Terminological Inexactitudes

What Folks Might Inaccurately Call 'Lies'

After all, you can be sincere and honestly believe in something, only for it to be complete and utter nonsense, yes Milli Vanilli I'm looking at you.  No I shan't explain, go look it up.  

     We shall get to Jake and Anders in good time, Conrad merely wants to set the record straight as regards various Armoured Fighting Vehicles.  Art!

     Yes, that appears to be Queenie STAND UP FOR HER MAJESTY! enjoying herself at the rear of a Rolls-Royce armoured car.  This was a Rolls-Royce chassis with a turret added, as well as armour plating, to enable it to become the metal steed of cavalry regiments, out to scout.  Their mileage was rubbish but you wouldn't get traffic wardens trying to ticket you.  Art!

     Here we see one in it's natural habitat, the desert, where they served during the First Unpleasantness, the inter-war years and the Second Unpleasantness, too.  Different pattern turret this time, with a Vickers machine gun, Boys anti-tank rifle and what might be an Italian light machine gun perched to the rear - the flash-hider looks too long to be a Bren.  Notice the sand-channel used for traversing soft sand.  Art!

     ANYWAY the point Your Humble Scribe wanted to make was that, despite having a turret, this is NOT a tank.  Art!

     This, gentle reader, is the M113 Armoured Personnel Carrier, aptly described by Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart as a 'sardine tin', except it was made of aluminium not tin.  It's purpose was to carry the squishy vulnerable infantry into action, preserving their delicate hides from bullets or shrapnel, and inclement weather.  Yes, it has tracks, but it is still NOT a tank.  Art!

     Say hello to the Paladin M109 Self-Propelled Gun, which has tracks and a turret and yet is still NOT a tank.  That mighty cannon, which might have Mister Freud raising his eyebrows a bit, is an artillery piece intended for indirect fire, not for engaging battlefield targets in a direct fire role.  Despite looking all 'Alli' and hard as nails, the Paladin, like all SPGs, has thin armour because it's intended to be fighting miles behind the front lines.

     There will now be a short hiatus as I go check on the Barm Brack

     Looking good!

      ANYWAY what I wanted to spotlight here was another sloppy use of imprecise language, which torments me more than toothache or indigestion.  Art!

     "Long-range", "Long-range", "Long-range".  They all say the same thing and they are WRONG!  Here we introduce my first Expert Witness, Jake Broe, whom we have mentioned many a muckle here on the blog, for several reasons.  One is his expression of speechless incredulity as he describes the Orange Land Whale and adherents latest bottomholery.  Another is that he's a South Canadian Air Force veteran of six years service, whose day job was babysitting a wing of Minuteman III Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles.  Art!

    Surprise!  Images of him as a serving USAF officer at Minot AFB are kind of hard to find, because OPSEC.  Jake has pointedly made the - er - point that ATACAMS and Storm Shadow (and SCALP, sooner or later) are NOT long-range missiles.  They are, in fact, short-range missiles.  Despite whereabouts in Modern-day Mordor they are falling.  Art!

    The ATACMS and Stormzy have a maximum range of 300 kilometres, which sounds like a lot to the uninformed, and it would hurt your feet if you had to walk that far, but it's not long-range as missiles are defined.  Art!

     This is Captain Anders Nielsen of the Royal Danish Navy, whom works in intelligence matters, and probably knows a whole lot more than he's allowed to relate.  He, too, has taken up the cudgels of Accuracy in defence of Truth, and took pains to explains that weapons like the Tomahawk or Kalibr have ranges of up to 2,000 kilometres.  Those are long-range missiles.  The Ruffian Kh-101, when launched from an airborne platform (a long-winded way of saying 'a plane'), has a range of 5,000 kilometres.  Art!

"About War And Peace"

     Anders is careful to post his vlog out of uniform, or he'd be unemployed.

     As he accurately expounds, the ATACMS is seen as a tactical missile system, instead of Ruffian systems like their 'Oreshnik', which come bundled with a strategic image.  Art!

Fred and war

     Remember, as Nietzsche might have said, as you define language, so language defines you.  
     

On Track With Barm Brack

Conrad's baking renaissance continues.  Today I have made 'Barm Brack' from my "1,000 Recipes Cookbook", and the secret for this cake or tea-bread is in the preparation.  The night before, you make up 3/4 of a pint of tea, and soak 12 ounces of dried fruit in it, having mixed in 7 ounces of sugars.  Art!

