Month: January 2020

About Damn Time

Good Stuff, Men & Women

I have always pressed for a relationship where the men and women have clearly-defined roles — and preferably, one where the man is the earner and dominant partner, while the woman takes care of the home and children.  Needless to say, the feministicals come after men like me, spitting and clawing, and spouting bullshit about the “patriarchy” and (in times past) “male chauvinist” etc.

Now, after all the feministical nonsense, we finally seem to have something of a return to sanity:

Amid the Me Too movement and radical feminism, a new opposing trend has emerged across Britain – the ‘tradwife’ trend.
Harking back to 1950s Britain, and already established in the US, the trend sees women reverting to the traditional roles of housewives, practiced in the fifties and sixties.
The belief behind the movement is that wives should not work, and rather spend their days cooking, cleaning, wearing modest and feminine dress, and practice traditional etiquette, being submissive to their husbands and ‘always put them first’.

“Tradwife”… okay, I can live with the term.  I could (and do) happily live with someone who believes in it.  Even better is this perspective:

‘My view on feminism is that it’s about choices. To say you can go into the working world and compete with men and you’re not allowed to stay at home -to me is taking a choice away’.
Distancing herself from the movement’s right-wing links, she argued: ‘Being a tradwife is investing in your family and being selfless. So I would say the opposite of that is someone who is selfish and just takes’.

We need more of this, and more women like her.  Society will be all the better for it.

And my favorite line from the article:

‘We say to feminists: thanks for the trousers, but we see life a different way’.

Priceless.

Letting Nature Take Its Course

Vermin

I like this idea:

Eight terriers kill record 700 rodents in just seven hours – after desperate farmer called in handlers in bid to fix vermin crisis once and for all

Talk about creating a service to address a need:

The terriers are trained to kill vermin and are managed by the rat group, who travel around the region to clear farms of unsightly vermin.
Ed Cook, 34, manages the service and said the Suffolk and Norfolk Rat Pack are dedicated to promoting traditional hunting methods.

Now, if we can only create such a group Over Here to see off the vermin who infest the Government Swamp, Social Democrat party, United Nations and other such foul institutions, the world would be a better place.

Maybe Not

Grammar Nazism

I followed a link from Insty to Amazon (“Top Books In Military History”) and found this:

Priceless.

That said, given the Smithsonian’s increasing descent into woke-based illiteracy, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the cover was printed incorrectly, the book is about WWI, and nobody in the layers and layers of fact-checkers picked it up.

Or else it’s the Ockham principle, which would simply say that Amazon done fucked up.

Children Not Wanted

Men & Women

This doesn’t refer to refusing to have kids.  Instead, I echo the words of Brit actor Laurence Fox:

Laurence Fox has revealed he once broke up with a girlfriend because she liked a pro-#MeToo TV advert. The actor, 41, told his ex-lover: ‘Bye. Sorry I can’t do this with you,’ after she praised Gillette for their TV campaign on ‘toxic masculinity’.
He also said he no longer dates women under 35 as they are ‘too woke’ and most of them are ‘absolutely bonkers’.

Of course, this is not my battlefield — I’m so far away from the dating pool that I’m positively dehydrated — but I can absolutely see where Fox’s frustration stems from.

All this is the toxic consequence of the combination of militant feminism and modernist principle, as seen in the very next sentence of the article:

It comes after a furious row over his [BBCTV] Question Time showdown with academic Rachel Boyle, which saw him call her a ‘racist’ for describing him a ‘white, privileged male’ in a debate about Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.
[He] said ‘throwing the card of racism at everybody… [is] really starting to get boring’, triggering a Twitterstorm in which some praised him for his ‘common sense’ and others brand him a ‘disgrace’.

And he’s quite right.  Accusing someone of the “sin” of being a “White male [whatever]” is no less racist than calling someone a “Black gangster” or (ahem) a “woman driver” — it’s all racist / sexist bullshit.  (But lest I be lumped in with the appalling Mr. Fox, however, let me make it plain that there’s no such thing as a “Black gangster” and all  women are excellent drivers.)

