Overweening Ambition

Go On, Admit It-

This is the first time in 2023 you've read the word 'Overweening' because, let's face it, nobody else bar Conrad is going to use archaic language like that.  For your information, it means to be overwhelmingly ambitious or pretentious, and is derived from the Old English 'Ween', meaning 'To think'.  I now have to come up with a picture that embodies this <thinks> Art!

     Close enough.

     What am I wittering on about?  A project I began many years ago, that plodded along desultorily (another word you never expected to see today) for years, languishing untouched and forgotten until recently.  Your Humble Scribe, you see, wanted to create a hex-and-counter boardgame.  He's a bit of a dilettante with these, collecting many yet never actually playing them.  Art!

An example

     You would think that it's best to start small and simple with this idea, say perhaps gaming Mons, which has the appropriately small British Expeditionary Force up against a single Teuton army (in the First Unpleasantness, just to be clear).

     Not Conrad.  No, he decided that it was going to be the Third Ypres campaign, the legendarily awful Passchendaele battles of mid- to late-1917, with fifty or sixty divisions per side.  Nothing small scale here!  Art!

     Nor was it only going to be about the frontline warfare; O no, nothing simple here!  No, it was going to factor in logistics, that is to say, how the armies got supplied.  It would include things like the air forces used by either side, observation balloons for artillery spotting, super-heavy artillery allocated to Army level headquarters - what game designers call 'chrome'.  Then there'd be morale as well.  O and weather, too.  Art!

     It might come as a surprise to you that there were problems with water supplies in the middle of this ghastly campaign, when the weather abruptly dried up and created problems for watering horses, and dust raised on roads attracted enemy artillery fire.

"Is there a point to this?" I hear you ruefully chorus.  "You see, 'Police Interceptors' is on in a minute."

     Well, sort of.  I cannot now find the Word documents that detailed the armies Order Of Battle, which were pages long and went into numbing detail.  Art!

     I do have hard copies, which <groans> might have to be typed up again from scratch.  There was a breakdown, as I recall, of how the divisions were going to be represented with counters - so many counters! - and whether to have numbered counters to represent unit strength, and crucial stuff like what the ground scale was going to be, and how long a turn represented.  This may still be on my old PC - but I doubt it.  All Word files have been copied over and I couldn't find anything to do with this albatross in old documents.

     Now, rather than admit defeat and give up on this, Conrad is going to go digging through old PC files and also any handy-dandy lever-arch folders and files full of paper that happen to be hanging around the Sekrit Layr.  I shall probably also have to dig out all the MilHist books I have that cover Third Ypres, which is no great hardship.  Art!

Cloth Hall, Ypres

     This is all splendid practice for when I take over the world, of course - obviously! - because every dictator needs a sound grounding in administration and logistics.  I can think of one Miniature Machiavellian Moron who neglected the latter to his extreme discomfiture.  One suspects that Emperor Ming, whilst he might very well have been Merciless, was a lot less grounded in proper staff work*.

Trapped By Dog!

Not in the way you're thinking, you slavering ghouls.  Actually that reminds me of the novel where Biggles and Co. are stooging around in Cornwall about something nefarious, which - hang on - Art!

     Definitely this one, I remember Algy making a crack about the titular aircraft crashing into the 'Cornish Alps', which are giant spoil heaps associated with the china industry.  Art!

CAUTION! Picturesque flight hazard

     ANYWAY at one point Biggles is forced to take refuge up a tree, being forced there by a ferocious Alsatian dog, which I remember him describing as having too much of the wolf in it as a breed.

     That's the kind of TBD you were thinking of, isn't it?  WRONG.  Art?

     This is an unusual honour, lest ye be unaware.  Edna did resort to my lap on Saturday, thanks to the numerous fireworks going off outside.  What you see here is her condescending to utilise the Human Shaped Cushion, for a good thirty minutes.  Just to prove she can bend humans to her will, one suspects.

First Bus Take Note

Another pithy tale from Quora, and told by an Original Poster who was a senior member of staff at a bus company in South Canada, who actually ran the depot and had done so for 25 years.  Lots of experience, in other words.  Art!

     The depot was typically 'gifted' with a new General Manager once every 18 months to 2 years.  One who had the shortest tenure turned up in A Very Shouty Mood, belabouring OP with how inefficient and unprofitable the bus routes were, things were a shambles, how could the operate so poorly, why had the cost of pistachios skyrocketed when the harvest in Sanji Pazar had been at record levels, all that sort of guff.

     OP pushed the office door open, pointed out the four other drivers present in the office having a brew, and explained that between himself and these people, there were nearly 200 man-years of experience knocking around.  Not only that, his depot was the most profitable one in the city.

