The Solden Arches

NO! That Is Not A Typo

It is an hilarious pun, HILARIOUS I TELL YOU, although because it's going to take a while to explain it, perhaps a little less hilarious than I fondly imagine.  Art!

     The last time Your Humble Scribe was in a McDonald's was a few months ago, and then only to use their toilet, nor did I have any change to leave in their charity collections pot - must remember to remedy that next week.  As for actually purchasing their foodstuffs, that would be years and years ago, possibly six? as I remember buying "Fighting Isis" on the very same day.  That was when The Works had more books on sale than miscellaneous tat.

     ANYWAY Conrad was reading a Youtube Reddit about 'What thing vanished from memory?' and the McDonald's 'Monopoly' scam came up, which I'd never heard of, since it came to light a good 23 years ago and involved McD, for which see paragraph above.

     The background was that McDonald's were affixing Monopoly game pieces to their fast-food franchised faff, only a very few of which were winning pieces.

     Enter Jerome P. Jacobson.  Art!

     In a classic example of gamekeeper-turned-poacher, this chap was responsible for the security of the Monopoly pieces, which he simply stole.  His organisation, Simon Marketing, had been hired to run the promotion, and JPJ (not to be confused with J.P.L. - "Jet Propulsion Laboratory") had accidental access to the pieces thanks to getting his sweaty mitts on a set of anti-tamper labels supposed to be used for transferring the winning pieces.

     So, he would then give the winning Monopoly pieces to his family and relatives, the deal being that they had to split the winnings with him.  This scam also involved the Colombo Mafia family, one member of whom JPJ had bumped into at the airport.  The Colombos recruited willing accomplices to claim their winnings, taking a split of the proceeds.  Art!

     The scam ran from 1989 to 2000, with the really lucrative years being 1995 - 2000, where JPJ and his family and accomplices won nearly all the top prizes, and we're not talking about chump change here; they netted $24 million.

     However - and you knew that word would crop up eventually - JPJ eventually fell foul of someone, most probably an accomplice who felt hard-done by, or an accomplice whom he'd boxed-in at the car park, or - <invent petty reason here> because the FBI got an anonymous tip-off that he might bear a bit of close scrutiny.

     Ooops.

     JPJ was one of 53 people indicted in the scam, which went to trial in 2001.  He was sentenced to three years in jail and had to repay $12.5 million.  This judgement came out and yet was almost completely ignored, principally because the judgement day was September 10th, and we all know what happened the next day at the Twin Towers ...

     

     Upon getting out of prison, JPJ has led a quiet and uneventful life in Georgia, so quiet that the last he was checked upon was in 2018.  He is now 81, if he's still alive - probably so, as his death would trigger a notable obituary - in poor health and very probably regretting poaching that parking space in 2000 from Dylan, a man who bore grudges.

     The film rights were acquired by Ben Affleck in 2018, with his bezzie mate Matt Damon also being interested, so we may yet see JPJ's sordid yet interesting story on screen.

     And thus we have the rationale for this evening's title.

You What?

Conrad, as he is all too willing to admit, is a stranger to this thing called 'Fashion', not to mention 'Style' and 'Skin-Enhancing Products' also 'Male Moisturiser' and 'Sports Grooming Products' (a.k.a. 'Perfumes For Men').

     So, when I witnessed this, I was baffled.  Art!

      This image came up in an advert on Quora, which I couldn't thus trace on the internet, and I wasn't going to click on it to discover the ****** *** ******* aid.

     It's only £2.38, so it can't be terribly sophisticated.  There appears to be a trigger mechanism, and a metallic nozzle, plus provision to dangle it from a lanyard or belt.  I sincerely hope it's nothing sordid or seedy, because BOOJUM! is and remains SFW.  Perhaps not SFS*, but definitely SFW.

     If you can be bothered, an explanation in the Comments would be most welcome.

Back To The Beeb's Theme - 'Spring'

I think this will be the last picture of this particular theme I post, as all the others are quite banal, being either flowers or birds, neither of which are particularly interesting.  Art!

