Cursed Construction

Well, Allegedly

As you should surely know by now, Conrad is far too much the rational skeptic to really believe in curses, dooms and the supernatural, which doesn't not make reading stories about them entertaining.  Look no further than the short, macabre stories of Ambrose Gwinnet Bierce - BIERCE FOR PREZ! - or that exemplar in British literature, M. R. James.  Art!

     I don't think Ambrose can realllllly run, as he's been dead for about 110 years, although if they allow zombie candidates to r

   ANYWAY I wanted to mention a few construction sites that appear to have very, very unhappy histories, and where better to kick off with that Gomorrah-On-The-Irwell.  'Manchester' if we're being formal.  Art!

     This is the 'Stockport Pyramid' and Stockport is perhaps an outlier of Manchester yet still in the Greater Manchester area, so I'm allowed.  It was constructed in the Nineties, a process taking three years, and the building firm immediately went bust after completion.  Ooops.  It stood derelict for years, whilst companies in the business park around it went bust, a process leading to the environs being called 'The Valley Of Death'.  NO JOKES ABOUT 'NEFERTITI' AND BUST!

     It was taken over by 'Royal Nawaab', a halal restaurant chain, in April 2025, and is still in business, so the curse may have been broken.  Art!

     This is 'B Of The Bang' which we have covered on the blog before.  It was an art installation erected in 2002 for the Commonwealth Games in Gomorrah-OTI, and you can see how large it is from the passing traffic.  Problem was, those enormous metal spikes were not well-secured and kept on falling out, risking the impalement of passing pedestrians, for it was located on a busy thoroughfare leading to a ballfoot stadium.  It was dismantled and totally destroyed in 2009 and nothing now remains.  Shades of 'Ozymandias'.  Art!

 

     Another from 'Be Amazed's Youtube channel and their 'Most Expensive Mistakes In All History' vlog.  The enormous skyscraper you witness here is the 'Hancock', more formally known as 200 Claredon Street, Boston.  Looks impressive, doesn't it?  Yeah well you know what they say about looks.

     First off, it was slated to open in 1971, but only cut the ceremonial ribbons in 1976.  To be so late opening implies bad planning in the first place, scarcely a cause to celebrate. Initial costings for the building came in at $75 million, but with the five-year delay, this ballooned to $175 million.  If you fast-forward 50 years to 2026, that's the equivalent of $427 million escalating to $995 million , meaning that initial cost projections and returns on investment were now waaaaay out.  Ooops.  Art!

With puny human for scale

     Here we have one of the on-site coffer-dams that were intended to act as a retaining wall and prevent soil movement at the perimeter of the construction site.  Hot tip: they didn't work.  Which meant bulges and distortion in vertical surfaces, earth movement and damage to streets above.  The construction is not taking place in a barren wasteland, after all: this is the centre of Boston.  What essentials do you have running underground in major urban areas?  Electricity and gas and phone lines, all of which were damaged or destroyed by the horizontal displacement of earth.  Cue  further lawsuits.  Art!

     Also there is the Boston Trinity Church, which sued and won an $11 million lawsuit about damage attributable to the Hancock.

     Supernatural or not, this building does seem jinxed, doesn't it?

     Matters had not reached equilibrium, though.  The Hancock had attempted to be cutting-edge in skyscraper design, utilising a unique blue window glass, and these windows were very substantial, massing 500 pounds each.  Art!

     The thing is, they hadn't properly analysed the thermal contraction and expansion of these novel window panels, with the end result that they began to fall onto the street below after their adhesives failed.  Police sealed off the adjacent streets if winds were high, and the whole panoply of blue windows had to be replaced.  Over 10,000 of them at a cost of $7 million.  Art!

     The vacant window frames were covered with plywood before being replaced, because 10,000 windows being replaced takes time.  A lot of time.

