Month: January 2020

Pub Culture

Culture, Good Stuff

Tom Utley (one of my all-time favorite columnists) waxes rhapsodical about the revival of pubs in Britishland:

This week’s cheering news is that after years of precipitous decline, the number of pubs and bars opening in the UK has outstripped closures by 320 in 2019. So says an analysis of labour market figures from the Office for National Statistics.
…
Indeed, as I may have written before, my idea of heaven on Earth is an English village pub — ideally at least a couple of centuries old, with a thatched roof and a low ceiling supported by gnarled oak beams. On winter evenings, there should be a blazing log fire to greet us (sorry, Greta Thunberg) and a labrador stretched out on the hearth (‘just taking the dog for a walk, dear’).
On summer afternoons, there will be trestle tables out at the front, from which customers can watch the cricket on the village green or just listen to the drone of the bees in the roses above the door.

Of all the things I miss about being in the UK (and one of the very  few things I miss about living in South Africa) would be the weekly evening visit to the pub and / or the daily lunchtime visit thereto during the work week.  Lest anyone has forgotten, this was my “local” when I was variously staying with Mr. Free Market and The Englishman:

I desperately want to have a “local” Over Here, but we don’t have a pub culture:  ours is more a “get wasted after work” culture (not that this is altogether a Bad Thing, of course, but people don’t generally cluster around the pub (okay, bar) around these parts as a social venue).  The closest I’ve found is the Londoner in Addison, and it’s not close at all — a 20-minute drive away, assuming no traffic.

There is the Holy Grail a few steps from my apartment, which has excellent food but a somewhat patchy collection of ales — from week to week, they’re likely to be out of whatever I had the previous  week, which gets old very quickly — and as the website pics will show, it’s too damn big and very noisy.  (Aside:  why are  Americans so loud?  Is it because they have to shout to be heard above the earsplitting music/game on the TV?  Never mind:  that’s a rant passim.)

One thing, though, about Utley’s article:

It is run not by an ever-changing cast of managers on their way up the career ladder but by permanent fixtures in the community — landlords and landladies who have lived on the premises for years, know all the local gossip and are ready with their regulars’ preferred tipples, without having to be told (‘The usual, Tom?’).

Yeah, but that’s also a double-edged sword.  While an independent innkeeper can occasionally be persuaded to whip up a makeshift plate of sandwiches outside regular food-service hours, he could also be a cantankerous old fart, as per this story of Mr. Free Market, who arrived at his local one afternoon with a crowd of business friends and associates, and begged that the pub be opened to accommodate over fifty thirsty customers, to be met with the withering response:  “Fuck off;  I’m watching Corrie!” (Coronation Street).  Not yer model of customer service, innit?  And as the owner, he wasn’t going to get fired, either.

So there ya go.

All that said, I miss having a real local — but a place “where everybody knows your name” seems to have become a figment of TV fiction, hasn’t it?

I envy Tom Utley.

Messypants

Beauty

Apparently, Nigella Lawson is a “mess magnet”, and her house is filled with stuff because she suffers from “shortage dread”.

As do I.

I draw the line at dozens of empty mustard jars, although New Wife has stashed a few such empty jam jars packed away.  (Curiously, a few actually came in quite handy over Christmas, as we filled them with Reese’s Pieces and M&Ms and gave them to the kids as stocking stuffers.)

I have no problem hoarding things like foodstuffs, but empty toilet roll cylinders and the like need to be turfed out, toot sweet.  I think I’ll offer my ahem  services to Nigella, as long as she has a few bowls of pasta first.  Here’s a before/after comparison:

  Q.E.D.

Residential Collectivization

Eco-Crap, Marxists, Seen On Campus

As any fule kno, Communism is all about taking away the individual and replacing him with a cipher that can be controlled and manipulated by a benevolent Big Brother.  Here’s one such manifestation, in the ravings of some Marxist college professor [redundancy alert]:

“If we want to keep cities safe in the face of climate change, we need to seriously question the ideal of private homeownership,” says Kian Goh, who researches urban ecological design, “spatial politics” and social mobilization “in the context of climate change and global urbanization.”
…
Proposed solutions, including a public takeover of Pacific Gas & Electric, are missing one of the most important factors in climate change-driven destruction, Goh warns: “economic development, aspirations of home ownership, and belief in the importance of private property.”
To prevent catastrophe, Americans must reconsider their ideas about “success, comfort, home, and family,” particularly the single-family homes that followed in the wake of the Homestead Act of 1862 and federally backed mortgage insurance, the professor argues.
These policies benefited white middle-class families and “became synonymous with freedom and self-sufficiency” even though they represented “[e]xpansionist, individualist, and exclusionary patterns of housing.”

So having a house in the ‘burbs is a factor in Glueball Climate We’re All Gonna DIEEEEE! Catastrophe.

As we all know, of course, this whole climate bullshit manifesto is just a fig leaf covering the true aims of people like this asshole academic — there is no climate catastrophe looming —  but it sure as hell allows them to create their little model society, doesn’t it?

What really, really  scrapes these Commie bastards is that home ownership is the end result of individualism, provides the individual a stake in the society in which he lives, and provides for private security in his abode.  Private property ownership also means that people will, in the main, resist any and all efforts of the State to confiscate or otherwise appropriate it — and for the Commies, remember, there is no private property because all property belongs to the State.

