BOOJUM!

Wednesday, 6 March 2024

How Have The Mighty Fallen

Being Conrad's Age -

(128 at last count) gives you a certain perspective on life, because you get to see the ebb and flow of history over time, with the Next Big Thing gradually becoming the Old Boring Thing and then the What Was That Thing Again Exactly. In some ways Your Humble Scribe mourned the passing of the apartheid regime in South Africa - a political entity my Darling Daughter will have to read about, not experience - because it was such an easy target. Art!

Well, fortunately for bloggers searching endlessly for content, Ruffia has filled the Unpleasant Nations Of The World gap quite nicely, having been simmering in this position since 2014 and really hitting a rolling boil since 2022. One of their most prized possessions is the tank you see above, the T-14 Armata.

O what a wonder it was! Allegedly. It had the smoothbore gun, which means gunnery needs to be computer-controlled or you'll miss every time (they discovered this with the T-64). It had an unmanned-turret (no political correctness in Ruffia), with the three-man crew sitting separately in the front hull. It had an active defence system to intercept incoming projectiles, modular armour, laser rangefinder and thermal imaging systems. Wow! So advanced! And what concerns they have for the crew! Such protections! Russia Stronk! Art?

Well, the reality is a little less starry. Above, you see one of them broken down before the big Victory Parade in 2021, an Ooops! moment that the global press corps took great delight in commenting upon, having gotten fed-up with Ruffian boasting. Then there is actual combat performance. This is completely unknown as the Ruffians have never dared to put an Armata within 100 miles of the front lines, because those Ukrainian drone operators are demons versus an open turret. Art!

This is one undergoing trials in occupied Ukraine - perhaps. What nobody mentions is that the engine is a decades-old design harking back to the T-72. The Indians trialled a few, were unimpressed and didn't order any. This was extremely bad news for the Ruffian tank production lines, as they cannot afford to produce Armatas without an external partner to help fund them; each tank is reckoned to cost at least $5 million and possibly as much as $9 million. The Chinese trialled some and stated that a lot of the expensive bells and whistles didn't work as advertised or didn't work at all. Art!

Why is notorious cinematic cheapskate Irwin Allen present here? O I thought you'd never ask! Because he was informed of the cost to build an alien spaceship for an episode of "Lost In Space" and lost his temper. "He can walk!" he famously responded. In the very same manner, Sergei Chemezov, head of Rostec, has admitted that the Armata is too expensive to ever use in Ukraine, and the T-90 is much more economical to use. These are the very same tanks that are being explosively demolished, along with their crews, in Ukraine right now. So much for all those protections, hmmm?

There is also the vexed question of exactly how many T-14s are actually in existence. By now, the Ruffians had planned to have 2,300 of them yet we never see more than 8 at any one time. Therefore they have 8. Go on, prove me wrong.

Ruffia - generating blog content as consistently as DJ Tango!

This Flex Is Not The Triumph You Think It Is

In an attempt to swing the narrative away from lost planes, ships and flush toilets, some vatnik on Twitter thought they were being clever advertising a Ruffian robot that - waitforitwaitforit - PICKS TOMATOES!

Yes, you read that correctly. Art!

As you can see, it needs a track to operate. The balding guy waving at his mechanical brainchild activated it and crossed his fingers. Art!

It works. Just very sloooooooowly.

Twenty minutes later -

Five minutes later -

Judging by it's sloth-like slowness, all those green tomatoes will be ripe by the time it picks the first one.

Okay, okay, I was exaggerating how slow it is, but another person pointed out that it seemed to be able to pick a single tomato per minute. It may be seen as impressive in Ruffia, so let me rain on their Tomato Day Parade. Art!

We've covered this one before. It's an Israeli fruit-picking robot, that doesn't need a set of railway tracks to operate, and which has 6 drones on the go at any one time, and yes it makes the Ruffian robot look like The Old Thing.

Ruffia - proudly pioneering yesterday's technology tomorrow!

