The Refrain Is For The Train To Take The Strain

You Know Conrad By Now

Ever one to bore people rigid by whanging on about military logistics, especially those to do with the Second Unpleasantness in North Africa, and on the Western Front during the Second Unpleasantness SIT BACK DOWN! this is interesting.  Because I say so.

     ANYWAY I thought I'd better open with a compelling photograph to ensnare passing traffic, and here it is.  Art!

Photo courtesy Janet Macdonald

     No, it is not a Damien Hirst installation.  This is a British railway car loaded with dozens of tons of barbed wire, headed for a railhead on the Western Front.  It would have to be unloaded mechanically for loading onto trucks for onward movement, as it's far too heavy and hazardous for p

     ANYWAY AGAIN in this Intro Your Humble Scribe wants to focus on a man you have almost certainly never heard of, despite his very significant contribution to Perfidious Albion getting the better of the wily Wilhemine Hun.  Sir Eric Geddes.  Art!

     This chap was a mover and shaker.  As a young man he emigrated from Scotland to South Canada, being rather rootless until he took up a stationmaster job with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.  He ended up as a 'car-tracer'.  In case you think this somewhat menial, allow me to quote Google:

a car-tracer refers to the system and process of monitoring the real-time location, status, and health of individual freight cars as they move across the network, providing visibility for shippers, logistics companies, and rail operators 

    He returned to the UK and was then sent to India in 1895, where he built light railways.  We're not told what for; I suspect the transport of tea.  He then joined the Rohikund Railroad, until his wife's health meant they had to return to the UK.  Geddes joined the North East Railroad in 1904 and had risen to Deputy General Manager by 1911.

     Geddy, as I shall affectionately call him, knew railways inside out after working on them for 18 years.  His organisational, analytical and management skills meant he ended up working for the Ministry of Munitions in 1915.  Art!

'Canaries*' at work

     Geddy initially worked on small arms production, where he got production ramped up enormously.  Lloyd-George then poached him for work on filling artillery shells at the Ministry Of Munitions, where Geddy increased the efficiency so much that production increased by a factor of 10.  Doubtless LG swept in and stole all the credit for himself.  Art!

Photo courtesy Janet Macdonald
A supply train in France.  Note the bales of hay, fodder for horses

     This background information was new to me.  I'd heard Geddy mentioned in passing in a couple of historical works, and he's probably mentioned extensively in the multi-volume 'History Of The Ministry Of Munitions', which I don't possess.

     Enter Field Marshall Haig, who was such a military dunderhead that he immediately recognised management potential when he saw it and made Geddy a Major General, giving him the title of 'Director General Of Military Railways' and 'Inspector General of communications'.  There were no protests from Lloyd-George, possibly because he was uncomfortably aware of how talented Geddy was, and was happy to have a potential rival out of the way.  Art!

Photo courtesy Janet Macdonald

     This illo gives you an idea of the volume and amount of supplies needed to keep the 1.8 million men of the British Army properly equipped, clothed, fed and medicined.  
     Making Geddy a Major General did not sit well with the upper echelons of the British Army, to which Haig replied: "To put soldiers who have no practical experience of these matters into such positions merely because they are generals and colonels, must result in utter failure!"

     Getting down to brass tacks and analyses, Geddy reported back to LG that one of the primary issues causing problems in France and Flanders was shortage of labour.  Don't forget, this is 1916 we're talking about, where mechanical impedimenta to substitute for manual labour were not abundant, meaning it was the sweaty military navvy who had to serve.  Art!

Photo courtesy Janet Macdonald

     Railway stores being offloaded into horse-drawn transport.  Note the distinct lack of palletised loads, forklifts or overhead cranes.

     Some of Geddy's suggestions to provide labour were for women to substitute for men in clerical roles, in cooking and in baking.  Art!