Courtesy John Earnshaw

     Here we see more flowers: gorse, in this case, a plant plentifully provided with thorns that discourage intimate exploration.  In the background is the far more interesting Dunstanburgh Castle ruins, which look pretty worse for wear.  Not sure if that was siege-warfare or the seasons at work.  Art!

Without the gamboge gorse getting in the way

The Start And The Stop

For a while (code for 'I can't remember when we started and can't be bothered to check') we've been putting up pictures of Star Wars characters re-imagined as eighteenth-century baroque portraits in the Age Of Reason.  I've omitted quite a few as I've no idea who they are or were, or they just look like a conventional painting, but this last one deserves to be up there.  Art!

     Who would have thought that a film from 1977 would still be resounding down the decades in 2023?  Well, apart from me, obviously, because I know a chap with a big blue police box.

"The War Illustrated"

Yes, back to the antediluvian days of early 1944, where print media was the law in the land, apart from radio, which is kind of television-without-pictures for those unfamiliar with it.  Here the images being brought to the public would, at the very quickest, be two weeks out of date, thanks to the inherent delays in sending film from the Mediterranean to This Sceptred Isle.  The irony of images from Ukraine being on teh Interwebz within two seconds of being taken does not escape me.  Art?

     This series of photos shows two test pilots flying the RAF's new fighter, the Typhoon, Ralph Munday and Philip Lucas.  It was their unenviable job to take to the skies in the latest prototype, putting it through it's paces, making notes on performance and instrument readings, and hopefully getting back to ground in one piece.  It was their responsibility to detect and iron out any kinks or problems before what they flew went into mass production.

     This is actually a rather brave and transparent article covering the successful Teuton counter-offensive that recaptured a group of Greek islands the British had occupied previously.  It was definitely a setback, more in terms of dignity offended than practical consequences, and the Teutons liked to hide their losses of men lost at sea.  Still, it was a British defeat when such things had been unheard of for over a year.  Ooops.

     More interestingly, it is possibly the genesis of "The Guns Of Navarone", which has been played on British television every year since 1962, meaning that if only 100 Teutons were killed on-screen, then they actually lost over 5,000 soldiers thus meaning this was a British victory, the end.

Finally -

"But screw your courage to the sticking-place -" said MacBeth, in the titular play devoted to him.  Hang on a mo - if it's a 'sticking-place' why does he need to additionally screw it in with a Phillips Number Nine?  Is MacBeth worried about the transient nature of Post-Its?  If so, all he'd need is a tack, rather than the considerably more expensive screw.  Nor were sixteenth-century folks averse to boiling down horses to make glue.  Conrad suspects poetic licence here.

*  "Safe For Sanity".

Much Of Misery And Malfeasance

Conrad Is Pretty Sure He's Touched On Malfeasance Before

Otherwise, why would I have a Metro Tram Ticket inserted into my 'Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable' about - er - 'Leviathan'.  Okay, nothing to do with Malfeasance.  Moving swiftly along -

     Let's instead focus on my Collin's Concise.  "The doing of a wrongful or illegal act, especially by a public official".  From the Old French 'Mal Faisant', meaning 'To do evil'.  Art!

How to strangle cats the Donald Trump way!

     Now, Conrad is pretttty sure you imagined that we were going to slide seamlessly into a critique of Ruffia, or the Fun-Sized Foot Fiddler's latest attempt to create viable microchips out of spiderwebs and pixie-dust.

     Not so.

     At least, not yet.

     You see, I am currently reading "The West Riding Territorials In The Great  War", because it has been sat in front of me for who knows how many years without being so much as scorned, let alone read (BECAUSE YORKSHIREMEN!!).  The West Riding Territorials were a peacetime organisation before the First Unpleasantness, whom numbered so many amongst their members that they were able to form two whole divisions (49th and 62nd) when the First Unpleasantness erupted.  For those unaware, their home was Yorkshire, and it's West Riding in geographical terms.  Art!

     Their mascot was a pelican.  No, I don't know either.  Too much beer?

