Bear The Bear

 I Have A Tale Here - 

Which is more hear tail than the latter, scatter my data.  Also what the reasons are for behaving as you do when in the wilderness of South Canada.  Which is yet another reason for confirming why the wildlife here in the Allotment Of Eden is about as worrying as worrisome as badgers.  Because it is.  Art!

     There you go, about the most dangerous predator there is across This Sceptred Isle, whom you might invite inside for tea and crumpets because that's how we roll here.  Art!

     

     This tale, however - that word again! - is set in the South Canadian hinterland, where an isolated cabin in the woods might be hired by outsiders for Lo! these many months across the summer to the tune of three months or longer.  Big city folks like to enjoy the unspoiled wilderness doncha know.

     In Part One, these temporary neighbour's mutant offspawn offspring children throw rubbish all over their next door resident's yard, and yark hilariously - they think - in the face of local law enforcement, whom are called in to deal with the problem.  Because local law enforcement who live and work amongst the locals are going to be so, so sympathetic to outsiders from out of state who are there for twelve weeks out of the year and other big city mistakes.  Art!

     Put Upon Rational Residents, hereafter PURR, began discovering bas of rubbish being dumped in their back yard, which they caught in loving detail on their trail cameras, meaning Neighbours Of Nuisance, hereafter NON, got landed a $500 fine for littering.  They then vanished as their lease was up and the locals enjoyed peace and quiet.  Until next summer, when NON returned, this time with a boat, jet skis and motorbikes and a three-month lease over the season.  Oooops.  Art!

     Proving that there is no  material denser than a human skull, they proceeded to litter their own cabin grounds with their own trash, because throwing it into the back yard was easier then putting it in a bin.  I think.  Their thought processes seem to have been at the level of a two-year old.  The consequences of littering were skunks and racoons coming to visit and tearing rubbish bags open to see what goodies were within.  Given that this is summer, one can only presume that flies and ants were attracted, too, for the vermin bifecta.  

     Then the parties started up.  Loud, intrusive parties that got them fined repeatedly, because they didn't seem to realise local law enforcement was as fed up with them as PURR was.  Art!

     These parties only made the rubbish problem worse, as all the partygoers would carelessly discard their empty beer cans, paper plates, uneaten food etcetera, in the back yard.  Trust me, this is building to a climax.  

     So, PURR came home from work one day to discover two police cars and a Forestry Service truck outside NON's cabin, and a great deal of wailing going on.  PURR made themselves a pot of tea and sat down on their back porch to enjoy the schadenfreude, listening to all the sounds of woe that the massed NON were making. Art!

I can't see Skynet ever becoming a problem

     NON had assembled en masse and gone to town for the day, probably pining for their big city lifestyle, returning in the evening to find that their back door had been smashed in, and the culprit(s) still inside, grunting and swearing.  Impelled by a guilty conscience, they immediately called the police, blaming their next-door neighbours for breaking in and trashing the cabin.

     Alas no.  Art!

     When the police investigated, they discovered that the intruder was a very large black bear, hence the Forestry Service truck.  The FS chaps managed to get the bear out of the cabin, alive, upon which NON tried every excuse under the sun to blame PURR.  Unsuccessfully - these are the local cops, after all.  'Bear baiting' as an excuse doesn't work if you're the one baiting with bags of delicious fermented maturing rubbish emptied all over your back yard. Art!

     By next morning NON and all their impedimenta were gone.  Both PURR snuck across to have a nosey and witnessed that the back door had been boarded over, but the interior of the cabin was a war-zone. Not only did NON get fined for illegally baiting a bear, the cabin owners sued them for the damage caused.

     The story ends there but one can predict that NON would never, ever, EVER  return to that cabin.

   

Metaphorical Cement Overshoes

Another fascinating chapter of misery in the annals of Modern-day Mordor and it's industries.  Today, thanks to 'Joe Blogs' we examine 'Cemros' the Ruffian cement and construction business.  Nominally, they have 13,000 employees, although this is going to only ever decline over time, in alignment with other Ruffian industries.  Art!

Product placement

At only 13,000 workers they lack the political clout of RZD and so cannot merely lay people off.  Thus they have gone to a 4-day working week, meaning their employees get a 20% pay cut, whoopee.  Their industry-specific problem is a big fall in housing construction and cheaper foreign imports (from China) which they are lobbying the government to either ban or restrict.  Their problem there is that other Ruffian businesses need materials to be as cheap as possible, so that's unlikely to ever happen. 

Conrad Is ANGRY!

Angrier than usual.  Yes, we are back to fulminating about Codewords again.  Do you have a problem with that? because the Remote Nuclear Tormentor could do with a workout.  ANYWAY 

MYSTIQUE: An 8-letter word that uses 'Y' and 'Q'?  Bah!  Defined by my Collins as 'An aura of mystery, power and awe that surrounds a person or thing'.  Art!

     Actually that's not bad.  Perhaps we do need to be worried about Skynet.  Which has a mystique all of it's own.  The only good thing about MYSTIQUE is that it's French, not one of the zombie languages.

DIOXIDE: Grrrrr so they aren't satisfied merely with OXIDE, it has to be. two molecules of oxygen.  ARE WE CHEMISTS NOW ALL OF A SUDDEN?  Bah!  Art!

     Say hello to Osmium Tetroxide, which is the deadliest dioxide there is, because you need something interesting to look at. 

DETOX: This isn't even a proper word! It is repellent South Canadian slang <smacks Remote Nuclear Detonator repeatedly>.  If anything it ought to be DETOXIFICATION

More Cold War Contraptions

We turn to the Sinister Union's tanks of the Cold War.  Art!

T-72M

     This is one of the most numerous tanks ever built, 25,000 of the 40-ton rascals coming off the assembly lines.  The gun is a smoothbore 125 mm, backed up by two machine guns. 

     The most striking aspect of the T-72 is it's small size, which was achieved by getting rid of the loader, replacing them with an automatic mechanism instead.  Having only 3 crew meant the same number of crews could man more tanks.  There were significant problems with the auto-loader, which could load parts of the crew into the breech.  The ammunition was completely exposed, meaning any naked flame or anti-tank warhead would detonate the lot and thus we get the orc turret-toss competition.  Nor is that all; the auto-loader was sloooow and far less capable than a human loader.  Ooops.

     Another very significant problem was the inability of the gun barrel to depress sufficiently, meaning that they cannot hide behind cover.   Art!

We Cover These Occasionally

'These' being clifftop homes that are in peril thanks to coastal erosion.  Art!

     It's a bit heartbreaking to see your house get demolished before it falls into the sea.  You can guarantee that there used to be a lot more coastline in front of these houses and the sea has relentlessly eroded it away.  Art!