Fed with bread

      Thus they would free-up men for front line roles, which said men must have felt pretty cheesed-off about, going from a nice safe telephone job to ducking and diving in a trench.  Another suggestion was employing Teuton POWs at base ports, where they were found to be more efficient than the imported Chinese labourers.  Teutonic thoroughness and all that.  They would have appreciated Geddy.
     I have more on this matter but will refrain from unloading it all at once.  Perhaps tomorrow.  I bet you can hardly wait. 

O Goody!

'Daractenus' is a Romanian I follow on Twitter (ha! take that Elong Tusk!), whose English is arguably better than mine, and who regularly comments on the Big Orange Oaf Himself, and Ruffia.  He has done two long Tweets with satirical descriptions of, to quote him, 'posh Ruffian cities', which show what an urban hellscape Mordorvia is beyond the capital Barad-Dur ('Moscow' if we're being formal).  He has just embarked on a third series.  Art!

     I can do no better than append his description of Karabash.

Incorrectly thought of as having been bombed and never repaired, Karabash has just enough heavy metals in its breeze to go along with a romantic evening walk, while a dip in the rather suspiciously fish free orange lake is recommended to those looking to join the X-Men.

Art!

Wowsers

I Don't Have A Trumpet So I'm Ringing This Bell

Conrad managed to complete the 'Skeleton' crossword with no cheating or looking at the answers, with all the words in the correct placement.  As proof - Art!

     You can see from the clues that they don't tell you how many letters are present in a word, which makes things hard.  Conrad is not sure that a COURGETTE is really a 'Small form of cucumber' as I think they're closer to a marrow.

Are We Prescient Or What?

A few days ago - code for 'I can't remember when thanks to gin and old age and don't care enough to check' - we highlighted Elizabeth Holmes, the criminally-indicted CEO of Theranos, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison on seven counts of fraud, and who might get out in 2032.  Guess what?  Art!

     It's within DJ Tango's powers to commute a sentence, except he has to know what he's going to get out of it because he doesn't do favours for free.  She appealed against her sentence, which was dismissed, so this is her last chance, unless the Flabby Farting Fraudster pardons here, which means she admits her guilt.  Art!

BOOJUM!: Crunching Numbers Crushing

     Only joking.  That's the link.  You're welcome.

Failure To Lunch

Not 'failure to launch', 'failure to lunch' because they made a dog's dinner of it.  If you're not familiar with the English vernacular, it means to make a disgustrous mess of something.  Yes, yet another illuminating episode from the 'Museum Of Failure', which I am so glad I came across.  Both because it helps to create content, and it indulges my sense of schadenfreude.  Art!

     I know what you're thinking.  No, it is not the keyboard for a word processor.  No, it is not the controller of the latest greatest game-playing console.  You cannot microwave with it, nor play dance tunes on it, because it is the 'Sony Google TV Remote'.

     That's right, a television remote control.  It was miserably unsuccessful thanks to having 88 keys and buttons, and doubtless an instruction manual 995 pages long.  The idea of a remote is to minimise effort.  My television remote has 47 keys and my DVD remote 41.  MOX snarkily riposted with the Apple remote only having 6 buttons.  Art!

     My I-pod has only one buttons and a swirly dial.

Finally -

Here's a quote from my 'QI Book Of Banter'.

'Pictures are for entertainment.  Messages should be sent by Western Union.'   - Samuel Goldwyn.

*  Female workers in artillery plant had their skin turned yellow by fumes from curing TNT.

Pondering

Ah The Life Of A Blog Content Creator!

I had to check where we were in terms of how far ahead we are in content creation.  So, I am typing this out on Wednesday evening, with Thursday's blog already done.  Therefore this one will be going out on Friday, provided Europe survives until then, which seems a fifty-fifty proposition as of now.

     ANYWAY I was sitting and wondering what to do as an Intro.  There was one of my Saved To Watch Later vlogs.  Art!

     This is - did I bore you with the details at Bovington Tank Museum? which I have still not finished with, let me tell you - a South Canadian M3 'Lee' tank.  The video describes how designing, tooling-up for and producing a turret that could cope with a 75 mm gun would have taken a couple of years, so instead the M3 Lee had it's most powerful gun in a sponson to one side.  This is a production and engineering detail Conrad was not aware of.  I also note that they used a picture of an M3 Canal Defence Light instead of a generic M3.  Art!

