btw, Sweet Caroline is De Rigueur at all Big Ten football games. While we are at it, one of the greatest college basketball plays of all time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7N0Vmr4lz4

Had to mow grass on Sunday here in beautiful Southern Indiana. Bitched that it was $4.89 and spent a bit over 10 bucks to overfill my 2 gallon plastic tank. Okay, I filled the company vehicle first and tacked on the extra after filling up so the company payed for it. Accounting will never catch it. Stopped today to fill up the vehicle I drive to get to work. $5.25 a gallon. If I pull that stunt this weekend, Acct'ing is gonna get me. How fortunate am I? Very. How many others can't obfuscate their fuel purchases? Not many. The 'not many' is the vast majority of the electorate I'm thinking. I don't know where it'll stop but I'd wager on The Red Wave in 2022 and the The Red Tsunami in 2024 is gonna bring this current maladministration to an end.

Sheesh Clarice... So the FBI had a field office (RA) in the lawfare offices of the Democrat party. A 'secure facility' they could run FBI searches against the Dems opponents. That's what that sounds like. When people are harrumphing about the silliness of the 'conspiracy theory of a Deep State' we must assume going forward that they are in fact part of the Deep State.

Hmmm, Rocco... Maybe things ain't going according to plan now?

Hope you have a good one jimmyk!

I look forward to the next page sbw. There needs to be a second page.

An update on the bubarooni family: The Boy turned down engineering at Purdue and architecture at Ball State. He's going to go to I.U. at the Luddy School of Informatics. Engineering was where I was steering him but we are only about 8 miles from I.U. so he'll be around close which makes his Mom very, very happy. He got something called a 'Direct Admit' to the school which is apparently good and he got admitted to the Hutton Honors College too. I.U. offered the most money hands down as well. If he stays in Luddy all four years they are basically paying for half his college costs each year. Because of how close we live, he could actually live at home and save the other half but he wants 'the full college experience' (whatever that means...) and will live on campus instead. The other 'Big Thing' for me is my Sig Other and I bought my Mom's floor covering business last Octoberish. I had broached the topic here one time and got some great input from peeps here on this board. Anyway, I'm now a 'small businessman'. Honestly, I'm more of a 'silent partner' as my wife runs the business while I remain toiling away in the salt mines as an 'IT Guy' for the company I've worked at for the last 21 years. I do get a quarterly profit sharing check that will more than pay for the boys other half of the tuition. And his sisters too. I will tell you when we bought the company, which Mom sold to us for less than a third of assessed value, gas was 2ish dollars a gallon, interest rates where ridiculously low and it seemed the purchase was a no brainer... well things have changed a bit and I'm a bit nervous over taking the plunge. I.U. does seem to be flush with Covid Cash though (our biggest customer) and we are raking in cash from the out of state property developers here in Bloomington. Checks roll in from New Jersey, New York and Chicago on a weekly basis and I hope that continues. 20 years ago in Bloomington, the Big Money came from the locals. Some lady with 30 house rentals or a group of local business peeps building 100 apartments a few blocks from campus. Now it's some corporation or private entity from Connecticut building 250 rentals off campus. Or New Jersey. Or New York. Chicago. There is a place just west of the stadium with 850 rental units going up. They literally bought up blocks of those old single homes on plots the townies owned and rented out to students for decades and razed them to the ground. Now a building, it's a 6 story monstrosity to be honest, spans all those blocks in a single, uninterrupted conglomeration of steel, concrete and sheetrock broken only by the only occasional 4 story, concrete parking garage inhabitated by license plates from Cali, New York, New Jersey, Chicago and Connecticut. On Tuesday, some guys came in looking for transitions strips (I dunno look it up...) and willing to pay whatever. They were from the big 850 unit place going up. From Jersey and all Portugese. Bloomington has changed significantly change over the last 20 years...

Thanks for the link SBW. A distinguished looking chap if you don't mind a compliment. Now, to check out the prose...

I read an article yesterday that the Russkies are bringing in firefighting units to deal with the tunnels under Azovstal. The plan being to use pumps to use the nearby harbor water to flood the tunnels using airshafts. Those had better be really big pumps if that plan is gonna work.

Narc, I'd bet theres's no spring break in Narva. No good campaign season either.

Charles XII of Sweden, a fav of any military history buff. The boy king reached his high at Narva and his nadir at Poltava. OK, it got a little worse for him at Fredrikstein where he died...

It was definitely bad legal advice.

I wasn't in Bloomington yesterday, but we had a bolide event yesterday over Bloomington. One further south in Marysville, KY almost certainly related. Everyone here heard hold a large BOOM that shook windows and doors. It was heard in all the surrounding counties as well. I can remember some earthquakes over the years but a bolide? Nothing like Chelyabinsk but something to remember.