     Ooops.  Art!

     

     OP was a bit cruel in pointing out GM's unsuccessful background as a holiday rep.  Mind you, it came in useful six months later when Shouty GM quite to go be an entertainments manager on a cruise ship.  Well, I mean, it's still travel, isn't it?

"City In The Sky"

Ace and Alex are the cynosure of all eyes aboard Arcology One, after returning from "Downstairs" in Australia.

     ‘The only people in radio contact now are the Americans in Texas,’ added the Warden, whom Ace now recognised as the one called Barclay from her previous encounter when here with the Doctor.

     ‘What!  Radio?’ exclaimed Terry.  ‘What – what about the death-sats?’

     ‘The Ozzies are convinced laser satellites are sitting in orbit shooting anyone who tries to use electrical devices,’ explained Ace, to the astonishment of their audience.

     ‘Ah – why is that?’ asked another man, hitherto silent.  His quick, intelligent eyes darted between Ace and Terry.

     ‘It’s what they do.  Mayor Kenneally explained it, how if you try to build anything electrical, the death-sats destroy it.  It’s true, I’ve seen the Vicker’s workshops at Barralonga.’

     The man took a pair of glasses from an inner pocket of his worksuit and put them on, slowly, clearly thinking over his reply.

     ‘Okay, Terry.  I don’t doubt that a force of some kind destroyed electrical systems Downstairs.  I am equally  certain that it wasn’t a laser satellite in orbit.’

     ‘Why?’

     ‘Because there are no satellites left in orbit any longer.  None.’

     This bald statement of fact only threw the engineer off for a second.

     ‘You’re still up here.’

     I think that 'None' is using a bit of poetic licence.  But what do I know!

Colour Conrad Confused

I was watching a couple of different clips about "The Walking Dead" that seem to contradict each other.  Allow me to elucidate.  Art!

     In this scene where we, the audience, don't get to hear what Doctor Jenner is saying, Rick lets on later that the secret is - everyone is already infected by what has to be an airborne pathogen.

     Yet in another clip from a different channel, they were going on about who was Patient Zero.  Art!

     Surely, if everyone is already infected, then the first person to die anywhere globally after said pathogen goes airborne is Patient Zero - if you can even have the concept of a Patient Zero, because they are not the principal means of the disease being spread?  Or am I going to have to watch EVERY SINGLE EPISODE of both TWD and FTWD to get this resolved?

     Of course, I might be overthinking this ....

Finally -

The weather has cleared up remarkably well from this morning, when it was Uniform Grey Layer skies, a nasty bitter wind and endless puddles.  Doubtless when it gets closer to Walkies the grey clouds will roil back in and I shall be walking a wet pet (it's what happened yesteryon).  Well, we shall see.

*  We may come back to this.

Mission Immiscible

For Lo! We Will Be Dealing With Two Fluids Today

Namely, oil and water, which convention has it cannot be mixed together, as the two will always separate out.  This has been a truism since Biblical times, though not since the latter years of the last century, where Conrad has seen an emulsion created by using ultra-high frequency vibration to mix the two, wh

     ANYWAY what we need now is a clickbaity image as imported by our resident image-mage, Art.  Art!

     Oil and water, just perhaps not how you imagined it.

     Okay, let's lead with oil, and an annotated analysis from Joe Blogs courtesy his Youtube vlog on the subject of Ruffian oil.  As you should surely know by now, oil (and gas)  exports are what keeps the Ruffian state alive, because they have nothing else to offer that the world needs.  Yes yes yes, they used to export lots of weaponry abroad; of late this market has shrunk significantly - one wonders why?  Art!

     This graph shows what happened to the Ruffian oil exports in terms of millions of barrels per day; the figure fell off a cliff when Covid arrived and, more significantly, never recovered to it's pre-Covid level.  In detail, they were exporting around 11 million Barrels Per Day, which only got back up to 9.87 million BPD as of right now.

     You can see the hit on the chart when the Special Idiotic Operation came into play, and the Ruffian petrochemical industry was hit by the flight of Western technology, capital and expertise.  Art!

     This chart only goes up until July 2023, yet it gives you an idea of the decline in Ruffian oil output.  The production cuts that were 'voluntarily' made of 500,000 and then an additional 300,000 BPD are staying in place until 2024, at a loss in revenue of $31billion.  Not chump change.  The ban on gasoline export is still in place, which is bewildering when you consider Ruffia desperately needs the income from this source and is down by about $8 billion from this alone.  The official Ruffian reason/excuse/lie <delete least unlikely> was that 'The refineries are down for maintenance', a move never made in over 30 years of these oil fields producing oil.  'We are dangerously low on fuel to bring in the 2023 harvest' would be a tad too truthful and humiliating.  Art!

