A Mish-Mash Of An Intro

Today We'll Be Covering Autocracy, Architecture And Asteroids

Also more "Silicon Curtain", because this Intro's intro will be another one of those cunning tangents that zig-zag from truth to fiction, before doing a full 270º.  

     You see, I wanted to lead with 'Palladium', because it does come into play later on.  My "Collins Concise Dictionary" defines it as: "a ductile malleable silvery-white element of the platinum metal group", and I recall that sci-fi opus by Pohl and Kornbluth - Art!

     The extinct aliens who created their own destruction, and whom therefore dropped Hom. Sap. into it, preferred palladium to gold.

     Incidentally, the London Palladium is not named after the metal.  No, it's named after the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, who revived classical Graeco-Roman designs and styles, especially symmetrical planning and harmonic proportions.  Art!

     The name 'Palladium' itself is a derivation of Pallas, an alternate name for Athena, which title had been bestowed on a recently-discovered asteroid.

     Why is this relevant, and how can we beat Ruffia over the head with it?

     Well! because there is now talk of placing sanctions on Ruffian exports of titanium and palladium, is why, and here is where Jonathan Fink of "Silicon Curtain" put a very well-turned question to his guest, Prof Sonnenfeld.  He defined Ruffia as an "Extractive autocracy" which relied on creating dependencies, fear of scarcity and an ability to 'Limit the pie', a diametrically opposite view to that of the Global West, which manifests an 'Expand the pie' ethos.  Was this attitude a problem for the future?  Art!

     This septic midden is Norilsk, one of the dirtiest cities on the planet, thanks to how it completely ignores health, safety or pollution as it extracts palladium and nickel ores and smelts them.  

     The Prof joked that it was a good job he and Johnathan were sitting on different sides of the Atlantic, otherwise he'd have delivered a hug and a kiss, because Ol' Johnny's question is one nobody else has been asking, when it definitely needed asking.  Loudly!  Art?

Latest Ruffian Lada, hot off the production line

     As the Prof cogently explained, Ruffia in terms of economy and industrial output doesn't have any "Value Added", their entire economy is based on the extraction of resources (food, fuel and minerals) not the production of finished goods, which has already been identified by Big K. of "Inside Russia".  Nobody goes to Muscovy to get the latest in pharmaceuticals, or medical technology, or cars, or fashion.  

     Nor is that all.  The departure overseas, from where they are never going to return, of 2 million highly-qualified, experienced, skilled IT workers has also sounded a death-knell for any Ruffian intent to move beyond their Extractive Autocracy.  Art!

     The Prof reckoned that Ruffia has been set back by 20 years in terms of broadening and deepening their economy by this brain drain.

     What you see above is an example of extraction gone mad.  The European market for Modern-day Mordor's gas has dwindled to a miniscule fraction of what it used to be, but Gazprom dare not shut down it's wells, because doing so means immense hardship in re-opening them, if that day ever comes.  So, as above, they are now burning off 88% of their extracted gas thanks to no storage and an inability to process it into Liquid Natural Gas.  Art!

     This is the other side of the coin.  What you see above is one of six big deep-water ports the Teutons built last year, in the space of nine months, in order to off-load LNG tankers and re-liquefy the fluid into vapour.  The orcs of Muscovy could only dream of the technical prowess that allowed this to occur.  And, suddenly, their Extractive Autocracy's feet turn into clay.  No, the Teutons don't have the extractive capacity of Ruffia, but they don't need to, because a collection of 26 countries have been able to supply the market with their LNG, driving the price down.  Art!

     Who do we know who lives in a Pallas?  I wonder how the central heating's powered.

Conrad Is ANGRY!

Yes, again, what, you think there's a limit?  Still working through the Codewords I made a note of, because when I take over not only will the compilers get dropped from orbit - a punishment that allows plenty of time for reflection - but what's left will be sent on a touring display as A Dreadful Warning.

CRIBBAGE: The collective noun for a bed of cabbages?  No, it's a game of some description, isn't it?  My CCD declares it to be a card game, in which players try to <dull drivel redacted>.  Art!

