To Make It Look Good

I Will Start This Blog By Getting Ahead Of Myself

Because who wants a narrative that moves forward logically from the beginning, passes through the middle and comes to an end?  Not me.  So, I'm going to put up an illo as click-baity incitement.  Art!

A skit on 'Robocop'

     That's the Antipodean critic and reviewer 'Robot Head', whom is hilarious BUT also quite sweary, although for an Ocker he's probably very restrained.

     ANYWAY back to today's title, and allow me to bring in the notes I made from a vlog by Jason Jay Smart with the accurate yet not very inspiring title "Putin's $53 billion deficit".  JJS looked at the Ruffian economy in depth and it was all bad.  Very, very bad.  As an instance, Ruffian banks are now limiting the amount of money people can withdraw, for fear of a bank run, where a mass of customers want to take out their money all at once and the bank collapses.  Art!

     Specifically, the budget deficit of Mordorvia up to the end of August was $53 billion, which averages out at $6.6 billion per month, so the annual total will be at least $80 billion and probably a lot more, as the Ruffians lump a great deal into the December total.  Art!

    Ruffian oil and gas revenue has also taken a hit, having to be revised downward by 15% for 2025, leaving a $200 billion hole in the state budget.  Coal mining has made a loss of $3 billion for the first half of 2025, in that sector's worst situation since the Nineties.

    HOWEVER - a word you knew was going to crop up eventually - the Kremlin, in an attempt to make things look simply splendid and thoroughly top-hole, has forbidden employers to fire their workers.  The idea seems to have been that full employment can then be boasted about, that sanctions don't work and also STOP THE SANCTIONS*.  The downside is that companies are simply telling people to take Friday off and not paying them, thus cutting people's wages by 20%.  Doing a terrific job there, Putinpot.  Art!

Back to -

     "Disney just admitted that The Rise Of Skywalker Lost Money - How Is This Possible?"

"

     Ol' RH takes his info from 'Forbes' magazine, which he periodically chaffs for having written the article via AI.  TROS is a film RH hates with a vengeance, and we all need to bow in his general direction for watching this cinematic garbage so that we don't need to.  'This film doesn't get nearly the hate it deserves' is his considered judgement.

     For those wondering, Forbes got their financial data from Disney itself, so there's no concerns about figures being made up.  Art!

     Erk.  This makes it the most expensive film ever made.  

     "You can see where the money was wasted - unlike The Acolyte' opines RH, with the location filming, big sets, expensive CGI and hundreds of extras jacking up the final total.  

     Forbes quotes a couple of studio execs 'In line with budget' and 'below the production budget' to try and prove that TROS was fiscally sound, and also by trotting out the canard that re-shoots are planned into a budget.  NO THEY ARE NOT! because no studio wants to do any re-shoots, which are always but always super expensive to manage.

     This is proof that Forbes uses ChatGPT to write articles.  Proof I tell you!  Art?

ChatGPT personified

     ANYWAY they also provide hard data on the UK's tax rebate, which came to $103 million because large parts of the film were shot in the Allotment Of Eden, meaning the overall total dropped to $489 billion.

     Global box office takings were $1.077 billion, and using the 50:50 split between the cinemas and the studio, Disney got $538 million.  Forbes thus inaccurately declares that the film therefore made a profit of $49. million, or one-twelfth of it's overall budget, making it a very modest success.  To make it look good.

     EXCEPT they completely ignored marketing, advertising and promotion, which for a Disney film cost at least $50 million and for a big-budget film like this are likely to top $100 million.

     Thus, at best it broke even, more likely being in the red to the tune of $50 million.  Art!

 

     Yes, we are cruel.  No, we don't care.

More Of Mad Metal

The exhibits at BOVINGTON TANK MUSEUM have moved on from the First Unpleasantness to the inter-war years, except of course people at the time didn't realise it was an inter-war period.  Art!

     This is the Vickers Medium Mk II, and the turret is unhelpfully turned through 90 degrees, making it hard to discern which is the hull front and rear.  It positively bristles with Vickers machine guns.  Let me dig a little - Art!

     Col was highly unimpressed with the design, stating that it looked as if a load of oddments had simply been thrown onto the hull willy-nilly.  Be that as it may, these vehicles, all 12 tons of them, could travel at 15 mph, thus a doubling of the speed a Whippet could manage.  They had a crew of five, which must have made life inside one pretty cramped.  Originally delivered to the Royal Armoured Corps in 1924, two of them saw service in North Africa against the invading Italians in 1940.  Art!

Art!

     The Carden-Lloyd Carrier, because who hasn't thought 'How can we make our heavy-tripod water-cooled medium machine guns more mobile?"  Originally it was to be issued to the British infantry, who somewhat embarrassingly didn't want it, so it ended up with the Royal Armoured Corps.  They used it as a scout vehicle, because the armour was paper-thin and the crew had no overhead protection. Art!

     It had the saving grace of being cheap, and the unpleasant design of having the engine sitting between the two crew, making polite conversation impossible.  You can see the roots of the Universal/Bren-gun Carrier in this vehicle.  The CL Carrier was very successful, being exported to many other countries and influencing other tankette designs.

The Horrid Truth Courtesy The BBC

Yes, I refer back to that Have Your Say with 1,018 Comments about Manchester United Dairies.  Conrad guarantees at least 95% will be howlingly negative.

Seun

07:59 16 Oct

I don't know a lot of things, but I know one thing and it is that Man U season already took the shape it wants to take and even a blind man can see the shape and the deaf clearly hears it.
They are sitting comfortably where they belong based on all metrics: Board, coach, tactics and players.

     Lest ye be unaware, I think United are at number 14 in a leaguer of 20 or so.  I don't care about the sport, just the ladled invective.

To Make It Look Gooder

Technically, the Norks and Sorks are still at war with each other, which partly explains the heavily-fortified DMZ between the two nations.  Only partly, because the other function is not to keep the Sorks out of Nork territory, it's to keep the Nork's slave population from escaping.  Art!

     Firstly, he'll need to be quarantined for communicable diseases and have his digestive system purged of any parasites he thoughtfully brought with him.  After that the Sorks will probably assign him a mentor to guide him through a culture and civilisation utterly alien to him.  The Nork troops who failed to kill or capture him will doubtless be either executed or sent to a labour camp and worked to death, which is justice Nork style.

Late-Breaking News

I am re-reading 'Saga' from trade-paperback 1 to 11, and whilst sorting them out last night, found that I already had Issue 8, in addition to duplicating Issue 9.  I definitely didn't read Issue 8, so I must have put it away without reading it.  O well.  Darling Daughter can now have 3 duplicated TPBs.  Lucky her.  Art!

Issue One

     Very much NSFW thanks to sex, violence and cursing.  Terrific artwork, mind.

*  That don't work.