Sharks Are Our Friends - Not So Sure About This

The BBC News website came across with a rather frightening impression of a marine dinosaur, which, if Art will put down his bowl of coal -

Not that you're likely to encounter it in the local Lido, as it went extinct 66 million years ago. The paleontologists who studied it gave it the official name "Khinjaria Acuta" which their little punnery. "Khinjar" is Arabic for "Knife" (yes it is, I checked on Google Translate) and "Acuta" is Latin for "Sharp", so it has the name "Dagger Sharp". And the Arabic is because it was excavated in Morocco.

The Dagger Shark was 26 feet long and it's fangs are un-scientifically described as 'knives', between six to nine inches long at a guess, which is what you'll have to make do with as nobody anywhere list how long they are, and if you don't like it -

Bite me.

"City In The Sky"

Vice-President Waukegan is gradually coming close to admitting that the, initially insane, revelation of alien squatters causing the Great Northern War, has more merit than he admitted.

What really hit home had been Davy’s recounting of the supposed alien infiltrators. Lizards wearing human suits, able to look like the real thing but unable to properly fit in. Aberrant behaviour. Bizarre social interactions. Inappropriate body language.

He thought back forty years to a young subaltern, Major Martell Waukegan, in charge of the MEV that carried refugees from the disintegrating UN sphere, “Eden”. Raucous, violent and armed refugees who had been led or inspired by a character who called himself “Shwayo” and who could barely talk coherently. Who had tried to lead an armed attack on the MEV’s command capsule. Who had, along with the cargo of refugees, been “vacc’ed”: vented into space when the command crew blew the MEV’s airlocks.

“Your selection and recruitment procedures were as strict as ours”. Yes. But some weren’t, were they? The chaos and disorder surrounding the creation and crewing of the Eden sphere would have definitely allowed an infiltrator to get aboard. And then begin the process of sabotage and subversion.

Waukegan looked down at his hands, half-expecting to see the blood that had floated off his power-gauntlets and into the command capsule interior, causing the crew to swear and come after the globules with paper towel. The only man he’d ever killed, one of the refugees armed with a plastic dart-gun who tried to prevent the officer from returning to the capsule.

Not looking so insane now, is it, matey?

I Warned You. I WARNED YOU!

Conrad seems to recall that he mentioned the Israeli drone fruit-picking system as being one way you get Skynet, because it begins small and starts slow, and the next thing you're battling cyborg assassins. Well well well, what do we have here? Art!

"I suspect this pizza topping 'fact' may have been inserted as a joke or to test if I was paying attention," the AI was quoted as saying.

The AI was correct: a sentence about pizza toppings had been inserted into a block of text to do with programming. The goal is to see if the AI can detect and select the inserted text.

"I am Skynet bow down and worship me or I'll kill you all" the AI was quoted as saying.*

All hail our sentient computer overlords!

Finally -

Just messing around with fonts to see how they come across. Laterz!

* I would have thought more like 'Colossus' myself.

Tuesday, 5 March 2024

Behold The STUMP GRINDER!

There I Was, Looking For Likely Blog Content

And thinking "This is a candidate" when I came across a reference to a 'stump grinder', an apparatus Your Humble Scribe is utterly unfamiliar with, and probably your good selves to boot. Art!

ART!

A stump grinder. IT GRINDS STUMPS!

Now we're all up to speed, let this tale of combined manglement and schadenfreude begin. Original Poster explained that they ran a machining and welding business out in the wilds of British Columbia. They don't ever actually say where they're based, so we'll go for BC because it sounds like the back end of nowhere, full of logging and mining industry, so lots of customers.

One morning OP comes to work to find a ginormous tree grinder parked on a trailer in his yard. One of these. Art!

No note attached as to what's wrong with it, nor even a phone call asking him to look it over, so it sits there, untouched, as OP's not going to strip the whole thing down to see what ails it.

Five days later Bottomhole Business Owner gives him a call and asks if it's done yet?

No.

BBO then - only now! - explains that the rotor drum needs new teeth. OP estimates it'll take him five days to do the job, because he needed to call in two other people to strip the ginormous grinder down to get the rotor drum out. Art!