A cribbage bored

AXIAL: Let me guess, being along the axis of an object?  Because I'm familiar with the 'Co-axial', or 'Co-ax', which is or was the machine gun mounted alongside the main gun in turreted tanks.  Art!

     Apparently this, too, is a co-axial gun, as using in the construction industry.  You' put a tube of liquid what-not into the guide and, when you squeezed the trigger, gunk would come out of the nozzle. 

ERSATZ: From the Teuton, and admit it, how many of you have ever used this word in either conversation or written communication?  It just doesn't come up, unless you're going for the Pseud image <hack spit>.  Let me see what CCD has about it:  "Imitation or substitute" from the Teuton "Ersetzen" meaning "To substitute".  Art!

Gets excellent mileage, though

"The War Illustrated Edition 196 22nd December 1944"

Following on from the rather pathetic mock 'panzer' above, let's see what the censor had permitted to be published in the pages of this hallowed magazine.  Art!

     They aren't very helpful in identifying exactly, or even vaguely, where these photos were taken, apart from possibly being south of Bologna.  Perhaps a map - let us prod Art into his normal semi-sentience with this obsidian scalpel -

     That red dashed line is the positions as of 31st December 1944, so close enpugh to TWI's publication date.  Rather far up the peninsula, doncha know, which is why there's plenty of snow on the ground in both photographs.  No snow capes or white issue clothing in the first picture, making those chaps rather stand out in stark contrast.  Bad drills, fellas, go kick the quartermaster's shins.

A Mystery Solved

As you know, Conrad is an inquisitive chap, who wants to know everything all the time everywhere, so naturally I picked up on a photograph posted on Twitter by "Farmer Marv Bot", who is a genuine South Canadian farmer.  He posts occasional clips of him doing farm stuff from his tractor, and put up one of his wife in a cow costume.  Art!

Takes all sorts

     Of course - obviously! - my interest focussed on that large rusted heap of junk in the background, and I asked FMB what it was.

     "An old broken-down square baler" he informed.  Art!

     So now we know, and are much happier for it.

     The next puzzle to be resolved is what a 'Square Baler' does, although I suspect there's a clue in the title and it will not only bale hay, but do so in cubes rather than cylinders.  We shall see.

Finally -

Currently watching Season Four of "The Umbrella Academy" and, really, I ought to have watched Season Three, because I remember very little of it, apart from the ending.  O well, one can always go back.  The past is another country, but you can still Netflix it.

     Cowabunger.

Talking About Phillips And Curves

First Of All, WASH OUT YOUR FILTHY MINDS!

Conrad is all too familiar with how those septic sewers you call imaginations leap to the lowest possible denominator, if you can leap in a downward direction, and no doubt you were thinking of Kate Phillips, a moderately famous British actress, whom, if Art is not mooning over his Angela Lansbury calendar - 

Kate

     Here she is, with a backdrop of "Peaky Blinders", which is about the dangers of becoming vision-impaired when at height in the Alps.  Or something.  She also appears in one of those period dramas that go down terribly well in South Canada, and have done ever since "Upstairs, Downstairs", the poor benighted trans-Atlantic beggars, pining for royalty and aristocracy - O sorry, went off at a bit of a tangent.  "Downton Abbey" is the series in question.  No, you don't get a picture.

     Okay, we will now transit wildly to one of my semi-transcripts from that Youtube channel par excellence on deep and meaningful matters, "Silicon Curtain", as hosted by Jonathon Fink, with his guest Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld.  Art!

Jon and Jeff

     Jeff, as we shall dub him, is a Prof at Yale School Of Management and an economist by trade.  This is to shorten his educational resumé and qualifications to meaningful length or we'd be here an hour later.

     So, well into the interview, Jon asked if " - the structural problems of Ruffia's extremely brittle economy don't get nearly as much attention as they deserve?"

     Jeff nodded sagely at this and proceeded to disembowel the Ruffian Prez's habits of making shizzle up from whole cloth, though he put it in rather more delicate terms than I.  For one thing, Putin simply invents numbers.  The next time you hear of the International Monetary Fund quoting data about Ruffia, be aware that they have ZERO visibility of genuine Ruffian numbers.  Art!

Zero-X.  Close enough.

