Will O' The Wisp

The Phrase Which Led Me Astray

Much as the real thing is supposed to.  I had a conceit all ready in my mind, and went to my faithful "Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable" to look up today's title, and what did I find?  Art!

Except not

     I remember this cartoon fondly, but not only was it completely absent from BDOPAF, so was the phrase.  Instead, it directed me to "IGNIS FATUUS", which happens to be Latin for 'Foolish Fire'.

     What on earth?

     All I can do (which boosts the word count) is repeat what they describe: "The will o' the wisp, or friar's lanthorn, a flame-like phosphorescence caused by the spontaneous combustion of gasses from decaying vegetable matter, that flits over marshy ground and deludes people who attempt to follow it."

     Okay, got the memo: will o' the wisp is a distraction that will lead you astray and vanish - put a pin in this for later.  It goes by any number of pseudonyms along the way: elf-fire, jack o'lantern, peg-a lantern, kit o' the canstick, spunkie, walking fire, fair maid of Ireland and John in the wad.  There's some Ruffian folklore about it, which we will politely ignore.  Art!

     

     Possibly the most disturbing example is that seen in the Dead Marshes in "Lord Of The Rings", which are the polar opposite of Ol' Willo, being hostile and malevolent.

     Well well well Steve Cantrell, look whose images I dug up yesteryon after I'd put my blog to bed, courtesy 'Bricktop_NAFO' over on Twitter.  Art!

Poster kids for 'hostile and malevolent'

     Tim "The Uncool Fool" Pool has suddenly turned into Ukraine's biggest fanboy in a reversion of character that is hilarious to behold.  Grovel, Tim, grovel!  Johnson is threatening legal action against anyone who comments on his indictment because he's an innocent victim who had no idea his $400,000 per month had anything to do with Barad-Duh.

     Which brings us to the meat of the matter for today.  Art!

     You may not have heard this baseless claim, which Conrad would describe as 'a big fat lie'.  A website allegedly belonging to KBSF-San Francisco News put up an article that alleged Kamala Harris was the driver of a vehicle that struck and paralysed a 13-year old girl in 2011.

     At this point any reputable press or media would deploy what Rudyard Kipling called his 'Six Sub-editors': Who, What, How, Why, Where and When.  These are the underpinnings of good journalism.  Needless to say, when the BBC Verify team began to dig, they found a positive warren of rabbitholes.  Art!

     No other identification was provided bar her name and age - 26.  She claimed to have been hit by a car driven by Kamala Harris, without any proof.  Two x-rays provided proved to be of two completely different people, taken in 2010 and 2017.  There are no details of Harris being involved in an accident in 2011.  There is no record of a KBSF news outlet in San Francisco, or indeed anywhere.  Art!

     Reverse-image searching showed this to be a road traffic accident in Guam.  

     The website had opened only in August 2024 and is no longer extant, but it had done it's job, as a lot of right-wing media and commentators immediately latched onto it and promoted it widely.  It is doubtful in the extreme as to whether any of them will have the integrity to admit their slavering hatred of political opponents had them chasing a will o' the wisp.

     Who could be responsible?

     O come on, as I said yesteryon, only people who are genuinely surprised at the big reveal at the end of "Scooby Doo" won't realise it was - the Ruffians!  Art!

     This bald dastard is John Mark Dougan, a deputy sheriff in South Canada who was under investigation for extortion and computer hacking, and who took the logical next step of retaining counsel and filing fleeing to Ruffia.  He helps them to run fake networks like KBSF, which pretend to be local South Canadian news channels.  A man's got to have a hobby, I suppose.  Definitely on the FBI's watch list, and probably that of the CIA and MI6, too.  If he ever tried to return home he'd be 'John in the Quod'.

Conrad The Comic Critic

A bit of analytical focus on "Judge Dredd The Megazine" may be merited here.  

     Okay, as you ought to remember, Conrad had narrowed his eyes and declared that he was going to do some review work on the story "Raptaur", which took place in the early reign of JDTM.  Art!