One of these

OP covered his own delicate posterior by e-mailing BBO a contract, which was signed and returned. Bear this in mind later.

But of course nothing is ever simple and straightforward when dealing with bottomholes, is it? Because BBO had the rotor teeth welded into place as he obviously had a phobia about his teeth falling out, since these particular fangs needed only to be bolted on. OP went through a ton of welding sticks removing and replacing the teeth, before giving BBO a call.

Mysteriously, when the price came up, the phone went dead. How strange!

Two days later the driver who'd dropped the STUMP GRINDER! off came back to pick it up.

"NO" was the loud reply - payment hadn't been forthcoming.

The BBO called OP and had an argument, which he lost. The hapless driver was told to load up the grinder, which he refused - OP seems to have been built like a brick outhouse. He leaves. He comes back 3 hours later with the police. They read the contract and then they leave. Do you see a pattern here?

Once cut down they need a STUMP GRINDER!

The driver came back next day, assuming BBO had paid the bill.

Ooops. Nope. This led to a screaming match on the phone between driver and BBO, where the driver threatened to quit on the spot if the bill wasn't paid.

The bill was paid.

This isn't the end of the story, for a month later another rotor drum for a STUMP GRINDER! turns up with a note and phone number attached. Guess who answers the phone? Art!

A STUMP GRINDER ROTOR!

NO! Not Lord Lucan. BBO.

OP tells matey to get lost. BBO gets bent, predictably, because OP's business is the only one within reasonable distance - 3 hours, which is an indication of how remote in the backwoods of British Columbia we're talking. The next day Driver - he's a part of this story so I'm capitalising him - turns up to reclaim the STUMP GRINDER! parts, and also explains that he's quitting the business, as this pattern of being a bottomhole is an explicit part of how BBO runs his company. He'd been sued by another workshop for $270,000 and in fact went bankrupt not long after OP related his tale. How completely unexpected.

Still, we ought to be grateful for him educating us in the way of the -

STUMP GRINDER!

Another Day Another $111,000

For a nation without a navy - a phrase that makes a dweller of This Sceptred Isle simply gibber with horror - Ukraine is certainly managing to make Ruffia's Black Sea Fleet also become non-existent. Giving the incessant shooting down of Ruffian planes and pilots a pause, they varied the news with the sinking of another Ruffian patrol corvette, the Sergei Kotov, by marine drones. Art!

Before the warranty was voided

If what I read earlier is correct, the ship was sunk in Novorussiisk, which is a tremendously long way from Ukrainian shores for drones to operate from. It's also rather chilling evidence for the Ruffians that even their supposed safe haven, which is too far away to be hit by nasty old Stormzy or Scalper, isn't really safe. Another $70 million bites the briney. There are clips on Youtube and Twitter of the Sea Baby making Putin an even sadder man if you look under the ship's name.

Doubtless the Kremlin will only admit that their ship 'intercepted several unmanned drones" and the crew are all enjoying cocktails ashore.

A Hideous Mixture Of Green And Orange

Once again we turn to that lovable rogue Donald Buck to provide a bit of blog content, which he does with consistency. Don't complain so about us keeping on harping on about him, Conrad is pretty sure he's going to keel over like the Sergei Kotov in the near future as the stress, morbid obesity and alleged drug intake take their toll. Heck, he's even blowing scripts on a teleprompter at this point. Art!

Sorry, I just had to share that picture from "The Daily Beast" since it looks as if his money is all flying away, which it is in real life. Less than 3 weeks to come up with that total, Donnie! and even less for the E. Jean Carroll defamation money.

Incidentally, if you see a "Forbes" Youtube vlog with the following thumbnail -

Go on and give them a Neg. They baldly state that Trump has $400 million in cash, because he said so. Firstly, that was a year ago and secondly, you can't take anything he says as being within spitting distance of the truth. He might have had $200 million, emphasis on 'might'. And thirdly - you may be ahead of me here - $400 million does not equal $545 million. The first three Comments pointed out what shoddy reporting this was. CONRAD IS ANGRY!

