Unsure What Metaphor To Use Here

Snowball Or Avalanche?

By 'Snowball' I don't mean the cocktail, I mean a small ball of snow being sent downhill from the very top of the piste, accruing more and more snow along the way until it becomes a positive behemoth.  That kind of snowball.  By avalanche I mean a few pebbles displaced at the highest col on the mountain, which, by the time they reach the valley floor, are the initiators of one hundred thousand tons of rock travelling at sixty miles per hour.  Art!

     For in today's Intro we are going to be dealing with the trifling sum of $0.75, seventy five cents in the South Canadian currency, in a tale as old as greedy managers trying to steal staff wages, so from a century ago in Europe but tomorrow in South Canada.  Art!

     We are told that the eatery involved was 'Café Donuts', which is a way of avoiding being sued, as there is no such chain in South Canada.  The likeliest choices are Dunkin' Donuts, as above, or Krispy Kreme or Randy's Donuts.  

     ANYWAY the tale is related by a friend of the protagonist, whom we shall call DOnut Dan, for he worked in the donut and coffee place.  

     Here an aside about franchises.  Dull but necessary, I'm afraid.  'Funkin' Donuts' licences their brand to a franchisee, who has access to their training materials, operating manual and large-scale advertising promotions.  In turn they have to adhere to the rules and maintain the brand, also running and financing things on a day-to-day basis.  They also have to turn over a certain percentage of their profits to the franchisor - 'Funkin' Donuts' in this case.

     Any franchisor will keep a verrrry close eye on franchises being run, because the one thing they ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT TOLERATE is damage to their brand.  Art!

Brand damager manager

     This is Mike Coupe, former head of the Co-Op, who was caught on an open microphone singing 'We're In The Money' before an interview.  It went down verrrry badly and it took a couple of years before the Co-Op managed to put it behind themselves.  Conrad knows, I was working in HR for them at the time.

     ANYWAY back to 'Funkin' Donuts' and DOD.  FD was run as a franchise, along with another location, by Jim.  Which we will say is the acronym for 'Jackass Idiot Manager', hereafter JIM.  Art!

     Because JIM was a penny-pinching bottomhole, he kept telling DOD to total the till amounts after clocking out, thanks to - see 'Bottomhole' above.  When DOD protested that this was still working, JIM promptly fired him.  Well, he is JIM after all.

     When DOD got his last paycheck, JIM had docked him $0.75 

     BATTLE WAS JOINED!

     JIM refused to pony up the $0.75, so DOD and a colleague contacted Labour Standards - hence possibly this is in New York, as their state labour board is the 'Division of Labour Standards' - who challenged JIM, who in turn refused to pay up.

     Labour Standards took him to court.  Art!

Close enough

     JIM's court preparation amounted to forging fake pay records, which were immediately busted when DOD and colleagues produced pay stubs and bank statements.  Surprise!  JIM had to pay DOD the $0.75, plus hundreds of dollars in stolen wages to ex-employees, a fine imposed by Labour Standards and everyone's legal fees.  Ouch.

     That was just the wage theft case.  Unlucky - or stupid- JIM also got charged with fraud and falsification of documents.

     It gets worse.

     Recall, if you will, that JIM was running two 'Funkin' Donut' eateries as a franchise.  Art!

     Recall that these two eateries were held as a franchise.  'Funkin Donuts' found out about the court case and were highly unamused.  They revoked the licence, which meant JIM lost the restaurants, building and land they stood upon.

     It gets worse.

     FD sued JIM for damaging their brand, and predictably, since they had very deep pockets and he didn't, they won.  The sums involved were so large that he had to sell his house to settle them.

    It gets worse.

     His wife left him.  Presumably being homeless and penniless with no prospect of any income for the near future put strains on the holy bonds of matrimony, or she was fed up being married to a bottomhole.  Art!

     Before all that, DOD responded in court to JIM having to pony up the 75 cents in court.

    'You know what?  It's only seventy-five cents.  I don't even want it,' and he gave it to another ex-employee.  

     Sick burn, as the yoof say.

What On Earth?

My news feed does throw up oddities at times, and today was one of those times.  Art!

