The Gravitas Of Gravid

Talk About A Weighty Matter!

"Conrad cackled triumphantly -" for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, I need to explain away today's title, for you may not be as loquacious as I am, nor as modest.  'Gravitas' means to have a sober, serious, contemplative nature, or to be authoritative in conduct and judgement.  It comes directly from the Latin <spit hack> 'Gravitas', meaning 'Weight', itself derived from 'Gravis', meaning 'Heavy'.  Art!

One of the few covers not featuring nearly-naked women with swords or female robots fighting

       'Gravid' is defined by my 'Collins Concise Dictionary' as 'The technical term for "pregnant"' but an obstetrician would be well advised to use the non-technical term for 'pregnant', that being 'pregnant', as informing a husband that his wife can be served up alongside steak and potatoes and covered with a meat sauce might earn a thump or two.

     ANYWAY - ooops, the spine of my CCD just came apart, the poor hardworking thing - we have yet another tale of manglement, as related by the hubbo of a pregnant worker.  Yes, it is from South Canada, however did you guess!  Art?

Selfie of the manager in question

     
     Note to readers: I've had this tale on my Word Cheat Sheet for months and months, so did due diligence and checked that it hadn't appeared already on BOOJUM! and it hasn't.  So we're good to go.

     The tale was narrated by Direct Retribution Wrathful Husband Opponent, hereafter DRWHO - a bell is ringing faintly in the background - in response to the question on Quora 'Has someone ever been fired because of you?'

     Yes, he replied.  Four people.  Two of whom he reported to the store he worked at for stealing, and another for, in his own words - 

"making disgusting sexual comments about a co-worker (he was a serial sexual harasser and it was the last straw). I did feel a little to blame when his wife found out why he was fired, she left him, and he un-alived himself, but he was a grown-assed man who knew better and had been punished for it before."

     DRWHO not one to take anything lying down, it seems.  

     As for Number Four - Art!

One of these is Bottomhole Manglement

     His wife's second pregnancy had been difficult and troublesome along the way, meaning she needed - not wanted, needed - to go to the hospital.  The business knew she was pregnant, which is kind of obvious after the third trimester, yet her supervisor, Moron Advancing Short-TERmism, hereafter MASTER told her if she went to the hospital, she would be fired.  Art!

Stylus skipping and taking you out of the moment

     Er- WHAT?!

     Any British or European manager reading the paragraph above would be having kittens, whom themselves would be having kittens*.  Firing a woman because she is pregnant is a good way to get an Employment Tribunal fining you an enormous amount, dragging your name into the gutter and from there to the sewer, and being forced to take the ex-employee back.  UK and EU laws take an extremely dim view of this straight-out-of-the-Fifties manglement approach.

     So, it has to be said, do South Canadian State Labour Boards - if the matter comes to their attention.  Given his conduct so far, do you think DRWHO is going to shrug his shoulders and carry on regardless, whistling a merry tune and letting the MASTER win?

     NO HE IS NOT.     Art!

     This is just put up as an example illo, different states call them by different names.  A couple of days after the sacking, DRWHO took Winsome Obstetric Wife, hereafter WOW, to their state unemployment office.  Their case worker listened to the tale with stunned disbelief, then went to drag one of their lawyers into the meeting, who rubbed his hands with glee and danced a little jig was also gobsmacked at the sheer illegality being carried out by MASTER.

     "It was the easiest case I have ever had," he said afterwards, happily rubbing his hands and chortling with glee adding it to his professional resumé.

     Net results:  

1)  MASTER gets fired, no euphemistic nonsense about 'let go' - fired.

2)  WOW got her normal wage across the entire pregnancy.

3)  WOW got an additional 6 weeks pay post-partum ('after baby arrives')

4)  WOW gets her old job back at the same wage in the same position

Art!

     The business seems to have suffered a brain-fart of epic proportions, being an Industry Deficient In Observing Things, hereafter IDIOT.  They had just fired a manager for illegally firing WOW, then had to pay her and then pay extra, and they -

     Tried to offer her a different job with more manual work and chemical exposure.