     Director Kristalina Georgieva simply tells her minions to approve whatever information Putin has passed on to them, because she has a fear of both windows and tea.  NB  This is exactly what Big K. of "Inside Russia", warned of at least 6 months ago, that the IMF does no analysis of, or auditing to, Ruffian data.

     Ostensibly, the IMF needs 30 different statistics to calculate a nation's GDP, which it doesn't get from Ruffia, because Putin has Rosstat, the state's official statistical body, make stuff up and give that out.

     Case in point: Inflation.  Art!

     According to Rosstat, Ruffian inflation fell to 8.6% in September 2024.  Jeff roundly pooh-poohed this and stated the real figure is three times that.  This is confirmed by us going off at a tangent, bringing in "Joe Blogs" and his referral to the "Phillips Curve", an economic model created by Polite Australian Bill Phillips in 1958.  Art!

     Put in terms so simple Conrad can understand them, there is an inverse relationship between the unemployment rate and inflation.  If unemployment is low, inflation ought to be high, as the factors leading to low unemployment will tend to increase inflation.

     Enter another Prof, this one Steve Hanke, who has carefully calculated the Ruffian's real inflation rate as based on the Phillip's Curve, using what economic data is available.  Art!

     This 'dip' in the official figure, when it went from 11% to 2%, is one reason Conrad never trusted the official Ruffian statistics, because there was no reason or explanation for it.  What you might call the first blue flag.  Look at the extreme starboard of Prof Hanke's graph, because that shows inflation at 27% - backing up Jeff's assertion with data.

    Jeff also repeated a fact that Joe has put across repeatedly, that the only reason the Ruffian economy still functions is because it has gone over to a wartime economy, which is great for all the businesses contracted by the state to fulfil military requirements, but considerably less great for non-war economy businesses, which are now being taxed at up to 50%.  Art!

The stark choice

     Another weakness, as detailed extensively by "Prune60" over on Twitter, is that there is nobody propping up the Ruffian economy, because all recent attempts to sell government bonds have been miserable failures.  Jeff pointed out that not even China, Putin's fairweather friend, is willing to buy Ruffian bonds.  At a recent meeting he had with ex-pat Ruffian economists and security experts, they looked in detail at all Putin's weapons and weapon systems and concluded that the Ruffian economy will collapse by mid-2025 AT THE VERY LATEST, thanks to the gigantic deficits the economy has created.  Art!

"Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown*"

     The only way Putin (and Jeff) can see his surviving is by praying for the Orange Land Whale to become Prez next week.  Going to be an interesting Bonfire Night!

     

Asiagone

Yes, back to the Asiago Plateau of December 1917, where Lt. Col Pitt-Taylor (a peculiarly apt surname) and Captain Heywood went a-scouting in the Italian front lines, the better to understand their capacity, and that of the troops.

     Here we come to another defect in the Roman army; lack of rotation.  In that exemplar of military efficiency, the British army, units in the front line would be rotated back to the support lines, then out of the lines altogether to the rear, for a period of rest before going back into the lines.  Art!

Italian trenches on the Asiago plateau

     Thanks to the very bad practice of stuffing as many men as possible in the front-line trenches, the Italians did not practice rotation.  Thus, Pitt-Taylor and Heywood, with their 'conducting officer', encountered ill-prepared and underclad Italian troops, who had been left in the front lines for months.  Not only that, they were holding the front in the depths of winter and at least a trio of them were found frozen to death each morning.  Art!

The plateau in winter

     Both British and Italians were expecting the Austrians to take advantage of this over-extended front line, which never happened, thanks to that same winter weather.  The Austrians were in positions much higher up the mountain slopes and consequently got worse weather, with lower temperatures and more snow.  This put the kibosh on any notions of a winter offensive.  Art!

Who And What?

Once again, Conrad is convinced that "Strictly Come Dancing" is an elaborate hoax dreamed up by dark and sinister forces (the same ones who keep putting out musicals) to mock and confuse him.  Art!

     No idea whom either of them are, nor do I care to Google and find out more.  Rest assured, both of you, that you will pay dearly when I take over.  I shall now go and cogitate on what appropriately dreadful punishment to inflict.  "Metal Machine Music" at 120 decibels 24/7 for a month sounds like a good beginning.

