The Tracks Of My Jeers

Bear With Me On This One

Nothing to do with the species 'Ursa' in real life, but very much a metaphorical one, and I'm going to run with this theme to be able to wheel in a click-baity picture.  Art!

     Congrats if you figured out that the 'Bear' in question is a Ruffian one, but did you get what the 'necessities' part referred to?

     I'll bet you didn't.  Allow me to guide you in the right direction with a map I stole from 'Prune60' over on Twitter (ha! take that Elong Tusk!).  Art!

     It isn't the circulatory system of a Resimbulated Thiomine, nor yet the wiring diagram for a Sixties transistor radio.  It is, in fact, the railway network of Mordorvia, appropriately enough in red, as it's a relic of their Sinister history.  The rail network is relatively dense in European Ruffia, getting increasingly sparse as you move out of the regions with high populations to the poverty-stricken provincial backwaters, where a flush toilet is a thing of legend and teh Interwebz are satanic magic.  Art!

'RZD'

     Or, 'Rossiskoe Zhelenye Dorogi' in their barbarous tongue, 'Russian Railways' in proper language.  RZD not only owns and runs the trains, it maintains the track network as well, and is wholly owned by the state, so they can't blame a single tech bro or oligarch if things go agley.

     RZD - made up of 22 subsidiary companies - is tasked with keeping 85,000 kilometres of track in good condition, or at least not too bad condition, running 20,618 locomotives and over 250,000 freight cars, and is/was Ruffia's largest employer, with a workforce 700,000 strong.  
     Why the intermingling of present and past tense?  O I thought you'd never ask!  Art?

     I enjoin you to go visit Ol' Pruney, either on the devi's digital desert, Twitter, or Bluesky, because she puts an awful lot of work into her analysis, of which this is a minor buffing o'er the surface of, never mind a scratch.

     You see, there have been inherent problems in RZD for decades, which have been compounded ever since it came into existence in 2003.  As of April 2024, over a year and a half ago, 50% of Ruffia's locomotives were over 20 years old.  Their own management admitted that age was exacerbated by wear, incorrect operation, how good (or bad!) previous servicing and repair had been, spare parts, depot stocks and the quality of management.  Conrad thinks this last one is a euphemism for 'how corrupt and incompetent they were before they got arrested.'  Art!

"The train on Plaform 13 will never move again"

     'Kyiv Insider', again in 2024, reported RZD's profits had fallen from ₽118 billion in 2023 to ₽14 billion in 2024, or a decline to less than 1/8th.  You can probably anticipate where we're going with this.  Art!

     This is Ol' Pruney's graph showing Ruffian freight tonnage in millions of tons.  Between 2019 and today, the amount of freight shipped has declined at the start of the year by 500,000 tons, and even at peak demand, is still down by 250,000 tons in that month.  A collapse in Ruffian industries across the board has led to sharp drops in tonnage moved, with overworked locomotives and rolling stock degrading capacity still further.  Art!

     A return for 'Beefeater' whom we featured in the article about boars.

     By May of 2025, RZD employees were having their salary cut by 50% to reduce staff costs.  Individual divisions within the business were down to 60% of staff, with a hiring freeze in place, again to keep staff costs down  

     In his August 2025 Tweet he explains that RZD employees are now being sent on unpaid leave for three days of the month, and that their investment program has been slashed by 40%.  Which means far less money for maintaining railway tracks, meaning travel by RZD is going to become as dangerous as travelling by Aeroflot.  Art!

     Case in point.  A derailed train that had been ordered to do 100 k.p.h. on a stretch of track near St. Petersburg only rated for 50 k.p.h. 

     Beefy's latest update as of 2nd December quantifies how badly RZD is doing: ₽4.4 trillion in debt, or $50 billion in proper money.  AND this is only up to the end of Q3, so there's another 3 months for it to get even worse.  The business's cash reserves have shrunk from ₽251 billion to ₽21 billion, $271 million in South Canadian currency, which might sound like a lot.  HOWEVER! O that word again - if we assume that a Ruffian RZD employee's average monthly wage is the equivalent of $1,000 - perhaps a bit on the high side but convenient for calculations - then their collective monthly salary comes to $700 million, or over $2 billion for Q4, that is, eight times what the business has in cash.  Art!