     ANYWAY the 62nd was in betweenst battles in the front lines around Bullecourt, a legendarily grim and bloody battlefield.  Art!

     As is their wont, the paper-clip counting Captain Darlings of the British Expeditionary Force focussed their beady, monocled eyes upon the 62nd and declared them deficient in salvage.

     Here we interject a little exposition.  The post-battle battlefields of the First Unpleasantness were an unbelievable midden of murder and mundaneness.  The bodies got hauled off for interment, because both Perfidious Albion and the Teutons adhered to basic human values YES RUFFIANS LOOKING AT YOU, in a tradition of interment of one's own that goes back to classical Greek history.  Art!

"Leave no man behind, unless you're all dead" said Leonidas

        There was always a detritus of military kit left on the battlefield- if you're dead then you cannot tidy up behind yourself - and so an un-named platoon of the 62nd set to with a will, determined to carry out what salvage they could, and to give a silent **** *** to the HQ warriors.  Art!

     They found a derelict tank, hidden in undergrowth.  They found seven Lewis guns and forty drum magazines to go with same.

     More particularly, they found four bodies belonging to the Royal Warwicks, which inspired them to go looking for other bodies in the locality.  They discovered forty bodies, who were then transferred from the 'Missing' totals to the 'Killed' totals.  

     Stop and think about that for a minute.  The Yorkies were digging up the rotting corpses of men long dead, riddled with maggots, surrounded by flies and beating off vermin, not because they'd been ordered to do so, but because they felt obligated to.  A ghastly job.  Art!

     Thanks  to dog-tags the families of the dead would have at least been given a sense of closure.  Brigade Headquarters would probably have been more impressed with the recovered Lewis guns.  And this, gentle reader, is 'Salvage'.  We may come back to this, it's a big subject.

     Yes, I realise this is more misery than malfeasance.  Give me a couple of minutes and we'll see.

Aha!

Here's a Mighty Meaty Malefeasance, focussed on our old pal Ruffia and their budgetary woes, as evinced by Konstantin of "Inside Russia" on Youtube.  Thanks, K!  Art?

K  the hairy one at rear

     K, having been a Ruffian all his life, is knowledgeable in the ways of Muscovy, especially their economy.  When talking about the Ruffian national deficit, he's had to qualify his statements, because the Ministry Of Finance only put out partial figures for the federal budget.

     Does this matter? I hear you asking.  Yes.  Yes it does.  Art!

Just to remind you where we're talking about

     You see, the federal budget is only part of the whole 'Consolidated' budget, which also includes the provincial budget for all the regions of the Ruffian Federation, plus the local budgets for cities, towns and villages and the vaguely-defined 'Extra-budgetary funds'.  

     This month, for the first time, the Consolidated budget deficit was revealed for the first time, and - no spoilers here - it's not good.  In fact it's bad.  Very bad.

     For the first two months of 2023, the Consolidated budget deficit was ₽6.1 trillion rubles, compared to ₽3.4 trillion for the Federal budget part of this total.  Using the dollar/ruble exchange rate (which has also plummeted) of ₽80 to the $, those are $76 billion and $42.5 billion respectively.  So the annual deficit for 2023 could be approaching half a trillion dollars.  Dollars, not rubles (that would be ₽34 trillion)

     And this, whilst the total revenue has fallen by 62% and expenditure increased by 42% compared to this time in 2022.

     There you go, pretty much the poster child for 'Malfeasance'.

More On That Theme Of 'Spring'

You know, the monthly BBC picture competition.  This one has been extremely dull, frankly, with endless pictures of flowers or birds.  Not exciting at all.  Art!

Courtesy Clare Sheppard

     As lively as it gets.  The photographer captured these hares boxing the stuffing out of each other at the unearthly hour of 06:45, so she deserves a good picture for getting up at that time.

The Haul

As you should surely know, Conrad took Wednesday off as a holiday, resulting in him being able to visit a couple of charity bookshops.  Art!