The beast itself

     Artwork by Dean Ormston, in his early years.  You may not like it, or you may be a fan, but you're not going to mistake him for another scrawler.  Art!

     Rappy turns up and makes it an extremely bad hair day for some delinquent juves.  Bad hair, bad skin, bad blood, bad insides, pretty much bad all round.

     Stick a pin in this one, we'll come back to it.

     The incredible vanishing Rappy.  Further to Ol' Stony Face's plaintive quote, we do know that 'fecal samples' prove that Rappy is a silica-based life-form, rather than God's Noble Ideal, carbon.

     All told, Rappy's body count that I tallied comes to between 40 and 50 bodies, and all over a three-day span, so it gets the Work Ethic award for Busiest Murder in the Big Meg.

     BUT! I have questions.  Where does it come from?  We aren't told.  Conrad has a couple of year's worth of JDTM after this story and - nary a Rappy in sight.  How can it vanish from electronic monitoring systems as in the picture above?  We aren't told.  How did it arrive in Mega-City One undetected?  We aren't told.  Bear in mind that the Judges maintain a VERY strict watch over who gets into the Big Meg.  There is a perpetual state of low-level warfare on the city's western limits with the mutant hordes trying to get in, and on the eastern side, bordering the Black Atlantic, nothing can survive in the toxic seas.  Art!

     Any answers, please attach in a Comment.

"The War Illustrated Edition 194 November 24th 1944"

Yes, we move onto another edition of the fortnightly magazine, which, once again, was publishing info two weeks out of date thanks to OPSEC.  Art!

     This is a fascinating snapshot in time, which neither Tito nor the Teutons could have imagined would have happened waaaaay back in 1941 when Yugoslavia was invaded by the Teutons, who were, at the time, very best mates with the Sinisters.

     Yugoslavia was both unique and fortunate that it liberated itself from the Axis yoke, because it meant it could keep the Sinisters at arm's length.  Yes, they were brothers in Socialism, but neither Tito nor his countrymen trusted the Sinisters as far as they could spit.  And, for one thing, the Allies had supplied Tito's Partisans with shedloads of kit by air and sea across the Adriatic, when the best Moscow could manage was platitudes.  Art!

     Niš (pronounced 'Nish') a year later in 1945, with a blue-on-red where the South Canadian air force mixed with the Sinisters, accidentally.  Entirely accidentally.  Completely by accident.  Definitely not on purpose.

Look Who's Back In Court

Donold Judas Trump, in case you've been asleep for a couple of years.  You may recall that he was found liable in a civil case back in May 2023, having a judgement of $5 million levied against him.  As he does when losing, he threw his toys out of the pram and appealed, which has now come around to be heard in court.  Art!

E Jean Carroll looking rather sharp

     It's unlikely the verdict will be overturned, as judges tend to follow the book when dealing with Pumpkinhead in order to kill any grounds for appeal in the first place.  Donold, who blamed his lawyers for losing the case in 2023 because they advised him not to turn up in court, sat and glowered for this hearing, before ranting and tanting afterwards - typical piehole-flappery that may come back to bite him on the bottom.

     Why so?

     Because EJC's lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, said that 'all options are on the table' when asked about filing a new defamation claim.  We on the blog have speculated about this earlier this year.

     Bring on more wheelie-bins of popcorn!

The Hammer Falls

You'll Have To Forgive Me If This Is A Bit Patchy

My sources are primarily people posting on Twitter (which I refuse to call anything else) and official South Canadian websites, the first of which tend to be over-dramatic, and the second of which tends to be dry as dessicated dust.  Nor has this news broken here in Perfidious Albion.

     To what am I referring?  Why, none other than news that Modern-day Mordor has been caught paying South Canadians to traduce Ukraine, their own nation and Prez Biden, and to big-up Pumpkinhead.  Art!

     The bumbletucks you see here are: David Rubin, Tim Pool and Benny Johnson.  I'd only encountered Pool on Twitter and imagined that he'd not only been dropped on his head as a child, but on every subsequent birthday since.  He was raucously pro-Ruffian, and now we know why: he and others named in an indictment had gleefully accepted $9.7 million to read Ruffian scripts.  

