Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

No!  Not The Sinister Clown From "It"

Conrad read the novel decades ago and doesn't remember much about it.  I think there's an explanation in there about why the titular monster appears as a clown.  Well, if there is I've forgotten what it was.  Age and too much gin will do that to you.  Art!

One for the coulrophiliacs out there.  I know there must be some.

     I've also seen the original television series but not the new film.  There was a clip on Youtube featuring what must be one of the densest children on the planet: a clown in a sewer is inviting you in, what could possibly go wrong?  Art!

He's 'armless

     Step into my parlour said the spider to the fly, hmmmm?  

     ANYWAY of course - obviously! - none of that has to do with the rest of this Intro, which is about more money manglement, in a tale told on Quora.

     The Original Poster was one of a score of people who routinely used their own  mobile phones for business, especially him as he got calls from across the globe at all times of the day and night.  His boss and the Vice President had gone through a lengthy process to have this usage okayed and all went swimmingly for a few years.

     Enter a new Chief Financial Officer.  Like all new manglement, she was determined to make her mark.  She focussed, with laser-like intensity, upon OP's phone usage and openly admitted that she didn't like it; she felt he was cheating the company.  Art!

The instrument of evil and the digits of doom

     Thus she created an elaborate spreadsheet the mobile phone users had to fill in to get paid, whilst also getting rid of the need to have the boss and VP okay the process.  The spreadsheet was deliberately designed to be as complex as possible, to put people off.

     This did not work.  ALL the phone users filled their sheets in, costing the business at least 40 lost hours because they did it at work.  OP's average monthly bill had been $100, and this new process saved $2 per month for him, and less than $50 globally.  Never mind the $16,000 lost in filling in those forms, the CFO was convinced this was a killer success.

     Hold hard, madam.  Because then EVERY company employee with a mobile phone began to submit these forms, because there was no need to get exceptions from boss and VP, and it turned out a very large number of these people had been using their personal phones for business with no way to claim back.

    The monthly expenses bill went through the roof.  But! CFO still insists it's a success, because - well, just because - and actively boasts about it.

     This is not a good idea AT ALL because now all 10,000 employees in the business are using their mobiles thanks to the CFO's boasting about it publicly, hitting productivity thanks to the maliciously complex spreadsheet.  The monthly expenses bill went  from $1,500 to $1,000,000.  Net cost over a year was $12,000,000 with another $1,200,000 lost in productivity.  For a net saving of $18,000.

"I am amazed at my staggering success."

     Unsurprisingly, CFO jumped ship when it became obvious just how badly she'd messed up.  I wonder how she put that down on her CV?

     And that's the story behind today's title.  Truly, there is little in the world of business more dangerous than someone with a degree and an idea but without a clue.

"It's All Going According To Plan, It's All Going According To Plan!"

Thus spake Peter The Average about the Great Idiotic War.  Losing 14 generals, the 'Moskva', Snake Island and Kherson City was all part of the plan?  Your plan appears to have been created by Baldric.  Whilst drunk.

     Conrad is minded of a bleak Berliner joke in the aftermath of the Second Unpleasantness, when the Allied powers were in occupation.  It goes: on the day that the war is over, a man looking exactly like Der Fuhrer crawls out of the wreckage and makes his way over to a British army patrol.  He snaps smartly to attention and, in best Received Pronunciation says "British agent XB2701 reporting in, sir!"

     Now, I wonder if <long thoughtful silence>

Conrad Is, As Usual, Seething

Really, I don't know - you mercifully allow Codeword compilers to go on living and how do they repay you?  By pushing the envelope of what's acceptable.  Hear me out.

"ARABESQUE": How is that fair?  HOW!  My Collins Concise has it that: "Ballet; a classical position in which the dancer has one leg raised behind."  Silly Conrad!  How could I not know my ballet positions?  Art!

Tongues back in you slobbering perverts

"VIADUCT": Yes, this was in the same Codeword as AQUEDUCT, since you ask.  CC informs that it's a bridge - yes, really, I got that part - built to carry a road or railway, especially across a valley.  From the Latin <hack spit> "Via" for "Way" and "Ductus" for "Convey".  Art!

More duct for your buck

"LENITIVE":  You what?  I'd never heard of this word before, and Your Humble Scribe is widely read.  CC <pats dictionary in friendly fashion> has it as "soothing or alleviating pain or distress".  I see.  It's getting so that I need a lenitive after completing a Codeword.  Art!

"The Sea Of Sand"

The Doctor and Sarah are fleeing the scene of their skullduggery, masked by fire and explosions.

When Sarah sat up to look in the rear-view mirror, the most obvious aspect of the supply depot was a pillar of flame blazing thirty feet into the air, from the petrol bowser.  Later, while they were en route to the rendezvous, a colossal fireball soared into the night, the rolling boom coming to them after many seconds delay.

‘Must have set off another fire,’ said the Doctor, sombrely.

 

Twenty:  Cutting Losses

 When the sun rose over Mersa Martuba, it did so over a haze that reeked of petrol and cordite, and a supply depot disordered and in places shattered by explosions.

