Month: April 2019

Well-Earned Reward

Bad News

This kind of thing makes my head ache.

Father deserts family when kids are young.  Then, years later, kids (or one of them) becomes Rich & Famous basically through talent and/or luck.  Whereupon Runaway Dad, who did fuck all to help and has since Fallen On Hard Times, suddenly reappears (usually following some media discovery) and bemoans the fact that he’s No Longer Part Of The Family, or similar.  Like in this case.  Whereupon my reaction:

I remember John Lennon once telling that his father walked out on his mother and emigrated to New Zealand before John was born — and the next time he heard from Daddy Dearest was after the Beatles exploded onto the music world, when his father wrote to him asking for money.  Lennon’s response was as expected:  caustic and dismissive (think:  FOAD).

Now, of course, someone like Adele (whose talent is astonishing and her success justified) is going to get some stick from the Bleeding Hearts Brigade because she somehow owes this asswipe a piece of her vast fortune.  I hope that her response is even more extreme than Lennon’s, and should be quite simple:  “He wasn’t my father;  he was just my sire — and he doesn’t deserve shite  from me.”  (Her Cockney frankness is one of her more endearing features.)

Stick to yer guns, darlin’.  Never mind all those Commiesymps at The Sun.

More Outrage

Food & Drink, Nannies

Of course, no festival could be safe from the Perpetually Indignant.  From the so-called National Obesity Forum (U.K. branch), we are told the following:

Super-sized Eater eggs are a risk to health because of the extraordinary amount of sugar they contain, [these fucking busybodies] have warned.
Over-indulging youngsters could do ‘real’ damage, they say, if they consumer an entire egg in one day – all too likely at Easter.
Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Crunchie Ultimate Easter Egg contains a whopping 330g of sugar. This is the equivalent of 17 days’ worth of sugar, based on the NHS recommendation for children aged four to six to consume no more than 19g in a day.

It makes me want to go out and buy six dozen of these bad boys, and hand them out to random kids at our local playgrounds.  I wonder if World Market has them in stock…

Difficult Choice

Drive Time

Over at Timewaster’s place, he puts up this poignant statement:

I have to tell you that quite frankly, the whole 50s-era obsession with large fins on cars left me cold.  Not really being infected with sci-fi/space obsession (which was what drove the styling motif of the era), I thought that the large finned American cars of the time were gaudy, ostentatious monstrosities.

However, of late, I’m starting to revise my opinion.  Loyal Readers will recall how I often gripe about the wind-tunnel-driven shape of modern cars which renders modern cars pretty much indistinguishable from one another.  So much do I detest this homogeneity that I find myself drifting towards a scenario whereby if someone were to offer me a choice between, say, an old Chevy Bel-Air:

…or a modern Chevy Malibu:

…I would most likely go for the ’57 Bel-Air despite  all the modern comforts afforded by the 2018 Mali-Boo-Boo.  The first has character, the second looks like a Toyota Camry.

Am I alone in this?

Another Victory For Automation

Technology

Somebody remind me again how this “self-drive car” thing is supposed to help us, save lives, end Glueball Wormening and bring Peace To Mankind, etc. etc. etc.?  Especially when we have crap like this happening to these “A.I.” systems?

The investigation into a fatal plane crash in Ethiopia has zeroed in on suspicion that a faulty sensor triggered an automated anti-stall system, sending the plane into a dive.
The Federal Aviation Administration received black box flight data from Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on Thursday, indicating that the MCAS anti-stall system was activated shortly before the crash.
The same system was implicated in the crash of another Boeing 737 Max in October in Indonesia, Lion Air Flight 610.
The MCAS is designed to push the nose of the plane down when sensors indicate that the ‘angle of attack’ is too steep, and the plane in in danger of stalling – but investigators are now probing whether a faulty sensor activated the system during a normal climb, sources say.

This, and especially after we hear that a.) the “safety” feature (i.e. pilot override) was available as an (expensive) option on the system, and b.) the pilots of said doomed airliners appear not to have had, shall we say, adequate  training on the system.

Don’t even get me started on cock-ups like the faulty reservation systems, which have been in place since at least  the 1970s, are one of the simplest programs in existence, and they still  fall over occasionally.  (Adding features which screw paying customers over*, however, doesn’t seem to have been a problem at all.)

Color me skeptical on all this stuff.  Hell, I don’t even care for automatic gearboxes, let alone “self-drive” systems.  “Faulty sensor”, my pale African-American ass.

*British Airways, among others, has a cute little sub-routine when you book two or more tickets at a time that automatically ensures that none of your booked seats are next to each other.  So guess what?  You have to go back into the system and pay extra  for that “privilege” of sitting next to your wife or kids.  That  automatic program, I’ll wager, works perfectly every time.

Miscarriage Of Justice

Crime, Two-Minute Hate

Somebody ‘splain to me why this little shit doesn’t deserve to be taken out behind the courthouse and shot in the back of the neck, instead of being jailed for only 20 years.  (Note that even without time off for “good behavior”, he’d be back on the streets at age 46.)

A California man has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for hoax calls that led police to fatally shoot an unarmed Kansas man following a dispute between two people over $1.50 bet in a ‘Call of Duty: WWII’ video game.
Tyler R. Barriss, 26, was sentenced on Friday by U.S. District Judge Eric Melgren sentenced under a deal in which he pleaded guilty in November to a total of 51 federal charges related to fake calls and threats.
The 2017 death of 28-year-old Andrew Finch drew national attention to the practice of ‘swatting,’ a form of retaliation in which someone reports a false emergency to get authorities, particularly a SWAT team, to descend on an address.

If there was ever a malevolent, spiteful crime, this one of “swatting” another person deserves a massive prison sentence — but if someone gets killed (see story), it should carry an automatic death penalty… pour encourager les autres  assholes who want to play this sick little game.

Cool Prezzie

The Gun Thing

Now that’s what I call statesmanship:

On March 7th, 2019, President Trump and the First Lady met with Prime Minister Andrej Babiš of the Czech Republic and his wife, in the White House. The meeting was cordial, with both men celebrating the bond between the two countries.
After the meeting, PM Babiš told reporters that he had presented President Trump with one of one hundred custom crafted CZ75 pistols created for the centennial of the Czech Republic in 2018. The pistol presented to President Trump had serial number 1946, the year of President Trump’s birth.

And the gun?

That’s a purdy lil’ thang, I don’t care who you are.  (Memo to POTUS:  try the Federal HST 124gr ammo.)

And as any fule kno, whilst I am often dubious about the 9mm Europellet, I am anything but dubious about the wonderful CZ 75, which is one of the finest pistols ever designed.  I saw a plain-Jane 75B at the gun store the other day, and were I not already in possession of a High Power, I would have bought it then and there.

And some wooden grips for the thing, like Trump’s gun.

Afterthought:  if the CzechPres had tried to give a similar present to has-been president Urkel, the Commie punk would probably have screamed like a little girl and called in the Secret Service.