     I have a couple of other works by John Toland.  This one deals with 1918, the last year of the First Unpleasantness and, unusually, it deals with events on the Eastern Front as well.  This is normally dealt with as an aside, so it will be interesting to see Lenin and the Bolshevik hordes squirming under Teuton occupation.  'Para Handy and Other Tales' concerns the exploits of the Clyde 'puffer' (a small steamship) "Vital Spark" around the lochs and islands of West Scotland at the beginning of the twentieth century: Para Handy is the captain, Dougie is the mate, McPhail is the engineer and The Tar is the general dogsbody.  Later on we get Sunny Jim, and still later on Hurricane Jack.  Art!

Adapted for TV umpteen times

     I was rather chuffed at getting a James Ellroy novel in the British Heart Foundation shop; he is widely regarded as one of the best South Canadian crime writers evah, possibly only eclipsed by James Crumley.  

     And one can never have too many Philip K. Dick novels.  I've not read TMITHC for probably 40 years, so it will be interesting to see how it and Conrad get along now that I am an aged, surly truculent chap.  As opposed to a young, surly, truculent chap.

More Baroque 'Starry Wars' Crew

Some of these I've omitted from highlighting because they seem to simply be a painted portrait with no particular eighteenth-century resonance.  Art!

     Brrrrrr.  Not a chap you'd like to get on the wrong side of, hmmmm?  I imagine he'd challenge you to a duel, skewer you like a kebab, then be on his way, all in the space of thirty seconds.  Art!

     I think this one falls under the heading of 'Saucy Wench'.  Not 'Strumpet' as she'd knock your head off if you called her that.

Finally -

Hmmmmm I've finished this blog unusually early, which comes of not festering in my pit until 10:30 any longer - having to get up at 06:45 rather broke that lazy habit of mine.  And we've hit over 1.300 words without any recourse to Fan Fiction, for which you may be truly grateful.  Or not.

Whilst Wandering At Work

Wandering Mentally, Conrad's Work Ethic Is Far Too Strong For Him To Meander

Unusually, there were a few spaces between phone calls this morning instead of one coming in hot on the heels of a previous one, so Your Humble Scribe was diverted by watching an excavator busy shifting piles of rubble in the direction of Strangeways.  No, you don't get a picture, management are pretty hot on instantly sacking anyone wandering with a mobile phone.  Instead - Art!

An excavator, just 'One Louder'

     Naturally my keen and analytical mind focussed in on the practicalities of an excavator.  Why did they come to be?  Who invented them?  When did they arrive on the scene?

     Here an aside.  I did think today's title had echoes of that album by Jefferson Airplane, "After Bathing At Baxter's", though I wasn't going to lead with a picture of it because it's probably at least 50 years old and nobody would know what I was talking about.  Art!

Yup.  1967.

     ANYWAY the impetus for creating a giant digger came from the engineering projects that came into being in the early nineteenth century, canals and railways to the fore.  These were very labour-intensive efforts that required thousands of men to dig and carry the spoil, spades and wheelbarrows being the tools of choice.  Art!

     Enter William S. Otis, a South Canadian partner in an engineering firm, who were endeavouring to construct a railway, with all the attendant labour costs.  You know South Canadian management, they hate paying for things if they can possibly be gotten cheaper.  So, in 1835 Ol' Bill begot himself to inventing, and he came up with this.  Art!

     Possibly inspired by the railway engines that would be puttering down his railway, this beast was powered by a steam engine, that worked to raise and lower the bucket.  The bucket could be lowered, then moved forward to scoop up spoil, at which point it was dragged to one side in order to dump the spoil into waiting barrows or wagons.  Art!

     As you can see, it ran on four dinky little rail wheels, mounted on a temporarily-laid track to where it needed to be.  The idea took a while to catch on, with varying improvements being added: steel cables instead of chains, a rotating chassis that could move through 360º, and mounting caterpillar tracks to allow free movement across ground.  Art!

     Since major urban metropoli of South Canada were expanding enormously in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, what were known as 'Steam shovels' were used to excavate foundations and basements.

