BOOJUM!

Friday, 3 January 2025

I Got You

Yes, That's Ambiguous

What did you expect? This is BOOJUM! after all, where the shortest distance between two points is a boring story.

First of all, NO! this is nothing to do with Sonny and Cher, because do you see "Babe" in that title? Art!

~~Dinner on the hoof~~ BABE! I mean Babe.

Hmmmm I don't want to start Art's 2025 off with a Tazering so we'll let that one stand.

No, the song I was thinking of was by Split Enz, who seem to have taken spelling lessons from Slade. Art!

Allow me to make my point with a selection from their lyrics.

I don't know why sometimes I get frightened

You can see my eyes, you can tell that I'm not lying

Then allow me to amend them slightly in order to kick-start this Intro.

I don't know why sometimes I get frightened

You can see my eyes, you can tell that I'm not Lyon

For Lo! we are into another tale generated by that Youtube Reddit question "What's the fastest way you've seen a CEO ruin a company?" Art!

Drugs R Bad

Nope, I'm not going to apologise for going off at a tangent, deal with it, this is how we role around here. Art!

This is the company that Michael Lyon inherited from his father. It was already successful in the Sacramento area, and he expanded it even further, making it a significant local player, whilst still being a family-run firm, which is very unusual in real estate.

Michael seems to have been undergoing a mid-life crisis, which lead to his wife of 24 years, Kim, divorcing him, with a few grace notes present. Except 'grace' was entirely lacking and the separation got positively toxic.

'I Got You' and indeed Kim did, because she knew where all the bodies were buried, and O Boy! were there a couple of cemeteries-worth. Mike was an utter chump in alienating a lady who had all the dirt to dish. Did she dish? She sure did! Art?

She went to the FBI, and explained in detail how hubbo had blown $300,000 on drugs, prostitutes and pornography - in the space of two months.

The agent's interest was piqued. Kim, secure in the knowledge that she had their attention, then informed them that hubbo had installed a sophisticated camera system in the house and would video his guests, relatives and the Ladies Of The Night. All without their consent.

Upon his arrest in 2010, Mike pleaded guilty to 4 counts of 'Felony Eavesdropping', a 'Felony' being the far more serious charge rather than a 'Misdemeanour'. He got a four year sentence, and proved he'd learned nothing because in October 2014, being on probation, the police paid him a visit. Art!

They found a cocktail of drugs in his apartment, and he went right back to prison. He'd also been doing his video voyeur act again, and this time he got hit with sixteen counts of 'Felony Eavesdropping'.

Eight members of his domestic staff sued him for recording them without consent, and Ol' Mikey had to pony up $2.5 million in compensation.

This sordid saga didn't end there, as in 2021 he appealed against the original Felony Eavesdropping charges, claiming that prostitutes had no expectation of privacy in the - ah - 'execution of their duties' at a client's residence. This got thrown out of court, too. Art!

It probably comes as no surprise to learn that Mike's antics badly damaged the branding and reputation of Lyons Real Estate - "Drugs, hookers and porn" doesn't really sell the image of a respectable family business. His father had established the company 78 years prior until, also in 2021, it was acquired by Windermere Real Estate and has now vanished.
Way to go, CEO!

A Butter Tomorrow

No! I am not talking about an early entry of John Woo's, featuring Chow Yun Fat, which I used to have on VHS, but which does allow me to insert a click-baity photograph. Art!

It's a John Woo film; there have to be guns

No, what I want to highlight here is a disconsolate Ruffian at the supermarket, who films himself inspecting packs of butter. Every man ought to have a hobby, even if this one is a bit dull. Art!

That rather depends on what one calls 'urgent', doesn't it? Matey picked out a pack of butter to demonstrate what he was pointing out. Art!

To put this in perspective, a week ago it cost just under $2, and now it costs about $3.50. Food inflation in Modern-day Mordor is a very real thing, especially as the average weekly wage comes in at less than ₽1,000. Art!

Note that they're short-changing customers here as a pack of butter here in Perfidious Albion costs £2, and we get 225 grams of it. So, we get almost half as much again for ₽100 less. So the orcs are facing a dilemma; they can afford potatoes but no butter to go with them OR they buy butter and then can't afford potatoes.

