Sitting In A Hot Seat

That's A Metaphorical Hot Seat, Gentle Readers
Mine only ever gets warm thanks to it's close proximity to the radiator.

Not that warm, Art

     Anyway, what I refer to today is another pyramid scheme, after the concept was introduced yesteryon.  A pyramid scheme, lest you be unaware, is a scam where the people at the top earn riches whilst the people at the bottom end up penniless.  Typically the people at the top recruit lesser peons who pay them money, for the sheer privilege of belonging to Purple Wim Wam, Inc.  

Close enough

The peons try to recruit more peons, so that they may rise above peonhood and become bosses in their own right.  The whole thing is camouflaged by Pretending To Sell Something, and the bosses at the top go to bed each night wondering if the authorities aren't going to be waiting on the doorstep come morning.  So, gentle readers, pyramid schemes ("Multi-Level Marketing" to be both formal and euphemistic) are to be avoided!
      Thus we come to Burn Lounge, who were supposedly a music marketing and management entity, where folks could download music.  Art?

Translation: "Crook"

     Here an aside.  I used to watch "Burn Notice" but stopped watching after (I think) the first season, since it seemed as if the producers were going to keep shifting parameters and ensuring Our Hero never got to the bottom of anything.

4 seasons?!

     It did have Bruce Campbell in it, which is always a plus.
     Anyway, back to BurnLounge.  It tried to look as if it was a version of LimeWire crossed with Spotify, and whilst you could make money by selling music to subscribers, the big bucks were in selling more BurnLounge memberships.  However, the way the site, memberships and organisation was structured meant 94% of all members lost money.  The people at the top made about £18 million, until the Federal Trade Commission (South Canadian scrutineers) declared the whole thing an illegal pyramid scheme and closed it down.
     BurnLounge appealed.  They lost*.
     BurnLounge appealed again.  They lost, again*.  In fact it's a wonder they bothered with a second appeal, since they were shot down in flames, and in pieces, and very small pieces at that, in the original trial in 2007.  The FTC then started to re-imburse those who had been scammed, whilst BurnLounge put up a rather pathetic page-holding page on the Internet.  Art?

Yeah, right.

     Designed, one feels, to soothe the egos of the bosses, as this same screen has been floating around for ten years now with no sign of another BurnLounge.  Isn't that strange?  Well, not really, as they seem to have gone the way of successful pyramid schemes - an initial surge of incredible business, which draws the eyes of the authorities, an investigation, and then the whole thing collapses.  If you, as one of the bosses, manage to stay out of prison, you're not going to set the market alive subsequently.
     So there you have it, and how we got today's title, and isn't analysing human greed and duplicity fascinating reading? 

Tee Hee*!

     Now, motley, you know teabags are killing the planet, right?  So shall we bin all ours and go for All Loose-Leaf status in the Kitchen Of Doom?

The Villar-Perosa If you don't like stuff about guns, now is the time to go make a pot of tea - LOOSE LEAF OF COURSE! - because this is very gun-y.

A rather jazzy Italian bomber
(See below)

     When the First Unpleasantness began, Italy brazenly sat it out, stating that, because it's partners Germany and Austro-Hungary had done the attacking, the Sunny Republic didn't need to join in.  Later, frankly bribed by the Allies, they joined the Allies, which is only sensible and logical.
     Anyway, they had this Caproni bomber, see, which was armed with a twin-gun arrangement, okay, that had an extremely high rate of fire, right?  Art?

There it is

     You need an extremely high rate of fire (hereafter EHROF) in aircraft guns because the opposition is going to be whizzing past at hundreds of miles per hour, so you've got very little time to aim and pull the trigger.
     Some bright spark got the idea of using the dismounted defensive machine-guns in a ground role, where, because it used 9 m.m. (apologies for not using our usual noble Imperial measurements) ammunition, i.e. pistol bullets not rifle bullets, it is sometimes termed the first sub-machine gun.  Art?

Gun Jesus!