          Assault Leader Icono felt considerably disattisfied with the night’s events, all his complacency of yesterday vanished.  He cast suspicious glances at staff working on the consoles dismounted from his own Transport Car.  Nobody met his gaze, or seemed likely to challenge him, at least not yet.

          Over a dozen of his Warrior detachment were dead, and another half dozen injured, which meant Evisceration of course.  Another Transport Car destroyed by the first series of explosions.

          Fortunately the Repair Unit hadn’t suffered any damage, so the damaged Transport Cars could be made mobile again shortly.  The Life Signs  scanner wasn’t showing much of interest.  There had been a few fleeting traces last night, erratic and distant.

     I did warn matey not to get too cocky.  Hubris, son, hubris.

Finally -

Today's the first of my four days off, having been 'on' for the past four days.  This means my stepcount is low, for on a working day I'd be hitting 2,500 steps by now thanks to the hike down Queensway, which means either a constitutional stroll into Royton or walking Edna.  Or - this is a wildly outside-the-box idea - perhaps both?

     I think I'll listen to vlogger Joe Blogs on how Russia's economy is in the toilet first, nothing like a little early afternoon schadenfreude!

Conrad's Frothing Nitric Ire

You Know, That Righteous Rancour That Courses Through My Veins

Or it would do if I had veins, or blood, instead of liquid lava and nitromethane.  Long-time readers will know that Conrad's default condition is seething implacable hatred, regardless of situation because he can always find an excuse to be angry.  Too hot?  ANGRY!  Too cold?  MORE ANGRY!  Too wet?  ANGRIER! Too dry?  ATOMIC ANGER!  A stone in my shoe?  DEATH TO EVERYONE!

     That kind of thing.

     "Okay, humour the demented old bafune," I hear you quibble.  "Until he sends the Remote Nuclear Detonator in for servicing."

     In this case the joke's on you, because ACME have furnished me with a back-up RND.  Heh.  O a sudden silence in the gallery, hmmm?  Art!

     ANYWAY Conrad is seething with bile at those Codeword compilers who have been trying my patience recently.  Honestly, you vapourise one lot and their successors still don't understand why.  I shall fill you in.

     "DEXTER" was a Codeword solution.  Can you credit it?  Let me resort to my Collins Concise.  "Of or located on the right side of the body".  Yes, because everyone uses this word in everyday speech, don't they?

     NO THEY DON'T! <dares anyone to object>

     It did inspire me whilst I was traversing the canal towpath this morning.

     "DEXTER'S LAB": Amusingly enough this cartoon came up in a discussion amongst the supposedly grown-ups in the office yesteryon, about children's cartoons.  Your Humble Scribe's contribution from the other side of the workspace was "Fairly Odd-Parents".  Art!

Dexter, with idiot sister in background

     Dexter is your archetypal science genius and all-round nerd, who has a secret laboratory - because being out in the open would be boring - that he unsuccessfully attempts to keep his far more sociable sister Dee Dee out of.

     "DEXTER": Another television series, which your children are definitely advised not to watch.  Art!

     Dexter, you see, is a sociopath who enjoys killing people.

     But wait!  The people he kills are evil criminal scum themselves, who only escaped justice thanks to corruption or a technicality.  So he's a kind of Bloody Batman, if you will and no that's not swearing, because he does do away with people in gory fashion.

"SINISTER DEXTER":  This was a strip in '2000AD' featuring two gun sharks who would kill anyone if the price was right.  Set in the near future, the milieu was a run-down mega-city that ran across the whole of Europe, where S & D would hunt down targets and retire them with extreme prejudice.  Conrad liked it; the setting was different and downbeat and who cannot fail to like two characters named after a heraldic convention?  Art!

Sinister at rear, Dexter to front

      There we go, I think that's enough of that particular theme.  Unless anyone can come up with a list of other famous Dexters?  Nope, I Googled and there's only a bunch of sportspeople Conrad has never heard of before, so they can't be that famous.  I don't want to resort to the Collins Concise and all sorts of exotic words that have to do with right-hand stuff.

I'll Have Less Dreaming Quavering Aboard This Ship!

Sorry, I was confusing real life with a quote from "Forbidden Planet" (which is "Zakazana Planeta"in Polish).

     I'm afraid this is another reference to the loathsome music young people like today.  Yesterday we consigned the Vocoder to perdition and today it is the trend that music producers have for their electronically-filtered, digitally massaged, vocodered singers to WARBLE ALL THE DOG BUNS TIME!  I wrote down in my notebook 'QUAVERING!  TOO MUCH QUAVERING!" and I stand by it.  Can't these people hold a note?  Bill Withers is spinning in his grave at their performance, and Conrad's not even a fan.  Art!

     Watch out, warblers.  Bill is annoyed.  O go and Youtube "Lovely Day" to discover what I am ranting about.

Do You Know What An Aqueduct Is?