Tim last week: "Ukraine is the #1 enemy of America and the world"

     

     Well, it becomes abundantly clear why he and other sweaty-fisted grifters were pushing drivel like this.  Caught red-handed!  I have focussed on Tim 'The Fool' Pool because I've taken an unreasoning dislike to him, which ought to discommode him somewhat.  The Curse Of Conrad is worrisome to behold.

     Mister Fool, once the news came out, started bleating that he was in fact the victim, trying to claim that he'd been fooled.  So, he never wondered where the money came from, nor what poisonous screed he had to push, as long as the money came rolling in from 'Tenet'?  Notably, he has not offered to repay any of the toxic funds because treason is forgivable and forgettable but a dollar remains a dollar.

     "Should the allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims."

     <self-pitying wall of text redacted>

     "Putin is a scumbag".

     Art!

Imagine the noise (of hammering)

     Bit late to have a change of heart, matey.

     This information comes a few weeks after a certain professional vomit-spitter named Scott Ritter was detained by the FBI as he was about to  travel - or flee - to Ruffia.  Scott, as those on the internet who detest his very tripes like to point out, is a twice-convicted paedophile who shills for Modern-day Mordor.  The FBI confiscated his passport to stop him trying to flee - or travel - to Barad-Duh, and when they raided his home earlier this year O my! the amount of kit they took away with them.  Art!

No, there is no kitchen sink.  They're not Ruffians.

     Interestingly enough, Ritter's name doesn't seem to be on the indictments that the Department of Justice published, although in August it was confirmed that he was under suspicion of election interference.

     This has led to the more conspiranoid loonwaffles wondering if Ol' Scott has, perhaps, cut a deal with the DoJ to mitigate his sentence and they had him dead to rights with all the digital kit and papers they removed from his house.  If he skates through the rest of 2024 without getting charged then he may have given up bafunes like Tim Not Cool Pool.  In which case all the other indicted will fall upon each other like starving rabid dogs, each declaring that they weren't a stoolpigeon for the Feds.  Art!

     Typically, one of the more thorough delvers and diggers on Twitter is Prune60, or 'Mighty Prune' as I like to call her.  What you see above is an English version of the original Ruffian one, targeting South Canadian 'influencers', which she posted in a long Tweet.  The DoJ has coyly redacted "US Political Party A", but only those who were ever surprised at the end of an episode of "Scooby Doo" where the villains are revealed will be aghast to know that they mean the Republican Party.

     This is fascinating stuff and will echo on for months to come.  Bring on the buckets of popcorn!

The Journey With Bernie

Our exploration of the trading cards Ol' Bern did for FPG continues.  I've gotten rid of the link to "Print" that I was using as they didn't give titles, media or dates for the artworks they put up, which an orderly mind like mine detests.  So -

     Hmmmm Conrad suspects Bernie was using artistic licence here, because this whatever-it-is still possesses eyeballs, whereas the nose has decayed completely and those peggies need an urgent appointment with Mister Tooth Doctor (I use this term as it ups the word count a lot more than simply saying 'dentist').

     Let's really set this burg on fire and have a second of his cards.  Art!

     Conrad unsure where the 'Knights' bit comes in, unless Bern was going to add in armour and horses.

     To those wondering about how this run up to Card #8 seems to possess a lot of the same elements, don't forget that these cards came in randomly-assorted packs, so the prospects of getting numbers 1 - 8 and feeling disappointed is as remote as the heat death of the universe.

Kyle's Isles

A change of tack here, onto more bucolic and pacific matters rather than slavering over treason and zombies.  Yes, we are back at "Geography King" and Kyle's pick of unusual or interesting South Canadian islands.  Art!

     This is Pea Patch Island, sitting in the Delaware River in the state of - you may be ahead of me here - Delaware.  Actually, New Jersey argued that the island was theirs, until legal counsel informed them that, no, it belonged to Delaware.