     This hottie Ukrainian ex-diplomat and current scholar in the UK is Maria Drutska, who has also been commenting, with a silent jeer, on the RZD story.  She and Beefy both highlight the Kremlin's extreme reluctance to bail them out with ₽200 billion since this would create a precedent for every other business on bankruptcy's brink, and there are thousands upon thousands of Mordorvian businesses in that situation.  Instead there are talks about reducing debt obligations, increasing rail freight tariffs - where have we heard that as a panacea elsewhere? - or converting debt to shares, which sounds like a scamble to beat the band and Bitcoin.  Who in their wrong mind, let along right, would sign up for that*?  Art!

     It's gotten so bad even the Ruffian print media are acknowledging problems.  The mighty Steve Rosenburg, our man in Barad Dur, noted that the Ruffian paper 'Economica' admitted/confessed/predicted <delete where applicable> that RZD was going to drop in freight volume by 6% this year.  Art!

With helpful Rosenburg Pilot Hi-Techpoint transalation

     None of this is helped by the gradually increasing number of Ukrainian - er - 'interventions' as exemplified by 'Igor Sushko' on Twitter.  Art!

.

     That's a Ruffian 500 Kv substation going up in flames, which used to be able to provide electricity to RZD substations.  Shocking.

DANGER! Will Robinson And Everyone In The Vicinity

Let me illustrate and perhaps entertain in equal parts with another example of outstanding stupidity, by one who will collect a Darwin Award in due course.  Art!

Courtesy 'Discover Tech US'

     The footage is rather grainy, so you may not be able to see that he's working on a lathe, which is spinning it's VERY SHARP edges at incredible RPM.  He wants to reach a tool on the shelf behind the lathe and doesn't bother shifting a couple of feet over, choosing instead to stretch from where he stands, because idle.  Art!

     Before you even look at the next picture, you know what's going to happen, don't you?  Art!

     There's no sound on this clip, but I bet matey was yelling his lungs out, as his dog has woken up and started to get interested.  Art!

      Luckily for him it was a cheap and nasty t-shirt, which shredded apart faster than he could be pulled onto the lathe.  Imagine if it had been anything more robust.  No, he didn't get time to hit the 'Off' switch as the whole clip only takes 7  seconds from stretch to shorts-only.

     Lesson learned.  One hopes.

TACO Taco

That's the acronym for 'Trump Always Chickens Out', referring to how he consistently backs down, off or away when either pretending to stand up to Putinpot, or making hard decisions that require the intellect of a 10-year old.  I have only just discovered, because it was announced with minimal publicity, that 200 food tariffs he had imposed have been rolled back.  Art!

Donold hard at work.  For him.

     Sadly for DJ Tango, tariffs do not magically cause money to be created out of nothing, which he probably read in a Christmas cracker joke when he was 8 and took to heart.  In fact they have pushed up the South Canadian cost of living and if there's one thing they hate hate hate above all else, never mind war, famine, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes or poison ivy, it's having to pay more for their groceries.

Half A Loaf

Conrad has been merrily bashing 'Tank Encyclopedia' for Lo! these many months as they use either the Bob Semple or another incorrect vehicle as the thumbnail for their items on my news feed.

     Today they get it half-right.  Art

     'Captured' is stretching the truth, rather.  You see, when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia, they also acquired the Czech armaments industry, and their tank park.  They rapidly incorporated the Czech tanks into the Wehrmacht, as they were quite as good as any native designs the Teutons had.  Art!

     This is the tank in the thumbnail, a Panzer 35(t), the 't' being short for the Teuton word 'tschechisch' meaning 'Czechoslovakian'.  All good, right?

     WRONG!  Art?

     This is the tank the video is about, the Panzer 37(t), a completely different vehicle as you can tell from the chassis and lack of recuperator above the gun barrel.

     Don't get it wrong in front of a hair-splitting pedant.

Finally -

Art!

     Never mind Fat Caligula, this here is Nicholas 'Five Dinners' Maduro, the Venezualan dictator, whose waistline vies with that of BOOH in a country on permanent verge of famine.  Conrad is intrigued as to what he's doing here - a very bad salute or cocking a snook?

     Done are we that with and!

.*  Dozy Don?

Landships Get Their Chips

I See I Am Going To Have To Do A Bit Of Explicating

When you read 'Landships' you may be mis-interpreting a concept that is <sucks teeth> well over a century old.  No, it is nothing to do with cruisers or aircraft carriers getting mobile on dry land.  The very idea!  Art?

     No, what Conrad refers to is the 'Admiralty Landships Committee' of the First Unpleasantness, formed under the impulse of Winston Churchill.  You can bet that, under his hawkish and piercing eye, there would be no prevarications or postponements or defaults to non-quora, just a quest to create a 'landship' that could traverse No Mans Land, shrug off machine gun bullets and crush both barbed wire and Teutons not speedy enough to get out of the way.  Art!