Of course you do, which still won't stop me from holding forth about them.  The word is, of course - obviously! - derived from the Latin <hack spit> 'Aquaeductus', from the words for 'Water' and 'Convey'.  Art!

     Here you see water being ironically transported across a river valley, on the uppermost level, because back in antiquity they didn't have steam engines to pump piped water uphill, nor a coal industry to power the steam engines, nor advanced metallurgy to build the pump components -

     ANYWAY that's not what we're focussing on here.  Art!

     Are they taking the Kreplach?  Two solutions that are exactly the same IN THE EXACT SAME PLACE!!  Yes, I used two exclamation marks because that's how angry I am.  Do I duct how very annoyed I am with the Codeword compilers here?  Hopefully I do.  O and by the way it's "Akwedukt" in Polish.

     We'll be coming back to these pikers, O yes don't you worry.

"The Sea Of Sand"

From wet to dry, as it were. The Doctor and Sarah are doing a little constructive sneaking and peeking at Mersa Martuba whilst the Doctor's explosive distraction plays out.

His caution seemed to be redundant.  The bangs, whines and occasional much larger explosions outside drowned anything less than extremely noisy.  Still looking, he saw nothing that resembled what Roger described – a thick wad of flimsies on a clipboard.

‘Is this it?’ asked Sarah, lifting a uniform jacket from a wall peg and discovering the clipboard.

‘Excellent!’ and the Doctor recovered his good spirits straight away.  ‘Now, let’s conduct a little effective theft and sabotage, shall we?’

“Theft” involved a Bedford truck.  “Sabotage” was opening the stopcock on a petrol bowser and throwing a lit match into the puddle resulting.

With a violent final bang, the explosions ceased.  Devoid of the covering noise, the Doctor didn’t bother with subtlety, driving out of the depot westwards at breakneck speed.  He guessed any bio-vores in the depot would have made themselves scarce during the explosions and that this side of Mersa Martuba would be free from sentries.  Just to be on the safe side, he told Sarah to hide on the floor of the cab, and hunched down himself to present as small a target as possible.  He trusted to luck and the flat desert floor and simply drove for over a minute without looking outside.

     Not a driving technique that The Stig would approve of!  Hmmmmmm then again maybe he would .....

Talking Of Matters Military -

I see the Ukrainians are going to be getting the Challenger 2 Main Battle Tank at some point in the near future.  This will brown quite a few Ruffian tank crew's pants, as the 'Chally' is a mighty mythic metal monster.  A couple have been destroyed in combat thanks to a blue-on-blue, but the Ruffian armour they went up against might as well have been made out of cake for all the good they were.  Conrad proudly maintains that BOOJUM! laid the way.  Art!

"Gaze upon my works, ye mighty, and despair."

Finally -

Next time I'll take photos.  Conrad purchased one of Tony's mighty mythical meaty monster Extra-Large Kebabs on Friday and I've only just finished it, so it has lasted for three days.  You never know, I may purchase another one tomorrow after work; it depends on whether there's a queue or not as to how long it takes them to assemble what looks like a sleeping bag stuffed with doner meat.  If I do then I'll capture it's essence in a photo and you can marvel at it.

Not that kind of Marvel!

Niespodzianka!

Or "Surprise!" In Polish

The Sunday 409 service delivers Your Humble Scribe home slightly earlier than the regular weekday ones, so here I am twiddling my thumbs wondering what to do with the extra five minutes.

     Aha!  Put out a Sunday retrospective with links, I bethought myself.  So - Art!

I don't think it's Photoshpped

     Well, can't complain, I did ask Google for 'Cheesy magazine covers'.

2022

BOOJUM!: A Dog On A Manger (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2021

BOOJUM!: Mighty Mighty Bitey Bitey (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2020

BOOJUM!: I Should Apologise - (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2019

BOOJUM!: When Paddington Bear Kalmly Kountenanced Killing (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2018

BOOJUM!: Darkness On The Edge of Town (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2017

BOOJUM!: The Wrath Of Grapes (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2016

BOOJUM!: Serial - No - Cereal - No - Seary-All Killer - Yes! (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2015

BOOJUM!: It's Late - But It's Here (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2014

BOOJUM!: My Weasel Is A Dalek, Doctor (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

The Sheer Adrenaline Rush Of Being ME!

For Instance

Last night I sorted a pile of dried laundry.  I know, I know, settle down and sit down lest you fall over from the excitement of reading these lines.  How can you get more rock 'n' roll than that?  Apart from being Robert Plant or Ozzy Osbourne.    Art!

     Look at them.  Their lifestyle consists of listening to the devil on their right shoulder and ignoring the angel on their left.

     ANYWAY back to me me me.  As you should surely know, I am currently temping at Footasylum in Sandbrook Park, a short bus ride and a moderately long walk from The Mansion.  I shall draw the veil of discretion o'er what the job involves, since one does not simply walk into Mordor - no, sorry, that was "Lord Of The Rings" wasn't it?  One does not simply deliver any great vituperation - not a word you expected to see today - upon one's workplace via social media, as Conrad personally knows two people who were fired for it.  Art!