I was chatting to the Son&Heir,  who has recently split from his long-time girlfriend, about this very topic, and he echoed Laurence Fox’s sentiments almost to the word.  Even in conservative north Texas, he finds women younger than him (at age 31) to be… I think the words he used were “inconsequential” and “flakey”.  As a result, his dates with the same woman are generally in the low single figures, as it takes him very little time to discover that underneath their superficial shallowness, “wokeness” and ignorance is… noting else.  To quote some other guy:  “They know absolutely nothing.”  He just laughs it off, as I suspect other young men of his intelligence, education and experience do when confronted with those same prospects.

Even worse is that older women of his generation come with either a world of psychological baggage or (sometimes “and”) a ready-made brood of children.  He doesn’t see why he should have to deal with their heritage of bad decisions and the consequences thereof, and I can’t say I blame him.

As for Laurence Fox, it comes as no surprise that he’s being attacked for pointing all this out.  What people often forget is that the little boy who announced that the Emperor was wearing no clothes was soon thereafter torn to shreds by the mob for showing such disrespect for the ruler.

‘Twas ever thus.

Monday Funnies

Funny Stuff

Wherein we drag ourselves out of bed to face the horror of another week… wait a minute, it’s Martin Luther King Day!!!  (a.k.a the holiday celebrated by many, while others go “Who?”)

Now on to the serious funnies [sic]…

And to celebrate MLK Day properly, what better than a quickie with some vintage Pam Grier?

Would.  And so would anyone.  Now get off that lounger and celebrate the day.

Cute Lil’ Italian Thang

Drive Time

When Mazda reintroduced the concept of “sports car” to the automotive world, a whole bunch of other automakers, who had doubtless been told by Marketing that nobody wanted sports cars anymore, suddenly rediscovered the joys of a small, inexpensive, modestly-powered open-top car.

Of course, people had always wanted sports cars — what they wanted was a reliable sports car, which the Euros and Brits seemed to be incapable of producing (Alfa Romeo Spider, Triumph anything, MG anything, Fiat anything, and so on), while the US had never produced a sports car.  (Corvettes, Thunderbirds etc. aren’t sports cars.  The closest one we’ve ever had was the Saturn Sky/Pontiac Solstice, which was really the German-designed Opel GT anyway —


— and  we were late to the party.  By the time these came onto the market in the mid-2000s, Mazda had gobbled up the market already.)

Anyway, Mazda ended all that, or to be more correct, they started it up again.  Now, all of a sudden, everyone else had to get back to the drawing board and play in this pool.

Enter Fiat’s little derivative of the older 124 Spider:  the Barchetta.

If it looks like the Mazda Miata, it’s probably not coincidental:

…because there are only so many ways you can design a sports car, after all.

Another sports car of the late 1970s was the Lotus Elan (which predated the Miata, and in fact was probably the car that Mazda used as their model):

Even Alfa Romeo replaced their old Spider (which was gorgeous) with a 90s lookalike (which wasn’t).  Here’s the 1980’s Spider:

Compare to the 2000 model:

‘Nuff said.

The only thing which set the Alfa apart from the rest was terminal unreliability a snarling 3.0-liter V6 which made the Spider so much quicker than the rather lackluster Mazda- and Fiat roadsters.  (Then of course there came new environmental restrictions [sigh]  and the V6 was replaced by a 2.0-liter turbo version.)

As Longtime Readers of this here website are know well, I love little two-seater sports cars, whether the 1930s MG TA, the Austin Healey MkIII or indeed, the modern Fiat 124 (a.k.a. the “Fiata” because in the Great Circle of Automotive Life, the 124 shares a chassis with the Miata.  Confused, yet?).

I don’t really care for the 1990s/2000s models, though, because that “bar-of-soap” shape was fashionable at the time but really, it’s dead boring.

However, all was not a complete waste of time.  Enter those maniacs at Abarth and a design firm named Stola,who took the staid little Fiat Barchetta and turned it into this:

Ooooh, baby… and that’s  the “cute lil’ Italian thang” in the title.