      The CDL had an incredibly powerful light element inside the turret, which was lensed through that vertical gap, in order to - 

      Erm, not sure what.  Illuminate?  They were only used a handful of times in Europe late in the war.

     ANYWAY AGAIN there's not enough detail there to sustain a whole Intro.  What might be next?  Art!

     I don't expect you to know him, but this is Sir Eric Geddes, a man who helped the Allotment Of Eden win the First Unpleasantness.  The trouble is, his experience and ability was all in the field of logistics, the worthy-yet-dull field of military supply that sends people to sleep.  In order to manage an Intro about him, I would need to add in background to half the volume.  It will come, don't worry, just not tomorrow.  Art!

     Yesssss!  The problem here is that I've not finished watching Episode 5, even if I do have a few illos of the serial so far, so we - that being the Production Team 'We' of me, Steve, Oscar and Art - need to continue watching to get more background.  I just had to confirm that Mook The Moron had already been mentioned, and she had.  I have to say that this serial's background story is one of the most unique I've seen in decades.  Art!

     Well, we've had tanks, tracks and Thais.  What else might we negotiate in an Intro?

     Hmmm well nothing particularly inspiring comes to mind, so we'll just go with more not-so-gentle shoeing of the Ruffian economy.  Art!

     That, apparently, is supposed to be '75 million dollars' and is yet more proof that AI cannot take over the world as it can't even manage a simple text prompt.  Skynet my hairy white posterior.

     ANYWAY I plucked this number, not from my hairy white posterior thin air, but from Youtuber 'William Spaniel', whom was paraphrasing and analysing a 'New York Times' article that was itself reporting on a CIA analysis of Mordorvia's economy.  Which id not looking good.  The single aspect that William seized upon was the CIA estimate of how much damage Ukraine's 'kinetic sanctions' are having upon Ruffian oil refineries.  Art!

The bingo card

     Lest ye be unaware, since January 2025 Ukraine has been relentlessly attacking Ruffian oil refineries with drones.  Before that date they had intermittently targeted them, but come 2025 they had the numbers, range and payload in HE to reallllly go after the refineries.  What does that translate to in the bottom line?

     $75 million in lost revenue per day.

     Thus, over the course of 2025, the Ruffian economy missed out on $27 billion.  Not rubles, dollars, the ruble now being a form of toilet-paper - allegedly the orcs are printing ₽3 trillion rubles per week in an attempt to deliberately create hyper-inflation or some such shizzle.  According to Will, that $27 billion represents 13.7% of the federal Ruffian budget, or one-seventh.  This budget black hole is one reason why Ruffian taxes have been hiked as of 1/1/2026, including a VAT increase from 20% to 22%, with the tax threshold being dropped from businesses making ₽50 million rubles per annum to those making ₽10 million per annum.  As one orc complained on Telegram, these tax hikes are why Avito market shops are selling up and closing down - they cannot afford to keep paying for the Tsar's war.  Art!

The orc in question

     Here a bit of train of thought.  Today is one of those grim grey days that requires one to have the lights on all day long, and it is a long day on the Stupid Schedule - 07:45 to 16:45 grrrrr bah.  Still, one day closer to payday.  Which has also been a long time coming as we got paid a week early before Christmas.

     Small update: I had to move the black bin onto the street for collection tomorrow and it's horrid outside, miserably wet and cold and cannot now feel the ends of my fingers.

Conrad Is ANGRY!

Not just at the weather and long working day, also at the wretched Codeword compilers, and believe me I've kept track of their offences.  The Remote Nuclear Tormentor has been getting in overtime.  Art!

The RMT

     Let me detail their offences.

AXIOMS:  I bet this has a Greek root.  Time for the 'Collins Concise English Dictionary'.  'A generally accepted proposition or principle, sanctioned by experience.'  I was right about the Greek, too - originally 'Axioun'.  Art!