     And, also the Suez and Panama canals.  One can only guess at the amount of man-hours that would have gone into these projects if they'd been done merely by hand.  Even with these mechanical contrivances it still took a decade to excavate the Panama Canal; we'd still be waiting for the hand-dug version*.  Art!

Panaman at work

     Time marches on.  By the Thirties the valiant coal-powered steamer had given way to the diesel-engined excavator, which maintains it's position of superiority, and it probably will continue to do so until they manage to build a safe and compact nuclear power plant that's not as big as a house.  Art!

     Conrad is minded of Marty T's virtuoso use of his battered yet hale excavator in removing flood spoil from a culvert.  One man was able what would have taken a team of half a dozen by hand, and with a fraction of the risk.  Art!

    Conrad could probably find enough niche stuff about excavators to fill the rest of today's blog -

     But I will be merciful and refrain.

More Fun With Tidal Islands!

Several years ago we had a long succession of articles about tidal islands around This Sceptred Isle, a subject Conrad found intensely interesting, because that's how his mind works.  These are islands that can only be reached on foot when the tide's out.

     What follows are less tidal islands than not-quite-flooded islands, namely the Halligens, ten islands situated off the North Teuton coast.  Art!

     Only five are inhabited, because they are very low-lying, and rising sea levels have already drowned a lot of them.  When the North Sea has a storm, these people know about it in the most direct way.  Art!

     The islands have their own semi-Freisian dialect, quite distinct from normal Teuton, as with the inhabitants of Heligoland, which you can see to their east on the map.

     I'm sure I've seen Tom Scott visiting one of these places because I seem to remember him taking a trip in the world's smallest railway train, as below.  Art!

     Visit while you can, because these places will be underwater in a couple of decades.

Hardly

Conrad is unsure if I'll be able to get the background article up again, so I shall at least put up the image I captured.  Art!

     This is the Daily Express being either disingenuous or lazy, because there's nothing 'secret' about it.  In fact Quora had a question about it yesteryon.  Art!

     The Republic has an 'arrangement' with the RAF that is based on sheer practicality, because Ireland lacks a modern air force, anti-aircraft SAM systems, defence radar networks and all the paraphernalia that the UK has.  Art!

     The Irish Army Air Corps thus costs the state next to nothing, and the Brylcreem Boys in their Terror Typhoons get to practice intercepting Ruffian bombers and shooing** them out of airspace that doesn't belong to them.

     It's hardly secret.  More - discreet.

Are We There Yet?

Conrad has been valiantly parsing "The Magic Flute" in search of the titular instrument, to no avail.  Let's get back to the plot.  You remember, there was Tamino the fainting milksop, and Papageno the bird-catcher (not much of a promotion-structure but at least he's self-employed), the three female attendees of the Queen Of The Night and Queenie herself.  Art!

The hat got a separate credit

     Queenie promises Tamino that her abducted daughter, Pamina, will be his if he rescues her from the demon Sarastro, who h

     HANG ON!  This is the coward who went into an artificial coma when he was being chased by a snake.  Queenie expects this jellyfish to save her daughter?  Art!

Sarastro: half-demon, half-citrus fruit

   
     FINALLY!  The Three Attendees return and give Tamino a magic flute, which "turns sorrow into joy", and then th 

     HANG ON AGAIN!  That's it?  'Turns sorrow into joy'?  How about it shoots lasers when played, or kills people stone dead at a particular pitch, or even gives you five minutes of breathable oxygen underwater?

     'Turns sorrow into joy'?

     BAH!

I See The Beeb Is Having Another Themed Photo Exhibition

This one is on that of 'Spring', so one wonders how many bad puns are going to be expressed visually <sighs> that's my job.  Okay, Art, let's have an inspect.

Courtesy Stuart Manktelow

     I warned you.  These gazelles romping around for the sheer fun of it are Springboks, apparently, at Damaraland in Namibia.  They inspired the photographer to exclaim, every time he saw them "It's springtime!"