     The island's name seems to be attributed to a rather hazy and possibly apocryphal story about a freighter losing a cargo of peas in the river, which sprouted and helped to form the base for the island.

     Rather less arguable is the use of the island for the site of a naval fortress.  Art!

     The original fort burned down, and what you see here is the 1860 replacement, which was used to house Confederate prisoners from the battle of Gettysburg.  The fort was decommissioned by the South Canadian Army in 1944.  Art!

     Looks a bit tidal to me.  Next!

An Offshoot Of 'Daylighting'

As you should surely know, that's the practice of unsealing and uncovering rivers in urban environments that have been hidden away for possibly centuries.  Auckland, capital of the Polite Australians, has really suffered in recent years with regular huge floods, caused partially because there is nowhere for large amounts of water to go when it suddenly arrives.  

     Here is one potential solution.  Art!

     In the architecture and city design community, this is known as a 'Green roof'.       As is clearly visible, it's been designed to create a small urban park atop a skyscraper, which will probably require a reinforced roof to cope with the extra tons of earth applied so that things can grow.

     What does this do to prevent flooding?  O I thought you'd never ask!  The plants and earth soak up rainwater, some to be used by the plants directly, the rest of it being gradually and slowly released into the building's drainage systems.  Key words 'gradually' and 'slowly' meaning that sewage and piping systems are not overwhelmed.

     Another, simpler solution is just to use porous concrete.  Art!

A Bit More Gloating

I forget when we last checked on 'Trump Management & Technology Group''s stock values, but they're not doing very well.  Here's the 5-day analysis.  Art!

     O dearie me.  That poor man.  Getting poorer every day!

Getting To A Point

Which We Tend Not To On The Blog

For, despite our claims to be logical, sensible and fond of making a journey directly from A to B, we do ramble rather a lot, because making a journey to A via M, F, the number 3 and Tunbridge Wells and finally B is a lot more interesting.

     For proof, just re-read the above.  Art!

     What a wag young Jonny is!  What makes an arrow dangerous?  That sharp POINTy bit at the end, which is designed and intended to hit the target and kill it stone dead.  "How deadly?"  Very deadly.  Just ask the M8s about Crecy, Poitiers or Agincourt and watch them lose their temper at the Anglo-Saxons.  Art!

     I believe folks have studied the ballistics and kinetics of being hit by an arrow shot from an English longbow, and it approximates to being shot with a .357 Magnum round.  Very deleterious to one's health.

     You can judge how effective the pointy things fired from bows are because they have been around for millennia.  If we jump forward in time, we find specialised ammunition that requires a point, namely Armour-Piercing Discardable Sabot, which may be Finned or not.  Art!

Art!

     <Tazer sounds in the background>

     If the recipient of one of these is really unlucky, it will be made of depleted uranium, which 'self-sharpens' as it slices through the opponent's armour-plate.  It's also a toxic heavy metal, but by that point I think that's the least of your worries.

     Let us now get to the meat of the matter, which is points used to proportionally dish out an estate, which is very ingenious and thoroughly Teutonic.  Yes, this is another tale of malicious compliance or revenge all rolled up into one satisfyingly toxic bundle, as detailed on Youtube.  Art!

     The Ethical Narrator, whom we shall call EN from now on, chose to do the Civic Option rather than his 12 month's conscription in the army, so he spent a year in a retirement home, which he thoroughly enjoyed, even if it didn't teach him how to field strip and reassemble a G3 rifle.

     ANYWAY his best friends grandfather was having trouble coping with old age in the morning and evening, so Bezzie Mate - hereafter BM - asked if EN would teach him the ropes acquired via hands-on experience.  In fact both ended up being Gramps assistants for 6 months, partly because EN was so fond of his elderly friend.  Gramps had a mortal fear of retirement homes and his junior home helps enabled him to stay at home.  Art!

We feel his fear

     There were also a couple of Gramp's children in the background, and other grandkids, who appeared to have all the moral equivalency of a flock of vultures.