     Off they both went to the State LAbour Board lawyer.

     "It was the second easiest case I have ever had," he said afterwards.

     WOW was awarded another 6 months salary.

     Moral of the story: don't commit stupid crimes otherwise a SLAB will fall on you, and gravity - itself derived from 'Gravis', meaning 'Heavy' - hurts.

Is It A Slow News Day?

I mean, there's always the Orange Land Whale to generate headlines, either falling asleep or describing the Wonderland Zoo that is his mind, and his minions getting away with - ah - er - well, let's not go there.  Plus the war in Ukraine, China eyeing Taiwan, Test cricket, sharks in the Solent thanks to global warming - there's a lot going on in the world.

     Except apparently not.  As evidence I offer - Art!

     Conrad has no idea who she is and cares less, and a headline about her haircut?  Talk about filler.  Art!

Soon to hit Career-Ending Birthday

     O Rly?  Another nothingburger.  She's a lot older than I realised.  She may be too old to appear in the next 'X-Men' film, which isn't due until she's nearly a pensioner.  Well, they could bring her back as 'Shower' instead of 'Storm' and I want a royalty if that happens.

A Different Take On A Christmas Cake

Conrad, being stricken with procrastination, has not baked any cakes for ooooh a couple of months now, and ought to have done an Xmas cake at least a couple of weeks ago, so that it could mature for at least a month, interspersed with spirits being poured upon it.  Art!

     Being me, I dug around on teh Interwebz looking for recipes, and found one that has the usual list of ingredients, most unusually done in metric measures since South Canadians love using 'Cups', 'Roods' and 'Bushels' and such ilk.  What makes this one stand out is that the dried fruit (which I usually soak overnight and then drain), citrus zest and juice, butter and sugar are all put in a pan and brought to a boil before simmering for 5 minutes.  You then cool this mixture before adding in the rest of the ingredients.  

     The baking temperature is stated as Gas Mark 2, which seems low even for a fruit cake, and 2 hours cooking time, which again seems on the low side.  I'm guessing the time will be more like 4 hours, so Saturday baking here we come!

Back To Bovvie

Yes, we have lots of photos still to be posted up, including ones from the Ukrainian Exhibition, which I have to check and classify.  There are 3 vehicles I can identify straight away - the T-72, Challenger and M113 but shall have to dig around a bit for the others.  Art!

From sheep to marsupial

     Say hello to one of the earliest purpose-designed Armoured Personnel Carriers; this is the 'Kangaroo', which is the old Canuckistanian 'Ram' tank with the turret removed, leaving space for an infantry section in the hull.  Unlike half-tracks as used by the Teutons, this thing had proper armour, 3" thick, and was fully tracked, no nonsense about wheels complicating the design.  Yes, there was a hole where the turret had been, but it would take a shell exploding directly over the Kangaroo to affect it, which is unlikely.

     The infantry loved them, being behind a nice thick slab of armour plate, yet there were never enough of them, even with 500 being produced.  Art!

     The uniquely irreplaceable David Fletcher and a slightly elevated look at a Kangaroo.

Finally -

Just so you know, I am nearly at the end of Episode 2 of the Thai zombie series 'Zomvivor' and have gone back to review Episode 1 and take photos.  Conrad anticipates there will be far too much to review and too many photos to put up, so I expect you'll get a potted version of it over several blogs once I've worked my way through Episode 7.  I bet you can hardly wait.  Art!

     Already vastly better than that dismal Sork series I cannot even remember the name of, and cannot be bothered to check.

     That's all folks.  See you on the other side!

*  They must have been gravid, too.

An Editorial Dilemma

Greetings, Gentle Reader

One of Conrad's constant cognostications is what to put in the Intro, because you can only entertain people with tanks, atom bombs, zombies, Codewords and Colin Furze for so long, before people get fed up and demand more variety.  What else might we choose to defame in depth?  Art!