Finally -

I'm going to have to have a shower tonight, the weather has been exceptionally hot and I am a big fat sweaty blob.  I also need to check and see if the Arena is having an Event, since there seemed to be one in preparation tonight (though I snuck through even with my unfeasibly large rucksack).  In which case it's Dinky Manbag to the rescue!

Our Hero

*  "But it's so artisan!"

**  Yes, SHOOING, as in 'To shoo someone out the door.'  Not SHOOTING. That would be bad.

An Eventful Morning

You Know How It Can Be -

You get up early, catch the bus, suffer an additional fifteen minutes thanks to roadworks, get into Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell at 08: 20 for a 09:00 start, set out on foot wearing a jacket that's essential because it's COLD at the bus stop at 07:05 yet which causes you to wear a fetching layer of sweat by the time you hit the office (thanks to five flights of stairs).  Art!

With added SFW underwear

     That's Hermes, the patron saint of travellers, and a demi-god who derives malicious amusement from interfering with Conrad's quotidian sojourning.

     ANYWAY I strolled into the office and Alex, Team Lead, was there, looking slightly perplexed.

     "You're on holiday, Rob," he explained.

     Ooops.  There had been an e-mail the day before asking if anyone was interested in taking Wednesday off as a holiday, and Your Humble Scribe responded instantly "Yes", because getting back into this work ethic business after a three-month holiday was hard.  Nothing more was communicated out and I thought that was it, turned down.

     Except not.  Art!

Conrad: surly, truculent, surly and confused

     I had even determined that 'An Event' was on at the Arena, and so had my Dinky Manbag to hand, stuffed with a surprisingly large number of items, for all it's diminutiveness; because large rucksack-wearing folks have to leave via the rear entrance, adding another 7 minutes to their journey.  Art!

With ruler for scale

     I then splashed out on a tram ticket and got as far as the 409 into Oldham Bus Station, which is when Hermes woke up and started tying Fate and Destiny into knots.

    <short pause as tea is sorted>

    Toasted bagels with garlic mayonnaise chicken, if you must know.  Art!

     The bus driver refused to let anyone on here, as he was waiting for his relief driver, telling them to catch the 409 that had just come in after us.  This vehicle ended up rammed, so Conrad demurred.  Then, salting and lemoning the wound, another 409 drove past.

     'You'll have to get the next bus,' informed our driver.  'The relief driver's only just walked in the office.'

     We all get off and patiently wait.  The 09:27 fails to turn up.

     Our driver gets back in the bus, changes his sign to 'Sorry Not In Service' and drives off.

     Wait, what?  If I can't get no satisfaction and you can't get no relief, where does that leave the passengers?

     Waiting, that's what.  The 09:37 doesn't turn up.

     The 09:47 turns up five minutes late, which is almost as good as on-time for First Bus.  Art!

"Normal sssservice will be resumed whenever we feel like it" said the First Bus spokesdemon

          Conrad does not relish tomorrow morning's traffic if those roadworks are still present, because Hermes likes his ante meridian antics.  We shall see!

     For all that, I did get to return a couple of books to Oldham Library - where they no longer charge for overdue books! and have a quick trawl in Sainsbo's for more loose-leaf Darjeeling (only four packets available), and a quick scan in a couple of charity shops.  Then it was back home to do the weekly shop and take Edna for a trot; most remarkably there were no other dogwalkers present.  Art!

     Half as much again as a normal day.  Righteousness prevails.

A Glimpse Of An Unknown World

Once again, Your Humble Scribe cannot remember exactly how he got down this rabbit hole, only that it was there.  Art!

     Model railways, don't you know.  Conrad is very hazy about what a 'flood loader', never mind the 'Rotary Dumper'.  Perhaps a picture or two will elucidate.  Art!

     A noticeably empty wagon enters the tower, which might be a flood loader.  Hang on - Art!

     So they appear to load open wagons by depositing the cargo from above.  Right.  Art!

Loading begins

Loading ends

     The Rotary Dumper is self-explanatory and a few pictures from it's sequence of operation show why it is both Rotary and a Dumper.  Art!

Loaded wagon arrives

Rotary dumper rotates with the wagon upon it

Gravity does the rest

     All the work of EMD645, should you want to check them out on Youtube.