     Behold a 'Female' tank, so-called because it was armed exclusively with machine guns, rather than 6-pounder ex-naval guns.  For Lo! yes were are back onto the pages of 'Charley's War', dateline September 1916, when the first 'landships' went into action.  Art!

     Joe Colquhoun nails it with his representation of the Mark I.  The soldier to port is 'Smith 70', an old platoon member of Charley's, who had transferred to tanks - not the Royal Tank Corps at this point, but the 'Heavy Section Machine Gun Corps'.  Fittingly enough as he had been the Number One on their attached Vickers machine gun section.  Art!

     Is this a model?  Note the camo scheme, which wasn't used in September as far as I ken, and I ken quite far.  It sports the chicken-wire frame atop intended to keep out Teuton hand grenades.  Art!

     I rather doubt the tanks would have been lined up like that in broad daylight, without being camouflaged or hidden, as Teuton reconnaissance aircraft would have immediately spotted them, and Teuton artillery observers might also.  Art!

     I can't help but feel Ol' Joe was partly-inspired by this well-known photo of a captured Teuton trench with tommies on watch or lying about.  No, they're not dead, just catching a nap whilst their mate does 'stag'.  An attempt has been made to dig a firing-step on the opposite side of the trench to that facing British lines, which will get progressively upgraded over time.  Art!

     Ah, there you go, it's dawn, so the tanks were concealed by darkness.  Yes, British tank crews did wear chain-mail masks, to protect from 'bullet-splash', which was a mass of fragments created when a bullet hit the tank's armour plate.  Note that Ol' Joe has drawn him with his watch just visible, as the officer would have been keeping a close eye on the time.  Art!

     Again, I think Ol' Joe has been inspired by a real life photograph of a scragged British tank, except from a year later during the awful Passchendaele campaign, rather than the Somme.  Art!

     Here the track has broken but the engine still moved it around the wheels, until it jammed solid.  Art!

     Spot on research from Ol' Pat and rendered by Ol' Joe.  The interior of a Mk I tank, and all the Marks that followed, was a terrible place to be.  They had an unshielded engine working away in the middle of the floor, producing heat, exhaust fumes and carbon monoxide, with the ever-present risk of getting burnt or bloodied if you fell against it.  Then there was the noise - to which you can add that of the ordnance it was equipped with letting off.  All with very little visibility.  Note the special leather-coated 'tank helmets' the crew are wearing, a very sensible precaution against head injuries caused by being thrown about, and which mimic (but whisper who dares!) the Teuton 'Stahlhelm'   Art!

     Charley has helped one of the crew to remove the jammed steering wheels, foreshadowing their wholesale removal as they were completely useless.  With a longer program of research and development this might have been discovered, but those tanks were needed as soon as possible.  Art!

     As usual Ol' Joe nails this Teuton 77 mm field gun, which was just light enough for the crew to haul it round by main strength; you can feel those gunners wrestling it into a firing position.  I think Ol' Pat has gone overboard with the purple prose that the officer is spouting, and his other ranks would probably turning the air blue with swearing - which you couldn't have in a boy's comic of the era.  Art!

     The real thing.  Your average Teuton field gun made a very effective anti-tank gun, because it fired a 15 pound shell at sufficient velocity to cover a quarter-mile in one second.  The British landships were proof against bullets and shrapnel, but not high explosive shells, considering they carried 50 gallons of petrol in their 'horns', making them a tad vulnerable.  Art!

     Thus they might well get spifflicated, or, referring back to the title, had their chips, meaning finished, deaded or otherwise comprehensively done in.


Fill Cool

No!  Not the rubber-faced comic from the Eighties and Nineties, but rather a - what's that?  You want an illo?  O go on.  Art!

     I won't make it any larger in case there are any small children watching.

     What I actually intended to cover was a 'cooler', which seems to be one of those insulated big boxes with a handle, that you tote around beer and sandwiches in, at the seaside or at picnics, or in the back yard if you're on a budget.  Art!

With puny human for scale

     This is the Coolest 'Cooler', which was the subject of a Kickstarter that raised €13 million back in 2014.  It had cool storage, Bluetooth speakers, bottle-openers, a battery-powered blender, USB ports and crockery and utensils.  60,000 backers put their money in and -

     Waited.

     And waited.

     And waited.