That makes a billion recipes.  Food for thought.

     Then you line a 2-pound loaf tin with a double layer of greased baking paper.  The fruit-and-tea mixture is added to flour and a single egg, the whole lot goes in the oven and - Art!

     It's a dead simple recipe, unlike the original Barm Brack, which seems to be a yeasted loaf with dried fruit, more akin to Bara Brith than tea-bread.  The proof, as ever, will be in the eating, which will commence tomorrow.  I will let you know.

Gaining Traction

Unless you have been divorced from contact with the news of late, you cannot but have noticed that things are getting fruity in Syria again, thanks to the amalgam of Syrian opposition groups burying the hatchet and not in each other.

     This allows me to focus on the tyrant-wannabe Assad.  Art!

The pillock can't even manage a Hitler salute

     If I may be cruel and personal, and I may be since WHOSE BLOG IS IT? I have always felt that Bashar looks like "The Stupid Boyfriend" in an Ealing comedy of the Thirties, and a whole lot of people over on Twitter <sneers at Elong Tusk> agree with me.  Let me know in the Comments if you think we have a winner here.

More Journey With Bernie

I've done my due diligence and yes, #41 is visible on teh Interwebz, so let us gaze on "Visitor".  Art!

     Conrad cannot remember a monstrous multi-legged entity appearing in the pages of "Treasure Island" but it was a long time ago when I last read it.

Terminological Exactitude

You may, or may not, be aware of the recent Georgian elections where their pro-Putin party were ridiculously obvious in stealing the vote.

     The general population of Georgia, who saw their election being traduced before their very eyes, are most definitely aware.  They have been out on the streets protesting, en masse.  Art!

     

     Conrad has to admit a certain frisson of support for these people who wield their flag, so closely akin it is to our own St George's flag in This Sceptred Isle.

     Look at the number of protesters.  Sheer mass presents a problem to the authorities, who cannot simply kill them all, nor arrest them, because they don't have half a million police.  Recall, if you will, 2014 and Ukraine, when the pro-Putin political puppet was forced to flee -

     Except back then Putinpot had a large, well-armed, well-trained army poised for action.  Today he cannot even spare a thought, let alone a rapid intervention force, for Syria, because troubles come in threes.  Or fours.  Or forty-fours.

Finally -

Get ready for a proper grilling.

Come On Down -

Paul Simon!

Normally, if this were a conventional BOOJUM! Ol' Paul would be hiding behind the sofa as we mercilessly mocked him in A Little Musical Critique, which he would totally deserve.  Today, however - that magic word again! - we are merely using a song title or two of his, because 1) We can, and 2) They're relevant.  Art!

     This is by way of an intro to the DANGEROUS! Toys Of The Sixties, and you may be ahead of me here when I say this Intro is about the hideously dangerous "Slip 'n' Slide", an apparently harmless children's toy that brought death and disaster in it's wake.  Art!

     We'll come back to that advisory, O Yes Indeed.  I am indebted to "Mental Floss" for in-depth information about this Dodgy Devil's Device.  The toy has it's origins with a Mr. Carrier - yes that's really his name - who worked as an upholsterer, and who observed his 10-year old son and friends sliding down a painted concrete driveway, having turned a garden hose onto the surface to remove friction.

     Ol' Bob - first name 'Robert' and a splendid first name it is, too - decided to engineer a safer method of sliding on a slick surface, and - Art!

Naugahyde upholstery

     He brought home a 50 foot length of naugahyde, which is totally waterproof, then turned one side over and stitched it intermittently.  Thus, when a hose was applied to the open end, it lubricated the long stretch of fabric.  The device was a draw for all the neighbourhood children, so much so that Ol' Bob patented his device and took the idea to a toy company, who also loved the idea.  Art!

     What they weren't wild about was the cost of naugahyde, so they substituted plastic and the 'Slip 'N' Slide' went on sale in 1961, and it sold like hot, cold and lukewarm cakes.  It is stated that some children added liquid soap to their hosed water to increase their speed.

     Sounds great, right?

     WRONG! or this wouldn't be an Intro and instead merely an item.  Remember this?  Art!