     I bring this up because Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons got his hot sweaty hands on one, a very rara avis indeed, and proceeded to fire it.

Ian in firing pose

     Wow!  It went BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT and then both magazines were empty, the result of a 1,500 rounds per minute rate of fire and only having 25 bullets in each magazine.  Ian conjectured that the gunner would fire off one magazine at a time, whereupon his assistant would remove the empty and put in a full one.  It has been described as being "surprisingly effective", which one can understand - if you were standing in the way of 50 bullets coming your way in all of two seconds, you'd either be perforated or running.

The evil little beast

     Enough of guns and crime!  Let us now look at -

Detroit
We had a question at Pub Quiz - started poorly and got better, thank you for asking - that had everyone scratching their heads and guessing.
     "If you travel directly south from Detroit, which country do you first come to?"
     Good question, eh?  Naturally everyone discounted Canada, so the issue must be a country in Central or South America, and Conrad was desperately scratching his head trying to think of lines of longitude.
     What's the answer?
     Canada!
     It sounds counter-intuitive, but geography will out.  Art?

There you go.

     Just barely, but just barely is enough.
Finally -
Here's another Pub Quiz question that I suspect nobody got, though Steve The Quizmaster insisted we'd been asked it before.  I don't remember it, and it's not in my little notebook where I write down the questions (yes I am a sad pedantic hair-splitter).
    "In the Caribbean, what kind of animal is a Mountain Chicken?"
     The answer, as I found out when I put my sheet in for marking, is not "Weasel".      It is, in fact, a kind of frog.  Art?

Big sucker, eh?

     The name comes because, allegedly, it tastes like chicken when roasted, which has led to the locals eating it almost to the point of extinction.  We will have to take this on trust, as BOOJUM! is not going to test the veracity of such statements.

Hop it

*  Tee Hee!

How Very - Pervi

No!  That Is Not A Spelling Error!
HOW MANY TIMES DO I NEED TO TELL YOU!  Conrad does not make spelling mistakes, because 1) he is clever and well-versed in the ways of language, and 2) Spellchecker, even if Blogger's version is a peculiar South Canadian one.
     What I refer to, obviously - O so obviously! - is "Pervitin", a supposed wonder-drug of the late Thirties as discovered by military medical staff in Nazi Germany.  Art?

Pervitin.  A gift of a name.

     The Third Reich loved loved loved this stuff; it made soldiers feel O so unbeatable, in addition to reducing hunger and the need for sleep.  The pills were manufactured by the tens of millions and were shovelled down the eager gullets of all the Third Reich's stubble hoppers.
     Until, that is, it was found that repeated use risked sending you mad with an attack of the purple wim-wams, or killing you via cardiac arrest, and that you were useless at anything for a couple of days after using it.  Take note of that; the use of methamphetamine came with significant health risks.
     Let us now jump forward many decades, to a rather naughty South Canadian police officer, Michael Ellis, who palled up with a pal to create and run a meth lab.

A meth lab somewhat enlarged

     As you may have an inkling of, this is not the sort of behaviour that police officers ought to indulge in.
     He managed to wiggle out of that one with only a short sentence, and then went on to establish "Metabolife", which sold diet pills stuffed with Ephedra, a drug very very similar to methamphetamine.
     You can probably see where this is going already ...
     Just like those unfortunate Teuton pill-gobblers, Metabolife's customers began to drop dead on a regular basis, at which point Metabolife promptly - ignored them. The whole management collectively crossed their fingers as the top strategy for dealing with the issue*.  They were also busily bribing padding contributing to the campaign funds of a swathe of politicians, all with the message of "don't ban ephedra".

One such recipient

     They lost.  The Food And Drug Administration, having been digging up dirt on Metabolife, banned ephedra, whilst the Internal Revenue Service - "never, ever mess with the IRS" - went to town on them for tax evasion, and they were also facing a £600 million mass action claim from disgruntled people who had been dieting just great whilst entering purple wim-wam land.  The company filed for bankruptcy in 2005 and is long gone.
     I didn't mention the other thing about Metabolife - they were a pyramid scheme, too, which they tried to camouflage, as this is illegal
    So.  Beware naughty policemen who like making drugs, motley, okay?