     The Hancockup story doesn't end here.  O noes.  You see, it swayed in the wind, as every skyscraper does, except a whole lot more than it ought to.  Supposedly so much so that residents on the upper floors suffered motion sickness, although that sound a bit hyped.  What's not hyped are the 500-ton Tuned Mass Dampers installed to absorb kinetic energy - as in buildings at risk of earthquakes - and reduce swaying.  For millions of dollars each.  Art!

     As BA totals it, the Hancock has accumulated $1.1 billion in costs since before opening.  Hmmm makes the Pyramint - as the Stockport Pyramid was dismissively known - look like a good investment.  Sadly you can no longer get Pyramints as they went out of production years ago.  Art!

Gone for 30 years

     I think we need to retain Tallahassee in this instance.  Art!

Clear The Decks

Nothing to do with either cards or the horizontal bits of ships, what I refer to is the backlog of Bookmarks and Favourites that are lurking on the blog's appendices. To deal with the whole load would take days, so we're going to focus  on a couple and thin the herd.  Art!

      If you can't resolve the fine print, this is the web page for OSHA, 'Occupational Health & Safety Administration', the South Canadian body that investigates breaches of - you may be ahead of me here - health and safety.  In this particular case the COCA company, which made large commercial furniture, had over-ridden safety features on rail carriages so they could work faster.  Which  resulted in an employee getting crushed to death and a $102,000 fine.  The case is from 10 years ago so the hyperlinks don't work any more or I'd post more about the case.  Discovered via the Comments on a Malicious Compliance Youtube vlog I was annotating.
     

For This One, You'll Need A Long Memory

Sorry to keep whanging on about the Special Idiotic Operation, it's just that I couldn't resist this one.  The Kozaky Angry Birds have struck again and sunk an orc naval vessel, a 'Project 22800 Karakurt' missile corvette (about the smallest naval warship there is).  Art!

     I am afraid I cemented my reputation as a terrible person by commenting: "Little Dead Corvette".  People Liked it, mind.

Not So Gentle Shoeing

I do enjoy putting up ghastly photos of Donnie Dorko, just to feel that I'm puncturing his zeppelin ego - huge but fragile - and documenting that his health is getting worse by the day.  No, he won't resign; being Prez keeps him out of prison as long as he's in office and I suspect he won't leave the White House unless in a body bag.  Which would have to be made from two stitched together.  Art!

     This one is from Twitter and the poster is 'Canada Hates Trump'.  Unusually for them there are no swears.  King Piggy looks as if he's checked out already, the lights are on but nobody's home and he's listening to the voices in his head telling him what to do, and how handsome and fit he it.  They lie!  His Hair Helmet looks to be failing, too.

Meanwhile In Mordorvia -

All Hail Steve Rosenberg, the BBC's Moscow correspondent, whose presence must surely irk the FSB, as he's fluent in Ruffian and does not need a translatoer, and whom is willing to go out and interview the natives in Barad Duh.  Well, he has another Item on the BBC webpage - Art!

"For the first time in nearly two decades, there will be no military hardware, just soldiers during Saturday's parade in Moscow."

     Ordinary orcs in the street, especially the younger ones, are questioning why there's a 'Victory' parade at all, as they know they're getting their collective bottom kicked everywhere.

Finally -

Going out with a Biercism.

"Accordion,n: an instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin."

We Define 'Nine'

I Know What You're Thinking

'It's the number between eight and ten, consisting of three threes'.  Well, yes, technically correct, except you omit an awful lot that comes under 'Nine' in my 'Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable' and I thoroughly intend to explore all of them.  Thus, if you don't feel nine is fine, you may repine.  Art!

      But if you do, stand ready for the Remote Nuclear Tormentor.  You have ben warned.

     ANYWAY whilst I was musing on 'Nine' I recalled a Lord Peter Wimsey novel, 'The Nine Tailors' and seemed to recollect that it was about bell-ringing; 'campanology' if we're being formal.  Am I correct?  Art!

     Why of course I am!  I'm pretty sure I got rid of the paperback because once I read a murder-mystery to the end, the solution sticks with me.  So I cannot go back to it for years yet.