I did Pin, because of Alp Arslan. Kind of a famous dude.

The french map mentioned above is most interesting.

"In the meantime I'll side with the little guy and the weak and helpless." I'm tracking with Matt on that too! I'm very concerned about the little guy right now in the Donbass region though. I've read reports that up to 40k Ukraninian troops are there and in danger of being cut off. If so, it would be a strategic disaster for the Ukranians. I think I posted some musing in the first 7 to 10 days that I was befuddled that they weren't withdrawing towards the west. I speculated it might be that they were in good, fortified areas and that withdrawing would subject them to heavy air assaults. I've also read that the fighting there is intense and they may not have been able to disengage.

Yeah Davod, I'm tracking with you on that.

They are luanched from modified Mig-31's. With a range of about 1300 miles, they can be launched hundreds of miles behind Russia's lines and still pretty well cover the whole of Ukraine. I don't think the Ukranians have the reach to hit Russian air bases that far behind the lines. They are fast, so useful in destroying targets of opportunity that may present themselves or other high value targets that may have heavy air defences. I don't know how many the Russians have but I doubt it's 'hundreds' and will be used sparingly. I doubt they are a game changer in the present conflict and their main impact is probably propaganda and to cause the Ukranians a good case of nervousness.

"Russia is losing..." Facts not in evidence counselor. The western press, purveyors of The Disinformation we have suffered thru for six years, says so. The Russian say otherwise. They plod on. 2 clicks here. 5 clicks there. The map tells the story. History will eventually confirm what happened.

the puppet art, while impressive in the manual dexterity displayed, is creeping me out. Chuckie...

I've read that the Russian ship hit and sunk was an LST loaded with supplies, including ammo, that the Russians flooded and sank to prevent it from exploding. The Russians say it was a Tochka-U missile that they intercepted but was apparently low enough that when intercepted it started fires on the LST. They say a second LST was also damaged as well and is out of commission. The Ukranians had the intelligence and the assets to conduct a successful strike. Game changer? Probably not. Nonetheless, that's a win for the Ukranians and demonstrates that, 28 days into the conflict, they still possess good capabilities.

A cold look at a potential Ukranian future: https://mwi.usma.edu/dont-underestimate-the-bear-russia-is-one-of-the-worlds-most-effective-modern-counterinsurgents/

The Russians are currently behind the 8 ball. Certainly if the objective was to take Kyiv or Kharkhiv quickly to end the war. I think I stated as much on day 10. On day 20, that's probably twice as much behind the 8 ball. I think this is largely due to what I am beginning to believe is a truly remarkable resistance by the Ukranians. I think it is their adeptness, well outright stubbornness in defence against great odds, more so than Russian ineptness. I think that the Ukranian's use of western supplied atgm's and manpad's are an important facet of their defence. It has nearly paralyzed the Russians on the ground at the tactical level. I also believe that they have been invigorated in their heroic struggles by the actions and demeanor of their Prez. I have always been a firm believer in the Man on the White Horse theory of leadership. Had Zelensky run away, his army may have too. He has not. Neither has his army. The trade off here is that the Russians are now responding with heavy shelling of those targets with artillery, rockets and air launched munitions. The Russians at this point have found no place to push units around Kyiv or Kharviv thru weak spots. That is an operational failure on the Russians part. These are both tactical and political targets of the highest value whose fall would have enabled a military victory early, on the cheap and on their terms. With that option gone, and I think it is, Plan B is probably to take those targets thru reduction. It is the only logical way for the Russians to continue on and still preserve their own forces. Western media is constantly rehashing Ukranian claims about the 'targeting of civilians' and such but for Russians I think this is simply the inevitable results of trying to assualt entrenched forces in built up areas against heavy restistance. I think the Russians also hoped to take those targets with a minimum of destruction so as to reap the economic benefits of their absorption into a greater Russian sphere on influence and have held back on shelling for that reason. Time is ticking against the Russians on Day 20. They need to do something on the battlefield and soon. I don't think we have seen the Russians use the total throw weight of their artillery against cities and we are rapidly approaching a point where the only option left to them is employ it or accept at best a stalemate that they can't afford to maintain and would be perceived as a defeat for Russia. Absent a diplomatic solution, I fear we will see Kyiv and Kharkhiv in flames.

Ig, I think the Russians are about to go 'Full Russian'.

We have been hearing for weeks now about how the Russians are inept, especially in regards to the stalled 40 mile long convoy. That convoy has now deployed. What if that convoy was a siege train? I fear that a city of almost 3 million is about to suffer a 'Grozny'. I think the Russians will do it. They'll flatten it.