Nope, not going to inflict "The War Illustrated" upon you, one item about warfare in the blog is quite enough.

"Our Kind Of Traitor" By John Le  Carré

I picked this up months and months ago, along with "Wild Swans", and have recently set-to and begun reading it.  Up to Page 80, and it cuts back and forth in time so that you know the protagonists survive whatever Ruffian mafia gang-related outrage is about to happen.  Though not if they'll make it to Page 304, which is where it ends.  Art!

     Well well Kelvin Gosnell ("2000AD" stalwart) it was made into a film in 2016, which I never knew.  Conrad will be good and not look up the plot or how it ends, because I can forbear like that.  Written in 2004 when Ruffians weren't quite as persona non grata as they are now.

Finally -

Better go eat another quarter of my Blueberry Mug Cake, before it goes mouldy, even it is in the fridge.  O, and box up my Sunday Stew, too.  Perhaps even taste test it!

*  Yes yes yes, it's SHakespeare, sue me if you want.

The Shades Of Night Are Falling

As You'd Expect

You wouldn't expect them to be rising, would you?  That would be stupid.  Or "Asta ar fi o prostie" as they say in Bucharest.

     ANYWAY my point is that the clocks went back very early this morning, so while everything electronic or electro-mechanical says "16:39", it's really 17:39 by one's inner clock.  Edna, bless her, has trouble accommodating her hunger pangs to Daylight Saving Time, and starts to get whimpery at The Evil Humans kind of 15:00ish.  Art!

     Yes, this person might be more attuned to what's going on.  Yes yes yes, for the purists amongst you The Third Doctor did not encounter the Cybermen during his dramamentary years, that's poetic licence.  Conrad is more bothered by the miniature Daleks in shot close-up, which are pretending to be normal-sized Daleks a long way off.

     Right, time to set out the links, methinks.

2023

BOOJUM!: The Sound Abounds

2022

BOOJUM!: Bork Bork BOrkney!

(more Cybermen!)

2021

BOOJUM!: Burgoo Burgoo Burgoo -

2020

BOOJUM!: Doctor Yes

2019

BOOJUM!: You Can Tell When Autumn Has Arrived -

2018

BOOJUM!: Wham, Bam, Thank You S.L.A.M.

2017

BOOJUM!: The Halls Of Monteazuma

2016

BOOJUM!: Like The Wall, Pink Floyd Support All

2015

BOOJUM!: How Now Brown Cowl

2014

BOOJUM!: Toxic To Voles!

2013

BOOJUM!: I Bake - But Not Of Cake

Hail The Rail In The Vale

If You're Going To Be A Stickler

Then it should more properly be 'Val', as yes, we are once again discussing the clash of martial cultures in Italy during the First Unpleasantness, and with particular reference to a rather unique variety of railway transportation that I don't think we've covered before: the rack and pinion railway.

     Before we get any further, I want to bring up a picture from one of "Bruno Pisani"'s mountaineering exploits, and no false modesty about him merely being a hiker, these were proper mountains he was climbing.  Art!

     This view is indeed of the Austro-Italian border mountain ranges, looking westward from the Dolomites inside Italian territory.  If there is any level ground there, it will be very narrow strips of land at the bottom of valleys.

     The British in late 1917 has been shunted around to the Asiago Plateau, on the mountainous northern border with Austria, sandwiched between Italian and French forces.  Whilst the plateau was a vast, shallow depression, the routes to it lay up hills and mountains.  Art!

Courtesy Imperial War Museum

      The mountains were so steep that it was impossible for roads to traverse them in the normal fashion, so they were hairpin in layout, as you can see above.  On a minor note, the British 3-ton lorries were too large to cope with the bends and Italian trucks with a smaller turning circle were purchased for use.

     Right, so that's roads dealt with.  Now let me throw a few maps into the mix.  Art!

     The salient part of the Legend here is the 'Rack Railway' which you can see goes through Cesuna and on to Asiago.  These sketch maps don't detail things like contour lines, necessary for depicting how steep the land depicted really is, so - Art!