     Joe made the very salient point that these Ruffian 'voluntary' cuts, supposedly in line with OPEC plans, may be nothing of the sort.  You see, with the loss of Western firms, Ruffian ones can no longer repair or maintain refining and well technology; it's entirely possible that the failure to achieve pre-Covid production levels was because the wells were kaput and couldn't be re-started.  Most of them are in conditions like those above; Arctic.  If the oil stops flowing it destroys pipelines and pumping equipment, meaning you're not going to be using that well ever again and need to create new ones.  Except, with the Western know-how long gone, that's not possible.  Art!

Putin's least-favourite protesters

     In the way these things dovetail together, whilst the price of Ruffian Urals oil has now risen to about $73 per barrel, for the first time this year, demand for oil from China is now falling thanks to a cooling-off in their economy.     

     Can't win for losing, I suppose.

Watch Out For Di-hydrogen Monoxide!

The world's chemists think this is the funniest joke extant, because it's an hokey alternative name for H₂O, or water to you and I.  Edna and I were lucky to avoid it falling from the heavens upon us this morning.  Elsewhere in space and time other people have found that it is indubitably one of life's essentials.  Art!

What you see here is a schematic of the water supply to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force as it crossed the waterless wastes of the Sinai Desert, en route to Palestine.  This was desert as imagined, lots of sand dunes with no oases or springs or wells, water coming in a pipeline adjacent to the railway tracks.  Reservoirs were constructed and filled, to avoid running short, with pipe-stands to fill trucks that would carry it further forward.

     With not a little irony, although the advance was parallel to the sea, shipping could not be used to supply the EEF, as the shallows were treacherous and unsafe in the winter season.  Yes, you do get winter in the desert.

"Hambantota"

Thank, Steve, for conjuring up this name as of last week.  Your Humble Scribe had no idea who or what it was.  It does have the ring of an Assyrian king, you know, one of those fops who had their beard coifed into oiled coils and whom waged war against insular Greek polities when he got bored.  Art!

     But no.  What, then?  An native tribe from West Africa, who lived by cattle, fighting and drinking?  Based in and around what used to be Togoland?

     Still no.  Art!

     'Tis a city and port in Sri Lanka, rather controversial because The Populous Dictatorship constructed the port for the Lankies, who ended up not being able to pay for it.  No problemo! said the Chinese, and took it over themselves.  Art!

     Thus India, which pretends to be friends with China, is keeping a wary eye upon it.  Getting into Politics there so we'll stop.

"City In The Sky"

Our perspective has jumped back aboard Arcology One, splendidly isolated in orbit above a troubled Earth.

     His expression of open surprise suggested that he hadn’t expected either of the travellers to return.

     ‘Who’s this?  Another visitor?’

     ‘Can we help?’

     ‘Is Doctor Smith back, too?’

     Shaking her head, she introduced Terry.

     ‘Unlike me or the Prof – er, Doctor Smith – Terry has grown up in Australia.  The town of New Eucla.’

     Twelve eyes abruptly switched to stare at the young engineer, who flushed in embarassment at being under such scrutiny.  One of the six gave a long, low whistle.

     ‘Okay, I vote we drop the business in hand and instead interview this man from Downstairs,’ stated a pale young man wearing the epaulettes of a Warden.

     ‘Done!’ chorused the rest.

     ‘Take a seat, please,’ invited the Warden.  Another member, a curly-haired woman with an air of being in command, used her Tab to order refreshments, and another slid over a table and chairs.

     ‘Er – are you sure you want to interview me?’ asked Terry, seating himself slowly and looking puzzled.  ‘I’m not very important.’  Ace nudged him and tutted.

     ‘Oh yes,’ said the woman who had Tabbed.  ‘We’ve not had any contact with Downstairs since our shuttle got destroyed, and none for fifty years before that.’

      I told you: troubled

Conrad's Compulsiveness Compounds

Coruscatingly.  Allow me to prod Art back into sentience and wakefulness, with this handy-dandy cattle prod.

     One reason I stopped doing the "Metro"'s Sudoku puzzles is because it always took me ages; words and letters I am hot stuff at.  Numbers, not so much.  Art!

     There it was, partially-filled, so how could I possibly say no?

     I wish I had, it took AGES to do, since it's at Medium-level difficulty, rather than the Easy ones I used to do.  Art!

     I'll be honest and admit I cheated and used a Sudoku-solver, but only to get five or six numbers, which is not bad out of eighty-one total.  It confirmed my suspicions, which were that Sudoku is designed to get back at the West by hideously sadistic Japanese compilers, aching for the glory days.