                                        

     The issue here was body mass, as the SNS had been tailored for children with an upper weight limit of 125 pounds.  What happened when an adult decided to try out this slippery fun toy?  Why, in several cases they came to an abrupt stop that caused permanent damage to their spinal column and inflicted partial or complete paralysis.  Conrad cynically wonders if there was beer involved.

     Wham-O were concerned enough to take SNS off the market in the late Seventies, without being sued into oblivion, so well done them.

     HOWEVER! (yes that word again) Wham-O were bought up by Kransco in 1982, and they brought the SNS back.  Art!

About the right size of participant

     Things went swimmingly (excuse the pun) until 1987, when an adult user of his neighbour's SNS suffered a broken neck and partial immobility.  He promptly sued Kransco, who initially offered $250,000 in compensation, which was rejected.  A jury awarded matey $12.3 million, which Kransco negotiated down to $7 million.  Art!

     What follows next sounds like the negotiation phase of "Escape From Atlantis", because Kransco sued their insurance company, America Empire Surplus Lines Insurance Company.  Kransco alleged that they could have settled for $750,000, if AESLIS hadn't fumbled the catch, meaning Kransco had to pay waaaaay above the $1 million they carried in insurance.  Kransco won the case and got - waitforitwaitforit - $17 million in compensation.  Art!

The Slip 'N' Slayed in action

     As if that weren't enough, Kransco got sued again in 1988 by another (adult) victim who had broken their neck on a SNS.  This was quite enough for the company and they stopped production and recalled extant stock.

     That didn't stop Wham-O from being repeatedly purchased by other companies (four at last count) and still being retailed, because the argument goes that it's perfectly safe for children - provided the slide doesn't end in a skip full of used medical sharps - just not for idiot adults.  "They Slip 'N' Slide and that's how they died" is a rather silly epitaph.

Like A Fridge Over Troubled Waters

I did warn you in the Intro.  The new fridge has arrived and is a lot more hi-tec than the 21-year old relic that was taken away, which is not hard.  Art!

     The old device, which was being taken away after being emptied and rendered ice-free and dry.  Art!

     The new fridge, totally rocking the 'Monolith' look from "2001: A Space Odyssey"

     The interior, with LED lighting and cool air circulation.  Speaking of which, I'd better head down to box up the Sunday Stew and check on that dried fruit now soaking in cold Darjeeling tea.  For a Barm Brack, since you ask.

Our Journey Onward With Bernard

Just to throw you once again and choose a name that's neither "Bernie" nor "Berni", because that's how we role here at BOOJUM! and yes role not roll.  Art!

     I've not extracted and enlarged Bern's thoughts on this one, as you ought to be able to read them yourself.  Quite what or who the 'Freaks' are is open to question ONCE AGAIN BERNIE because he doesn't explain what the axeman is doing or being done to.  Conrad would like to believe it's a Home Woodworking Class being given practical instruction.  But that may just be me.

The Haul

From my early finish on Friday, which still seems a bit like cheating even if it isn't.  Conrad cannot complain, he's whined repeatedly about working a nine-hour Monday with a seven-hour Friday - except the Planners have one starting at 10:00 in order to finish at 17:00 again.

     ANYWAY Art!

     That mysterious white slipcase is "Spartacus" in a Special 2-Disk Edition, which promises to be an interesting watch.  This is one film Stanley Kubrick was not over-fond of, as he was beholden to Kirk Douglas, the Executive Producer, who had the ultimate say about what happened and when and how.  The two famously did not get on, Kirk describing Stan as "A talented <vulgarism for bowel movement>" which he had probably discovered in "Paths Of Glory".

    This one seems to have been a 2018 re-release of an 2013 original to cash in on the centenary of the First Unpleasantness.  Matey here is wearing a gas mask but no Small Box Respirator on the other end.  He is wearing a gas mask BUT HAS HIS SLEEVES ROLLED UP which is a big no-no, as Ukranian biolab Satanic mosquitoes mustard gas affects exposed skin.  Finally, he appears to be wielding a Garand M1 rifle, which only came into issue a couple of years into the SECOND Unpleasantness.

     All of that notwithstanding, £1.50 means it would have been rude not to purchase it.  I will let you know, which is either good news or bad news, depending where you stand.

Remember The Triceratops?