It's almost as if there's a huge background event causing food inflation like this, if only he and I knew what it was .....

Hello!

Conrad found this picture on his Word notes page, where I keep text and pictures for later use. The thing is, age and gin have addled my wits, rather, and I can't remember why I copied it. Enough prevarication - Art!

Not a thing of beauty, is it? What you are looking at, head-on, is a Nimrod Airborne Early Warning aircraft, based on the venerable Nimrod airframe. As an AEW it's role would be to stooge around at height, picking up enemy air activity, tracking friendlies and informing the latter of the former. Art!

Conrad is not an expert on matters aerial, yet is prettttty sure they don't make AEWs like this any more, where the radomes are located at nose and tail. Nowadays they tend to mount them on a platform above the hull.

Now we are all better educated than we were five minutes ago. BOOJUM! educating people.

Czeching Out

I well remember my Pub Quiz partner, Rosie, explaining how well-organised the Czechs in Prague were when it came to the removal of snow. She and Phil had taken a short break there, possibly tempted by Czech beers, and it had snowed. Hay Pesto! out came an array of vehicles intended to give snow a good seeing-to and send it packing. Art!

Why do I mention this? Because once again in This Sceptred Isle we have had a light dusting of snow and what is the result? PANIC PANIC THE END TIMES ARE UPON US WITH EXTRA ADDED COLDNESS!

Not here in Royton. The light dusting vanished later in the morning when it began to rain, thank you so much, weather. Art!

This illo is from the BBC's News website, stating it to be in Northumberland, an ill-defined region in the distant North where only the local squire has the vote and electricity is spurned as being black magic*.

Dear Diary

Your Humble Scribe is going to have to travel into either Ur-on-the-Roch or Babylon Lite in order to get a new 2025 diary, because he is a dinosaur and if it's not written down in physical form on a piece of paper, then it doesn't exist to him. Travel will be a pain, what with the roadworks outside The Mansion <fed-up face>.

* Perhaps.

Thursday, 2 January 2025

The Hooded Cape

I Know, I Know

It sounds like the arch-villain from the "Perils Of Penelope Pitstop", whom is possibly the only girl you can call 'racy' without impugning her morals or dress code. Art!

I'm calling this a breach of the Trade Descriptions Act. For one thing, he has perfectly normal hands, not claws or talons. For another, he's wearing a mask and a hat, and a hood is noticeable BY IT'S ABSENCE. "The Masked And Hatted Hands" is a bit feeble as a name to strike terror into the onlooker.

ANYWAY of course this has nothing to do with the rest of this Intro, because I want to introduce you to the Late Latin <spit hack> word 'Birrus', which means - you may be ahead of me here - 'Hooded Cape'. From this we derive the name for a 'Stiff square clerical hat' as worn by official in the Roman Catholic church. Art!

This is known as a 'Biretta' and also the alternative spelling 'Beretta', which is where James Bond - or, rather, Sean Connery - comes in. He narrated a film clip from the Sixties whilst on location for "Goldfinger", about a Mister Geoffrey Boothroyd, Ian Fleming and 007. Art!

Which makes sense when you think about it. As if the South Canadians would allow a film production company - and one hailing from Perfidious Albion at that - anywhere near anywhere near Fort Knox.

ANYWAY AGAIN Mister Boothroyd was a big fan of guns, and after reading "From Russia With Love" he got in touch with Ian Fleming about 007's personal weapon of choice. Art!

This, Dougal, is a 0.25 calibre Beretta, Our James' original weapon of choice. Mr. Boothroyd explained in some detail about what he felt a secret agent ought to use as a weapon, and it wasn't the dainty little Beretta. O noes. Art!

You could get away with language like that in the Sixties <sighs wistfully>.