     You may be thinking "Pshaw!  Utter nonsense, can't possibly exist in real life."  O yeah?  Art!

Psych

The Travails Of Manglement

We've not had one of these popcorn-scoffing monuments to massive managerial <thinks> miscompetence for a while, so have at this one.

     Original Poster was one of 11 staff, in a company where he was the Customer Operations Manager.  They were abruptly cut down to 6 staff, supposedly due to contracts not being negotiated, yet still had to do the work of 11 people.  Art!

     Hmmmmm they were having to do the work of 11 people?  But business had supposedly slowed down?  Sounds more like a cost-cutting exercise to me.  After a month of working 65 hours per week or more, OP asked for a 12% raise, and was laughed out of the office, being told there was no money in the budget for this.  Art!

     O but there was money available - the salaries of those 5 staff who were fired.

     OP, impelled by this rebuff, promptly started looking for work elsewhere.  He immediately got an interview and was hired for a job paying twice what he'd been on.  Like a good employee, he handed in his two weeks notice.

     Next day he cannot log into his computer, and is marched in to see the General Manager, who says he is fired immediately.  Obviously they didn't like getting the two weeks notice and thought they'd be petty.

     O but what's this?  Next morning his ex-supervisor rang him and asked him to come back, same salary as the new job, until they can find a replacement for him.  You see what being petty-minded vindictive little bottom-holes gets you?  Art!

     

     OP very reasonably asks why, if they're now willing to match salaries, they refused his 12% request?  (I told you they had the budget).  He counters that he wants to come back as a contractor on $225 per hour, and when the ex-supervisor acts offended, hangs up.

     Over the next few days OP gets 12 texts and phone calls, all desperately begging him to come back.  Obviously the business had no idea what he actually did and cannot find anyone to step into his shoes; if they hadn't been so childish they'd have had 2 weeks for him to train another person up.

     

Putin's On The Fritz

One of the good things about being a totalitarian dictator is that the fawning sycophants that surround you always but ALWAYS laugh at your jokes. Or else it's prison, torture or death, or a combination of all three.

     ANYWAY, the Fun-Sized Foot Fiddler gets his reported cracks at the expense of others printed in world media, at which point we can point and laugh.

     Take his quote about Ruffian political exiles: "They gather in Prague, let them drink beer there, there are a lot of female sex hormones in it".  Art!

     The Kremlin Gremlin is notoriously abstemious when it comes to alcohol, so he's pretty obviously not got a clue what he's talking about.  Czech beers and lagers have a well-deserved reputation for excellence.  It also seems that Bloaty Gas Tout has conflated a chemical used in beer, 'Phytoestrogen', with 'Estrogen', because let's face it, his knowledge of chemistry or brewing is 0.0%.

     Phytoestrogen is weaker than estrogen by a factor of 5,000 and to get any hormonal effects one would need to consume 140 gallons of lager per day.

     Sorry, Dimya.

"Intelligence In War" By John Keegan

A recent purchase from a charity shop, and well worth it.  

     In this work Mr. Keegan looks at how intelligence information (not intellect, in case you were wondering) has affected military operations over the past two-hundred odd years, and the first example he gives is that of Admiral Nelson, who was trying to intercept the "Toulon Armament", that being a French invasion fleet bound for Egypt.

     The date was 1798, meaning all communication was limited by visible range, calculated as being twelve miles between ships at a maximum. Art!

Nelly's flagship

     Even if the Toulon Armament consisted of 300 ships, it was a mere speck in the midst of the Mediterranean.  Intelligence information could only reach Ol' Nelly via ship from Britain, a voyage that took up to five weeks.  He could put into harbour and see if British consuls or agents of the Foreign Office had news, which was not guaranteed, or attempt to seize French or neutral vessels to see if they had more up-to-date information.  He had to scad about the Med for months trying to catch up with Nappy, until finally cornering the French fleet in Aboukir Bay - which is another tale for a different kitchen. 

     I think that's quite enough wibble for one day.