Finally -

O boy, you couldn't make it up.  DJ Tango, on the stand as a defendant, was bloviating about how he couldn't be sure how accurate a property appraisal was, thanks to him being so, so, so very busy in the White House, dealing with Ruffia and The Populous Dictatorship.  In 2021.  When he'd left office in the White House in 2020.  Mind you, he'd probably flub things even if they were on a teleprompter.  I shall try to keep Trump items to a minimum as they could easily be the whole blog three times daily.  Easy content creation, yes; less easy to read of him so much.  Art!

Hiding his TINY HANDS

The Hair-Splitting Pedant Rides Out!

Perhaps "Outland" Would Be A Better Choice

More accurate, if rather more confusing.  You see, Conrad has been putting himself in the shoes of the General Manager of mining outpost Con-Am 27, which is the setting for said film, and which means we get to use pictures from it.  Art!

 

     Given that the film is over 40 years old by now, a little reprise is in order.  Our Sean stars as a Federal Marshall, sent out to do a tour at the mine on Jupiter's moon Io, which is a private enterprise run by Con-Amalgamated.  The GM, Sheppard, is of course - obviously! - an evil corporate hack interested only in the bottom line.  To this end he is having drugs smuggled in that boost personal productivity to unheard of levels, making lots of profit all round.

     The slight side-effect of going completely hat-stand after 10 months of said drug's ingestion was probably glossed over by the dealers.  Art!

     The film wasn't a hit at the time with either critics or audiences, but has since acquired cult status.  "Heavy Metal" serialised it with artwork by Jim Steranko and I'll see if I can dig up an image or two.  Art!

     I'm not sure if we get an explanation why Sean gets sent to Con-Am 27; perhaps his predecessor cracked up or was gotten rid of?  The former is just as likely as the latter, because Hyam's* Io is a hellish place to live and work.  The lethal atmosphere would kill you by decompression at the same time it poisons you.  There is no handy trip back to Earth if you get terminally home-sick, because the shuttle that travels between the Jovian moons and the space station is on a strict schedule.  If there's any bad blood between miners or staff or the Federal guards, tough, you're all stuck together in a giant pressure-cooker.  Art!

     Conrad wonders if GM Sheppard and other Con-Am staffers weren't sent to Io as a punishment of sorts; "Do three years on the armpit of the solar system and we'll get rid of the fraud and embezzlement charges".  You can't imagine many people volunteering for duty there, even on big wages.  Art!

     Conrad's not sure if this plot point is explained.  We are supposedly in the 21st Century yet our hero is tooling around with an ancient pump-action shotgun?

     But of course, Crazy Horse.  Consider that a shotgun is jolly good for un-aliving people at short ranges, yet it's comparatively low-velocity shot, especially if consisting of lead pellets, will not pierce structural members inside the mine.

     Okay, I'll now grace Sheppard's predecessor with a name: Young.  He would doubtless have greeted the previous Marshal with a hearty handshake, a happy hello and heaps of honesty.

YOUNG:  Take a seat, Marshal.  Coffee?

MARSHAL CALLAGHAN: No, thanks.

YOUNG:  Good, I restrict myself to one pot a week.  Ekes it out.  You'll have read the briefing docket at least ten times on the trip here.  Allow me to fill in a few gaps.  <points to window>  I left the shutters up so you can see what a hellhole Io is.

CALLAGHAN: So you're all cooped up in here, twenty-four seven?

YOUNG: Yup.  The boys blow off steam and you guys get to keep it reined in.  I got two personal rules I won't have broken.

CALLAGHAN: No hurting the company whores and no drugs, presumably.

YOUNG: <frowns> We call them 'Professional Companions', Marshal and yes, I won't tolerate any of them being harmed.  You catch anyone abusing them, I give you a free hand.  The other no-no is sabotage.

CALLAGHAN: Who on earth would sabotage - it's where you live!

YOUNG: We've caught guys with explosives twice.  Pretty obviously corporate sabotage.  Strange thing is, they never made it back to Earth alive.

CALLAGHAN: What about smuggled drugs?

YOUNG:  It happens, I can't deny that it doesn't.  There's only half a dozen of you and the average shuttle cargo amounts to four or five hundred tons of supplies.  

     Why would Con-Am put up with Federal security on their property?  Simple, they don't have to pay them.  Remember, it's all about the bottom line.

     There you go, the end product of Thinking Time whilst walking Edna.  O and it cropped up on Quora, too, which I took as a sign.

Multiple McGuffins!