Axioms as per AI Art Generator

EPONYM:  You bet this one's Greek, too.  It means, primarily, a place name that was given from the name of a real or fictional person.  Art!

It seemed fitting

BUSBY: Conrad got this one because of his keen knowledge of military history, but you young snappers of whip out there would be somewhat out of luck.  It's a peculiar type of military hat, a tall fur one with a bag hanging off the right hand side.  Art!

     That was back when hussars and their ilk measured martial proficiency by how much of a peacock they were.  
     Another distant memory bobbed to the fervid waters of Conrad's mind, about British Telecom and a mascot of theirs from decades ago.  Art!

     Not quite the same spelling, but close enough and it's pronounced the same, so suck it and see.  

More Gentle Shoeing!

Okay, not so gentle.  Art!

Look at his tiny hands*!

     The Big Orange Oaf Himself hits a new low?  Colour me surprised.  Watch this space, because Donnie Dorko is going to get progressively worse.  Dementia says 'Hold my beer!'.  The meat of his meandering was being an utter bigot about Somalis, which is rich as he doesn't know where Somalia is.

     Also - Art!

     He nearly walks off the red carpet and is weaving all over the place, thanks to not having Melania to keep him straight.  He weaves as much when he walks as when he talks.  Gosh I will miss the senile content creator when he keels over and I predict a world shortage of champagne when that happens.

Ha!  Fiction Reading Shortage Resolved

Abebooks came through for me SO YOUTUBE CAN STOP PIMPING THEM after making my order earlier this week, both books I bought came at the same time.  Art!

     I guess reading all nine books in 'The Descent' series will have to wait a couple of weeks not.  Just thinking back, it must be about nine years since I started reading them, meaning I've forgotten a lot about the finer details.  

Finally -

Let us round things off with another Biercism.

"Giraffe,n: An animal that loves to bathe it's fevered brow in the midst of dizzy altitudes, and supplies it's own pinnacle for the occasion, whence it overlooks you like a step-ladder.'

*  Calling them 'tiny' sends him apoplectic with rage.  TINY HANDS TINY HANDS!

TREE LAW!

In Case You Are Unaware

Trees are - you may be conscious of this already - large living entities in the neighbourhood, whom have been around for decades and form part of the architecture and landscape.  Pay attention to the 'decades' part of this sentence.  Art!

     Bear in mind that a mature tree, of whatever species, takes decades to reach maturity, even if it is left alone in the grounds of said possessor.  This is where Tree Law comes into being, because an item you may have been used to as a background object turns out to be worth $1,000,000.  Ooops.

     ANYWAY what we have here today is an hideous combination of MalCom and Tree Law.  The Unfortunate Narrator, hereafter TUN, lived next door to a woman who was the walking, talking definition of a 'Karen' and whom was also the Home Owners Association president.  Since HOAs are passing rare in The Allotment Of Eden, allow me to explicate: they are associations of home owners with a handbook of rules and regulations, usually monitored and enforced by little tin Hitlers who abuse their powers for enrichment and malice.  There must be good HOAs out there, except you just don't hear of them.  Art!

"Evil HOA" because pollution?

     To quote TUN, " - she seemed to have some vendetta against trees" in addition to being a complete bottomhole.  Not a semi-bottomhole or a partial bottomhole, a complete bottomhole, who used her HOA position and authority to fine anyone with trees and force them to get rid of.  Traumatised by watching 'The Evil Dead', one presumes.  Art!

     ANYWAY Karen hated a large tree that TUN had in his garden, claiming that it blocked the sun at midnight and imperilled power lines, neither of which was true.  Eventually she got the HOA to send TUN a letter imposing a fine on his tree because it might fall down and damage Karen's house, in the same way that the Earth might fly out of it's orbit and into the Sun.  'Possible' is not 'probable'.  TUN told Karen this face to face when next they met, which apparently silently enraged her, because THE TREE MUST DIE!