     ANYWAY AGAIN let us begin

NINE MEN'S MORRIS: A peculiarly British game, like a variant of draughts (or checkers for our Trans-Atlantic members), coming in two variants: a board game or etched into grass.  Art!

     The aim is to get three 'men' in a row and prevent your opponent from getting three of his own in a row.  It's been around for centuries and even the Barf Of Avon quotes it: "The fold stands empty in the drowned field

And crows are fatted with the murrion flock

The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud"
(A Midsummer's Night's Dream 1595).  From this we can tell that English weather in the sixteenth century was just as bad as it is now.  Art!

NINE DAYS' QUEEN: Lady Jane Grey, 1537 - 1554.  She was proclaimed Queen at the age of 15 on July 10th 1553 and was deposed nine days later, being succeeded by Bloody Mary.  That's all Brewer's says about here, which is being a bit cheap, I expected more gore and conspiracy.  I shall dig a bit further. 

     Ah, it's all tied up with religion.  She was a committed Protestant, whereas her sister Mary The Bloody One was a committed Catholic.  Jane was appointed Queen by the Privy Council as per the previous Kingie's orders.  Then, nine days later they changed their fickle minds and deposed her, appointing Mary instead.  She eventually un-alived Jane as she was seen as a dangerous rallying point for disaffected Protestants.  That's how you add detail, Brewer's.  Art!: 

Yes yes yes I know there's only 7.  DON'T QUIBBLE!

NINE TAILORS MAKE A MAN: Putting down all tailors, quite caddishly I think.  The expression means it takes nine of them to make a Real Man, as it's not a Manly Trade like mining or steel welding, although they make good pallbearers.

The poet John Taylor manfully stood up for them.

"Some foolish knave, I think, at first began

The slander that three tailors make one man."

NINE TELLERS: Nope, nothing to do with South Canadian bank clerks or Customer Service Officers as they're probably called nowadays.  No, 'Teller' means a single stroke of a funeral bell, which I shall prod Art to illustrate with -

???

     Ah.  Apparently there is a species of fungus known informally as the 'Funeral Bell'.  Now we're all better informed than we were five minutes ago.  Try again, Art!

     Traditionally there were 3 tells for a child, 6 for a woman and 9 for a man.  I never knew that.

NINE DAYS WONDER: Meaning an event that arrives with a great deal of excitement and acclaim, which then rapidly dies away, becoming quickly forgotten.  Brewer's adds in a rather reaching aphorism: "A wonder lasts nine days, and then the puppy's eyes are open", comparing public interest with puppies, which are born blind.  They also quote the Barb Of Avon but he's had one quote already which is testing the elastic limit of my temper.  Art!

     Yes, it's a comic: '9th Wonders', an in-universe publication from the series 'Heroes'.  That there is Hiro, who loses his memory whilst time-travelling, and whom uses the assorted comics to advise him of what is about to happen, as useful kind of life hack to have access to.  

AS RIGHT AS NINEPENCE: One presumes they came up with this phrase pre-decimalisation.  It means to be perfectly fine and healthy and in tip-top condition, and Brewer's claims it refers to silver ninepenny pieces that were given as love tokens.  Hmmm.  Seems a bit thin to me.  Art!

     Colour me unconvinced.  

     Aaaaaand that's enough nines for today.

Bunker Grandad Is Getting Sweaty

Yes, Putinpot must be feeling an unpleasant itch between his shoulder-blades as he wonders who might stab him in the back, whilst his neck is on a swivel watching for Ukrainian drones.  Art!

     Whatever Charlie Chipmunk Cheek's reason for the sacking, it doesn't look good, and the new commander, Colonel General Chaiko, now has mere days to get to grips with the air defences of Barad Duh.  Thanks to Mordor via still attacking Ukraine with drones, the Kozaky are absolutely refusing to go with a truce on May 9th for the Victory Parade, despite Peter The Average declaring an unilateral truce.  That's not how a truce works, Dimya you dimwit.  Red Square has now been completely closed, there are protective anti-drone nets up and snipers, machine gunners and EW troops are already positioned on rooftops.