     Conrad doesn't have ANY concrete that requires crushing, either in a full-size crusher or a miniature one.  When have I ever, ever, ever posted an item or Intro that suggests I need or want a crushing machine?

Plummet Airlines

You may not care or be aware that the Ruffians have a very limited number of Tu-22 strategic bombers in working order.  These are the airframes that daily send cruise missiles to blow up churches and kindergartens in Ukraine, and other strategic military targets.

     How many they have is open to question.  At least 50, perhaps as many as 60.

     HOWEVER - O that word again! - the number of aircraft actually able to deploy at short notice is likely as low as 27, upper bound, or 9, lower bound.  Art!

     A 'Backfire' in conventional flight orientation.  The orcs stopped producing them in 1993, so the ones currently flying are enabled to do so by cannibalising others for spare parts, and since Operation Spiderweb these airworthy planes have been pushed hard to carry out missile attacks.  Maintenance is poor and erratic, especially since the aircraft technicians have been sent off to Ukraine as meat-wave fodder.  

     Yesterday, one of them carried out a test flight after undergoing maintenance.  How did that turn out?  Art!

     Almost as badly as possible; one engine failed and when the crew turned back to their airbase, the second engine failed, leading to the bird going into a vertical dive and disintegrating on impact.  The aircrew ejected and now have to come up with an excuse not to be sent following their technicians to the Z-line, as they no longer have an aircraft.  Ooops.

More Ungentle Shoeing

Nobody seems to be posting awful pictures of Mopey Dick - I re-discovered this insult whilst looking at old BOOJUM!s - at the G7, for which you may be grateful.  There is the embarrassing Billy No-Mates photograph of him standing alone as everyone else communes and networks - Art!

     One suspects Full Diaper Syndrome.  There's an even more humiliating one inside a conference room.  Art!

     THEN!  I found a wonderfully awful photo of him looking sweaty, bloated and dishevelled, which, if Art will do the honours - 

     You can see the true extent of his baldness.  Thank heavens this is from the side, not the front, and we are spared his hideous turkey-wattled neck!

Conrad Begs To Differ

Rather contrarily.  Here's what Jeff Bezos has to say about AI.

     Nonsense!  Already supermarkets have replaced manned tills with the self-serve ones, where a dozen checkouts are supported by a single staff member, thus cutting back on wages.  Somewhat negated by the amount of fraud going on, as Leon informed me at Morrisons last year.

     I am also convinced that the service my Enormous Anonymous Employer offers to claimants making phone calls will replace you us humans with an AI phone service.  You'll get a call-tree and then a recorded voice reciting our scripts.  Art!

     Although Your Humble Scribe has been told he was assumed to be AI anyway by certain callers.

Finally -

Going out with another Biercism.  Thank you so much Ambrose Gwinnet!

"Mouth, n: In man, the gateway to the soul; in woman, the outlet of the heart."

Bubble Troubles

Yes Indeed, Though Not In The Way You Were Expecting

In yesteryon's blog I made a reference to the 'South Sea Bubble' and didn't explain what it was, merely by context that it was a fearful financial catastrophe.  Given that it took place over three centuries ago you're not going to get film or still shots of the participants.  Art!

     A bubble, as you should surely know, is an ephemeral and fragile object, that when blown tends to expand until it bursts.  Thus the South Sea Company, which was formed in 1711 and granted monopoly trading rights with South America, and later the South Seas - more correctly the South Pacific.  In return they were to try and write down some of the British national debt, accrued during wars on the Continent.  Art!

The company's shield.  Looks a bit fishy to me.

     'Fishy' is absolutely spot-on.  TSSC indulged in riotously inaccurate and exaggerated publicity, bribed politicians for favours and promotions, lured investors with soft credit and got other joint-stock companies banned.  Shares ballooned in value, from £100 to £1,000, until in 1720 cold hard reality set in when it became verrrry apparent that there were no riches in the offing.  Share values collapsed, akin to a bubble.  Art!

     Yes, that Sir Isaac Newton.  

     ANYWAY that was pretty depressing, wasn't it? because the same impulsive greed still assails Hom. Sap.  Art!