The venue by day

     The real kicker about working there, apart from the terrible taste that young people have in music, is that when working Saturday or Sunday, the back gate is padlocked shut.  It's eight feet high before any of you come out with smarmy comments about scaling it, with a padlock the size of my fist; no puny lightweight used to secure a traveller's suitcase.  No photographs - Opsec doncha know.

     To get to the back door, since the front entrance is closed, one has to walk around the whole building by the scenic route, which is probably picturesque in dry daylight but considerably less so on a cold, windy, wet, dark night.  Art!

Ignore the arrow!  Ignore the arrow!

     That's SH from above.  Note the dirty grey linear feature going from north-east to south-west - that's the Rochdale Canal.  You see, when the back gate is shut, Your Humble Scribe has to totter his aged way along the canal's towpath to where another path cuts down to the road leading to SH.  This is not a journey he relishes, because it is completely dark with no lighting, no guardrail by the canal's chilly dank waters, is uneven, narrow in parts and liberally coated with rotting veg.  Let me illuminate with a photo I thought to take this evening.  Art!

     This is looking squarely at the canal.  Trust me, doing this also destroyed my night vision.  Also, if one keeps as far from the canal bank as possible, you run into dark, invisible branches and brambles and risk impaling an eyeball.  Footasylum customers, I hope you appreciate my sacrifice.

     Let me add another picture, taken from the bridge over the canal.  Art!

     Bridge and building geolocated for your enlightenment, some of which would be very useful on that towpath.  Ah yes, the sheer adrenaline rush of walking to the office!  Conrad is unsure what made a significant splash this morning as he lurched by and does not feel inclined to enquire further.  Yes, I am a big fat coward, but we knew that already, didn't we?

     I suppose I could cut down on the drama and adrenaline rush by taking a torch along, but that won't generate blog content, will it!

Talking Of Young Folk And Their Terrible Taste In Music

Conrad, with his analytical and logical mind <yeah right dream on! - the horrible truth courtesy Mister Hand> WITH HIS ANALYTICAL AND LOGICAL MIND thanks, has noticed that the ghastly rap music and it's hideous mutant children that get played far too much uses all the same production techniques.  

     Amid the tropes that they abuse, none is more abused than the vocoder.  Art!

     With the old voke, one speaks or sings into the mike, which is then played back after being interleaved with music.  This means that people whose singing could be compared to nails scraped down a blackboard can appear to have actual singing talent.  The thing about the voke is that it's effective when USED SPARINGLY!  Take Pink Floyd; about the only time they used it was for a brief segment on "Dogs".

     Don't worry.  When I take over all rap, grill and drime music will be banned, and there will be an International Inspector Of Vocoders to ensure they remain but lightly used.

     Hist, I am Edna-less at present, probably because I don't have food to hand.  I shall rustle this packet of Sour Cream Flavour Party Mix and see if the little scamp appears.  

"The Sea Of Sand"

The Doctor - and, unknown to him, Sarah - are sneaking around the alien-occupied supply depot at Mersa Martuba.

The jam-jar full of petrol felt childish and silly compared to a dirty great monster like the one in front of her, but Sarah unscrewed the lid and threw most of the contents at the bio-vore, which turned at the sound of the lid grating free.

          Before Sarah could light a match to ignite the petrol, her victim  shrieked repeatedly in fear or pain or both, running blindly into the night and across the beaten route between the mud huts.  A fragment of shell or another  missile hit it in the side and it collapsed instantly, dead or incapacitated.

 Diving into the hole, the Doctor banged his head painfully on the hefty wooden desk positioned only a couple of feet from the entrance.  He froze before making an exclamation of pain and annoyance, hearing a noise outside and recognising the pitch of the footfall.

‘Sarah!’ he said, with quiet anger.

‘Fancy meeting you here!’ whispered the young journalist, sticking her head into the hut, then climbing in.

‘I deliberately came here alone, and you still followed me!’

‘You didn’t say not to come.’  She added a few details about the bio-vore for good measure.

With an exasperated tut, the Doctor turned huffily and began to look in the desk drawers, sliding them out carefully in order to avoid making noise.  Suddenly he turned to Sarah and his eyes twinkled with mischief.

‘Thank you!’ he whispered.

     Well, he can be gracious as well as childish on occasion.

"Who Invented The Fuzz Guitar?"

Wondered Conrad earlier today.  A gent called Glenn Snoddy, and he did it by accident.  He was a sound engineer and studio owner who was recording a C & W session when one of his mixing desks developed a fault, lending a very distinctive fuzzy tone to a country artist.

    'Great!' thought other musicians, who wanted him to record them with this brand-new (1961) guitar effect.  Alas, not possible; his mixing deck up and died on him.

     So!  He sat down and created an effects pedal that replicated the fuzzy tone.  His patent was bought out by Gibson, to disappointing commercial sales.  Until -

     This chap, one Keith Richards, used one on "Satisfaction" and ever since people have been fuzzing it up.

     So now you know.