Not sure how to , describe this, except as 'flattering'

     Hmmm. That's the AI Art Generator working off a prompt of 'Sharon Stone Oliver Stone Devyn Stone'.  We can probably agree which is Sharon. This simple 6 name input might very well generate pages and pages of content, thanks to acting, directing, scriptwriting, sardonic legal commentary and 'Harvey Birdman Attorney At Law' for which we shout hurrah!  Fecundity it's own reward.

     ANYWAY I was wondering what to concentrate upon for the Intro, as the topic of 'Stones' has not been exhausted at all, see above for evidence.

     Then there is the secondary optional input, which I have decided might be centred around 'Dogs'.  Art!

     Your Humble Scribe has never understood what Battersea Power Station had to do with this album.  If you squint hard you can see the big pink pig floating between two of the chimneys.

     ANYWAY my point is that there are an innumerable number of dogs present in the 'Dog' section of my 'Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable', but which only have a single line or a short paragraph entry.  How to craft a solid Intro from fifty different miniscule entries?  Art!

     Dogs it is.  Here's the 'Doge' meme.  Those of you with sharp eyes and a good memory will recognise this breed as a Shiba, which is the breed used as an emblem by NAFO - The North Atlantic Fella Organisation (also Fellarinas), whom are dedicated to fighting orcish disinformation on teh Interwebz.  HOWEVER - yes that word again - the Doge meme became viral in 2013, which predates the orcish invasion of Krim, so the two are entirely coincidental.  Art!

 The best thing about DOGE? It’s dead.

By Larry Edelman Globe Columnist,Updated December 1, 2025, 2:00 p.m.

21

Elon Musk in the Oval Office on May 30, his last official day in government. Tom Brenner/For The Washington Post*

     The other iteration of DOGE, it being the so-called 'Department Of Government Efficiency', as helmed by Elong Tusk.  Conrad is unsure if the acronym was pronounced 'Dowg' or 'Dogee', which is immaterial as it was quietly disbanded in November this year, eight months ahead of schedule and with no glorious fanfare about how much money it had saved.  Elong himself had departed it months earlier, when he and BOOH had a falling-out and there was much hurling of toys from prams.  Dogegone, you might say.  Art!

'But Conrad!  Those are cattle!  What can they possibly have to do with dogs?' I hear you quavil (if that wasn't a word it is now and I want royalties if if ever makes the dictionaries).

     Because of South Canadian slang, I'll have you know.  

"Whoopee ti yi yo, git along little dogies"

    From an anonymous cowboy song.  The 'dogies' in question are calves, orphaned or otherwise motherless, which had to be fed by the cowboys on a diet of flour and water, resembling dough.  Hence the nickname 'dough-guts', which transmuted over time into 'Dogies'.

    Nothing to do with the canine species, it's just a song lyric that has stuck with me for a good fifty years and Conrad only just learned the real meaning.  Art!

    I reckon my 'Brewer's' deserves a co-writing credit for this Intro.  Under the heading 'Dog' it gifts this noun with three different meanings: items to do with canis familiaris itself, things having a 'mongrel' quality about them such as 'Dog Latin' and things of an inferior ranking, of which there are many.  Art!

Dog Rose

     This is a species of wild rose, which is one reason the canine appellation is attached.  The other is that the Greeks of antiquity believed it cured the bite of a mad dog.  Given how rational and analytical the Greeks were, I don't believe this erroneous concept would have persisted for very long.

     Then there is 'Dog Grass', another name for 'Couch grass' (back, JD, back!) which, if Art will do the honours -

      'Tis a frothing nuisance to gardeners, but is eaten by dogs when they are off their food, acting as a purge to empty their stomach, which is probably more detail than you wanted or needed, and quite enough to end this Intro.

     Fine, one Intro completed and we've only begun to lightly buff the surface of 'Dog'.  This one will run and run.  I bet you can hardly wait.

Lost And In Translation

'NAFOViking', one of the Norwegians who posts regularly on Twitter and whom has been swanning about eastern Europe and Ukraine of late, posted a picture that piqued my interest, to put it mildly.  Art!