     This became apparent when Gramps had a stroke and died a couple of days later.  His will-reading involved EN, to his surprise, and here Gramps proved that his wits were sharp until the end - because he split the estate according to a POINTS system.

Letter/phone call = 1 point

Visit = 2 points per hour

Practical help = 3 points

These were totalled over a 3 year period

Son 1 = 8 points

Son 2 = 10 points

Grandkid 1 = 150 points

Grandkid 2 = 133 points

BM = 7,341 points

EN = 5,883

     The estate was going to be liquidated and the total divvied up between people according to their POINT total.

     The sons respectively nearly had a myocardial infarction when they heard these terms, and tried to sue.

     Which meant they got nothing; wily old Gramps had a secret clause in the will that invalidated inheritance for anyone trying to sue.

     O delicious Schadenfreude!

Conrad Polishes His Frothing Nitric Ire

I have to use it every so often, lest it become feeble and as dangerous as a leaky sachet of vinegar.  What am I fulminating about again?  The inevitable and unstoppable progress of "Strictly Come Dancing" is what, surely this program cannot be real and is simply a jest put on (at considerable expense and effort) to mock Your Humble Scribe?

     The other matter annoying me is, of course - obviously! - Codewords.  The compilers are getting far too cocky and seem to think they're not vulnerable to a good Remote Nuclear Detonation or twenty.  Wrong.  That peculiar orange sky a short while back?  What remained of a stable of compilers.

EXPUNGE: "To delete or erase; to blot out" states my Collins Concise, and it inevitably has a Latin root, "Expungere", meaning "To blot out" and is in turn derived from 'Pungere', which means 'To prick' and we'll call a halt at this point.  Yes yes yes, all well and good, but are we still living in 1859 and writing lilke Dickens?  NO!  NO WE ARE NOT!!  Art?

Another compiler expunged

HELIX: A spiral.  Why can't they just use the word 'spiral' instead?  O, because that doesn't sound pseudy and intellectual enough, I'll warrant.  It comes to us from the Greek "Helissein", meaning 'To twist', a motion that ought to be applied to the neck of whomever compiler dreamed this up.  Art!

Any excuse.

STOIC:"A member of the ancient Greek school of philosophy founded by Zeno, holding that virtue and happiness can only by submission to destiny and the natural law."  Thanks, CC.

     Typically in today's descriptions using this word, it means a person indifferent to pleasure or pain.  This philosophy must be what's driving these compilers.  Art!

     Must be a new, more modern translation.  Ha!  Look at those numpties wanting hundreds of pounds for their ex-rare edition; I'll be they're not feeling very stoic now.

Conrad Comes Over Critical

The usual suspects - musicians quivering under the table or behind the sofa because Citric Critic Conrad is criticising their lyrics - can rest easy.  This time.  Art!

     This is the end of the Dredd serial "Raptaur", and it ends with more of a whimper than a scream, which is a shame, as they had built up the titular monster into quite a beast.  I must have missed a bit of exposition because I don't recall Raptaur's origins being explained, apart from the Judges pondering whether it was a mutant or an escapee from ' - one of the alien zoos.'

      Which raises more questions than it answers.  The Big Meg has zoos full of alien exhibits?  Repeat after me, "What can possibly go wrong!"

     I shall now consider tonight's homework to be reading the serial again and paying closer attention.

I Couldn't Resist

I do try to keep the conflict on the ground in Ukraine to a minimum on BOOJUM!, as we have only recently made up the lost audience members who rather jibbed at such content.  Occasionally an item comes along that challenges this silence and yesteryon was just such an occasion.  Art!

     It seems that the canny and crafty Ukes have fitted up a drone that carries a payload of thermite, which is usually iron oxide and aluminium oxide.  Once you start thermite burning, you cannot extinguish it; if you set up a pot of it on the bonnet of your car and ignite, it will destroy the engine block.  This drone probably carries a large flowerpot filled with thermite (which the orcs have mis-translated as 'Termite'), and ignites it when nearing the opposition.  Whatever utility it has may be questionable, but it looks absolutely TERRIFYING in action.  It has already earned the nickname 'Smaug' and there will be others in considerably worse taste - "The Dragon Drone" "The Human Scorch" "Flaming Termites" "Roast Porc" etcetera etcetera.