It exemplified being stuck on the horns of a dilemma, when the dilemma had only two options for the Putin Fun-Sized Foot Fiddler (he has lifts in his shoes).  Either he ditches Assad and Syria because he cannot afford to send troops, tanks or aircraft from his Special Idiotic Operation, or he slackens the pressure on the Ukes.  Art!

     Another front has been opened, again, because the Georgian people are not happy at being straitjacketed into Ruffian slaves.  This is another toxic headache for Putinpot, who cannot now simply send in the Wagner Group as deniable assets.

Finally -

The pundits on Ruffian state television are all praying for January 20th to come, so that their Holy Saviour the Orange Land Whale will rescue them.

     Except he doesn't seem to give a stuff about what they think or want.  If the Kremlin Gremlin had kompromat on Donald Judas Trump, it has absolutely no value now.  Conrad confidently predicts that Pumpkinhead will spend his Presidency playing golf whilst J D Vance does the heavy lifting.  Furniture being quite weighty.

Our Look Backward

Conrad Was Slightly Surprised To Discover It's Already December

It only hit me when I was exercising Entitled Edna this afternoon between showers, as there were quite a few cars parked up at Tandle Hill Park, again surprising thanks to the grim grey weather.  

     Art!

     That's the AI's vision of "A long line of weird unusual cars".  Let's try again.  Art!

     Better.  And, truth be told, rather like that scene from "Leave The World Behind", where Julia R

     ANYWAY onto the links, methinks.

2023

BOOJUM!: Mickey Mouse's Money Miseries

2022

BOOJUM!: The Future Is Now

2021

BOOJUM!: From Latin To Ruffian

2020

BOOJUM!: Late Braking News

2019

BOOJUM!: Free! Free!

2018

BOOJUM!: The Enormous Dwarf

2017

BOOJUM!: Strange Times

2016

BOOJUM!: S.W.O.R.D!

2015

BOOJUM!: "7 Weirdest Movies Ever!"

2014

BOOJUM!: Guardians Of The Galaxy

2013

BOOJUM!: Hipster Conrad

Un-Natural Appetites

Back To Bulgasari

I did threaten you with this yesteryon.  So far we've covered the two films that were made about this mythical Korean beast, rather than the folklore original.  It was composed of elements from many different animals: the body of a bear, an elephant's trunk, the eyes of a rhino, the claws of a tiger and the tail of a bull.  Bit of an anti-climax, the tail.  One has to wonder how familiar medieval Koreans were with the African rhino, too.  Art!

     One doesn't really get a sense from this particular picture but it's fur was made out of needles <bites tongue to avoid bad punnery>.

     The most interesting thing about it, to Conrad's curious mind, is that it ate metal, specifically iron (and presumably steel, too).  The legend goes that it was created in miniature form by a monk, from rice grains, and fed upon needles, which helped it to grow.  Having acquired a taste for metal, the Bulgasari grew bigger the more metal it ate - Art!

     Yes indeed, because thanks to the inverse square law, the bigger the beastie got, the more metal it needed to consume, which inevitably led to a clash with the authorities of that time.  Property damage is property damage even a thousand years ago, matey.

     There is no satisfactory end to the Bulgasari's tale, as it was either vanquished by monks - soldiers proved woefully ineffective as it simply ate their arrows and swords - or it's still out there and, if you have a problem no-one else can solve, and you can contact it, you may be able to hir - no, wait a minute, that was "The A-Team" wasn't it?  Quick, Art, a picture!

     Conrad strongly suspects that it will be found lurking near scrapyards or ship breakers, as only thus is it going to assuage it's dietary requirements.  Art!

     This is Ro-Jaws, one half of the terrible pun "Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein", being a stand-in.  There was a one-off story in "2000AD" with art by Dave Gibbons about a pestilential plague of metal-eating invaders, which looked rather like metallic starfish.  Can I find a single picture from this story?  No I cannot!  "Dan Dare", "Harlem Heroes" and "Rogue Trooper" yes in abundance, but nothing under "Future Shocks" or "Time Twisters".  So Ro-Jaws it will have to be.  He - definitely a 'he' - is a cheeky sewer droid, designed and intended to clean out sewers, so he's pretty much an omnivore with an irreverent attitude.  We'll not go into any detail about what a sewer droid eats, and in fact - Art!

     This is an hilarious Czechoslovak sci-fi satire from 1977, which features an extremely handy cleaning agent in a bottle.  Dirty dishes?  Just sprinkle a little of the magic organovore on them and Hey Pesto! the dishes are clean again as it just ate all the remains.  Art!