     Let us not concentrate overlong on Donold's own bubble.  Instead, let us have more cheerful matters associated with bubbles.  Art!

     Meet Patricia Harmsworth, Lady Rothermere, far better known by her soubriquet 'Bubbles' as she had more than a passing fondness for sparkling champagne.  Champers is wasted on Conrad's peasant palate, it tastes like upmarket cider to me ANYWAY AGAIN during the time of the South Sea Bubble they would have been toasting each other in still champagne, as the sparkling variety didn't become popular until much later that century.  I like to keep you informed.
     Let us now get back to the even more gloomy and sombre subject of 'Dictatoritis', a phenomenon we examined in the world of antiquity, which we will now bring into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  Art!

     Kaiser Wilhelm II, and his writing desk complete with saddle seat.  Arguably the man most responsible for starting the First Unpleasantness, 'Little Willy', as he was insultingly described by the tommies, Kaiser Bill became a figurehead with little real power, which lay with the Teuton General Staff.  His days consisted of a command sinecure in the heart of Germany, where his courtiers vied to tell him amusing or inspirational 'trench stories' which were frequently completely fictional.  This insulated him from the grim realities of front-line trench warfare.  Art!

     On his very infrequent visits to the front, it was always to a quiet sector and well back from anywhere he might be at risk.  He was cocooned to such an extent that the civilian riots of late 1918 in Germany came as an utter surprise to him.  Art!

     Josef Stalin, colloquially known as 'The Little Sod With The Moustache', an Oriental despot who was Emperor in all but name, and whom existed in another bubble caused by his own rampant paranoia, ego and sadism.  He was another classic example of 'Shoot the messenger then exile his family to Siberia', which made it dangerous to tell him the truth if it was remotely unpalatable.  Thus intelligence information got filleted before being sent up the chain, amended or deleted altogether, so that it chimed with his perceptions.

      

     The Teuton preparations for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Sinister Union in June 1941, were so enormous they couldn't be completely hidden.  Stalin, cosy in his bubble, dismissed every piece of information that indicated this and even scrawled crude comments about 'This is just a <swear>ing provocation' on reports.  Hot tip: it wasn't.  Stalin learned a very hard lesson in not divorcing himself from reality.  Art!

     I don't feel like flattering Peter The Average with a formal photo, he can suffer a caricature.  That'll teach him!

     It has been long known that Putinpot lives in an information bubble which he has partially crafted himself, and his lickspittle toadies do the rest.  When he does one of his cosplay visits to a military HQ, the maps on the walls do not correspond to reality, with front lines being shifted many kilometres westward from where they really are.  Art!

     He famously does not use the internet, perhaps because he might accidentally see uncensored news and suffer sympathetic blindness as a result.  His generals lie, flatter and pander to him, lest they fall out of a window whilst drinking a pot of polonium tea.  The speech he gave recently about Ruffia advancing on all fronts, and the Kozaky not having any drones, nor means to counter drones, is pure drivel and a consequence of that bubbly life.

     HOWEVER things are even worse and have been for 15 years.  

"Russian President Vladimir Putin has been receiving separate news broadcasts since 2011, which are not aired on television and are intended only for him. This was revealed in an interview with "I Gryunyu Grame" by Dmitry Skorobutov, the former chief editor of the "Vesti" program on "Russia-1". "
     

STAY AWAY FROM WINDOWS!

     The isolation ramped up from April 2022, when the Kozaky sank the 'Moskva', which the Puffy-Phaced Petrol Pimp wasn't told of for a week.

      Comical Ali come back, all is forgiven.

Thank You, 'Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare'

MOUW posts a lot on Twitter, and is the very opposite of a vatnik, which is why we Follow each other.  He recently put up a Tweet displaying the barrel-scrapings that the orcs are resorting to.  Art!

Suspension on bottom starboard looks goosed

     Ah yes, the camouflage netting makes all the difference, but what they really need are TYRES TYRES TYRES! as they used to place on the upper surfaces of aircraft to - to - er, not entirely sure.

     Well, the pictures above tickled my memory.  Art!

