NO! This Is Nothing To Do With The Nuclear Emergency
Even if BOOJUM! might come back to the topic, because NUCLEAR and EMERGENCY are trigger words for us here. Is this good? Bad? Indifferent? Only you can tell!
First of all, I would like to bring up Raymond Chandler, Philip Marlowe and Forties thriller fiction. Art!
ART!
<sounds of industrial-strength Tazer in action>
Thank you. Put some Sudocrem on the burns you big baby.
ANYWAY in "Farewell My Lovely" Phil encounters the phenomenon of 'gambling boats', which are large freight vessels converted into floating casinos. They take on passengers, and then proceed to beyond the three-mile limit offshore California, where gambling is not illegal, and then lots of money changes hands. I am using the Californian peninsula* as almost an island, hence today's title. Art!
Let us fast-forward fifty years, and here's immigrant entrepreneur Gus Boulis, either a shark on the mark or a shake on the make, who takes his massed employees on a gambling ship off the coast of Florida for a party. Which actually seems to be more caring and concerning than most South Canadian employers.
Gus, who had considerable assets and greed alongside each other, buys into the casino cruise market. He purchases 11 ships in total, whose business model is to load up with passengers, sail three miles offshore, and gogogo gambling. Art!
That's Gus, when he was alive and smug.
However - ah that word again! - the forces of officialdom mustered to harass and prosecute Gus, being the local sheriff, the City Commissioner and the state Attorney General. They did not like Gus or his casino cruise ships, because - because - because gambling idiots need to be protected from themselves? Art!
Possibly because of this official harrassment, Boulis decided to sell SunCruz - I have to say nothing good will come of a mis-spelled name - to Abramoff and Kidan for $147 million, retaining a very hush-hush 10% interest of $20 million, which was covered by a promissory note rather than actual money.
Here are the statistics for a single SunCruz ship, the 'SunCruz VI'; it was 165 feet ling, had 38 gaming tables, 300 slot machines and could accommodate up to 600 suckers - sorry! guests I meant guests, making two cruises per day. If we guesstimate that each suc - guest drops an average of $100, you're looking at $1.2 million per day. If we also guesstimate that ships aren't always full, don't always sail daily because of maintenance, repair, refurbishment etcetera, that's still $300 million per ship per year - and SunCruz had a fleet of them.
Kidan and Abramoff rapidly fell out with Boulis, since they were finding it hard to come up with the money for him, and if there was one thing Gus liked, it was money. Things got so bad that he and Kidan ended up assaulting each other. Boulis then threatened to take the company back, which may well have been possible given the very dodgy way it had been sold.
So, K and A had him murdered.
All in all, it took only five months for matters to get murderous once Boulis sold SunCruz, which implies a degree of ineptness on the part of A and K. Art!
The murder scene
This was very much killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, as SunCruz filed for bankruptcy. Imagine that, a business that had run for six years making hundreds of millions of dollars annually - and it went bust. Ooops.
SunCruz was then bought out of bankruptcy by Ocean Casino Cruises in 2004, going for $36 million. It seems the star of ocean-going cruise lines had dimmed, as OCC shut down in 2009. By that time they only had three ships left. Art!
The sad ship you see here is the SunCruz VII, which was bought up and christened the 'Diamond Royale' gambling cruise ship, which also failed to generate a profit and was abandoned. To add further hubris, it was sold at auction in 2014 to a man looking for a houseboat, for a mere $100,000. When he got fed up of his extremely large houseboat, it was sunk as an artificial reef. Art!
The SunCruz VI was also bought up and refurbished as the 'Island Breeze', and it also failed - twice. The new owners ended up $50 million in debt - remember what I said about their star fading? Also -
as it has become inevitable that the renewal of the Seminole Tribe compact will be enacted. The casino day-cruise industry in the state of Florida cannot compete with this land-based expansion of gaming.
Gambling on Indian reservation land is perfectly legal, you see, and has been since 1988.
Well, that was a wild ride. We may come back to A and K, they were a right pair of crooks. I bet you can hardly wait.
Cope Alert! Cope Alert!
I was watching Jake Broe's latest vlog, where he posted an interesting Tweet from November 6th 2025, less than two months ago. Art!
One example is from 35 years ago and the other from 27 years ago. I also doubt that a mere two examples prove that South Canadian air superiority is over. Note that, of the 5,000 MANPADS - presumably 'Igla' - only 1 was fired and it missed. None of the S-300s or Buks managed a launch, either. There was so little response that Conrad wonders if there was collusion by the Venezuelan military, or if they just couldn't be bothered to defend Five Dinners Maduro. Whichever, an hideous embarrassment for Mordorvia.
The Hangover From Hades
Another Darwin Award winner for you. This one concerns warehousing, shelving units and robotics. The narrator was installing an automated system that used a robot crane to stack very large loads on heavy-duty shelving. There were strict rules about people not being allowed in the warehouse whilst the automated plant was in operation, because it was DANGEROUS. Art!
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The Beating Goes On
It never snows but it blizzards. The supposed ability of the orcs of Mordorvia to tolerate misery, squalor and poverty is going to be tested in the future, even if the Special Idiotic Operation ends. Why so? O I thought you'd never ask! Art?
the country’s low-cost hydrocarbon reserves are running low. Easier production conditions have passed, and more difficult production is getting increasingly more expensive.
It costs a total of $42 per barrel to extract this 'easier' oil, so in the future the cost will rise even more as these fields are exhausted. In this year the total revenue from oil that Mordorvia receives will be down to 23%, when it was 50% back in 2021. This isn't biased Western media or intelligence agencies, this info comes straight from Ruffian Finance Minister Siluanov. Ooops, and also tee hee.
Finally -
As is becoming traditional here, we are going to finish with a Biercism, because Word Count.
"Bard,n: A person who makes rhymes. The word is one of the numerous aliases under which the poet seeks to veil his identity and escape opprobium."
* Okay, okay, BAJA California is a peninsula
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