Here an aside. Conrad courts controversy! Edward Gibbon, author of "The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire", was convinced that it was Christianity that did in the empire, and contemporary critics are likewise convinced that the decline of Western civilisation can be traced to exactly that point when women got the vote, be

ANYWAY AGAIN AGAIN Mister Boothroyd managed to convince Ol' Flemmy to have James adopt the Walther PPK - which stand for "Pistole Polizei Kriminal". Ol' Boothy himself preferred a revolver as an agent's weapon of choice, which is fair enough, as they are more mechanically reliable than a self-loading pistol. He proposed to test-fire a Beretta, a PPK and a .44 Ruger Magnum, using tins of tomato puree as targets to exemplify the ballistics involved. Art!

The three degrees

Ol' Boothy mentions that the Beretta is a very compact weapon, easy to conceal. The PPK is a compromise of power and portability. The Ruger is a real man-stopper but it's sheer size works against it as a concealable weapon. Art!

Onto the tins of tortured tomato. Ol' Boothy leads with the Beretta. Art!

That's the thing. The Beretta is small and easy to carry and conceal, but the downside is that the ammunition doesn't have a lot of stopping power. You would need to hit your opponent in the head or heart to encourage their jitterbugging off this mortal coil, and they might delay proceedings in order to shoot back at you. Art!

Next up is the PPK, and you can see there is a lot more damage inflicted. A delay in jitterbugging is looking less likely here. Art!

The .44 Magnum round demolishes the can and contents. Sorry, tin of tormented tomatoes. Art!

British understatement at it's finest.

Clearing Out My Bookmarks

Conrad only recently discovered the 'Bookmark' function on Twitter, which is a great way of tabbing an item and coming back to it later on, when the gin and seven-course meal have worn off. The Intro above is from a Bookmarked item, and here we have another. Art!

Cum nu vii tu, Ţepeş doamne, ca punând mâna pe ei,

Să-i împarţi în două cete: în smintiţi şi în mişei,

Şi în două temniţi large cu de-a sila să-i aduni,
Să dai foc la puşcărie şi la casa de nebuni.

Yes, it's Romanian. No, I'm not certain what it says. Allow me to exploit Google Translate.

Why don't you come, Tepeş lady, as if laying hands on them,

Divide them into two groups: the crazy and the poor,

And in two large prisons with de a sila to gather them,
Set fire to the prison and the madhouse.

Right. Right.

No, not any clearer. Art!

That's Vlad Tepes, original Romanian inspiration for the tale of Dracula. I knew we'd end up in Transylvania once Romania got mentioned!

I don't think I can really impose on Daractenus, that Bookmark was from August and here we are 5 months later. Conrad seems to recall that Ol' Darry mentioned every Romanian schoolchild learns this poem by heart.

A First

I won't go into the background of this in any great detail, only to point out to you that Ukraine has been proving that a force of drones can compensate for not having a navy at all, or a lack of long-range bomber aircraft. Art!

You might call this an example of asymmetrical warfare, as a cheap naval drone, the 'Magura' - Art!

Magura with puny human for scale

- has shot down a Ruffian Mi-8 helicopter, costing millions of $$$, and sent the crew jitterbugging off this mortal coil, too. It was bound to happen, the Ukrainians have been using heavy machine guns on their drone boats already, damaging Ruffian helicopters and their crews. Commentators on social media have made much of this as a first, whilst Your Humble Scribe wonders if it will become one of many. The Ruffians, you see, have always flushed their helicopters to act as gunships to hunt down Ukrainian naval drones. Now the calculation will have to be: is this a genuine drone attack or are they just trying to bait our choppers? Suck it and sea.

Excuse briefly, got to go check out the Barm Brack. Done with gluten-free self-raising flour, so I need to check how raising it's being.

Not enough. Tented.

Our Journey With Bernie

Wrightson, not Madoff. Just so we're clear. Wouldn't want the portrayer of ghastly monstrous macabre nightmarish artwork to have to sit shoulder to shoulder with a white-collar criminal, would we? Art!

For Your Information, "Gesundheit" is what South Canadians say instead of "Bless You" when a person sneezes. This chap sneezing would shatter all the windows in the lower floor. In case you can't make out the notes, Ol' Bern was doing storyboard illustrations for an adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's "Shadow Over Innsmouth" which never came to fruition. Stuck in Development Hell. Or, in this case, Development H. P. Lovecraft.