     From the BBC's premier dramamentary, 'Doctor Who' and here are the sinister security forces guarding The Master in 'The Sea Devils'.  Conrad always thought them more like parrot-pigs than anything demonic.

Conrad Being A Bit Spiteful*

As regular readers ought to know, Conrad has a browser Favourite dedicated to the artwork of Terence Cuneo, who depicted scenes from military history as well as steam trains and new builds in city centres.  Art!

18th June 1855

     Lance Sergeant Phillip Smith winning the Leicestershire Regiment's first Victoria Cross during the Crimean War, by bringing in wounded soldiers at the Great Redan, Sevastopol.  Almost a hundred and seventy years old.  

     Yes, that Sevastopol.  The Ruffians have never forgiven or forgotten that they lost that war.  

Orbanned

O this is a good one.  You may recall that the Were-toad lost the recent general election in Hungary, and lost it so badly that the victorious Tisza party are able to make changes in the constitution.  Art!

     Well, their first constitutional change was to amend the length a president can serve to eight years, or two terms.  Loser Orban has served something like four terms, so he can never run for President again, which was his reason for staying in parliament and not fleeing the country.  He may yet turn up in an apartment in Moscow living next to Assad, if he can charter an especially wide-bodied jet to carry him there.

     Tee hee!

     Thanks to the Magyar 'Splendid Pete' for bringing this matter to my attention on Twitter.

Don't Crack Open The Prosecco Just Yet

Donold Judas Trump is in France at the G7 summit, which he doesn't enjoy as he's not the cynosure of all eyes, and it's a long way for an 80-year old in bad health to have to travel to.  Art!

     He's still alive, just having a senior moment by dozing off, miserable that all the attention is focussed on Macron, who had to suddenly ask him a question to ensure he either woke up or was no longer of this world.

Finally -

Another QI Banter quote.

"First the doctor told me the good news: I was going to have a disease named after me."  Steve Martin.

*  Nothing new there.

Today We Talk Of Bubbles

Don't Worry, Things Will Get A Lot Less Frothy In Short Order

Seeking inspiration, Your Humble Scribe had a peruse of 'Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable' and what do you know, lots of bubbly entries.  There were two that I hadn't heard of, and, at the risk of going off on a tangent ("No!  Surely not!  For shame!" etcetera from the loyal readership) I shall detail both of them.  Art!

THE MISSIPI BUBBLE: The French equivalent of the 'South Seas Bubble', wherein a Scot, John Law - horribly ironic name! - got permission to set up a General Bank in France, which was dubbed the 'Compagnie de la Louisiane ou d'Occident'.  Somewhat confusingly, the bubble was known for the Mississippi River, which divides Louisiana from Mississippi the state.  Art!

     Obviously the share price rocketed upwards during 1719, then collapsed over 10 months in 1720, causing utter ruination amongst speculators.

'BUBBLES': In 1886 Sir John Millais painted a portrait of William James, blowing bubbles through a pipe.  Art!

     When adopted by Pears' Soap it became the viral equivalent of it's day.  Young Bill went on to become - honest, no word of a lie - Admiral Sir William James.

I am now going to add an entry that I doubt any more than one person in a hundred thousand will be aware of.  Art!

     Meet 'Mr. Bubbles', described as a 'bubble imp', who lived inside a plastic washing-up liquid bottle, and whom would emerge when it was squeezed, granting three wishes to the squeezer.  

The perils of offering 3 wishes to a dog

     Conrad vaguely recalls reading a few of the strips, which tended to end up with the wishes backfiring in whimsical or comic fashion, probably because people tended to wish from the hip, without hiring a solicitor to parse things in a logical manner.  Nor do I remember anyone wishing for more wishes.  Mr Bubbles - truly a djinn for the twentieth century.

     ANYWAY I did say 'short order' and we're already 333 words in, so let's get on with the darker stuff.

     Okay, if you're familiar with Conrad's pontifications about autocratic despots, then you're aware of my contention that they inevitably end up suffering from 'Dictatoritis', wherein they become victims of their own brutal systems in terms of living inside an 'information bubble'.  There are various causes and consequences of this, and don't imagine for one minute that it's a modern phenomenon.  O noes!  It goes back as far as dictators do.  Art!