Finally -

You can tell when a person is truly, truly middle-aged because they go on about the nights drawing in, after the longest day has passed.

     Yeah, well, that's why we have electric lighting not torches made out of tarry straw, Grandad.

     Ceiaou!

A Vanishing

Coming Up With A Picture For This Is A Bit Tricky

After all, what can you show - an empty chair?  "Look, look, look at what's not there" might be accurate and truthful, if rather dull.  I could have put Wire's "Chairs Missing" up as a picture, except we've already used it and I hate to recycle previous artwork.  Art!

     This claims to be "The" instead of "A", a conceit we will ignore in the interests of brevity.  In case you're unfamiliar, it's about the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers from Eilean Mor lighthouse, a desolate post on a bleak Scottish island.  Art!

     Obviously - of course! - all three were swept away thanks to wave action with none of the bodies being recovered.  This is what happened, which hasn't stopped film companies with dollar signs in their eyes making up extensive lies about it.  So, three vanishings for the price of one.

     Then there is another film called "The Vanishing", which is a remake of a Dutch original.  Art!

     I have seen it and remember nothing but Keefer's character buying an army jacket at a thrift store to embellish a lie that he's living.  I can't remember who vanished or if they came back again.

     Then we get to Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce.  I've mentioned him many a time in the blog, because his intensely citric and dark wit chimes well with Conrad.  He came from a large family and lacked much formal schooling, not really becoming anyone important until the South Canadian Civil Unpleasantness broke out, when he joined the Union army.  Art!

     He joined as a private, got commissioned in 1863 and ended up a brevet-major, so quite a successful career.  Also a career that led to him experiencing quite enough of the horrors of war, lending a distinct cast to the way he saw the world.

     As an author of short stories, he wrote three that dealt with Mysterious Disappearances, which you might also call Vanishings.  We've mentioned one already, "Charles Ashmore's Trail", about a boy who vanishes mid-trail when going to get a pail of water.  There is also "An Unfinished Race", set in Britain, where a tailor, running a race to win a bet, stumbles on the road and - vanishes.  I seem to recall this story being flounced about as being a real-life Mystery Disappearance.

     I cannot lay my hands on that elusive third story, which might be present in the collection "Can Such Things Be?" - Art!

Story 1: The Death Of Halpin Frayser - Section 1 Section 2 Section 3 Section 4 Story 2: The Secret Of Macarger's Gulch Story 3: One Summer Night Story 4: The Moonlit Road: Section 1 - Statement Of Joel Hetman, Jr. Section 2 - Statement Of Caspar Grattan Section 3 - Statement Of The Late Julia Hetman, Through The Medium Bayrolles Story 5: A Diagnosis Of Death Story 6: Moxon's Master Story 7: A Tough Tussle Story 8: One Of Twins Story 9: The Haunted Valley: Section 1: How Trees Are Felled In China Section 2: Who Drives Sane Oxen Should Himself Be Sane Story 10: A Jug Of Sirup Story 11: Staley Fleming's Hallucination Story 12: A Resumed Identity: Section 1: The Review As A Form Of Welcome Section 2: When You Have Lost Your Life Consult A Physician Section 3: The Danger Of Looking Into A Pool Of Water Story 13: Hazen's Brigade Story 14: A Baby Tramp Story 15: The Night-Doings At "Deadman's": A Story That Is Untrue Story 16: Beyond The Wall Story 17: A Psychological Shipwreck Story 18: The Middle Toe Of The Right Foot: Section 1 Section 2 Section 3 Story 19: John Mortonson's Funeral Story 20: The Realm Of The Unreal: Section 1 Section 2 Section 3 Section 4 Section 5 Story 21: John Bartine's Watch - A Story By A Physician Story 22: The Damned Thing: Section 1: One Does Not Always Eat What Is On The Table Section 2: What May Happen In A Field Of Wild Oats Section 3: A Man Though Naked May Be In Rags Section 4: An Explanation From The Tomb Story 23: Haita The Shepherd Story 24: An Inhabitant Of Carcosa Story 25: The Stranger

     No, I don't have time to read them all and track it down.