     Here is where we come into the realm of gravity, friction, mass and physics.  A normal railway cannot exceed a gradient of more than 4.5º, at which point mass and gravity will combine to prevent any progress being made and the locomotive's wheels will just spin on the track.

     How to solve this problem took enterprising engineers no more than a quick peruse, which is a lot easier than putting it into action.  Art!

     A rack and pinion railway has three tracks instead of the normal two, the central one being a toothed rail, and a pinion or cog-wheel on the locomotive engages with the pinion to physically move it forward.  Thus the 4.5º limit for a normal locomotive can be disregarded, and inclines up to 45º or even 50º can be travelled.

     However - yesss! - that angle creates another problem for normal locomotives, because they only function properly when horizontal, thanks to their boilers being sensitive to changes in orientation.  How do you solve this problem?  Why, you re-design the locomotive.  Art!

     These locos are optimised for travel up and down steep gradients, where their design and pitch keeps the boiler level.  They look rather odd out of context, though.  Art!

     I nicked this picture from Wiki, as there aren't any others I could find showing this mechanical fish out of water.  I don't even know if it would run on level tracks but looking at how angled the boiler it, one doubts it.  Has anyone come up with a gimballed-boiler steam loco that adapts to changes in elevation?  A bit of a niche market, one presumes.  It is also noted that r-a-p locomotives are a lot slower than conventional ones, and 10 miles per hour is about the quickest they can manage.

     ANYWAY back to sunny Italy, or, rather, snowy mountainous Northern Italy, where they had the Rocchette-Asiago rack and pinion railway, which you saw a portion of in the maps above.  This was laid down (or up) in 1910 and was used until 1958.  Art!

Note the middle r-a-p track

     The whole track was torn up decades ago, and since it went out of commission 66 years ago there's precious little evidence of it whilst it was running.
     Today's rack and pinion railways are all either electric or diesel, so there are no peculiar adaptations to mountain conditions, which is an aesthetic loss we'll just have to put up with.

     There you go, a great deal less blood and thunder than you expected if rather more steam and smoke.


Further To Being Buried Alive

We have covered this ghoulish yet interesting trope a while back, principally covering Victorian worries about being sent to meet your maker a trifle early, and methods of resolving this.  Principal amongst them was not dying in the first place, or at least not seeming to die.  What follows next is from "The Infographics Show"'s take on how to survive being buried alive.

Step One:  Calm down.  Art!

CO₂ monitor

     As used by "Mythbusters" when they buried Jamie alive.  You see, the more stressed and anxious you are, the faster you use up the available oxygen and the more CO₂ you emit.  Since many coffins are airtight, you have a limited air budget to work with.

Step Two: What physsical assets do you have with you?  TIS optimistically encourage you to hit the coffin lid with whatever hard objects come to hand, in order to potentially allow any sharp-eared cemetery worker or visitor to hear you.  Art!

Handy yet unlikely

Step Three: Break out.  Unless you're in a steel coffin, in which case you're doomed unless you were buried with a power drill and multiple bits.  A very big 'unless' there.  Assuming that the coffin is cheap and fragile, cover your head with your shirt to keep out dirt, then use whatever tool you have to attack the centre of the coffin lid, it's weakest point.  Causing it to flex may be sufficient to break it under the weight of overburden.  Art!

Step Four: Wiggle.  As earth pours into the coffin, you need to keep on top of it and also to get out of the recently-dug grave.  This earth will be relatively loose so your chances of getting to the surface are not 0%, as encouraging as that sounds.

     One of the Commenters claimed to work in a cemetery and said coffins are often placed in a concrete vault which is massive enough to need a crane to assemble it.  Plus, the burial takes place possibly a week after the body is placed in the coffin.  Which rather takes the romance out of this subject.  O well.

Our Journey With Berni

Will continue in a few minutes after I've made sure the pictures are available.  Wait one.  Art!

     Kind of.  The picture and Berni's comments were entirely separate, so I've had to meld them seamlessly with Snip, which also means that the text is horizontal, not vertical, if still a tad too small to read.  Allow me to correct that.  Art!