      Delivery dates were constantly being pushed back, and back, with a total of 56 updates being posted on Kickstarter.  Conrad suspects they put a lot of time, effort and money into creating a brilliant prototype that they simply couldn't manage to scale in production.  By 2019 20,000 backers still hadn't received their Cooler, and then -

     The company went bust and closed down.  They blamed 'Chinese tariffs' for this, instead of, you know, their own incompetence.

     A lesson learned.  One hopes.



Loud Atlas

There has been a lot of internet chatter on various media websites about the astronomical object 31/ATLAS, with a whole lot of specious drivel being posted about it.  Art!

     None of the items popping up on my news feed have been from any scientific or, especially, an astronomical source.

     Until then, consider all the wibble to be Shakespearian, in the sense of 'a tale told by an idiot'.  If it ever gets promoted by NASA or ESA or JPL, then you can pay attention.

Cause To Worry About The Human Race

Another montage from 'Discovery Tech: Shocking Machine Disasters', and this time I have previewed it and tried to match a business or report to the hideously dangerous activities displayed, just for more verisimilitude and a better background.  Nothing available on the first clip.  Art!

     There are no logos, marques, signage or registrations visible to identify where this takes place.  I hope you can see the two safety issues present: matey is using a drum to give him height, instead of a ladder, and he's stretching far too much to keep control over a welding torch.

     What can possibly go wrong?  Art!

     You can see white-hot metal sparks falling from the weld spot and hitting the drum he's perched upon.  Art!

     The contents are either flammable liquids or an air-fuel aerosol, which explode under the rain of white-hot metal.  Who could possibly have guessed!  Art!

     Both barrel and berk become airborne objects, briefly.  Thankfully there was nobody else nearby to get hit by flying debris, because that drum ends up atop the second cargo-bed, giving an indication of how much force propelled it.

     There is some movement from matey on the floor after he lands but no indication how badly he was injured or whether he survived.

     A lesson learned.  One hopes.

Finally -

I've been dry for November, and two days of December, as I very naughtily sipped a snifter or two of gin on Nov 1 and 2, it being the weekend, but as of Wednesday 3rd Dec, the drinks are back.  Just so you know.

     I have analysed my posts on Twitter and they are just as nasty and tasteless sober as not.  Just so we're clear.

The Doomsday Clock Goes Tick-Tock

Having Said That, I'm Not So Sure It Does

Er - in fact, Your Humble Scribe is not entirely sure what it looks like, if it looks like anything at all.  It's a conceit dreamed up by the Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists, who wanted to scare the living bejasus out of everyone about how dangerous nuclear and thermonuclear weapons are.  Art!

     What we have here is a schematic representation of a clock that you could not use for timing hard-boiled eggs.  Mind you, if it hits midnight a runny yoke is going to be the least of your problems.

     ANYWAY what we're going to be - hang on, hang on, don't Linkin Park have a song called 'Minutes To Midnight'? that I was listening to on the I-Pod this afternoon?  Art!

    ANYWAY AGAIN what we're going to get around to eventually is the forthcoming Marvel release 'Avengers: Doomsday' which is slated for a December 2026 release.

     Before we get there, mayhap, Conrad is going to be doing a little budgetary analysis of what films Marvel released in 2025, what their budgets were or claimed to be, and what they made at the box office.  Art!

Ryan fulminates again!

     Thanks to Ryan of 'RK Outpost' on Twitter for bundling all the information into one location.  Be advised, Ryan swears pretty freely when he's angry, and - shock surprise twist in the tale - he was pretttty angry on this vlog. He mentioned three films in addition to 'Deadpool and Wolverine' that Marvel released this year, and blithely stated that they made a loss.

     Can Conrad resist the temptation to go digging for more detailed data?

     No.

     BEAR IN MIND! I am going to be using the '50%' rule for box office receipts, meaning that the studios only get back half of what cinemas get; don't make the mistake some critics or pundits make and fondly imagine that ALL the box office monies go to the studio.

     First, we'll take a look at the film above, where accurate publicly-available information has just been released by HM Government.  If you film in the UK then you're eligible for a tax rebate of up to 25%, with the kicker that you HAVE to release the complete budget breakdown and do it in public.  Art!

Dateline 2024

     According to Marvel, the budget for D&W was $200 million, plus another $150 million for marketing, promotion and advertising - hereafter MPA.  Thus a $350 million total outlay.  With a global Box Office Take - hereafter BOT - of $1.3 billion, of which the studio gets $650 million, they made $300 million in profit, drum roll, trumpet blast, all the suits go home happy.