     "Why trot out all this stuff about 'Bitter' Bierce?" I hear you quibble.

     Good point.

     Because, gentle reader, Bierce himself was the subject of a mysterious disappearance.  In late 1913 he expressed his intent to 'see a bit of a fight' before he kicked the bucket, and allegedly planned to travel to Mexico, then in the grip of a bloody civil unpleasantness.  Since countries wracked by revolutions are not known for the efficiency of their postal service, it was long into 1914 before people suspected that Bierce had died.  Art!

     That's the film of a novel that had him dying in Mexico.  He had supposedly written a letter to friends from Chihuahua, saying that he was in the saddle - except there is no proof such a letter ever existed.  This has not stopped various Mexican towns claiming to be where he died.

     Other, smarter people than I (a few exist) have surmised that Bierce's plan was a complete misdirection, that he never even crossed the border into Mexico and instead committed suicide at a remote and desolate location in the Grand Canyon.

     The fact remains that no trace of him has ever been found.  Ergo: a vani

The Wrightson Stuff

More of Berni, or Bernie, either seems to be acceptable.  Yes, we are back in the FPG trading cards artwork again.  Art!

     Ol' Bern sure did like bodies rising from the grave, didn't he?  Conrad - ever the realist - doubts this could easily happen, because your modern coffin is a very robust piece of kit, nor are human hands better at excavation than a spade or shovel.  Or - they're just at the end of a weekend-long bender on alcohol and illegal pharmaceuticals?

"The War Illustrated Edition 193 November 1944"

Let us see what they have for us today.  Don't forget the two-week minimum mandated delay between a photographer taking a picture and it appearing in TWI.  Art!

     Ah yes, the Greeks.  They had given the original Italian invasion a right shoeing, forcing the Teutons to intervene, who were not slowed down much by a British intervention.  Then the Teutons had to take over when Italy joined the Allies and their Greek garrison forces went home, deserted, or joined the Greek resistance organisations.  The Greeks were also fighting a civil unpleasantness between Royalist and Communist factions, and the locals must have been pleased to see the British Freedom Army if it meant a quiet life.  Here at top you see the RAF flying in British forces, below that a column of Greek ELAS partisans on the march, at bottom starboard some Greek urchins make friends with the Tommies - interesting flag selection! - and to port a group of alleged Greek collaborators were rounded up by the RAF Regiment.  Good news for the collaborators as if ELAS got their mitts on them there'd be many a lamp-post being employed as a gibbet.

     This is the Muraglione Pass in Italy, showing you one reason why the campaign there tended to work in fits and starts - there were a lot of mountain ranges to cross.  This picture also shows you the underlying sinews of Allied might; a huge logistical tail to support the combat teeth.  Again, "What's Wrong With This Picture?"  The need to enforce march discipline thanks to the risk of enemy air attack; if this were behind the front lines then you'd see fifty yards between vehicles and a few mobile AA guns.

Disaster Looms!

It's okay, it's only Donold Judas Trump it's happening to.  Bring out the popcorn and get munching, because his TMTG stock continues to - what's the word?

     Plummet!  

     Art?

     Oh dear.  Things really accelerated in September, his stock was only sloooowly declining until then, now it seems to have ramped up.  Conrad wonders if investors are desperately dumping their own stock before Pumpkinhead dumps his and kills the stock value stone dead.

     Must remember to get more popcorn on the weekly shop tomorrow.

Finally -

Better sort out those remaindered pies, hopefully they haven't gone as mouldy as the remaindered somosas, they looked akin to a purple and green leopard.

Chin chin!