     I think it's more about giving the slavering undead monsters a vulnerability that derives from supernatural forces, rather than them observing etiquette.

And This Just In From "R.G. Poulssen" On Twitter

Ol' Rog is a Dutch national who loves to post "On This Day" clips on Twitter - HA TAKE THAT ELONG TUSK! - and put up an interesting one that I've not seen before.  Art!

     He wasn't sure what it was, which is easily resolved, as it's the Sinister's knock-off of the British Vickers 6-ton tank: the T-26.  There are British soldiery watching it trundle along and thanks to the dust and sand, other Twitter users identified the location as Iran, during the dual British-Sinister invasion of same country in 1941.

Finally -

Your Humble Scribe is finally feeling better, which means a prospective stroll into Lesser Sodom, which means a scrape and a scrub beforehand.  Can't go around frightening people.  Also I've run out of Codewords to do, Horrors! so a copy of the M.E.N. is also in prospect.

     Chin chin!

The Full Monte

That's 'Monte' With A Long '-eh'

Just so we're not confusing it with that film about a bunch of ex-factory male strippers, where going "The Full Monty" meant to totally divest oneself of garments, for the delectation of a watching audience.

     Here an aside.  Yes, already!  There was considerable speculation about where the phrase "The Full Monty" hails from, with no definite answer at the time.  Back then (an horrifying 27 years ago) they didn't have the latest edition of "Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable" to refer to.  Mine has a few suggestions: from the Spanish card game 'Monte', from the three-piece Sunday suit from Montague Burton, or from Field Marshal 'Monty' Montgomery and his full English breakfast.  Art!

I don't have to tell you who's who, do I?

     Given that Monty was an ascetic of the first water, I strongly doubt the FEB story.  A cup of black tea and a dry piece of toast sounds mor 

     ANYWAY we are back on the subject of a culture clash between the armed forces of Britain and Italy in the First Unpleasantness, where the M8s were also present in some force.

     One of the immediate problems for the tourists-in-arms was communication, as very few British officers spoke Italian, very few Italian officers spoke English, and very few French officers spoke more than barely-passable schoolboy Italian.

     Conrad is surprised the British officers didn't try communicating in Latin, which language had been beaten into every prep school pupil for centuries.  Whatever.  Art!

     This is a colourized photo of Italian soldiers.  You can tell by virtue of their Adrian 'casque' helmet, produced by France, and their khaki uniforms, as the M8s wore blue ones.
     I did mention language problems, didn't I?  Well, it transpired that many of the Italian rank and file had lived and worked in South Canada, long enough to become fluent in English, even if it was with an accent.  Can't have everything.

     WE'LL GET TO 'MONTE' SHORTLY BE PATIENT!  Art?

     One of the things that drove the British (less so the French) to distraction was the Italian army's clocking-off between 12:00 and 15:00 for lunch and a rest, regardless of circumstances - static in trenches, in retreat, advancing, training - 
 whichever.  What you might call 'urbane warfare'.  However - a word that inevitably crops up here - matters martial did not become unravelled because the Austrians, too, liked to sign-off from 11:30 until 13:30, emphasising the 'hungry' part of 'Austro-Hungarian'.  Art!

     Another cultural clash was the allocation of roads and march columns, which might sound petty and unimportant, which is because you don't have Conrad's extensive background in reading people cleverer that he is.  In the First Unpleasantness when infantry battalions or regiments or brigades moved, they moved on foot, and a large formation might take up many miles of road.  Were they to collide with or cross the path of another formation also on the move, things got hideously snarled up.  Art!

Tommy Atkins synchronises his watches

     You've probably seen this in any number of war films: the Colonel is giving instructions to his Order Group pre-dawn, he looks at his own wristwatch and tells everyone to synchronise at Oh-Five Fifty NOW.  This means everyone is working to the same time, instead of being five or ten minutes ahead or behind, which can lead to disastrously staggered actions.

     "Sincronizzare gli orologi?" would be the Roman's response, to puzzled looks.  See second paragraph above for consequences.  Art!