     It's going to be a less than impressive event; no aircraft, no heavy vehicles and doubtless as rushed and short as possible.  I doubt Putler will attend in person and instead send one of his lookey-likies, especially since he suspects his own siloviki might assassinate him with a drone and then blame Ukraine.

     Bring on the buckets of popcorn!

I Hope You're Not Eating

Because this next will put you off your chips.  Art!

     Jesus Christ on a petrol-powered pogo stick, he looks like a chimpanzee, and a very sick chimpanzee at that.  I really should keep track of where I get these images from, shouldn't I?  Art!

      Here we see King Piggy making very heavy weather indeed of walking in a straight line after getting off Marine One.  This is as bad as the paretic red carpet shamble at Davos.  Plus there's that laugh-inducing AI photo of him supposedly 'Jogging', having lost at least a hundred pounds.  Art!

     Where will I get all my content when he keels over dead?  Imagine the work I'll have to do if Dimya dies as well.

The Smile On The Face Of The Tiger

For 'Tiger' read 'Employment Lawyer'.  You'll see why in a minute.

     Once upon a time, there was an OVerworked IT engineer, hereafter OVIT, working at a small company, which didn't care about Bus Factor One, which tells you immediately that they were a load of stupid cheapskates.  Illness, injury, leave or going to live in a hermitage are all predictable outcomes in such a situation.  Art!

     

     Then manglement thought they'd get clever.  They got OVIT to sit down and detail exactly what he did, giving him instructions about scope and responsibility.  Shortly after this he was told he was being made redundant as the business was going to be outsourcing his job.  Although, somewhat fishily, they kept any details of the company doing the outsourcing secret and didn't do any transition.

     Freshly unemployed, OVIT goes looking for jobs after taking a week off to drink beer and eat pretzels.  He finds a job that matches his old one but with an massive pay cut.  He asks for a detailed job spec and is gobsnacked- like gobsmacked but worse - to see the job description he'd enthusiastically written for the company.

     This means war!  Art?

The tiger smiles

     OVIT contacts an employment lawyer, who arranges a meeting with the C-suite manglement.  He slides two pieces of paper across the desk at them: the job description and the advertised vacancy.

     "I'm not here to argue if or how you broke redundancy law.  I'm only here to establish how much settlement you are prepared to offer."

     It took less than 60 minutes for the manglement to realise they were right royally lambasted and OVIT got 2 years of severance pay with medical and pension benefits.  I suspect his legal fees were also paid, and whichever bumbletuck invented this plan 'left to spend more time with his family.'

Finally -

Phew.  Just walked up to the Polling Station to vote, and then took Edna for trotties, 6,000 steps in.  Go me!

If I Were To Say 'Concord'

You Might Be Confused

So, we shall explicate a tad in order to provide enlightenment.  Looking in my 'Collins Concise English Dictionary' I see the word 'Concord' defined as "Agreement or harmony between people or nations; amity" and is ultimately derived from the Latin <hack spit> 'Concors', meaning 'Of the same mind'.

     The thing about concord is that it frequently doesn't arrive or deliver as advertised.  Art!

     This is Concord, Massachusetts, looking like a chocolate-box illustration.  How very splendid!  Except it was one of the first locations fought over in the treacherous traitorous American War Of Stabbing GREAT BRITAIN In The Back <pauses for blood pressure to diminish>.

     Then we have the ill-fated Concorde - note the additional 'e' added because of the French.  It was a supersonic airliner produced by the British and - you may be ahead of me here - French and it literally left every other airliner standing still.  There's an awe-inspiring British Airways advert where it tools up at the end, doing Mach 2 and making everything else in the sky look old and tired.  Art!

     You can see the variable-geometry nose here, in the 'down' position before it transitions to supersonic flight.