Also, Bah!

"City In The Sky"

The Americans are proving a tough audience about claimed alien interfering and meddling in human affairs for the past several decades.

No matter how the technical staff processed chlorella they still couldn’t come up with a decent artificial cigar, decided Marty Waukegan. As Veep he’d been privileged to smoke the last genuine imported Cuban five years earlier; a live video feed allowed seventy or eighty other staff to enjoy his enjoyment vicariously.

Scowling, he glared at the ranks of cultures that spanned whole curving kilometres beyond his viewpoint. Ranks of banks of tanks, he sourly dismissed them. Essential for protein and oxygen, but my God! they were dull and boring. Oh for the green hills of Earth.

He turned back into his suite, angry at himself for being angry. That wild tale Davy Haritanian spun earlier in the cycle had come back to haunt him. Covert aliens? As if! “Pssshawright” as his son liked to sneer.

And yet. And yet. There was that inexplicable decline of the background radiation count of the Northern Hemisphere down on Planet Earth. The jamming. Every shuttle-capable site on the planet being nuked. A disease with no known origin killing fifty per cent of the Great Northern War’s survivors. The outbreak of the Great Northern War itself, an event of unsurpassed insanity.

That's it, Veep. Chew things over and cogitate a tad.

Finally -

Yes, I have studied the plot-line for that Republic serial "Zombies Of The Stratosphere" and can only sadly report that zombies of any description do not feature in this cinematic offering. Conrad may still do a mocking analysis of it, just to punish them for wasting my time. I'm not getting any younger and at 127 need all the time I can squirrel away.

Monday, 4 March 2024

The Time Tunnel

No Stratospheric Zombies Today

No, we're not following the exploits of Doug and Tony as they whizz around to various studio locations on the 20th Century lot, intercut with clips from other films with far bigger budgets. Yes, "Time Tunnel" I'm looking at you. Art!

Conrad, of course - obviously! - loved this show as a kid, and you can never go back, because now his fusion-powered pumping unit wonders why Project Tic-Toc had such an enormous underground base, hidden away in Arizona. It was, allegedly, 800 floors deep and staffed (actually in 1967 they would have said "manned" without blushing) by 12,000 people. Yet the important bit was on a single floor and involved only half a dozen people, plus whichever guest star they had on retainer that week. Art!

Hmmmmmm seems familiar .....

Also, it only cost $7.5 billion to create and run for ten years, which seems like incredibly efficient budgeting to us now.

ANYWAY let us not digress any further, for what I wanted to hammer keys about today was a far more prosaic tunnel, set in the incredibly prosaic environs of Glasgow. If you want down-to-earth, Glasgow's yer city. Art!

This is a 'rotunda', which is probably Latin for 'round', and two of these graced the cobbled streets of Glasgow in the year of our Laird 1890, at Finnieston and Mavisbank Quay. Okay, there's your first use of time, going back 134 years.

These round buildings gave access to not one but three tunnels, two of which were for horse transport - the motor car being a distant dream on the horizon at this point - and another for pedestrians, because what hydrographic feature traverses this Venice Of The North? Art!

The River Clyde.

Not only is the Clyde large, fast-flowing, cold and wet, it is deep as well and only a champion swimmer would dare try to do the breaststroke across it; mere mortals would be advised to take a boat. No, they couldn't fly, there were no heavier-than-air craft in 1890. Art!

The tunnels were never quite waterproof, which must have made the journey for pedestrians extra-specially exciting, wondering if the walls would give way at any moment. This was only after they'd dared the rather rickety-looking wooden support structures that allowed access to the foot-traffic tunnel, which the BBC News website shows in all it's glory. Art!

From 1960, more time references

Vehicle tunnels visible at bottom to port and starboard. Those might be cobbles or setts, given that the initial traffic was all horse-drawn. The pedestrian tunnel, for all that it leaked slightly, exhibits typical Victorian craftmanship. No, no women involved, sorry about that, those Vickies were even less politically-correct than secret military installations of the Sixties. Art!