Interesting!

A couple of years ago the Ruffians put out a propaganda video that was actually quite amusing. In it, a young European girl gets the Christmas gift of a hamster. Art!

"Rozhdestvoe" - Ruffian for "Christmas"

By the next year all the Ruffian gas had been cut off, so Europe was freezing, and the hamster was powering the family's Christmas decorations. Noble hamster!

The following year they end up eating hamster soup.

The thing is, this is all coming true in reverse. Remember all the street bonfire parties the serfs in Ruffia had to arrange last winter, when their heating and power broke down? Well, now an entire region is going to undergo similar - Art!

That purple section is Transnistria, a Ruffian enclave they nicked in 1945 and have never been kicked out of. It was supplied with cheap Ruffian gas, for which the locals were grateful, up until the beginning of Putinpot's Special Idiotic Operation. Then they were given three year's notice that Ukraine would NOT be allowing the transit of Ruffian gas across it's territory.

Transnistria's leaders - if you can grace them with such a term - obviously believed that the war would be over long before their three years were up and that Ruffia Mighty Ruffia would prevail, the gas would continue, et flipping cetera.

NOPE.

Ooops.

Now their gas supply has been completely severed. No gas. No hot water. No heating (in winter!). Nobody on the streets. Nothing moving. What's that song by The Specials? O yes. Art!

That horrid sound you can hear in the background is Conrad laughing, because Yes! I am a horrible person.

Wednesday, 1 January 2025

Funny Money Punny

No! That Is Not A Typo For 'Moneypenny'

Which tangential mention allows me to introduce a bit of clickbait, as we all know she was the pining secretary to 'M', that irascible head of MI6 to whom James Bond reported. Art!

ANYWAY today we are going to be focussing on a couple of despicable villains, who come without secret volcano lairs, unfortunately. Ken Adams is long dead, or they might have done well to hire him.

So, Your Humble Scribe has just picked up on a news item about Bernie Madoff, whom you may dimly recall, as his time in the headlines was a good sixteen years ago. Art!

Looking a bit humbled

This is where the numbers come into play. Bernie, you see, made off SORRY COULDN'T RESIST DID SAY PUNNY with enormous amounts of money from his investors, in an elaborate Ponzi scheme.

"What is a P -"

PATIENCE! I shall explain. A PS is a financial fraud where a company appears to pay out big returns to investors thanks to being an absolute dynamo in the marketplace. In reality, that cold hard unforgiving mistress, the original investors are being paid with money deposited by all the later investors, who came along thanks to the very high returns. Caveat emptor! which is Latin <hack spit> for "The Securities and Exchanges Commission Smelt A Fish But Couldn't Find It". They had investigated Bernie's company EIGHT times, thanks to it's ridiculously high rate of returns, yet either they weren't looking very hard, or he was a skilled criminal, because nothing came of these audits. Art!

What did Bernie in (not -off) was what we now call a 'Black Swan Event', an unpredictable and unique crisis which in this case was the financial meltdown of 2008. Nervous investors tried to remove their $7 billion from his business, only to discover that he couldn't pay them. All 41,000 of them. Gee, that's an awful lot of people!

Ol' Burney - picture piles of cash being set on fire - got handed a 150-year prison sentence in 2009, which he was never going to see the end of as he was 70 years old at the time. Sure enough, in 2021 he jitterbugged his way off this mortal coil, having served 12 years in clink.

Now, you may fault the SEC for not catching Bernie whilst he was committing fraud, yet their response afterwards has been epic in scope and duration. The last victims have now been finally compensated to the value of $131 million this month, concluding the sixteen-year process that has returned $4.3 billion. Art!

That's Richard Breeden, ex-head of the SEC and now head of the MVF - 'Madoff Victims Fund' not 'Most Valuable Fraudster', which has returned 94% of the misappropriated money.

This is an excellent achievement, no question, BUT of course - obviously! - wouldn't it have been better to catch Bernie before 2008?

Let's bring on the second scoundrel of this Intro. Art!