     NOW we get to Monte Asolone.  This was a mountain originally within Italian lines, which the Austrians successfully attacked and occupied.  The picture above is an extremely unhelpful one from Wiki, which only states that it's "Austrian trenches on Monte Asolone".  Note no indication of which way is North, nor ground scale, or a location on the mountain, nor even a date.  3/10 must try harder.  Art!

The real thing today

Monte Asolone dead centre

     Here's what was originally a four-colour map, which Naval & Military have cheapskated into a monochrome version.  You can see the Monte at dead centre once again, incorporated into the Austrian line, since the Italian counter-attack had only recaptured the southern slopes.

     Why all this concentration on one particular mountain?  Because it was a key geographical feature that both sides needed to fully occupy in order to stand any chance of prevailing in a new offensive on the Asiago plateau.  Austro-Hungarian  possession of it galled the Italian Comando Supremo, who considered retiring to positions further south.  Art!

     This splendidly-moustachioed chap is Lt. Colonel W. William Pitt-Taylor, an enterprising staff officer with the XIV Army Corps staff, who was sent by General Plumer in late December to assess the Roman lines on the Asolone slopes.  His report did not exude confidence: the Italian maps were hopelessly inaccurate; the front-line trenches were blasted from rock and thus shallow; there were no communication trenches (used to reach front-line trenches under cover); barbed wire was far too close to the parapet to protect the lines; and, again, there were far too many men in the front lines.  All very depressing stuff if the Austrians chose to attack .....

     We shall have to leave it on this literal cliff-hanger of a moment or there'd be no room for anything else in this Intro.

Our Journey With Berni

Continues!  Let me do my due diligence and ascertain whether this card's visuals are available on teh Interwebz.  Wait one.  

     Why yes it is.  'Night's End'.  Art!

     He's probably got a bald spot on top.  It's not cold, you can't see his breath and there's no ice or snow visible.

     ANYWAY I think there's a bit of poetic licence at work here.  You can clearly see the Moon in the background, nowhere near setting, so night still has hours to run yet.  As for slaking his un-natural lusts, Conrad is unsure and uncertain whether it's blood our wolfish chap has on his mind, given the young lady's attire (or lack of it).

SACK THE EDITOR!

I did think I might get through this blog without having to descend upon those two guaranteed content creators: Ruffia or the Orange Land Whale.  Sadly not so.  Art!

     "Dailymotion"?  "Dailybowelmotion" is more like it.  They cannot get the capitalisation correct.  "BBC's" is how it OUGHT to read, and nobody at this wretched web publication caught the error before it got launched?  Bah! Art?

     THIS IS HOW HIS NAME IS SPELLED!

     Sheesh.

     Actually I'm surprised Steve got chosen to ask the last question.  Their spokesman, Dmitry Were-Bogbrush Peskov, made a crack about the BBC not being a very frequent visitor to Putin's speeches, which is horse-rosefodder.  Art!

     
    What he meant is that they don't like Steve asking questions, as he is fluent in Ruffian and thus cannot have his question or answers filtered, filleted or falsified by an official 'translator'.  Art!

     This is the unamused face that says 'Peskov had better stay away from windows for the next few days.'  Toilets, too.

Latest Update On Mug Cake

Conrad ensured he had the requisite ingredients, having done the weekly shop on Wednesday, namely butter and blueberries, both of which are pricey.  £2 for a half-pound of butter, whatever that is in hideous Metric measurements.  Nor were there any cut-price non-branded versions available.  No wonder the benighted citizens of Muscovy are stealing it off the shelves; in fact some supermarkets merely have a notice requiring shoppers to request a shop assistant obtain what they want from the warehouse.  Art!

     Yes, we do this in Perfidious Albion, just for hard liquor that costs upwards of £15 per bottle.  Not for eggs or butter, as if i

     ANYWAY the Blueberry Mug Cake.  Art!

       It proved a little reluctant to get out of the mug, possibly because I used oil to grease it instead of margarine.  I shall know better next time.  Not tasted yet!  Which will be interesting as I substituted half the recipe's sugar for Canderel.


Finally -

For the first time in over a week, I feel as if the balance issues that saw me lurching around The Mansion like a comedy drunk have relented.  I put it down to clean living and being pure of heart.  Disagree?  Prove me wrong.