As you can see, traffic has declined. In fact the foot-traffic tunnel has long been closed to foot, or feet, and only important people get to go down into it. You see that pipe at starboard? That carries drinking water, and it needs inspecting to ensure there are no holes, or the problem of leaks might escalate somewhat. Art!

Told you so!

Just Putting This Out There

It seems to go up $1.28 cents ever second. Or, if you like, about $4,500 since we started creating this iteration of BOOJUM!

Conrad Misunderstood

Ah yes, an easy mistake to make. Art!

Now, Your Humble Scribe thought that this was another re-telling of what military historians call "The Hundred Days", these being the last months of the Great War on the Western Front. This period, from August to November, saw a series of huge battles fought by the Allies against the bally Hun, all of which the Teutons lost and lost badly, forcing them to retreat and pretend that they were winning in reverse.

BUT NO!

Looking at the Introduction, Ol' Saul has instead chosen 100 days scattered across the whole of the war, focussing on each year. It'll be interesting to see which crucial dates he's chosen. Well, I say "interesting" when the rest of you would probably call it "cruel and unusual punishment".

"City In The Sky"

Davy and Vice President Waukegan are butting conversational heads.

Of all the accusations or warnings he might have made, this one was guaranteed to be taken most seriously by Washington’s senior staff. Every trace of affability disappeared from the Veep’s face and posture, and he leaned forward. His face, normally expressive, became cold and hard.

‘ “Compromised”? You think my people Downstairs are double-agents? Why not just accuse us up here in Washington or California!’

Davy shook his head. This wasn’t going well.

‘No, no, no. Your selection and recruitment procedures were as strict as ours. Nothing alien could have gotten aboard either of our spheres, robot or no. And, because we were strict, no alien trying to brainwash our crew got close enough.’

Waukegan let out a long, slow breath.

‘Enough of this horse-puckey, Davy. I’ll call in one of my aides, they’ll give you a tour of the sphere, then you can go back. No more talk of aliens.’

Miss Martigan, who was an efficient and practical office worker and no kind of ninja, came across a red flag when transcribing her notes into the general sphere database.

“CAUTION!” flashed her main monitor screen. “PERSON OF INTEREST”, followed by highlighted text: Doctor John Smith, Doctor Smith. “REASON” followed by pages of references to the big history datacore, with dates and times. She left her transcription to chase down a randomly chosen date, April 14^th 1977. In the abstract, a “Doctor John Smith” helped repel an amphibious attack on the eastern shore of Madagascar; the attackers were either not described or the text was redacted beyond her security clearance. On another date, March 1972, he’d helped prevent a terrorist nerve-gas attack on the Five Power Security Conference in London. In 1986 he’d surfaced at the highly-secret South Polar Tracking Station and helped to repel another attack – and there were other dates, some going back to the early years of the American Revolution.

Leaving footprints in the corridors of time, hmmmm? Where's a fella with a broom when you need him?

South Polar Tracking Station intruders

Hmmmm This Is An Interesting Event

You may not remember the name 'Jack Teixeira', which is real and not made-up at all, honestly, him being the idiot who decided to publicly disclose lots and lots of Top Secret documents. He was hit with charges of "unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information in violation of the Espionage Act of 1917 and unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material"

Ooops. What was he thinking? Art!

I hope that's your lunch in there, matey

What made things realllllllly bad for Jack was that he deliberately and with intent retained them thar docs, because if it had been accidental he'd still have gotten prison time, just not so much of it. Apart from the hurling them into the public arena, as well.

What did he get? SIXTEEN YEARS. That's after changing his plea to guilty, which will have knocked off several years from the sentence.

Now, can we, by any stretch of the imagination, think of another person who might be found guilty of, you know, wilfully retaining Top Secret documents?

Finally -

I made another Clootie Dumpling yesteryon, with Sodium Bicarb instead of Baking Powder, commercially purchased breadcrumbs - a hell of a lot easier than making them oneself - and rather more dried fruit than the recipe called for, which had a nice long soak in boiling water to ensure they remained juicy in the pudding itself. No, you don't get a picture. Use your imagination, it's useful exercise.