     

Finally -

Yes, just as I guessed, rustle the snack pack and Lo! Edna doth appear.  I'm being slightly cruel here, I've got no intention of dining on crisps as I have the hulk of an Extra-Large Killer Kebab from Tony's to do justice to, and we'll see whose the worse off after the next ten minutes.  Smart money is on Conrad!

From A Crusade To A Challenge

Greetings, Pilgrims!

Or, if you like, "Tervitab palveraundureid", which is Estonian for the very same phrase, because 1) why not, and 2) broaden your horizons, dudes.

     Okay, no word of a lie, this Intro is going to focus on TANK.  I make no apologies.  Only quitters leave at this point.  Did Percy Hobart die in vain?  Art!

     This, ladies and gentlemen and those unsure, is a British Crusader tank, Mk. VI, present in the field in 1941.  Note the elegant yet soon-to-be-obsolete 2 pounder main gun, and the bizarre machine gun turret on the forward hull.  What looks like an edited bike-frame on the turret roof is an anti-aircraft mounting for a Bren gun.  Art!

     Here you can see the silly separate machine gun turret has gone, partly because if ever used in action it used to hog cordite fumes and choke the gunner.  Art!

     This is the version with the 6 pounder gun, which proved to be an extremely effective anti-tank gun, very much to the chagrin of the Axis.  It would turn anything they had into iron filings, out to a mile and a half.  Keith Douglas wrote lyrically of these.

     Well, we've had Crusade with an "R", what about the Challenge?

     O I thought you'd never ask!  Art?

     This, gentle reader, is the Challenger 2 Main Battle Tank, a concept not really appreciated at the time of the Crusader.  That gigantic explosion behind the lead tank is actually the rear tank firing, which gives you some comprehension of what awaits The Enemy downrange.

     Why do I bring this up?  Well, apart from TANK, the Challenger 2 is the lineal descendant of the Challenger 1, but with very little <inhale before buzzword> interchangeability.  The Challenger itself is a derivation of the Shir tank as ordered by the late Shah Of Iran.  Before that we had the Chieftain - Art!

     This biscuit used cast armour rather than Chobham, so it had pervy curvy lines not seen since the Seventies.  It was designed to lurk behind cover and destroy waves of Sinister armour as they infested the West German plain, and Bob Forrest-Webb's "Chieftains" is worth a read if you can afford it.  Hint: it does not end well.  For either side.

     If you go back before Chieftain, then you hit the outer margins of WW2, and the Centurion - I hope you've noticed a trend with the initial letter "C" - which was a frightening combination of firepower, armour and speed that lambasted the battlefield for 30 years.  Art!

     Which design came out of combining the previous British idea of an infantry tank that would plod along at slow speed amongst the accompanying soldiery, and a tank that would whiz across the battlefield at high speed.  Art!

     The reason I've put all this scrivel up is because there are noises being made about Ukraine being given British Challengers, which I think would be a propaganda masterpiece, since the Chally is a monstrous mobile metal myth.  I don't think anyone's managed to actually destroy one on the battlefield.  However, the MBTs in Eastern Europe are all Leopard A2s, which have the supply chain, logistics, technicians, spare parts and etcetera to sustain their neighbours further east.  If a Chally broke down in Ukraine it would need either repatriation to the UK, or the Ministry Of Defence sorting out forward deployment of engineering workshops in Poland.  This wouldn't happen because £££.  And because they can't tie a shoelace without a 25 page A4 summary.

     Conrad is unsure if he's missed you out on the list of People Who Have Been Annoyed - let me know!

   

"RRRRRRR Jim, lad!"

     I ought to apologise because I  never got this finished last night, thus no new blog content today, except I'm horrid and won't.  Deal with it!

In Memoriam

We here at BOOJUM! are not noted for being remotely sentimental or reflective, so it may come as a surprise that we held a minute's silence for the passing of Jeff Beck, guitar maestro extraordinaire.  Art!

     Conrad first heard him when Peely played tracks from the platter above. Conrad knows nothing about guitars but was rather gobsmacked at the sounds Beck wrought from his Fender, live at that.

     Jeff was blessed - or, as he felt, cursed - with a big commercial hit when he released "Hi Ho Silver Lining", because he felt it was so unlike the rest of his oevure, and it was dangerous to request it live, because then he'd look as he was going to get into the crowd and brain you with his Strat.  Art!

     "Beck's Bolero" is top stuff, mind you.  In later years Jeff grew to reluctantly acknowledge HHSL and it's present on one of his CDs that I have.

     His passing at 78 is rather a shock because he was an abstemious chap who eschewed the rock 'n' roll lifestyle.  Speaking of which, I have laundry to sort.

     

"The Sea Of Sand"

The Doctor, under cover of an explosive conflagration, is sneaking about in between the stacked supplies at Mersa Martuba.

Darting from stack to stack, the Time Lord felt uneasily aware of another presence.  Stalking him.  Or was he imagining it?  He paused to look around, not being able to check properly because time was tight.  No, nothing there.  A bio-vore wouldn’t bother to sneak about.