     The fleet was retired in 2003, thanks to the extremely high cost of running them, not helped by the fatal crash of a Concorde in 2000, which rather knocked public confidence in them.  You might say British Airways and Air France had a concord about Concorde.  Art!

     No, this isn't the 2000 crash.  What you're seeing here is the crash of a Sinister Tu-144 at the Paris Air Show in 1973.  The two aircraft were similar in external appearance, so much so that the Tu-144 was dubbed 'Concordski', whereas there were a lot of internal differences.  The crash occurred because the Concordski pilot made violent evasive manoeuvres, to possibly avoid having a French jet take photographs of the canard foreplanes.  Which sounds suspiciously like an excuse as it's a lot easier to take photos from the ground.  ANYWAY the recovery from the pilot's barnstorming overstressed the port wing, which fell off, and that was that.  It also tanked foreign interest in acquiring any Concordskis, so you might say other nations had a concord about Concordski.

     I think you'll agree when I say 'Concord' is a bit of a mis-nomer.

     ANYWAY AGAIN here we come to the meat of the matter, because I am going to feature an entry from the 'Be Amazed' Youtube channel, about - Art!

     The first section concerns the collision and sinking of an Italian cruise liner, the 'Costa Concordia', and you can tell this isn't going to be a pleasant excursion because of 'Concord's track record to date.  Note that the date for this incident is the 13th, another ill-omen.  Art!

     The liner was scheduled to set sail from Civitavecchia, the port for Rome and yes, I've been there, and spend a week tooling around the Mediterranean in what must have been pretty chilly weather, it being January.  Art!

     Captain Schettino ordered the CC to deviate from it's normal route in order to execute what the narrator and Google call a 'salute', near a brace of islands.  None of the bridge crew protested this ill-advised action, which was supposed to impress passengers and anyone ashore.

     Well, guess what the island of Giglio had in abundance?  Underwater rocks.  When Schettino ordered a course correction, the helmsman misunderstood and steered into the rocks.  Ooops.  The Costa C ran aground, putting at risk over 1,000 crew and over 2,000 passengers.  Art!

Looks expensive

If you want a metric, that hull damage was nearly 80 yards long.  Evacuation procedures were not followed as the Costa capsized, creating panic and causing the death of 32 people.  Art!

     Schettino was tried and found guilty, getting a 16-year sentence.  What made the court especially unsympathetic was discovering that, during the salute, he had been derelicting his duties in order to canoodle with a Moldavian exotic dancer he had brought onto the bridge.  No, I'm not making this up.

     In 2023, over a decade later, an attempt to re-float and salve the Costa began, costing an eye-watering $1.2 billion, which is twice the cost of the ship itself.  Art!

       Then there were the lawsuits and compensation, which tacked on another $93 million, and breaking up the CC for scrap, costing another $100 million.

     In total it cost over $2 billion to salve and then break up the CC, which had itself cost only (!) $612 million to construct.  Counting the Costa.

Stupid Items Sub-Editors Create Out Of Desperation

I am going to post the Snip and then comment.  Art!

     There's a never-ending stream of items like this on my news feed, featuring fatuous titles detailing stupid ideas.  I get that people have to create content but come on! use a tad more imagination.  And no more oscilloscopes, please.

     O look, here's another one.  Art!

Bah!

King Piggy Punctured

Or, more gentle shoeing.  DJ Tango loves to boast about all the cognitive tests he's taken, because he's so senile that he believes the indicate how intelligent he is.  The reason you've taken so many, Donold, is because your doctors are worried about your cognition, as well they might.  Art!

     The tests involve drawing a clock and numbering it correctly, naming as many words beginning with the letter 'B' in a minute as they can, then naming the date, day of the week and what city they are in.  This, Donnie Dorko, is hardly a rousing statement of intellect.  Art!

     Here's the Nodfather falling asleep in a meeting again.  The consequence of staying up into the small hours ranting and tanting on social media.  He needs an aide armed with a bamboo skewer to prod him at intervals to ensure 1)  He's awake and 2) He's still alive.