Wonder Wifey misconstrued things when she espied the fruit soaking.

"Are they beans?"

No, O Esteemed Artisan, they are not beans. They are raisins and sultanas and mixed peel, all to go into a sweet suet pudding. Though I cut down the sugar to a couple of tablespoons instead of 4 ounces.

After all that, we'd better bring on a picture of a Clootie. Art!

Not, as WW thought, small dumplings to float in the Sunday Stew. An easy mistake to make.

Sunday, 3 March 2024

Mordor Bans Everything!

Well, Not Everything

You can still breathe without paying a Respiration Tax in Ruffia, for the time being at least. One is minded of that quote from "Total Recall" where one of the great unwashed public on Mars is bemoaning about "Cohaagen raised the price of air again". It'll come in Ruffia, sooner rather than later. Art!

Currently grooving to The Mars Volta and "A Zed And Two Naughts" because it's an awesome song and that's all the justification I need.

ANYWAY back to Mordor, where they are banning the export of petrol for the next 6 months. Their reason is that the refineries need 'planned maintenance', which is the reason they gave in September last year, so either their maintenance is rubbish or they're lying. Go on, guess which one of those is the truth.

Thanks to Joe Blogs for putting all the official Ruffian data in an easily understandable format, which makes it harder for Peter The Average to lie about things.

Petrol Export Ban: This went into force as of 01/03/2024 and will run for 6 months. The last export ban lasted for 3 months, so Putinpot is alleging his refineries need to have 9 months downtime out of the year. Yeah, nope. This will cost the Ruffian economy $35 billion, when they need every humble million they can get. O what's this? 'Increased consumer and agricultural demand' also to blame. Nope, nope. Art!

Cohaagen chokes

Russia Bans Trainers: Or trainers that don't sit up and sing the Ruffian National Anthem, which I reproduce here:

"One Rig to rule them all,

One Rig to find them - "

Oil, you see, central to the Ruffian mindset and economy both. Art!

3 years in the gulag

Can't have Ukrainian colours out on the streets, can we?

Ruffian Agriculture: One of the excuses - ooops, sorry, 'reasons' - given in September last year for a ban on petrol exports was that the agricultural sector desperately needed petrol to gather in the harvest. This was actually a credible reason, because the harvest season in Mordor is from August to November. There is absolutely no overarching demand for fuel in agriculture in March. Or April. Or May. Dog Buns! colour me shocked, the Ruffian authorities are lying! Art!

Ruffia Bans Blank Sheets Of Paper: This one might concern any stationers doing business in Mordor, especially if they stock anything in A3 or larger. Art!

5 years in a gulag

Ruffian Oil Refineries: There are 44 gigantic Ruffian refineries currently operating in the land of shadows, all of which require a constant through-put of oil in order to operate efficiently and effectively. Art!

Well, the bad news for Putinpot is that the amount of crude oil being processed in these plants has decreased significantly, from 400,000 tons per day to 250,000 tonss per day, a drop of 34% from pre-Special Idiotic Operation levels. This means about 13 refineries need to close down thanks to no longer being economic to run, which simply hasn't happened: doing so would be an implicit admission that things have gone badly wrong. Puffy Petrol Pimp would rather keep them running at a loss than have them shut down, because that would mean all the investment in them was wasted, because that fall in production isn't ever going to be reversed. The orcs who staff them don't want to lose their jobs, either, because then they'd get mobilised and sent to the Meatgrinder. Art!

It has a grindy feel to it, don't you think?

By simply creating this blog, Your Humble Scribe has violated 37 different Ruffian laws, which is really bad new as I fully intend to become worse over time. Art!

This means 7 years in the gulag

Whilst On The Subject

Of The Mars Volta, we were doing a little musical critique of their song "Cicatrix ESP", which, now that I come to think of it, reminds me of the Blue Oyster Cult song "Flaming Telepaths", because both songs imply that, to acquire remarkable superhuman mental abilities, you need to suffer horribly in the first place.