          There was Dobie’s office!  A great black hole with rubble around the wall underneath.  Sarah and the other captives certainly made an effective escape route.  Or, in this case, an ingress route.

          Zing! went a hot piece of metal, inches from his head.

          ‘Discretion is called for, I rather think!’ he muttered.

 

          Following not far behind, Sarah clutched her weapon and tried to catch up with the Time Lord, who had outpaced her across the desert without trying.  Plus she had a stitch, and he didn’t bother much about keeping an eye on the bio-vores, whereas she did.

          Her heart flew into her throat in fright as a great black shadow detached itself from behind a pyramid of crates with Italian writing stencilled on them.  Seven feet tall, with pillar-like legs and arms splaying out directly from the torso: a bio-vore. It seemed to have been sheltering in the lee of the crate, and caught sight of the Doctor without him seeing it.

     Ooops!  Is that what was stalking him?  Tune in tomorrow to find out!

Twinkle Of Glory Postponed

Ah - er - yes.  Conrad got it wrong.  His finish date is actually 29th January, not the 13th.  

     Which does indeed means gainful employment getting more book-tokens, yet it also means having to trudge along the canal towpath tomorrow and Sunday, an experience your clumsy and oafish scribe does not enjoy.  Art!

Imagine this with no lighting or guardrail and you're getting there

     And, of course, putting up with the young folks dreadful taste in music.  I bet none of them have the faintest idea who Jeff Beck was.

     "Do you mean Beck?"

     NO I DO NOT!

     Bah.

Finally -

Better wrap this scrivel up, I've got lunch for tomorrow to sort out - a panini, I think - as well as sort out that laundry, charge my phone - because I'm still working at Footasylum, did I mention that? - and in what time is left over give the old World Domination planning a whirl.  I tell you, being an apprentice dictator is no easy business.

Chin chin!

Attack Of The DEMOGORGON!

I Know What You're Thinking

Because I'm fairly clever and you're fairly predictable and NO NOTHING TO DO WITH THE D.A.R.P.A. TELEPATHY HELMET - I've told you, it was a long-term 'borrow' and they got it back ages ago - I can tell what lines your minds run along.

     "Tut, the snowy-haired old duffer is blatantly appealing to the 'Stranger Things' audience, sad really, he used to be less -"

     YES yes yes, never mind.  Although I will sneak in a picture.  Art!

     This is a case of true serendipity, because Your Humble Scribe was leafing through his "Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable" in search of something completely different - and we'll get onto that in time - when I came across the entry about "Demogorgon".  As proof, here's a photo of the entry.  Art!

     Hmmm a bit too small.  Art!   Close-up!

     The name of this devilish entity has a historical record going back to the 4th century AD, and gets mentioned in both "Paradise Lost" and "Prometheus Unbound".  Conrad had no idea it had such a pedigree because he hates poetry almost as much as musicals.

     ANYWAY of course - obviously! - that has nothing to do with what I originally wanted to look up, but it does confirm my suspicion that BDOPAF is almost as dangerously distracting as Quora.

     ANYWAY AGAIN I was looking up the term "White elephant" to find out the source of this phrase.  It transpires that in South East Asia back in the day, and still in Thailand even now, the white elephant was regarded as a sacred beast.  Art!

     Being sacred means you can't put them to work.  Anyway, if the King of Siam was feeling malicious towards one of his nobles, he would gift them a white elephant as a token of his 'appreciation'.  Thus the noble has an elephant that needs only the best treatment, cannot be given away lest the King's feelings be hurt, cannot do any work and most certainly cannot be served up as chops for dinner.  The upkeep being so ruinous would result in a poverty-stricken noble, and a warning to others not to upset Kingy.

     Enter Shoreham Nuclear Power Station.  Yes, the very same one as yesteryon.  Art!

     To say that it's construction was unpopular with locals is an understatement of epic proportions; had they been in Europe they'd have been stormed with pitchforks and burning torches.  The Three Mile Island disaster didn't help in making locals still more hostile towards nuclear power.  Despite this LILCO pressed ahead with construction, the whole thing being completed by 1984.  Two years later came Chernobyl, and public confidence in atomic plant safety, already low, sank yet further.

     Enter the politicians - always a bad sign.  You see, in order for the plant to run at full power, there had to be a valid evacuation plan for the whole of Suffolk County, that being the county Shoreham was within.  Remember the hostile locals?  They refused to accept any part of the evacuation plan, so State Governor Cuomo forbade the plant to run at full power, only allowing a 5% output.  Art!

The people are revolting!

     After 5 years of minimal operation it became obvious that insufficient people would ever sign on to the evacuation plan, so they won.  

     Kind of.  You see, the plant cost LILCO $6 billion and under the deal they did with the State of NY, they walked away not having to pay any of it - that cost was hoiked off onto the citizens of Long Island.  Conrad cynically wonders how much LILCO forked out in bribes to have that happen.

     This white elephant - d'you see what I did there? - was eventually decommissioned in 1994.