More Aztec than Egyptian, one feels

 Time-Lapse Lego Builds: What Have I Stumbled Across!
I mentioned yesteryon that I'd found a time-lapse video, on Youtube, of a couple of miscreants assembling the presumably rather tricky "Creator" brand Lunar Lander in Lego, with a timestamp of 2 hours 15 minutes. 
    Predictably, I cannot find that exact same video again, though Dog Buns!  did I find others!  Art?

     There are lots of other people building Lunar Landers and timing them versus themselves, which Conrad thoroughly approves of, since it stops them rushing around to smash up bus-stops or throw fireworks into letter-boxes.  Your Humble Scribe is probably not best fitted to do any of this thanks to his innate clumsiness ("I definitely dropped a bit on the carpet and now I can't find it - don't walk around in bare feet!") and his giant sausage fingers**.

Dark Tourism
You want dark tourism?  Well, try one destination that the Beeb mentioned: Pompeii. 
     You need a little background to this, namely that Pom was a very prosperous agricultural town thanks to it's fertile soils, which were fertile thanks to the previous activities of Mount Vesuvius, a nearby volcano.
     Even if you've not heard of Pom, I bet you can work out how this ends -
     The volcano went bang in November 79AD, burying the town in volcanic ash.  Art?

The ruins

     The population were killed immediately by pyroclastic flows, i.e. giant clouds of debris, smoke and ash travelling at hundreds of miles per hour and maintaining about 2500C temperatures, rather than the earlier speculation of ash suffocation.  Their bodies then decayed over time, leaving people-shaped spaces that ghoulish archaeologists then filled with plaster, creating some memorable but horrid sculptures that I'm not going to put up.
     Despite all the pain and death associated with Pom, it is one of the most popular tourist sites in all Italy - over two million visitors per year - thanks to the insight into the everyday life of Romans it provides.

Mount Vesuvius: the sleeping monster

     I suppose the sheer distance in time makes this one less immediately horrid than somewhere like Auschwitz or Ground Zero NYNY, but still - pretty dark.

Now To Simultaneously Placate And Irritate My Ruffian Friend!
(The other one left in a huff).  For today we are going to be looking at the Armata T-14, or T-14 Armata if we're being formal.
     The T-14 is, without doubt, a very advanced piece of technology, and concrete proof that the Ruffians can be an inventive lot.  Just to go over a few features:  computer-controlled smoothbore gun; crewless turret thanks to autoloader; Afghanit anti-tank interception system; ceramic and explosive-reactive armour; low infra-red and radar signature.

Billions of tax-roubles at work!

     As hinted above, though, all this comes with an enormous price tag, limiting the number being produced to about 100 (rather than 2,500) and presumably also making Tsar Putin unhappy BECAUSE HE WANTS HIS TANKS!
     The thing is, this low production run implies a few other corollaries.  I doubt this model is going to be sold for export, because the Kremlin wants to keep what few it has close to it's bosom.  Then again, if they are so expensive and rare, they may well be kept out of combat.

CAUTION!  Only ever to be deployed when wrapped in cotton-wool

     That's another corollary right there - no combat experience.  The proof of the pudding with a tank is how it faces up to the modern battlefield.  It's no use having scads of hi-tec wizardry stuffed into your battlewagon if they break down when the gun fires, or if the AT missile system looses off every round at the first RPG that comes inbound.  How mechanically reliable is it?  How much maintenance does it need to keep going?  How often do the electronics need servicing?  How safe is the ammunition storage? How - I could go on but you get the picture.
     If you want a comparison, the Chally and Abrams have loads of real-time war fighting; they may be a generation behind the T-14, yet they are very much completely known factors.
     There you go, Conrad being sensible for once.  Cherish the moment, they're not common.



*  I think they also whistled, too.
**  Bad for Lego, great for strangling.