Yet another sidebar from "The Daily Beast" and this time a couple of the mystery tat objects are readily identifiable.  Art!

     That first one is a bulldozer, we both got that.  It's remote-operated, too, so you can annoy other people at a distance.  Okay okay okay, I cheated and looked up Items Two and Three.  Item two is a portable soldering gun, and Item Three is something to do with tyre valves.  Item Four is a miniature engine, because how many times have you been standing in the queue to pay for your weekly shop and been struck by the thought that, if only they sold miniature engines! because I desperately need one.

A Disgustrous Day

Unsurprisingly, Edna was a tad reluctant to venture beyond The Mansion's threshold this morning, thanks to the cold dank skies from which rain doggedly poured.  The weather is so bad even the local livestock is wearing coats.  Art!

     This was taken during a break in the rains, just so we're clear.

"City In The Sky"

The Americans are unhappy.  Their fuel plant keeps getting sabotaged, it seems.  Yet surely not!  Meanwhile, back in outer space -

CHAPTER NINE: Out of the Blue

      Terry’s reaction when he stepped out of the TARDIS was exactly the same as Ace’s had been, which is why she passed him a spare straw boater of the Doctor’s that had been picked up for this very purpose.  He squinted and winced, having had a rapid ultraviolet bath to prevent any terrestrial infections being carried aboard the sphere.

     ‘Wow!’ he gasped, looking upwards, then at the transparent strip, back down to the inner surface, at the north and south polar regions.  ‘This is like a dream!’

     Ace looked at him coolly.

     ‘Don’t speak too soon.  Everyone up here would gladly trade places with the people in New Eucla.’

     She led the awestruck young man across the tired plastic paths, heading for Lichfield.  Progress was slow, since Terry stared inquisitively at everything, until she linked arms and practically towed him to the building cluster.

     Davros wasn’t in, so she tried the central Common Room, which seemed to be a big meeting hall, lots of tables, chairs, screens and microphones.  A knot of people huddled around one table, working on digital screens and unaware of who the new arrivals were.

     ‘Er – hello,’ tried Ace, making all six look up in surprise.

     ‘You’re the girl from Earth,’ stated one.  ‘You’ve come back?’

     Surprise.

The Tautology Of Time And Tithes

A pithy little story from Quora here.  All of you who have been office slaves know how coffee (or tea, in the case of Conrad) helps the workplace function, unless management muck things up, as they did here.

     Original Poster said that they and their colleagues were all being docked $20 to pay for coffee, which had always been free up to that point.  This, I assure you, is some chinless waffle-bottom thinking how they can do over the employees and make money for the company.  Art!

NO EXCEPTIONS

     At least two-thirds of employees brought in their own drinks and resented this new policy.  So, they continued to bring in their own drinks and also made - and left untouched - several cups of coffee per day.  Coffee expenses tripled.

     The $20 deductions were halted and instead a pay-as-you-go coffee machine got installed, charging $1 per cup.  Art!

     Nobody used it because you could get a much larger cup for the same amount from the corner shop.  O, the managers used it if they had clients in.

     Since the machine took in far less money than it cost to hire, it, too, was gone after mere weeks.

     The office reverted to the old free coffee policy and everyone was happy again, no exceptions.  Except the bottomhole whose idea it was in the first place.  Imagine! messing with such a basic office functionality as staff coffee.

Finally -

I should whisper this, or put it in really small font, but it seems the weather outside is improving slightly.  Let's keep it between ourselves, shall we?  Don't want to scare the sun away.

*  Peter Hyams, the writer and director

Frenetic Kinetic

Or, If You Like, A Frantic Antic

For Lo! we are dealing with the remote manipulation of objects without any physical contact.  This is because Conrad is watching a hokey yet entertaining Sork film that has the English title "Psychokinesis".  The plot revolves around a third-rate near deadbeat absent dad, who is accidentally gifted with the power of - you may be ahead of me here - psychokinesis.  Art!

Shades of "Chronicle"

     The Youtube channel this screenshot comes from describes it as a 'Superhero action comedy fantasy', which sums it up pretty well.  The Sorks like to include umpteen tropes in their genre films and television shows, regardless of what the underlying concept is.  Just one of the reasons Conrad loves loves loves Sork television programs!

     Let me now resort to the trusty Collins Concise (my sole momento from a month's work at Ashton Children's Social Services*).  "Psychokinesis: (in parapsychology) alteration of the state of an object supposedly by mental influence alone."  Art!

     <excuse me, off to stir the Sunday Stew> 

     Conrad, because he is nothing if not thorough**, also looked up the very-closely associated term 'Telekinesis', which the CC defines as:"The movement of a body caused by thought or willpower without the application of a physical force".