Will I Or Won't I?

Hmmmm pondering.  I know I say that our charter excludes Politics - that above is merely mocking the feeble of mind - but I have saved a detailed analysis from Prof Roth about how the Hungarian elections provide insights for the South Canadian political opposition to Pumpkinhead.  Maybe at a later date.  I bet you can hardly wait.  Art!

     Orban claims he's going to lead the opposition in parliament, which is a fragile hope, since he's going to either end up in prison or flee abroad.  Given that he's been funding MAGA political funds, South Canada might not be a good fit for him.  There's always an apartment next to Assad in Moscow.  Or North Korea.

      Interestingly, the President of Slovakia, Fico, has done a 180º now that his mate The Weretoad is gone and is now best mates with Prez Zed, implying that Putin no longer has any European allies.  Poor Dimya!

UTTER NONSENSE!

Grrrr whom is responsible for this drivel?  Art!

     It jolly well DID appear, but woo-woo sites like this one pretend otherwise, because in photos taken with much better definition, the 'Cydonian Face' resembled nothing like a face.  Art!

     That took all of 10 seconds on Google.

Finally -

Going out  with another Biercism.

"Comfort,n: A state of mind produced by contemplation of a neighbour's uneasiness."

If I Were To Say 'Coach'

You Probably Wouldn't Expect A Treatise About Tanks

And, for once, you'd be right.  No tanks today, neither of the Armoured Fighting Vehicle type nor the fuel container type.  Tankless BOOJUM! shall be.  Unless I change my mind, I'm fickle like that.

     So! one memory I have from my days - well, twenty-two years actually - at Connexions is of Gavin, my manager, who volunteered as a football coach for young lads.   One of the worst things about his role were the aggressive, ignorant, abusive, entitled parents of the sprogs he was tutoring.  Art!

     Never read it myself.

     ANYWAY I had wit enough to look up 'Coach' in my 'Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable' and it did indeed have an entry.  It transpires that, when the railways arrived in This Sceptred Isle from 1840 onward, they inherited or adopted many of the terms previously used for horse-drawn transport.  Such as?  Well, 'Carriage' and 'Guard' and of course - obviously! - 'Coach'.  Art!

     'Coach' is another word akin to 'Biro' in that it has Hungarian roots.  It originates in the Magyar town of Kocs, where they built wagons, known in Hungarian as 'Kocsi szeker' or 'Wagon of Kocs'.  No, I'm not making this up.

     ANYWAY my BDOPAF also explains the use of 'Coach' as a tutor because they 'carry' their charges.  Hmmmm.  Conrad unsure how much he believes that one.  I could look it up in my 'Collins Concise English Dictionary' except it's at the bottom of a large pile of books and I am a lazy dastard.

     This is where our Intro really kicks off, as we enter a tale related by a Commenter on a Youtube Malicious Compliance vlog.  We shall call them Referee Of Youth, or ROY hereafter.  You see how it all fits together?

     

     ROY was in reality a high-school mathematics teacher, who had volunteered to coach the football team, which South Canadians have to qualify with 'soccer'.  His team were in the next-to-last game when POtty-Mouthed Punk, hereafter POMP, lost his rag and roundly abused the in-game referee.  ROY instantly 'benched' POMP, meaning he was off the pitch and not playing, for unsportsmanlike behaviour.  POMP immediately went whining to His Entitled Mother, hereafter HEM, because he'd never heard the word 'No' in his life.  She stormed up to ROY, demanding that her little darling be allowed to play.  Another person who had never heard the word 'No'.

     Things really kicked off the next morning, a Sunday, when ROY and the School Director had assembled all the players, and their parents, in a single room in school.  ROY rather theatrically introduced themself, and POMP and HEM.  HEM immediately told the School Director to fire ROY for benching her little ingrate.  The School Director gracefully refused, stating they were only present as an observer.  Art!