     OF COURSE - obviously! - when I go to find his Tweet, Elong Tusk has deliberately hidden it, so I've had to make do with a Finish advert, which will boil his urine, as he is always mocking Suomi.  

     DO NOT TRANSLATE THE BRAND!  We're not going to do on the blog as it describes Putinpot as an <ahem> 'male appendage'.  

     It seemed that a British brewery sold PH, which Conrad was hopeful about.  Art!

Three years too late

   

       Alas, they only brewed it in 2022, raising a couple of thousand pounds for Ukraine, and then discontinued.  Were there any other sources?  Yes, there were!

     Except they were all South Canadian, and the costs to import would make it prohibitively expensive.  

     It seems, from NAFOViking's post, that PH is still available in cans in Ukraine, but possibly not for export.  I shall have to dig deeper on this one and see if anything can be done before Christmas.  Because it would be surpassingly cool to turn up to a New Year's party toting  a six-pack of this.  Might have to let people taste it first before giving them the translation. 

 More Muttonheads Mangling Machinery

Yes, we are back with 'Discovery Tech US' and more people determined to win a Darwin Award, or at the very least get a serious nomination for the present and consideration for the future.  Art!

     That script in the upper port corner is Cyrillic, so this clip is from either Serbia, Bulgaria, Ukraine or, most likely, Ruffia.  

     What's out of shot is a whacking big piece of industrial plant being moved from A to B via crane.  Art!

     Here's Nicolai The Numpty, blithely walking underneath the slung load, which is now casting a shadow, literal, upon the lower ranks of machinery.  Art!

     Ooops.  Thirty tons deadweight falling.  There's no soundtrack on this clip or you'd hear Nicolai screeching in fear shortly before an enormous crash.  Art!

     Whatever was - very definitely past tense - connected to this harness to lift the machinery failed completely.  Now it, and what it hit, are going to need a rigourous check to see how much damage has been sustained.

     What about Nicolai The Numpty?  Art!

     He survived.  That's him, making Usain Bolt look laggardly, as he skeddadles and makes a personal promise to himself never to stand under a load being lifted.

The Algorithm Has Lost It's Rhythm

I have posted in the past about how the tracking algorithm swings wildly from realistic, to barely possible, to flattering heights of silliness.  We have reached another of those heights.  Art!

   Ten per cent of the previous month's total IN ONE DAY?

   You would think the FSB would try and diminish my totals, not inflate them.  Or - is that saturnine smirk on the face of Kyrylo Budanov there for another reason?  Art!

     Hmmm perhaps we are big in the forests and swamps of Suomi.  Perhaps.

Go On, Let's Mock 'Tank Encyclopedia' Again

As has come to be a bit of a tradition here on BOOJUM! let us put up an illo.  Art!

     Leaving aside the impertinent fact that they CONTINUE to mis-use the Bob Semple tank, very definitely one of the worst armoured fighting vehicles to ever exist, the Teutons were not alone in carrying out such engineering feats.  Art!

     The British Vickers Mk VI Anti-Aircraft tank, mounting 4 BESA machine guns in a power-driven turret, brought into use after Dunkirk to counter the Luftwaffe.  I have a couple of them in 1/300 scale somewhere.  Art!

     The British Crusader Mk III Anti-Aircraft tank, mounting a pair of 20 mm Oerlikon cannon, for use in accompanying armoured divisions coming ashore after D-Day.

     So, Teutons not alone or unique.  We may come back to this.  I bet you can hardly wait.

     And that is it, Vulnavia!

  * It took some sleight of hand to steal this from the 'Boston Globe' website

The Tracks Of My Jeers

Bear With Me On This One

Nothing to do with the species 'Ursa' in real life, but very much a metaphorical one, and I'm going to run with this theme to be able to wheel in a click-baity picture.  Art!

     Congrats if you figured out that the 'Bear' in question is a Ruffian one, but did you get what the 'necessities' part referred to?

     I'll bet you didn't.  Allow me to guide you in the right direction with a map I stole from 'Prune60' over on Twitter (ha! take that Elong Tusk!).  Art!