     Well now!  We could create a dozen Intros dealing with nothing but telekinesis if the mood so took us.  It appears to be the second-most desirable or important ESP skill/talent/curse/blessing after telepathy.  Why, Conrad even went so far - because we all know how thorough he is - to create a rating scale for telekinesis (and telepathy) as background for a fiction work of his <avoid expressing any interest at all and maintain a dead-eyed stare or you'll get the whole thing inflicted upon you, warning courtesy Mister Hand>.  Art!

     This is one of the more extreme examples, where Baby Yoda Grogu, who cannot weigh more than a stone, if that, renders helpless a brontosaurian behemoth that must tilt the scales at three tons, at least.  At the other end of the scale, small manipulations can render a sense of creepy unreality.  Art!

     Ah yes, another trope exemplified: "The Power Of The Gods In The Hands Of Children" which is a sub-trope of "Things Man Was Not Meant To Meddle With (Nor Woman Either)".  One can understand where the scriptwriters were coming from on this one, at least.  If you were suddenly granted these awesome powers and abilities, with no experience or training, just how well would you cope?  Art!

Full Mental Jacket

     Many years ago on BOOJUM! I posted up a list of 'drunk superheroes', because the idea of Batty or Supes getting pie-eyed and blowing up half of Gotham was amusing to the nihilistic little swine I was then.  Imagine, if you will, these telekines hoovering up hard drugs or liquor and the resultant chaos that ensues.  O that would not be good!

     Which is only one facet of telekinetic superheroes or villains.  Art!

         Here you have Wolfie, a sixteen-year old with superpowers that include telekinesis - or psychokinesis, if you like - and absolutely NO IDEA how to use them.  Please be advised this is from "2000AD" and is nothing whatsoever to do with Citizen Smith, and the mind boggles if Tooting's very own Socialist Superhero had gotten ahold of powers alongside his slogans. He caused quite enough trouble when he got hold of a Scorpion Combat Vehicle Reconnaissance Tracked.

     I think we may come back to this topic, I like it!  Whether you do or not is quite immaterial.

The Case Of The Dog In The Night

For reasons I cannot fathom, it being quite dry and un-downpoury, the amount of fireworks being released tonight seems to be a whole lot less than those of yesteryon.  That is, if you are reading this on Monday, bear in mind it was created on Sunday.  Art!

     Here is madam, quite comfortably ensconced in a blanket on the floor, whereas yesteryon she was desperate to sit on my lap and get stroked, the latter of which she usually vehemently rejects as a Hom. Sap. invocation of ownership <cont. Page 94>

This Is How You Attribute

One of the things that broadcast media needs to cleave to is being able to squirm out of the gunsights of responsibility, accountability and legal jeopardy.  This is why one sees headlines and taglines and cover stories with the following.  Art!

     'Don't speak much, if at all' is bookended by quotation marks, which means that "The Daily Beast" is alluding to an anonymous source, who is providing the quote.  That way they cannot be held accountable nor sued for making accusations.  If there are quotation marks, you see, or if the person speaking includes 'allegedly' then there is substantial legal protection inherent in such a phrase.  Omit these and you lay yourself open to expensive extensive legal sanctions.

     Plus I keep telling you that the South Canadians sorely miss being subjects of the Crown.

"City In The Sky"

We are experiencing the corollary of being a city in the sky, namely being a suburb on the ground, and a sorely-troubled suburb at that.

‘Mike?’ asked Boyce.   The other man sighed, straightened his back painfully and wiped sweaty ash from his face.

     ‘Looks like the welds holding up an intermediary process tank cracked.  The whole thing pancaked, split, sparked.  You know the rest.’

     Boyce ground his teeth.  Murakow looked puzzled and angry.

     ‘We knew those welds were crucial.  I inspect – inspected – them daily.  No signs of any shearing or tears.’

     ‘How long to reconstruct?’

     Murakow’s face lightened a bit.

     ‘Only a couple of months.  The original engineering was a by-guess and by-golly job.  We know the short cuts this time.’  He gestured at the fuel storage tanks, now ringed with cameras and sensitive sensor equipment taken from towns all along the Gulf.  ‘The stored stuff is fine for another five months.’

     Showing rare emotion, the colonel turned to look over the Gulf of Mexico.

     ‘Dammit Mike, when are we gonna get a break?  Half the country nuked, half the population dead of disease.  Our official government stuck in orbit.  Every shuttle site on the planet gone.  If I didn’t know better - ’

     He bit off the comment from an unfathomable, almost unconscious dread.

     I think he's onto something here, folks.