     HOWEVER - ah that word again - 'Geeks and Gamers' got hold of the actual budget figures from 'The London Standard' and boy do they tell a different story.  The real budget was £418 million, or $550 million.  They got a tax rebate of $80 million, but the MPA still stands at $150 million.  Thus their total BOT was $650 million versus total outlay of $620 million, meaning only $30 million profit, or 10% of their original claim.  Dunno about you but if I were an investor seeing only a $30 million profit after a $700 million outlay, I would be unhappy.  Art!

    Then we have, as an aside, 'Dr Strangle and the Multiverse of Badness' or some such, really I didn't pay all that much attention, except to note that it supposedly cost $200 million a la Marvel, and $400 million a la 'The London Standard'.  Guff like this is why Conrad used to joke about Disney being a money-laundering organisation. Many a true word spoken in jest.

     ANYWAY ANYWAY back to those three films, which are: 'Captain America: Brave New World', 'Thunderbolts' and 'Fantastic 4: First Steps'.  They were all released in 2025, so we're not going to get the UK government-mandated breakdown until much later in 2026.  For the moment - Art!

"CAPTAIN AMERICA:B.N.W."  The current budget quoted by Marvel is $180 million, which is hotly disputed by industry insiders due to the extensive reshoots involved, which they assert have kicked the total upstairs to $300 million or even $380 million.  Conrad is guessing the budget to be $50 million, which is kind of lowball for a tentpole production like this, yet it works for me.  Art!

     So, we have bounds of between $230 million and $430 million, versus a BOT of $208 million. At least worst, it lost $22 million and at hand-rubbingly awful, it lost $150 million.  Ooops.  Art!

I know of and care nothing about this film

     ''THUNDERBOLTS'' For this excrescence, we have Marvel's sworn testimony on the Holy Bible, Koran and Torah that the budget was $180 million, with a definite MPA of $100 million - I did warn you 'only' $50 million was being stingy - for $280 million total.  Art!

     Thus a BOT of $191 million and a $90 million loss.  Art!

    

"FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS" How many times have they tried to restart this franchise?  Well, they threw $200 million at this attempt, with the MPA being a very definite $170 million, total $370 million. Art!

    Thus a BOT of $260 million and a loss of $110 million.  

     Potentially, at the worst, Marvel lost £350 million on this trio of films.

     Now, back to the title.  'Avengers: Doomsday' is looking at an enormous budget, not least because Robert Downey* is rumoured to be getting $100 million to tempt him back, and there is going to be a huge cast.  Originally slated for May 2026, it's been put back to December 2026, which implies either reshoots or very, very extensive (and expensive!) post-production work.  The real, true, accurate budget details won't be released until late 2027 if they go for a December launch next year.  Speculation puts the production and MPA costs at close to $1 billion, meaning it would have to make $2 billion merely to break even.  Art!

     

    I count 26 characters.  Note the old release date.

    'Critical Drinker' pointed out the paradox inherent in a blockbuster like this: the budget is so enormous they have/want/need <delete where necessary> to appeal to the maximum possible audience, so it ends up as a bland mish-mash that offends nobody BUT which appeals to none.

     We shall see!

     Oops.  Nearly to Count on the Intro alone.  That's what numbers do for you.  Okay, we need pictures not text.  Art!

I'm Culling My Cheat-Sheet

That's the outstanding pictures and text that I've saved as a Word document in order to have content at a later date.  Here's a picture that's going - Art!

    
   Yes, that is a swastika.  It's a crossword with a difference, from 'Signal' I believe, the Nazi propaganda publication. date of publication 1943, location Tunisia.  Far too difficult - it's written in Frakturand Teuton and is of distinctly dubious morality.

Talking Of Standards -

In the Intro.  Do keep up!

Art?

     As proof that property prices in The Modern Babylon are insane, this house has been derelict for years - take a look at the 'garden' and what state it's in - and is now on the market as a 'refurbishment program', meaning it's not fit for Hom. Sap.  Art!

     I don't subscribe to the 'Evening Standard' and wonder if we'll get a follow-up story on whether this pit sells for what they're asking or an even more insane sum.  Watch this space after December 10th, when it goes up for sale.

Finally -

Never one to avoid shoeing a repellent bunghole when they're down, Art!

     Elong Tusk pimps a right-wing European political party that blames a falling electrical charge on the Jews, Muslims, liberals or all three combined?

Thank you and goodnight!

Short addendum - hopefully no obvious formatting probs after accidentally copying the whole of the above and adding onto the end of the blog.  An old man moment.

 

*  I refuse to use 'Junior'