     

     Okay, okay, it dissolved the dishes as well, so what, this is the future where crockery is endless and cheap.  That stuff is pretttttty potent, so much so that - Art!

     Dead body you want to keep out of sight?  No problemo!  You see, matey left that bottle of "Bio" at the side of the bath WITH THE CAP OFF - 

     Ooopsie.  

     Abracadabra no more cadaver.  They really ought to put a warning on that bottle, or a valve in the neck.

     Equally futuristic, if unremittingly bleak, was "Doomwatch", which was available on a couple of BBC video cassettes back in the day, and surprise surprise, what do we have here but - Art!

     This is the cautionary tale of an artificial virus created to consume all plastics, in order to minimise the effect of said plastic waste on the environment.  Trouble is, it gets loose from the test environment it was used in and out into the real world, where it proceeds to cause havoc and a plane crash.  After all, if your electro-mechanical controls function thanks to plastic parts and plastic-sheathed wiring, losing all that is going to be rather terminal.  Art!

     The killing joke of a plastic cassette housing a plastic tape, all inside a robust plastic box is not lost on me.
     Right, I've made myself hungry thanks to all that talk of eating, time for lunch.

The Killer Klackers Of B A Baracus!

Because I mentioned the A-Team earlier and because it rhymes, not because it has any basis in fact.  For Lo! we are back on the Dangerous Toys For Girls And Especially Boys, this time with an equal-gendered risk.  Art!

     They don't come much simpler than this: two plastic balls connected by a string, with a tab on the string for holding this infernal device.  The idea, as you may have already gathered from their title, was to jiggle the tab up and down until the balls collided with each other.  Whoopee.  They must have been easily pleased back in the Sixties, hmmmm?  Art!

You, madam, are old enough to know better

     They only just make the Sixties criteria by coming onto the market in 1969, and by 1971 they were banned in South Canada and British America thanks to their occasional habit of shattering when impacting together.  Conrad remembers a much slimmer version of him at school when they were banned there in 1972 or 1973.  Conrad himself would have been safe thanks to wearing glasses, which is selfish but honest.

"The War Illustrated Edition 198 19th January 1945"

I cannot recall what I took photographs of, so this will be a journey of mutual discovery.  Art!

     You can guess that this is Holland thanks to the flatness of the terrain and that windmill in the background in Picture One.  You can also tell this is winter thanks to the snow on their position.  What a miserable job they have, waiting patiently for a Luftwaffe that was on it's last wings and which might never appear, whilst they grow gills.  The Teutons, you see, had demolished Dutch dykes in order to create flood conditions, the bally swine.

     The sappers at bottom are laying logs to create what is known as a 'corduroy road', thanks to the original road surface doing an impression of a swamp.  Yes, it might freeze solid, but then again it might thaw loose again.  Art!

A Teutonically precise corduroy road

When Getting A Horn Is A Very Bad Thing

Art!

     This is a physical representation of a dilemma, and being on the horns of one.  Typically, a dilemma leaves the victim two options, each as bad as the other.  Not a situation one wishes to be in, yet this is where Putinpot finds himself as of this week.  You see, his low-profile involvement in Syria has just erupted into the headlines in the worst way.  In a comeback as startling as that of the Orange Land Whale, the Syrian rebel army has just conquered Aleppo and is pushing south.  Assad's army has abandoned a ton of kit in order to be able to run away faster, and their Ruffian allies have also established land speed records in retreating.  Art!

      Ruffia stands to lose their naval base at Tartus, on the Syrian coast, their only base in the Mediterranean, and their airbases are also under threat.  Before the Special Idiotic Operation, Putinpot would have thrown air power against the rebels, but he can't do that now - not only has the VDV lost over 300 aircraft, it remains committed to the war on Ukraine.  He cannot send 10,000 soldiers to prop up Assad as he needs every single one for the war on Ukraine.  He can't send in the Wagner Group as he dismantled it.  He will probably make a lot of noise about how he's going to help and then do nothing.  I wonder if we'll see another video of him looking as if he had toothache in his rectum whilst Gerasimov lies remotely to him?

     Sorry, that was supposed to be a map and a note, not a minor essay.

Finally -

Off to take pictures of fridge.