     So, she forged HOA paperwork, then engaged a tree cutting service, using the fraudulent papers to cite TUN's tree being removed.    So, TUN came home one day to - no tree, and a smugly smiling Karen.  Art!

     TUN did not take this lying down, and intended to get legal redress.  He found out, much to his surprise, that there are indeed lawyers who specialise in Tree Law " - which I didn't even know was a thing".  O TUN you sweet summer child you.  His first step was to consult an arborist and work out how much his tree was worth, with the irritating absence of ever mentioning what species of tree it was.  Whichever, the timber was used a lot in furniture manufacture and would have been worth $75,000, another reminder that Tree Law is EXPENSIVE.

     Karen, being in the same position as TUN and knot knowing anything about trees, assumed that he was either bonkers or had misplaced a decimal point, and offered to reduce his HOA fines by $100 if he dropped the case.  Karen also expected TUN to pay the tree cutting service's fees, which he must have had a good laugh at.

     SHOCKER! he did not drop the case.

     SURPRISE! he won the case, thanks to his having detailed reports from an arborist, and all Karen had were fraudulent documents.  Art!

Ooops

     TUN's lawyer then reached out to various environmental groups in the state, as well as the state's District Attorney office, about the HOA breaching state tree laws - yes, there are such things.  Suddenly the HOA was the focus of an investigation and another lawsuit, because healthy trees needed an inspection and state permission before they could be removed.  Which had never happened.

     Ooops.

     The HOA tried to resolve things by throwing Karen under the bus, by firing her.  This didn't work as all the actions she carried out had their approval, so all the homeowners who'd had trees removed came after them for restitution.  The state imposed numerous fines, to the extent that the HOA went bust and dissolved itself.

     TUN still has Karen as a neighbour, but she now has no standing, power or influence.  No word on whether TUN intends to buy a replacement tree or not.

     And that, gentle reader, is the power of TREE LAW!

     

Abramoff The Charts

You may recall the murky details of the 'Blue Horizon' gambling cruise ships, which we here at BOOJUM! did as an Intro several weeks back.  Two of the primary players, Abramoff and Kidan, were extremely corrupt and criminal.  Today I'll add in a bit of detail about Jack Abramoff.  Art!

Back when he had a reputation

     Rather than running a gambling cruise operation, Abramoff's day job was as a lobbyist in Washington, which translates into English as a person paid to bribe, corrupt and pander to politicians on behalf of their clients.  The clients in Abramoff's case were Native American tribes, whom were trying to get gambling concessions on their reservations.  Along with another three lobbyists, Abramoff swindled $85 million out of their clients, grossly overcharging them and even conspiring to work against them in secret, thus to force them to utilise said lobbyists.  The quartet of crooks were ordered to repay $25 million they had overcharged, and Abramoff took a plea deal in 2006, admitting guilt in conspiracy, fraud and tax evasion.  He owed the IRS $1.7 million in taxes after this judgement: no details available on whether he paid it or not, but one suspects the IRS, with their laser focus and bulldog grip, would not allow him to default.

     He went to prison in 2006 and was released in 2010.  Art!

Abramoff to prison

Here's One I Prepared Earlier

Art!

     Yes.

Okay, In More Depth

The Teuton Panzer 1, 2, 3 and 4 were all pre-Second Unpleasantness designs, meaning that they had years of development to iron out any faults or defects.  The Tiger, King Tiger and Panther were all developed in wartime and, thanks to Herr Schikelgruber being a frantic interventionist, were rushed into production far too quickly.  They were all underpowered, leading to serious reliability issues; they all had complicated interleaved suspension systems, which were vulnerable to mud, snow, ice and rocks; they were tricky to operate without lots of practice; they were very difficult to maintain or repair; they had overhanging barrels that would be blocked by close terrain; their large calibre guns meant they carried far fewer shells thanks to their size; they were big, meaning harder to hide, easier to spot and easier to hit.  Art!