     This is Darius III, the Persian king, coming a cropper at the Battle of Issus, 330 BC.  His opponent was <drum roll> Alexander Meglos, the Macedonian enfant terrible, whom had utterly scragged all the Persian armies encountered to date.

     Darius was surrounded by courtiers who flattered and pandered to him, leading him to discount the earlier Macedonian victories, and whom pushed the narrative that Persian might was irresistible, certainly against a rabble of provincial barbarians.  Darius lapped all this up because it chimed with his own beliefs.  He was over-confident enough to bring his family on campaign; after all, what could possibly go wrong?  Well, his bubble of complacency and superiority was burst at Issus and he was killed by one of his own generals shortly after.  Art!

     Yes, Ol' Nero, playing music whilst Rome burned.  In fact this is utter twaddle, he was nowhere near where the fire started, had nothing to do with it starting and was responsible for initiating emergency firefighting and housing the homeless.

     HOWEVER! - that word at last - he was not a popular emperor.  Not that he knew anything about that, or he might have sought to mitigate the bad feelings of his subjects.  His inner circle of courtiers were bootlickers to a man, fulsome with praise about his artistic bent, ensuring that he knew nothing about more serious matters, such as the Senate gradually, and then increasingly, growing hostile to him.  Thus being declared an enemy of the state came as a complete and horrid surprise to him.  Even his Praetorian Guard turned on him, which takes some doing.  Nero did away with himself in 68 AD to prevent the plebs doing it for him.  Art!

     Chap-in-need-of-grooming is actually the Emperor Domitian, whom was a bit of a targe.  In fact he got progressively more paranoid as his reign elapsed, executing people he suspected of being disloyal to him, which naturally results in one of the first-order consequences of Dictatoritis: nobody was willing to give him bad news.  Or any news, since that was the best tactic for staying alive.  Or, if he was informed of anything, it would be massaged into a more palatable form, meaning the messenger survived.  Naturally this led to him living in a bubble completely divorced from reality and he had no idea a plot to murder him was in the offing, until he was offed.  September 18 96 AD.  I like to keep you informed.

     I was going to follow up these examples from antiquity with more modern ones, but that would mean the whole blog being taken up by the Intro.  Expect us to return to this topic.  I bet you can hardly wait.

Conrad The Arch-Cynic Out-Bierce's Bierce

One thing you cannot miss on my Twitter feeds are the innumerable clips of enormously long queues of orc cars at petrol stations.  A couple of weeks ago this was restricted to Krim.  No longer, there are shortages of petrol across the entire nation of Mordorvia, This includes Barad Duh, centre of the empire and where the most privileged orcs of all have their demesnes.  Art!

     Yes, that last word is 'Moskvi', meaning 'Moscow' so this isn't some squalid, poverty-stricken province, this is the imperial hub.

     What's going on?  Well, Putinpot and his generals will guarantee that the army, navy and air force will all get priority when it comes to fuel allocation, so if petrol runs short, what's left gets sent to power golf buggies and motorbikes.

     The other aspect of this is that, should Putinpot finally take the plunge and declare mobilisation, a citizenry without the means to travel are a lot less able to rise up in protest thanks to the geographical restrictions a nation the size of Mordorvia imposes.  

     They still have Telegram, ironically enough, because everyone whom can has gotten a VPN in order to avoid using the government spyware 'Max', whose usage is thus at a - waitforitwaitforit - Min.  Art!

More Ungentle Shoeing

Tangential to the above, the UK government finally - FINALLY! - put on it's big boy pants and seized a Ruffian shadow fleet tanker in the ENGLISH CHANNEL (ha! take that, Lavrov!).  Art!

     Predictably, this has sent Ruffian mibloggers into a frothing rage, trotting out all the usual threats to nuke London, nuke Manchester, nuke Leeds, nuke Birmingham - not sure anyone would notice the difference - etcetera, etcetera.  Expect Peskov to whine and Medvedev The Sentient Vodka Bottle to slur something on Twitter or Telegram.
     Perfidious Albion, living rent-free in the Ruffian's minds since 1857!