"The War Illustrated"

In glorious monochrome.  With added single-colour on front and rear covers.  The colours are faded now, they must have been quite vibrant at one point.  Let us now bring on one of the montage pictures.  Art!

     This, as you may be aware, is a British mortar.  Not the more usual 3.1" version; this is the 4.2" bit of kit, which fired a bigger bomb a lot further.  You can see the crew ducking down or facing away to avoid being deafened by the weapon's fire.  Someone somewhere is going to have 20lbs of high explosive hate dropped on them, repeatedly, as this thing could manage 20 bombs in the air at once.  They had been introduced as a chemical-weapon deployed to fire mustard gas or phosgene, which sheer vituperativeness never actually occurred in the Second Unpleasantness.  Small mercies.

Conrad Rendered Speechless

Only for a moment!

     You see, Suchomimus, Youtube channel poster about the Ukrainian Unpleasantness since ages ago, did not originally establish a Youtube presence to analyse combat footage.

     No.  He set up his Youtube channel to go on at length about - 

     DINOSAURS!  Art?

     He apologised for being late with his most recent posting, as he'd been off buying dinosaur eggs.

     Yes, that's correct:"Dinosaur Eggs".

    I am off to go stir my Sunday Stew, you lot can talk amongst yourselves, or even type if the madness takes you.

*  Interesting but EXTREMELY GRIM

**  Okay okay okay, " - and also a nerd down to his very bones"

A Retrospective Rumpus

It's That Time Of Year Again

When people celebrate Guy With A Fork learning how to cook potatoes with explosives, or some such shizzle.  Those out there with pets know how they intensely dislike all the sudden loud noises, which is why Your Humble Scribe was playing a daft Sork film called "Psychokinesis" to try and drown out the background bangs.  Art!

     The hero is rather a loser, so it'll be interesting to see how he copes with being given superpowers.  Like all Sork drama they like to include every trope they can squeeze in, s

     ANYWAY let's have the links for this week.  

2022

BOOJUM!: Lies Are Unwise (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

BOOJUM!: Cheating Again! (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2021

BOOJUM!: Roel's Goals (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2020

BOOJUM!: Thunderball (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2019

BOOJUM!: I Hope You Appreciate This - (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2018

BOOJUM!: Let Lying Dogs Sleep (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2017

BOOJUM!: TrainsTeapotting (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2016

BOOJUM!: Death And The Maiden (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

BOOJUM!: Signing Off Bake Off (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2015

BOOJUM!: Time, Like An Ever Flowing Stream - (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2014

BOOJUM!: Manchester United (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

2013

BOOJUM!: Ha! Take that, Muse! (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

When The Alternative Is Boiling One's Head

As In The Scottish Insult "Gae Bile Yer Heed"

The logistics of this would be a little daunting, don't you think?  Firstly, a vessel large enough to accommodate a whole human head would be extremely large and, once filled with water, would take forever to come to a rolling boil.  You'd also need to work out how much water your head would displace, because lots of water on a kitchen floor is a potential slip hazard.  Then, is there an accepted minimum or maximum time for immersion?  You'd need a third party present with a stopwatch, since boil-proof timers are a niche market.  Nor is t

     ANYWAY enough about the mechanics of head-boiling.  Art!

     Serves me right.  I Googled "Strange Sci-Fi Magazine Covers" so of course - obviously! - I get Doctor Strange.  Not that he has anything to do with what follows, because who wants logical or sensible?

     ANYWAY AGAIN Your Humble Scribe got an e-mail on Thursday that I've not replied to yet, and may never indeed respond to.  Let me illustrate:

Customer Service -  Whatsapp/Email/Live Chat 
Location - Rochdale
Salary - £10.42 per hour weekly pay
Start: 13th + 20th November 2023
Full time: 8am – 7pm Monday - Sunday 4 on 4 off 

Temporary until February, a handful are kept perm every year!

     Since you never underwent the experience I did, you may be unaware that this is the annual seasonal temp boost at Footasylum HQ, based at Sandbrook Park in Rochdale.  Art!

     This is the prestigious front entrance, which I never got to use as it was more convenient to come in via the back gate and the back door.  Except on Saturday and Sunday, when the back gate was closed and I had to walk down the canal towpath and all the way round the building.

     'Twas a tough gig, frankly, working an 11 hour day for four days a week, which days moved forward one day each week.  One left The Mansion in the dark and got home in the dark, with a fifteen-minute walk to and from the Rochdale Road bus stop.  Art!

     You may notice a curious omission from the job spec: no telephone work.  This was both a blessing and a curse, because Conrad's always had to experience customers and stakeholders ringing up to rant, tant, and vent until spent on the phone.  I felt a certain schadenfreude at the frothing e-mails and What'sApps that gave the customer's phone number with an ORDER to call them back, and they were best friends with the CEO <cont. Page 96>.