SD knew where this was going

     ROY then stated that he resigned from his position as coach, at which HEM smiled smugly, thinking they had won.

     They had not.  ROY the informed the assembled players and parents that, as per regulations, a team without a coach automatically forfeited all games, so not only would POMP not be playing that day, neither would anyone else.  By this time HEM is getting serious death-glares from everyone in the room, and whines at ROY for doing what she asked for.  She told SD to fill the now-vacant position and he once again gracefully refused, stating that he was leaving at lunchtime.    She then threatens to have ROY fired from his coaching position in an exemplary case of Buyer's Regret, only for him to trump her with news that he was a mathematics teacher, not a coach.  She insisted and persisted, to no avail.  Many of the team players went home crying, and all their parents nursed a grudge against HEM from that moment on.  Art!

     

HEM and POMP.  Perhaps.

     As proof that neither HEM nor POMP were remotely self-aware, when he moved on to High School, he went for trials at their soccer team, and was immediately rejected.  HEM, watching from the crowd, promptly did her entitled rant, which didn't get him back on the team but which did get her permanently banned from all HS sports events.  Way to go HEM!  

Number One With Lots Of Bullets

Now, this one I have heard of.  Top of the 'Rotten Tomatoes' list of films that scored 0%, we have 'Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever' from 2002, and I remember it being absolutely panned at release.  Art!

     To say it underperformed at the box office is to understate wildly.  Art!

      So, using the 50% return to studio rule, it made $10 million.  What was the budget, you might enquire.  $70 million, an awful lot at the time in 2002 dollars.  No, not even the lure of Lucy Liu is going to make Conrad consider this one.

What Took You So Long?

One has to wonder what lies behind this headline.  Art!

     I cannot resist looking.

     Aha.  So, the polling organisation Ipsos and ABC delivered a poll in April of 2025 that indicated only 45% of people were worried that King Piggy was going to keel over dead  suddenly.  They re-ran the same poll this year in April and found those concerned DJ Tango was going to croak face down in his Happy Meal had grown to 59%.  It doesn't help that he continually necks four times the recommended daily dose of aspirin.

More Randomness From The Algorithm

At least it provides me with a bit of content, so there is a silver lining.  Art!

     What on earth is it?  Sorry but 'Blueridge 47,000 BTU (3,9 Ton) 3-Zone 23 SEER Inverter R-454B Series Heat Pump Ultra' is pure obfuscation.  I am guessing as the maker appears to have 'Air' in their name that it is some species of heating and/or ventilating kit.  'BTU' refers, I believe to 'British Thermal Units' hence my guess at a heating device.  

     Yes, I could click on the link but that would be cheating.  We have our morals here at BOOJUM! and I refuse to raise them.

I Think They Ironed The Kinks Out

We have commented a few times on the Kozaky's 'Flamingo' Firepoint cruise missile, which has had issues with accuracy ever since it was introduced.  It came late into service because the orcs bombed the original factory location and everything had to be moved.  

     Well, last night one of them travelled 450 miles into darkest Mordorvia, where it hit the VNIIR industrial plant in Cheboksary, which produces guidance kit for drones and missiles.  Art!

     This hapless orc was out wandering the night streets with his mates whilst air raid sirens are going off all round.  His mate hears the noise of a jet engine approaching at speed and manages to catch sight of the Flamingo.  Art!

     That's the bird in flight.  The trio were dangerously close to the VNIIR plant, which gives them a splendid opportunity to appreciate the 1,100 kilo warhead the Flamingo carries.  Art!

     None were injured but may have needed a change of underwear.  Might take a bit of spade and shovel work before the VNIIR plant is fit for purpose again.  After the night-time explosion the orcs moved a load of electronic warfare kit into Cheboksary, which is causing Kozaky drones to hit apartment buildings as they get spoofed.  

Finally -

Going out with a Biercism. 

"Neighbour, n: One whom we are commanded to love as ourselves, and does all he knows to make us disobedient."