The Scene Is Green

There has been considerable brouhaha in South Canada about the renovation of the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial, which was awarded to mates of Donnie Dorko on a no-bid contract with no scrutiny or oversight, and which we will discover 5 years later was 250% over-priced.

     ANYWAY AGAIN Donold insisted that it be painted blue, not the original unpainted grey of the constituent stone and concrete.  Because - because - O I missed that bit when Donnie Dorko gained experience and qualifications in architectural design.  Art!

    The blue colouration absorbed sunlight and raised the water temperature to one sufficiently high to cause a mass of algae to bloom there.

     Ooops.

Finally -

Going out with a Biercism.

"Politeness, n: Apologizing to a man for standing in the way, when he sends a bullet through you that he intended for someone else."

One To Free Four

Forgive Me If I Mutilate An Old Pink Floyd Song

Technically it ought to be 'Free Four', a track from 1972's 'Obscured By Clouds', which has an opening line of 'One Two Free Four!' as the band count themselves in, mis-pronouncing 'Three' most fearfully badly.  Tut tut, chaps, must do better.  Art!

     What am I whanging on about now?  O I thought you'd never ask!  

     You see, I've been using numbers as inspiration for Intros, thanks to my 'Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable', from which we went over the number Nine.  Once all the creative juice had been sucked and squeezed from that, we moved onto Three.  Art!

     Unfortunately this example of Three, being 'THREE GOLDEN BALLS', is the exception to the rest of the Three definitions, since it's interesting and they aren't.  The tailings of wh - excuse me?  It's the symbol of a pawnbroker, IF you must know.  Supposedly the sign of bankers and moneylenders from Lombardy who set up shop in England in late Medieval times, commonly held to indicate that whatever was pawned had only one chance of two in being redeemed.

     ANYWAY the residuum of Three either consists of things that are already exceedingly well known - 'THREE CHEERS 'for example - or stunningly dull, such as THE THREE GRACES OF LIVERPOOL and THE THREEFOLD MAN.  We've already covered the triple essence of man, and the Graces are merely buildings.  Art!

     You might, with considerable reaching, consider the "Dreikaiserbund" asa being under Three, even if it is in Teuton.  It translates as the 'League of Three Emperors' and was a coalition cobbled together by Bismark in the late 19th century: the Teutons, Hapsburgs and Ruffians.

     ANYWAY AGAIN we are now moving onto Four as an inspiration, and, as ever, BOOJUM! simply cannot go any further without a definition, as per my 'Collins Concise English Dictionary'.

     'FOUR': 'The cardinal number that is the sum of one and three (why not two and two?), from the Old English 'Feower', itself related to Frisian 'Fiuwer' and in Greek it's 'Tessares'".  Art!

     This is a 'Four', a type of racing shell for - you may be ahead of me here - four rowers, plus the cox.  I like to keep you informed.

     What follows will be a concatenation between CCED and BDOPAF as I seamlessly move between the two.  Just so you know.

FOUR-ALE: No, not how many glasses Conrad consumes at once.  Traditionally, a cheap beer sold at fourpence a quart, or one shilling and tuppence per gallon, and no I'm not converting that to metric.  I'd never heard of it myself, but it features as a line in 'Under Milk Wood'.  Art!

A bottle of beer and a-bed with Liz Taylor.  What a trauma.

FOUR-BY-FOUR: No, not a pair of two-by-four planks.  A vehicle with drive to all four wheels, making it much more powerful in traversing cross-country.  Also known as a 'Chelsea tractor' as beloved by the denizens of that locality.  Art!

FOUR CORNERS OF THE EARTH: Meaning to the very remotest places on Planet Earth, and rather inaccurately implying that globe is in fact flat.  In 1965 John Hopkins University, having more funding than they knew what to do with, defined these four geographical areas as: Ireland (not very precise!), south-east of the Cape of Good Hope, west of the Peruvian coast, and between New Guinea and Japan.  Art!

FOUR-FLUSH:A term from poker, which I have heard referred to in South Canadian idiom without knowing exactly what it is.  What is it?  Art!