     This, gentle reader, it the humble Sturmgeschutz III, a self-propelled gun based on the chassis of the Panzer III.  Not at all sophisticated, it was the Teuton's most effective tank-killer, rather than their over-engineered 'big cats', so we can only be grateful that they wasted so much time and resources on the latter.

What Were They Thinking?

Were they thinking at all?  Art!

     I will not comment, except to say that South Canadian English and Proper English As What Is Spoke here are two very different creatures.

     This is Dasani Water, a brand of bottled water hoiked by the Coca Cola corporation, big in South Canada but unknown here in the Allotment Of Eden.  For their 2004 launch, CC spent $7 million in advertising, only to commit the blunder you see above.  Not only that, their highly touted 'sophisticated filtration process' utilised British tap water, just priced 500 times normal.  Plus, their 'sophisticated filtration process' failed completely, resulting in bromate contamination of Dasani.  Coca Cola were forced to recall 500,000 bottles and then ditched Dasani Water completely.  Which is why it is a stranger to supermarket shelves here in Perfidious Albion.

Finally -

Goodbye!

Lonely

No! I Don't Mean The Character From 'Callan'

Played by Russell Hunter, whom was the antithesis of Callan himself - described as a 'grey, de-gadgetised Bond' - being prone to flatulence from fear and able to sink a pint in mere seconds.  Art!

Very obviously not 'Callan'

     Hunter was also in the dramamentary 'The Robots Of Death', a Doctor Who serial from 1977 notable for the outstanding production design.

     ANYWAY from alien worlds, let us move on in this Intro to -

     Alien worlds.  Or, perhaps, worlds with aliens.  It's a mathematical certainty that there are real live aliens out there in our home galaxy, except that most of them are going to be microorganisms, not Mister Spock.  What might be described as complex life, evolved to the level of a technological civilisation, is going to be a lot rarer, simply for the reason that it takes so long to develop.  Art!

     

     For this Intro, I'm afraid we're going to have to relegate 'The X Files' to the realms of fiction, alongside all those alleged alien abductions with absolutely no proof they ever happened.  Instead, we need to consider the 'Fermi Paradox', which queries why there is no evidence of intelligent life beyond our solar system, given the size and age of the known universe.  Art!

Article courtesy Wong and Bartlett

     Rather than continually expand, such civilisations might reach a point where their demands for energy outreach their ability to supply same, leading to a collapse and cultural extinction.  Or, alternatively, they might go into a 'steady state' where they maintain a low profile baseline without expanding, meaning once again that there is no signature to detect.  So, Hom. Sap. ends up being -

     Lonely.  Art!

     Another study that resonates well here is from Scherf and Lammer, of the Austrian Academy Of Sciences, whom posit that complex technological civilisations are going to be surpassingly rare, if their hypothesis holds water.  They highligh two things an exoplanet needs to develop intelligent life.  Firstly, carbon dioxide.  There needs to be sufficient in the atmosphere to allow photosynthesis and prevent atmospheric outflow, but not too much or it becomes toxic.  The presence of carbon dioxide in an atmosphere is in turn related to plate tectonics.  Art!

     No plate tectonics, no carbon dioxide.  Plus, eventually, the carbon-silicate cycle will cease to function, causing life to cease as photosynthesis stops.  On Planet Earth this process may halt in about one billion years, meaning that intelligent life had a 'window' of five and a half billion years to evolve.

     Secondly, said exoplanet needs a balance of nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere, both for biological and technological development.  Biological, because Hom. Sap. needs oxygen to breathe, and technologically because oxygen allows fire to burn, as long as levels are at 17% and not lower.  Schef and Lammer calculated that the odds of an alien complex technological  civilisation arising are vanishingly small, and our nearest alien neighbours are possibly 33,000 light years distant.  Not only that, they would need to survive for at least 280,000 years to have their civilisation overlap with ours and permit communication, provided we are willing to wait 66,000 years for a message back.  Art!