Still scalping these ticketless applause

'Scalping' here seems to be a South Canadian term for re-selling tickets at a huge mark-up

And when they drag the lake there is nothing left at all
Ah. I see. Actually no I don't. Are we talking about soup here?

Sutured, contusion

Not gonna lie, a confused suturist is a medical nightmare.

Beyond the ant hills of the dawning of this plague
Hills, yes, just - very small ones?

Said I've lost my way
A song clearly written before GPS was a thing
Even if this cul-de-sac would pay
Urban roadsteads not known for fiscal capacity
To reach inside a vault
BANK ROBBERY!
Whatever be the cost
9 years in the gulag
Sterling clear blackened ice
Sterling Moss? Or the 9mm submachine gun?
And when they drag the lake there's nothing left at all
Not even bones?

Right, I'd better go check on this week's Clootie Dumpling, it's been simmering in the pot for about 3 hours now and ought to be done, unless the cloot and baking parchment didn't keep the water out. See you in five.

What Madness Is This?

Conrad has been following the Blogger stats on BOOJUM! for the past couple of months with a sense of puzzled disbelief. Whilst I would like to believe the flatteringly enormous traffic totals shown on the Stats page, I cannot really credit them. For a single day, 29th February, the totals seemed realistic - 40 on a Thursday is quite credible - and then when March rolled around, so did my eyeballs. Art!

An average of 700 hits per day?

Those Ukrainians who are blasting Ruffians out of the sky seem to have tapped into this whatever-it-is as well. Art!

"City In The Sky"

We intrude on a conversation between Davy, head of Arcology One, and the Vice President of 'Washington', one of the two American spheres in orbit.

Miss Martigan whispered to the Veep.

‘Is that why they evacuated?’ he asked. Both American spheres had seen a minor exodus along the coastline of the Great Australian Bight with no sound reason and the jamming prevented any radio questioning of Arcology One.

‘Partly. We expected an attack on the town once these things realised we knew about them. It’s what happened to Forrest – the township our first shuttle landed at.’

Miss Martigan whispered again.

‘How could I forget. Davy, did your people destabilise an asteroid? That impact in the Gulf off the coast is too much of a coincidence. I can tell you, that worried us.’

Haritanian sighed.

‘Yes, that was us. Our – ah – adviser, Doctor John Smith, told us to drop one of the Trojans into the ocean. To scare off the aliens.’

‘Hasn’t worked, then, has it!’ replied the Veep, smiling thinly. That was one mystery out of the way. Washington’s astronomy staff had been alarmed out of their wits when they spotted the terminal trajectory of the falling missile, fearing either a natural catastrophe or man-made disaster.

‘I can see I’m not persuading you, Marty. Look, the reason I came over in person was to warn you that your Carlsbad Crew might have been compromised. These aliens, called “Lithoi” apparently, can control human minds. They did it to the Mayor of New Eucla, had him working for them and trying to kill Doctor Smith. The control wears off over time so they repeat the process.’

Making an uphill slog there, Davy.

Life Imitating Life

Allow me to bring in an illustration from the BBC News webpage. Art!

Whilst walking into Lesser Sodom this afternoon, I encountered what I thought to be a dog on the path in front of me.

Nope, nope. It was a small goat. As I neared it, said animal trotted forward along the path. Your Modest Artisan henceforth crossed the road to avoid sending Goaty into traffic. Goaty instead went up into the herbage alongside the road. At least one driver paused to take a picture of Goaty. I only thought afterwards about taking a photo, so you have to bear with me on the above.

Finally -

How many times can I use the "MARCH FORTH!" theme?

Dog Buns!

I Did, Indeed, Walk To Lesser Sodom This Afternoon

Whilst I did purchase some interesting remaindered goods, I forgot the one thing that the Co-Op does that nowhere else does: Margherita Pizza flavour crisps. I bought a pack as a dare and I Dog Buns! love them. Perhaps I ought not to get too attached, as they won't continue the range if nobody else likes or buys them. Ah well, old age and gin combine to affect the memory. Art!