     It's a hand of four card of the same suit and an odd on, being completely valueless.  In South Canada a 'four-flusher' is a despicable cand and an utter bounder.  

FOUR-IN-HAND: Nothing to do with cards or poker.  Rather, we're talking about a carriage drawn by four horses, controlled by a single driver.  Art!

FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE: Continuing the horsey theme.  Not that you'd ever try harnessing this quad to your wagon.  They are part of Revelations, Chapter 6, being variously Conquest, whom rides a white horse - nice touch in the details there, Bible - and wears a crown; War, whom rides a red horse, very martial and all that; Famine, on his black horse - I think he won the coin toss to see who got the most 'alli' horse of all; Death, on a pale horse.  Art!

     If they were invented nowadays they'd have to constitute at least 50% females and observe all relevant HSE and OSHA regulations, with full management oversight and KPI targets.

     I think that's enough of Four for today, there are oodles to come.  I bet you can hardly wait.

One Shudders To Think -

Of the thought-processes going on in whoever's mind dreamed up this combination, as it's something not even Your Humble Scribe would have imagined.  Art!

     If you're not familiar with the title, it's one of H P Lovecraft's, concerning a doomed Antarctic expedition from Miskatonic University, which uncovers vast subterranean cities previously populated by the 'Elder Things' and their hideous Shoggoth slaves.  Whoever thought it would be a hoot to render this morbid tale in the style of a children's book - well done!  We call that pushing the envelope.

    No, I've not watched it yet, it musters over 23 minutes and I'm still typing up this blog.  Perhaps tonight.

Get Thee Behind Me, Clickbait!

Once again Conrad is presented with a come-hither advert that fails to identify the film it is pimping, so that the viewers have to click on it in order to be enlightened.  Art!

    They're not kidding about how good the film is.  

     What is it?

     O I just felt like keeping you in suspense.  Art!

Best depiction of urban combat ever

     It doesn't star Sir Michael, he's one of the supporting cast, being almost unrecognisable in his ratty blonde wig.  Clive Owen's finest moment, and Julianne Moore looks delicious acts well also.

     Just to get my own back, I'm not naming the paper that put this clickbait up.  Tee hee!

Call Tree Of Doom

Nothing to do with wood or lumber, this is the name given to a phone menu with options when you ring in to a business.  We have one at my Still Coyly Mysterious employer, which gets randomly changed in order to annoy and inconvenience callers and have them on the back foot.  Art!

     The story is narrated by BAnk Drone, hereafter BAD, and concerns the deployment of a new credit card signup system, which he and his compatriots on the Service Desk would need to support.  

     12 hours before rollout, there was a final plenary meeting with the heads of departments involved, and the manager BAD denoted 'Jackbottom' piped up and informed those assembled that the documentation 'was being worked on'.

     Cue blank and black looks all round.  Art!

     This is verrrrry bad, because the Service Desk would be operating blind with nothing to refer to, meaning lots and lots of irate callers frothing with rage.  Going ahead with the rollout was highly unprofessional and BAD's manager, RAzor SHarp, hereafter RASH, decided to take action.

     The first BAD and his team knew of this surreptitious sabotage was when there were exactly NIL calls from irate clients on the first morning.  None.  

     BAD went in to see RASH, who rather gloatingly admitted he'd rerouted the call tree, directing any queries about the new sign up system to Jackbottom's company phone.

     By mid-morning Jackbottom had over 50 calls with more in the queue.

     

     Jackbottom had previously stated that documentation would take take two weeks to arrive.  Instead it took two days.

More Rocket Art From the Fifties And Sixties

A bit of filler material here, the better to reach the Count total that I want.  Art!

Boasting in front of the Sinisters

     Courtesy 'Vintage Space Art & Graphics' on Youtube.

     The abbreviation stands for 'Air Research and Development Command' dating from 1951, and was responsible for all research and development for the South Canadian Air Force, which is - you may be ahead of me here - why they make a point about air weapons.  ARDC located itself at Edwards Air Force Base, and if Art will do the honours -

Finally -

Now beginning the other Marvel Avengers jigsaw.  I like to keep you informed.