Hubris

That's the Greek word for pride or arrogance, which, combined with ambition, bring about the transgressor's fall from grace.

     This is another pithy tale from Quora, set in a major HQ building for a major company, with a subsidised canteen.  Meaning you got your food for a lot less than you ought to, the company seeing this as a boost to employee morale and a good point in staff retention.

     The company, never named, is based in the UK, as you can tell from the last sentence above.  Art!

     Here we have Jared, a systems analyst, who decided it was beneath him to pay for food.  He infested the canteen at it's busiest and avoided going through the tills, striding about as if he'd paid for his food, and he did this for a year, probably feeling quite smug about getting away with it.  His colleagues, who all paid for their lunches, found out and told on him to senior management, who followed him on the canteen's CCTV for a week.

     Busted!

     He was immediately fired.  He got no reference - which meant an embarrassing year-long gap in his CV that would be hard to explain.  It was politely explained that he'd better not make a fuss or 1) The catering company that ran the canteen would sue him and 2) The police would be involved.
     He saved £1,825 over the year.

     His annual salary was £60,000.

     As I said, hubris.

     Wow!  Try not to frighten it away, I see blue skies outside!

"The Sea Of Sand"

The Doctor has done some remarkable work with ballistics, a tracer bullet and a four-gallon tin of petrol, all to create a diversion.

The Doctor made an expansive gesture of false modesty.

          ‘Oh, Sergeant Lucy.  Royal Irish Rifles.  The retreat from Mons.’

          There wasn’t time for Roger to argue that the retreat from Mons occurred a good twenty-seven years previously.  Instead they dispersed the vehicles, knowing that to leave the wadi they must travel north to begin with.

          Already, whilst they moved, shells in the burning stack of crates were beginning to “cook off” under the heat.  Bangs and whines echoed across the desert.  The two pounder rounds were solid armour-piercing ones, and wouldn’t explode when they hit the ground, but they would make a nasty mess of anyone hit, as would shrapnel from their shell casings.

          They dropped the Doctor off at the point where the wadi reached ground level.  He kept low for several anxious minutes, Dominione’s parting words “I hope a simple list is worth risking your life for” resonating.  Yes, he hoped the list was worth it too.

          After moving west he turned south and headed towards the depot, which loomed unmissably in the dark, illuminated flash-bulb style by explosions that wracked the western edge.  There were no sentries, nor black tanks on watch duty.  A particularly large explosion sent bits of shrapnel zipping and bouncing around him.

     I believe Sergeant Lucy of the RIR was a real person who wrote a memoir about his part in the Mons campaign - "There's A Devil In The Drum" IIRC.

Going Out In A Twinkle Of Glory

It's my last day at Footasylum tomorrow, and even though the agency say they are looking to take on a few temps as permanent, Conrad is pretty certain they won't offer him anything.  After all, I spend my day scowling as I listen to my i-pod in order to avoid the sonic sewage they play from Spotify.

     So!  I think it's time to bake a goodbye cake.  This may necessitate a trip into Lower Sodom so I hope those blue skies persist.  Art!

     Conrad: still baffled at being associated with expensive contemporary fashion.

Finally -

Low on socks and underwear.  Laundry wash needed.

Atomic-Powered Extortion!

No, Nothing To Do With FTX

Although there do seem to be a couple of other contenders for Dodgy Crypto Scamblers, namely Genesis and DCG, the former allowing me to put up a completely tangential picture - Art!

     - whilst having been founded by the unlikely-sounding Himmelvoss twins.  $50 billion dollars-worth of funds at risk, making FTX's $32 billion look a bit weedy by comparison.

     ANYWAY this is a tale told on Quora, under the title of "What's the most extreme thing you had to do to get paid?"  So far nobody's come back with burying a body in concrete foundations ...

     So, Original Poster ran a business servicing South Canadian nuclear power plants, a bit of a niche industry.  He had undertaken work for LILCO, or Long Island Lighting Company, redesigning their radiation monitoring system at Shoreham and they were being tardy about payments.  Art!

Shoreham

      OP had a line of credit with his bank for $1 million and LILCO owed him $900,000, so he was getting both twitchy and suspicious.  OP also had a devious and furtive mind, so he got one of his better-looking male employees to date one of the LILCO ladies.  A lady from Accounts.

     Wellll interesting things were uncovered, most especially that LILCO was almost bankrupt, and was planning on stiffing the smaller contractors in order to pay off their prime contractor.  OP took the advice of his partner and took a trip to Wall Street, making enquiries about the quote "dirtiest, nastiest tort lawyer around".  Enter Mister Stergakos, whom had been the name on many people's lips.  OP sat opposite him, then took a cheque for $20,000 dollars out of his pocket and tore it in two, giving half to the lawyer, explaining that he'd get the other half IF OP's business got it's money within 48 yours. Art!