     It isn't the circulatory system of a Resimbulated Thiomine, nor yet the wiring diagram for a Sixties transistor radio.  It is, in fact, the railway network of Mordorvia, appropriately enough in red, as it's a relic of their Sinister history.  The rail network is relatively dense in European Ruffia, getting increasingly sparse as you move out of the regions with high populations to the poverty-stricken provincial backwaters, where a flush toilet is a thing of legend and teh Interwebz are satanic magic.  Art!

'RZD'

     Or, 'Rossiskoe Zhelenye Dorogi' in their barbarous tongue, 'Russian Railways' in proper language.  RZD not only owns and runs the trains, it maintains the track network as well, and is wholly owned by the state, so they can't blame a single tech bro or oligarch if things go agley.

     RZD - made up of 22 subsidiary companies - is tasked with keeping 85,000 kilometres of track in good condition, or at least not too bad condition, running 20,618 locomotives and over 250,000 freight cars, and is/was Ruffia's largest employer, with a workforce 700,000 strong.  
     Why the intermingling of present and past tense?  O I thought you'd never ask!  Art?

     I enjoin you to go visit Ol' Pruney, either on the devi's digital desert, Twitter, or Bluesky, because she puts an awful lot of work into her analysis, of which this is a minor buffing o'er the surface of, never mind a scratch.

     You see, there have been inherent problems in RZD for decades, which have been compounded ever since it came into existence in 2003.  As of April 2024, over a year and a half ago, 50% of Ruffia's locomotives were over 20 years old.  Their own management admitted that age was exacerbated by wear, incorrect operation, how good (or bad!) previous servicing and repair had been, spare parts, depot stocks and the quality of management.  Conrad thinks this last one is a euphemism for 'how corrupt and incompetent they were before they got arrested.'  Art!

"The train on Plaform 13 will never move again"

     'Kyiv Insider', again in 2024, reported RZD's profits had fallen from ₽118 billion in 2023 to ₽14 billion in 2024, or a decline to less than 1/8th.  You can probably anticipate where we're going with this.  Art!

     This is Ol' Pruney's graph showing Ruffian freight tonnage in millions of tons.  Between 2019 and today, the amount of freight shipped has declined at the start of the year by 500,000 tons, and even at peak demand, is still down by 250,000 tons in that month.  A collapse in Ruffian industries across the board has led to sharp drops in tonnage moved, with overworked locomotives and rolling stock degrading capacity still further.  Art!

     A return for 'Beefeater' whom we featured in the article about boars.

     By May of 2025, RZD employees were having their salary cut by 50% to reduce staff costs.  Individual divisions within the business were down to 60% of staff, with a hiring freeze in place, again to keep staff costs down  

     In his August 2025 Tweet he explains that RZD employees are now being sent on unpaid leave for three days of the month, and that their investment program has been slashed by 40%.  Which means far less money for maintaining railway tracks, meaning travel by RZD is going to become as dangerous as travelling by Aeroflot.  Art!

     Case in point.  A derailed train that had been ordered to do 100 k.p.h. on a stretch of track near St. Petersburg only rated for 50 k.p.h. 

     Beefy's latest update as of 2nd December quantifies how badly RZD is doing: ₽4.4 trillion in debt, or $50 billion in proper money.  AND this is only up to the end of Q3, so there's another 3 months for it to get even worse.  The business's cash reserves have shrunk from ₽251 billion to ₽21 billion, $271 million in South Canadian currency, which might sound like a lot.  HOWEVER! O that word again - if we assume that a Ruffian RZD employee's average monthly wage is the equivalent of $1,000 - perhaps a bit on the high side but convenient for calculations - then their collective monthly salary comes to $700 million, or over $2 billion for Q4, that is, eight times what the business has in cash.  Art!