     The curse bit is that staff were thus able to play music all day long, which was exclusively rap music, which is a case of sonic assault as far as Conrad's concerned.  FOR TEN HOURS!  I still get cold sweats just thinking about it.  Art!

     Phew!  A bit of prog, the best antidote to rap that there is.  Conrad is going to be a bottomhole and not identify these album covers, because I'm horrid that way.

     So, as the ad mentions, out of us 10 temps, only Sacha was retained as permanent.  Something of a mixed blessing, one feels.  Also, they only had a single teaspoon in the island kitchen, forcing me to bring my own.  What an imposition!  I might mention this if I do respond to Kirsty - she being the contact at Search.  So, you can see why today's title exists.

Nasty Night-time Nitrate Noises

'Tis the weekend of Bonfire Night, which means people will be bonfiring on Saturday the 4th of November in addition to the 5th, which is Sunday.  One reason being that Saturday was reasonably dry weather, and one cannot anticipate both nights on a weekend being free from rain.  Conrad rather hopes that the heavens open and a Biblical deluge arrived with dusk tonight.  Art!

     This is Edna seeking refuge on the Human-Shaped Cushion, not an action she resorts to normally.  I also had the television up loud to try and drown out some of the explosions  outside, with limited success - it was the last 30 minutes of "The Adam Project" which is pretty much all explosions anyway.

     "Nitrates" because, for your information, that's what they make explosives with.

The Grass Is Greener

This is kind of flirting with Politics, but I wanted to get a pun in there, so we'll carry on.  Art!

     Meadows was the Chief of Staff - rather, one of the CoS, as Prez Trump kept firing them - during the Trump administration.  This is a plum position that brings a lot of power and accountability to the post-holder, and doing it successfully or at least not un-successfully opens a lot of doors when they move on.

     The problem for Greeny is that he put in print that the 2020 election was stolen, which is hard to explain away as a minor point of nuance.  Now, when he was looking at many years of jail time courtesy Smiling Jack Smith, he has back-tracked completely and is admitting that the 2020 election was NOT stolen.  Or even "Stollen" as Citizen Trump keeps posting - as if he'd pay attention to a lowly spell-checker!  One has to ask what he was thinking?  ("Probably the $350,000 he was getting paid" is a likely answer)

     Meadows is now being sued for $3 million plus legal expenses.  Wow, that's a lot of green!

"City In The Sky"

Things amongst the American's Downstairs garrison are not exactly hunky-dory, it has to be said.

The real problem seemed to be fate.  Twice their stores of refined fuel had gone up in flames.  First, thanks to lightning from a tropical storm.  Second, a leak that contaminated the groundwater and also ignited.

     Now the duty team and patrolling dog handlers stared with dismay at the crumpled, punctured fuel refining plant, collapsing into itself in giant gouts of flame and fire, a salamander’s delight.

      Eighteen hours later the mangled metal detritus had cooled enough to be inspected.  The Chief Engineer and his two deputies scrambled around, under and over struts and piping that still radiated heat, smoking or steaming in the early evening air.  The three fire-suited figures congregated and pointed at a crazily-tilted pressure tank, getting closer and looking at support stanchions.

     Colonel Hamilton Boyce, the humourless and by-the-book commander of Operation Phoenix, stood and watched the trio examining wreckage.  A tic in one cheek was the only visible sign of the rage he felt; small as the gesture might be, it warned crew not to approach him on anything less than vital matters.

     Now, doffing his oversized silver headgear, Chief Engineer Murakow came back over the cooling wrack to the Colonel.  Murakow’s face was grimy, his eyes red and bleary.  He’d taken great risks in the small hours to try and extinguish the fires.  Unsuccessfully.

      Hmmmmm pushing it a bit with the prose there about 'salamander's', matey.

Make Mine A Mellifluous MacGuffin

I think I know this one!  Art!

     Conrad is guessing that this is a guitar effects box, which one can pre-set and then activate when onstage by pressing the big silver stud with one's size 10.  I have no idea what "Vintage Dist." is, but I am going to check and see if my guess is correct.  Art!

      Well there you go, the old dog's grey cells still function, after a fashion.

Finally -

Edna is sulking because I won't give her my overtoasted cinnamon-and-raisin bagel.  O boy, she isn't going to be pleased when I go into Lesser Sodom!

     I will, however, be driving as I have the car for a fortnight, so she will only have to amuse herself for a short while whilst ConraDaDog checks out what's going cheap in the Remainder chiller.