was done, that Frilly Pink Construction Inc. had been busy stiffing other sub-contractors over the past year, so Mark was getting desperate, and indeed he must have, to try getting a person he'd stiffed out of $1,500 to work for him again.
THUNDERCHIEF never heard from Mark again, and his Sure-fire Big Project With A Tight Deadline fell through as well. Gosh, it seems like Mark and the truth are very distant companions, doesn't it?
Then Mrs Frilly Pink Construction Inc tried calling sub-contractors, because Mark's telephone manner put people off, that and his being a chiselling toad. Surprise! She was roundly insulted by everyone she rang and got no further than her hubbo. Art!
It gets worse.
A year after Mark's desperate phone pleading, they were sued by many sub-contractors and clients, with Mark having reallllly messed up several construction projects. THUNDERCHIEF mentions wrong paint schemes but Conrad suspects defective construction work, big ticket stuff that's very expensive to remedy. FPC Inc tried to use bankruptcy to cheat these claims, but Surprise! weren't successful and had to compensate their plaintiffs.
It gets worse.
Mrs Frilly Pink Construction Inc decided to divorce Mark, having proof that she was only minimally involved in the business, and she scampered off into the sunset having dumped the vast majority of the business debt on her hapless ex.
Not sure what Mark's long-term business strategy was here. Cheats sometimes prosper, in contradiction to the old saw, yet not this time.
When The Bill Comes Due For A Billion Or Two
Since I took so long to describe Mark The Miscreant and his Miserable Marriage Partner, I'm going to have to put this item in separately. Here I am encapsulating a short interview of George Barros, the worryingly sharp geo-political analyst whom turns up on Youtube channels. Art!
That's George, looking devilishly suave, and as he put it, Ruffia's problem is not so much the million men they've lost to date in the Special Idiotic Operation, it's where the next million will come from.
ANYWAY AGAIN back to bills. George, underlining exactly the same commentary by Paul Warburg, stated that Putin's choice in this war is to avoid what dictatorial tsars and presidents have done in the past: throw a gigantic mob of unwilling conscripts at the enemy until one side cracks. Because mobilising the Ruffian population would be political suicide, so unpopular is the idea.
What Putinpot has done is amp and ramp up payments to the contract and volunteer soldiers, meaning that the sweaty-handed orcs joining the ranks are in it for the money. Money money money. The benefit of this is that it totally divorces the population of Mordorvia from the sweaty-handed money-grubbers, thus no political fallout.
The economic fallout, however -
You see, in order to keep the supply of orcs constant and consistent, the single joining-up bonus has been continually increased, with different regions adding to the 'pot'. In proper money equivalent, this is now $35,000, or a year's salary for podunks out in Buryatia. One region briefly raised it to $40,000.
What constitutes the swarm of flies in the ointment, because rest assured there is one, is that the sweaty-handed money grubbers keep infelicitously being un-alived in Ukraine, averaging about 35,000 per month. Art!
At the bottom line, just to keep the ranks filled, not to generate any personnel surplus, the Kremlin is forking over $1.225 billion EVERY MONTH just in sign-up bonuses, leaving aside monthly wage payments. Sustainable over a period of a few months, these payments are now driving up inflation, draining the National Wealth Fund and returning ever-worse specimens of money-grubber. By the end of Q1 in 2025 the entire recruitment budget for 2025 had been used up, for 90,000 money-grubbers, who had also been used up.
Don't forget - it's all going according to plan!
Conrad The Pedantic Hair-Splitter Strikes Again
Please don't think I dislike 'The 100' because I find it highly entertaining, it's just that Your Humble Scribe can never turn his brain to 'Off' unless he's asleep, and not even then. Dreams, you see.
ANYWAY to recap the plot driver: 100 teenage delinquents were sent down to a depopulated Earth, as guinea-pigs to see if humans could survive in the aftermath of a destroying nuclear apocalypse. Art!
The crisis looming is a complete failure of the Ark's oxygen in 6 months. Problem is, nobody seems to be working on a method of getting the Ark's population of thousands, if not tens of thousands of people, down to the ground. YOU'VE ONLY GOT 6 MONTHS YOU SLACKERS! They ought to be busily beavering away building dropships or shuttles or lifepods or whatever. Not only that,
SPOILERS AHOY!
- it turns out they've got even less than 6 months. The rational and logical thing to do would be to dump another load of voluntold delinquents onto the planet's surface, except no: they're going to kill off 320 people instead, because - you need an evil antagonist, it seems. Art!
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| The mark of Kane? |
"The Battle Of Fromelles"
This event takes up two chapters in 'The Ockers In France', more formally 'The Official History Of Australia In The War Of 1914 - 1918 Volume III', and it makes very grim reading indeed, concerning the two-division attack carried out on the Teuton 'Sugar Loaf' salient in mid-1916 by the British 61st division and the Australian 5th Division. There is an absolute wealth of detail on how things went wrong, kept on going wrong and only got wronger. Anyone slavering over the glories of war ought to be made to read these chapters to realise how inglorious an endeavour it is. Art!
Part of the battlefield, and one of the old, flooded Teuton trenches the Ockers were defending after reaching them. Be it noted that their opponents were the Bavarians, tough lads always up for a ruck but also dashed decent when it was called for, unlike the softy Saxons or the prannock Prussians.
Finally -
Art!
Putin doesn't know if the Ukrainians stole them or his own soldiers sold them. Or, even worse, simply gave them away. Tee hee!
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