To those of you asking "What did he <ahem> do?" the answer is pretttttty darned obvious - 'Crypto' which in BOOJUM! parlance equates to 'Scamble', because so so many of these get-rich-quick schemes are just that. This is the New Financial Criminal at work, who sneers at Bernie's old-school fraud.

Matey here managed two cryptocurrencies that collapsed in 2022, wiping out $40 billion of investor money <Surprised Pikachu Face> who would have suspected that! and triggering a run on the crypto market that saw it lose $400 billion. At this point Ol' Bern would be petitioning for a pardon, because what he did pales into utter insignificance. Which is not something you can often say about a $4 billion fraud. Art!

Do then did, meaning he left South Korea and travelled to Montenegro. Why Montenegro? Because it doesn't have an extradition treaty with either the Sorks or South Canadians. Eighteen months later, as Montenegro's courts decided he could be extradited to South Canada, he tried to sneak off on a plane to Dubai. And was caught. HA!

Conrad strongly suspects he will end up in South Canada and will have to <ahem> do time. I wonder if Thailand will try to extradite him? because then he'd be Thai Kwon Do.

No, Dougal. If it looks to good to be true, it's actually a big fat lie. Save your pennies.

"Bury Your Gays" By Chuck Tingle

Finished reading this loaner from Darling Daughter today, and I have to say it does have a lot of gay in it. Which you might expect just a teeensy bit from the title alone. Art!

Part of the fun is deciphering which real television series or film Chuck is talking about, because he doesn't have the clout or backing to out-and-out name them. "Predatory Hunt" is definitely "Predator". "Dark Encounters" is definitely "The X Files" done lesbian style. The titular "Black Lamb" undergoes a horrifying transmogrification straight out of "The Thing".

His Big Bad, however, is kind of rushed through. I feel he could have done a whole chapter on the aftereffects of <REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED> although that might have driven him into Michael Crichton territory.

Also, Conrad is unsure whether to be impressed or worried that I knew all the musical mentions Ol' Chuck made. He's got to be decades younger than I. Or perhaps I just have awesome musical taste?

"The War Illustrated Edition 200 16th February 1945"

Ah, thanks to the monsoon rains dying down today - I was able to walk Edna in bright sunshine whilst temperatures were barely above freezing today - the usual artillery barrage of fireworks is sounding off across Oldham.

Nothing to do with the item, I just thought I'd inform you. Art?

Ah yes, the fag-end of the Battle of the Bulge. The South Canadians don't like to be reminded that Field-Marshal Montgomery saved the day by taking over on the northern flank of the Teuton counter-offensive and walked on water whilst also raising the dead -

In fact he helped to defeat the Teutons but made this all about him, because Monty had an incredible gift of right royally ticking people off. What you see above are British troops - absent winter camouflage clothing - marching to the front lines, no location given. Art!

"IT WAS NOT MY OFFENSIVE!"

Just Thought I'd Throw This Out There

I did warn you. Art!

Featuring the gassiest alien imaginable. Sincerely, if you've not seen this student film-project beefed up with $100,000, go out there and buy it. At the very least you might learn about phenomenology. And star-surfing.

Monument Valley

This, lest ye be unaware, is a location in South Canada, where erosion has sculpted the landscape in spectacular fashion, much to the delight of film directors, who don't have to pay for an elaborate backdrop. A favourite location of John Huston.

I hope you all appreciate the awesome grandeur of this. Art!

Conrad felt this was appropriate. Here you see the value of the Ruffian ruble versus the dollar, over a one-week period, and I couldn't help but make comparisons. Your mileage may vary but, once again, whose blog is it?

Finally -

Better go sort out those sprouts. They're not going to boil themselves.

Don't Look Brack In Anger

Ha! Do You See What I Did There?

O you do. Conrad keeps threatening to make another Barm Brack because it's an easy recipe that doesn't require a lot of effort.

Well, on the first day of 2025 I'm going to do another set of links, rather than a proper blog entry, because I can. Also because 01/01 is an easy date to select. Also because I've been catching up on "Bury Your Gays", where the Big Reveal has just been - ah - revealed, with 40 pages still to go. Exciting times! Art?