     Then there is a third alternative: aliens are out there, they are advanced technologically BUT they don't want to make contact with other advanced civilisations for fear of the consequences.  'The Killing Star' is a novelisation of Stephen Hawking's warning about Hom. Sap. contacting a superior advanced civilisation, which has always turned out poorly in human history, even when supposedly benign.  TKS is an exampled of an alien culture seeking to exterminate humanity as a matter of procedure, before Hom. Sap. becomes a threat to them, and they do a very thorough job of it.  After all, why allow a potential rival to evolve that will only compete for resources when you can get rid of it before it even starts?  What you might call the 'Don't pick up the phone' hypothesis, being lonely by design.  Art!

<heavy sigh>

     This was also the plot behind 'Odyssey 5', which never got a second season to explore the other threads it picked up <swears dire retribution against studio heads>.  Since the crew of the Odyssey 5 are left in space when Earth is completely destroyed, they were very lonely indeed.

What Were They Thinking?

Another bizarre entry from the 'Museum Of Failure': 'Phone Fingers'.  These were rubber finger covers that mobile phone users could don in order to avoid getting greasy fingerprints on their phone display.  Art!

     I've had to use the MOX illo because nothing came up on a Google search.  Not a surprise, as MOX said they were only around in 2007 and possibly only in Austria, as they were - ahem - 'invented' by an Austrian.  I mean, you could always just, I dunno, wipe the phone display?  Or cut the fingers off a rubber kitchen glove?  An item nobody asked for or wanted.

     

You What?

Once again Conrad is stumped by an item cropping up in my news feed that seems to assume I know what they're gibbering about.  Art!

     Who is Sadio Mane?  Why is that man practicing karate?  Why is that clown wielding a chair?  What is 'AFCON'?  Conrad can guess that this is a sporting event of some variety ao;enrt ''''''''''''

     

      SORRY!  Sorry, I fell asleep as that's how interested I am in sport.  One suspects that this item might refer to the ballfoot game, which I am only interested in when fans of one ballfoot club ladle invective o'er fans of another club.

En Passant

Which is French for 'In passing' and is normally used in chess and I'm using it to be a bit of a pseud.

     ANYWAY Your Humble Scribe had his annual diabetic assessment, the most fraught part of which is the drawing of three syringes of blood, because I am the world's biggest coward when it comes to being stuck with needles.  Art!

The evidence of how brave I was

An Antidote To 'The Herculoids'

Don't worry if you've never heard of them, I hadn't either.  Art!

     Having never seen it, I can only parrot the assertion that it was a typically violent kids cartoon hailing from South Canada.  One animation studio, Hannah-Barbera, was aware of this and sought to get ahead of the field and angry parent's groups by creating a cartoon based on bufoonish slapstick, inspired by 'The Great Race'.  Somewhat bizarrely it was produced in alliance with Heatter-Quigley, a company that specialised in game shows, and the intent was to gamble on the overall winner - a concept that was immediately dropped when it was realised parents might not want their children learning how to gamble.  Art!

     WACKY RACES!

Born in 1968

    Please note that HB only made 17 serials, which was their standard modus operandi at the time; rather than continue making more serials they finished at 17 or 20, because these totals allowed them to get syndication rights.  They have been repeated countless times since 1968 around the world, because who can fail to laugh at Dick Dastardly losing yet again?

     The theme was so successful that it got two spin-off series: "Dick Dastardly And Muttley", with the bonkers premise that Dick was the squadron leader for 'Vulture Squadron', who were always trying (and failing) to catch an enemy messenger pigeon in their eccentric biplanes.  Conrad suggested they use a shotgun, but the censor wouldn't allow it.  Art!

     Then there was 'The Perils Of Penelope Pitstop', featuring that racer, and The Ant Hill Mob from Wacky Races as her pint-sized protectors.  She needed protection because 'The Hooded Claw' was always trying to kill her in order to - steal her inherited fortune?  Conrad suspects that's not how probate law  works.  Art!

     You may detect a resemblance between THC to port and Sylvester Sneekly, Penelope's guardian, which is because they're the same person.  Gasp!

Finally -

Just going to end this without any Biercisms.