     

Inside the now abandoned Shoreham

     The bloodsucker promptly hit LILCO with what's called a 'mechanic's lien', a legal tool that asserts privilege over something that the plaintiff has expended time and/or money in.  And this applied to the whole of the Shoreham plant, meaning that LILCO was legally stuck in limbo until OP's debt was cleared.  Not only that, a pal of Stergakos got an item into the Wall Street Journal the next day about this embarrassing financial gaffe

     Shortly after that, the Financial Comptroller of LILCO got in touch with OP, defeated, and got the money transferred immediately.  Mister Stergakos got his $20,000 and OP's business got it's $900,000.

     And thus we have today's title.  Moral of the story: don't mess about with OP or his business, because he does have access to concrete foundations ...

Back when it was working

     NB the plant closed in 1994, long after the lien incident, so don't worry that John - OP's real name - caused it to go bust.  I just thought this was interesting and illuminating as regards the little guy not getting done over, due to being creative, malicious and inventive.

     Motley!  Bring me my Grinch slippers, for I feel like being wicked!

"The War Illustrated"

I know we've not had one of these explanatory sets of photographs for a while, so Lo! rejoice for here are some from Issue 168.  Art!

     No, that's not a happy Panzer crewman, that's a Sinister Army soldier mucking about in what seems to be an abandoned Teuton Panzer Mk. 4  Since there's no damage visible and no signs of fire, and since the hull machine gun has been removed, I think it's safe to say this one either broke down and couldn't be repaired or towed, or it ran out of petrol.  Conrad would guess the former, as fuel abandonment didn't really become a thing for the Teutons until 1944.  Art!

   At this point the Allied action was all in Italy, with the 5th and 8th armies slogging slowly up the peninsula, which had been designed by Mother Nature to make such progress as slow and costly as possible.  Here we see a sketch map, which I'll enlarge to see if it makes things more legible.  Art!

     There you go, BOOJUM! ever helpful.  By the time this map was published it was already 2 weeks out of date, so no useful data divulged.

    Going back to the montage, you see at upper starboard a very definitely knocked-out Pz. Mk. 4, below which one Teuton is saying to the other "Fur uns ist der Krieg vorbei."  To port of them are sappers doing the unglamourous yet essential job of road maintenance, because the amount of vehicles in the Allied armies was unreal.  The Royal Engineers not only had to maintain roads but remedy enemy handiwork, too.

     And last picture shows a Sherman modified for 'wading' (note extended cover over the exhausts) crossing the Volturno River and tackling what looks like a riskily steep bank. Because the retreating Teutons had blown up the bridge, before you ask.  Art!

Last One

The James Webb Space Telescope hasn't been in operation for long, yet it has produced stunning images, akin to the ones that Hubble produced back in the day.   Hey, remember all those comedians who made jokes about it not working?  No, me neither.  Art!

     This, gentle reader, is M42, also known as 'The Phantom Menace Galaxy'.  As you can clearly see, it is face-on to JWST, so we get an excellent 'top-down' photograph.  Why the Phantom Galaxy?  Dunno.

     Aha!  It seems that nickname is because it's so faint in optical telescopes.

"The Sea Of Sand"

The alien garrison at Mersa Martuba is about to get an unpleasant surprise.

Making a nasty scrunch in the process, Capriccio engaged first gear.  The rear axle instantly accelerated from zero to twenty miles per hour, snatching the cable taut, catapulting the plank over the pintle and hurling the petrol tin in a high arc over the desert.

Splinters flew from the abused plank when the cable pulled it apart and Capriccio hastily turned the engine off.

Tam’s comments were unprintable.  Lieutenant Llewellyn stood open- mouthed at the tin soaring into the dusky sky.  Dominione pinched his forearm, just to make sure.

‘Not high enough,’ said Davey, turning to glare at the Doctor, who merely winked and shouldered his rifle.

‘You’ll never hit it!’ said Davey, bluntly.

Calmly taking aim, adjusting for windage, deflection and heat haze, the Doctor squeezed the trigger and hit the tin at the top of it’s arc, the glowing tracer round knocking a plume of ignited petrol into the air.  The additional energy of the bullet’s impact tumbled the tin further out and downwards, landing on the crates of shells in a glare of burning petrol.

          ‘I didn’t just see that, did I?’ asked Tam.  ‘I mean, that’s just not possible, is it?’

          This time Davey’s comments were unprintable.

          Roger stared at the fire, then back at the Doctor.

          ‘Where – where the hell did you learn to shoot like that!  People at Bisley would kill to be that accurate.’

     I should explain that 'Bisley' was one of the prime sites the British army used for small-arms training.

Finally -

Last week, after all that bleating and braying about bean sprouts, what did I not write down on the shopping list?  Bean sprouts.  What did I forget to get?  Bean sprouts.  Well, I remembered last night.  Hooray!  Now, of course - obviously! - I need to find a recipe to use them in.  I also got another cabbage, because there's still half the Holubtsi mix left and I know better than to cut the leaves in half, so we shall see.  Even Wonder Wifey, an especially harsh critic of the stinking stuff Your Humble Scribe creates, was mildly impressed.  Praise indeed!