     This hottie Ukrainian ex-diplomat and current scholar in the UK is Maria Drutska, who has also been commenting, with a silent jeer, on the RZD story.  She and Beefy both highlight the Kremlin's extreme reluctance to bail them out with ₽200 billion since this would create a precedent for every other business on bankruptcy's brink, and there are thousands upon thousands of Mordorvian businesses in that situation.  Instead there are talks about reducing debt obligations, increasing rail freight tariffs - where have we heard that as a panacea elsewhere? - or converting debt to shares, which sounds like a scamble to beat the band and Bitcoin.  Who in their wrong mind, let along right, would sign up for that*?  Art!

     It's gotten so bad even the Ruffian print media are acknowledging problems.  The mighty Steve Rosenburg, our man in Barad Dur, noted that the Ruffian paper 'Economica' admitted/confessed/predicted <delete where applicable> that RZD was going to drop in freight volume by 6% this year.  Art!

With helpful Rosenburg Pilot Hi-Techpoint transalation

     None of this is helped by the gradually increasing number of Ukrainian - er - 'interventions' as exemplified by 'Igor Sushko' on Twitter.  Art!

.

     That's a Ruffian 500 Kv substation going up in flames, which used to be able to provide electricity to RZD substations.  Shocking.

DANGER! Will Robinson And Everyone In The Vicinity

Let me illustrate and perhaps entertain in equal parts with another example of outstanding stupidity, by one who will collect a Darwin Award in due course.  Art!

Courtesy 'Discover Tech US'

     The footage is rather grainy, so you may not be able to see that he's working on a lathe, which is spinning it's VERY SHARP edges at incredible RPM.  He wants to reach a tool on the shelf behind the lathe and doesn't bother shifting a couple of feet over, choosing instead to stretch from where he stands, because idle.  Art!

     Before you even look at the next picture, you know what's going to happen, don't you?  Art!

     There's no sound on this clip, but I bet matey was yelling his lungs out, as his dog has woken up and started to get interested.  Art!

      Luckily for him it was a cheap and nasty t-shirt, which shredded apart faster than he could be pulled onto the lathe.  Imagine if it had been anything more robust.  No, he didn't get time to hit the 'Off' switch as the whole clip only takes 7  seconds from stretch to shorts-only.

     Lesson learned.  One hopes.

TACO Taco

That's the acronym for 'Trump Always Chickens Out', referring to how he consistently backs down, off or away when either pretending to stand up to Putinpot, or making hard decisions that require the intellect of a 10-year old.  I have only just discovered, because it was announced with minimal publicity, that 200 food tariffs he had imposed have been rolled back.  Art!

Donold hard at work.  For him.

     Sadly for DJ Tango, tariffs do not magically cause money to be created out of nothing, which he probably read in a Christmas cracker joke when he was 8 and took to heart.  In fact they have pushed up the South Canadian cost of living and if there's one thing they hate hate hate above all else, never mind war, famine, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes or poison ivy, it's having to pay more for their groceries.

Half A Loaf

Conrad has been merrily bashing 'Tank Encyclopedia' for Lo! these many months as they use either the Bob Semple or another incorrect vehicle as the thumbnail for their items on my news feed.

     Today they get it half-right.  Art

     'Captured' is stretching the truth, rather.  You see, when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia, they also acquired the Czech armaments industry, and their tank park.  They rapidly incorporated the Czech tanks into the Wehrmacht, as they were quite as good as any native designs the Teutons had.  Art!

     This is the tank in the thumbnail, a Panzer 35(t), the 't' being short for the Teuton word 'tschechisch' meaning 'Czechoslovakian'.  All good, right?

     WRONG!  Art?

     This is the tank the video is about, the Panzer 37(t), a completely different vehicle as you can tell from the chassis and lack of recuperator above the gun barrel.

     Don't get it wrong in front of a hair-splitting pedant.

Finally -

Art!

     Never mind Fat Caligula, this here is Nicholas 'Five Dinners' Maduro, the Venezualan dictator, whose waistline vies with that of BOOH in a country on permanent verge of famine.  Conrad is intrigued as to what he's doing here - a very bad salute or cocking a snook?

     Done are we that with and!

.*  Dozy Don?