So yeah, they’d prefer to have us all live in tiny, State-managed apartments in an urban environment, using public instead of private transport, and working for the State rather than for ourselves.

Already, the eeeevil automobile has been blamed for the non-existent growth of carbon emissions which is going to melt ice caps etc.  Now pricks like this Goh creature can add suburban homes to the list of eco-evils, which means that they too can be circumscribed, reduced and ultimately, banned.

Feel free to dispute anything you’ve read so far in this post, but you’d better have something more than emotion, slogans and hysteria in your argument.

“Spatial politics”, my fat African-American ass.

Past Perfect, Part Deux

The Gun Thing

Sheriff Jim talks about a “trend” of people reverting to revolvers as self-defense weapons.

Colt has recently made a big splash with the reintroduction of their Python revolver. At the same time, we continue to see and hear from shooters who cleave to their Smith & Wesson J-frame revolvers. And there seems to be continued interest in revolvers manufactured by several other companies. A custom holster maker recently told me that 70 percent of his orders are holsters for revolvers. I am curious if we are seeing a solid trend back to the defensive revolver, or if this is just some sort of fad.
Of course, many of our older shooters have never quit the revolver. They learned to shoot it and shoot it well. In many cases these folks have had revolvers save their lives and it’s pretty hard to quit a gun that you could rely on in those circumstances. Many of these older shooters also passed their love of the revolver on to their children which has affected the choice for many of the younger generation.

Yeah, no prizes for guessing where I fall on this spectrum.  Despite my eternal love affair with the Colt 1911 Government pistol, my bedside gun is and always has been a revolver, because at the end of the day, a revolver is like a fork:  you pick it up, and it works.  No fiddling with safety catches, worrying about popping the mag by mistake, trying to remember if you racked the slide to load it earlier (in my case, that would be “always”) — your revolver is loaded and ready to go, period, end of sentence, end of story (for any goblin on the naughty end of its muzzle).

For me (and, I suspect, a boatload of others of my ilk), there is no “trend”;  the rest of the world is coming back to realize what we’ve known all along:  the more dire the circumstances, the more we need simplicity.

That was my very first bedside gun, back in South Africa:  a Colt 1917 (.45 Long Colt).  I never had to use it in anger, thank goodness, but there’s no doubt it could have handled pretty much any situation short of a regimental banzai attack.

My choice of cartridge may have changed somewhat in the fifty years since then (.45 LC to .357 Magnum), but my philosophy sure as hell hasn’t.

Speechless

Immigration, Mocking Furriners, The Gun Thing

Some time back I read this article about Germany, and filed it away because at the time, it actually rendered me speechless.  I’m still dumbfounded, but let me give it a shot anyway.

The executive summary is that as migrant North African men have turned rape into a spectator sport in Germanland, more people are getting gun licenses and guns for self-protection.  The response from the Kraut gummint has been predictable:

A survey of Germany’s 16 states revealed that 640,000 citizens are now able to carry a weapon. This number was only 260,000 in 2014.
In total there are 5.4 million privately owned guns with the proportion of licence holders being highest in Schleswig-Holstein, reports thelocal.
The Union of Police said ‘more and more people feel insecure’ since the sexual assaults on women outside Cologne Cathedral on New Year’s Eve 2015.
Germany has seen a number of high profile sex attacks since more than 200 women came forward to say they were assaulted during Cologne’s festivities.
Police later revealed that the majority of suspects were said to be of North African origin.
Union of Police chairman Oliver Malchow said the rise was sparked by a ‘latent feeling on insecurity’ in the population.
He added: ‘The problematic increase in small arms licenses shows that we need to work to restore a sense of security to many citizens.’

Trust a fucking bureaucrat cop to think that an increase in gun ownership in response to lawlessness is a “problem”, whereas we all know that the real  problem is mass rape, and the unwillingness of the Kraut courts to cut the rapists’ pee-pees off in the town square for Saturday entertainment.

Hey, Herr Gewerkschaftsvorsitzender  Malchow you fucking weasel functionary, here’s a tip:  if you’re feeling squeamish about the peasants arming themselves, then you need to tell your cops to start dealing with the problem in a manner designed to discourage the behavior.   Then the people won’t feel deserted by the law and its enforcers, and feel the need to help themselves when the fucking cops can’t or won’t protect them.

As the old saying goes, the primary function of the State is to monopolize the use of violence by denying it to the populace.  Here’s a classic example of just that.  Our Oliver sees people arming themselves as the problem, and not the behavior of foreigners which gives rise to that (very understandable) reaction.

And this, I don’t have to tell you, is the endgame of the socialists who have seized control of the Democrat Party:  a disarmed, fearful citizenry dependent on police protection from the predations of others.

Well, fuck that.  Here’s a suggested antidote to the problem above, in our local context:

Too bad ordinary Germans can’t get their hands on one of these beauties., but I think they have enough choices not to worry too much about it…

…until this prick Malchow decides that genug ist genug, and sends his policemen round to confiscate all those licensed handguns, seeing as the cops know who all the gun owners are, and which guns they own.  All in the name of safety, of course.

Now, what was that about the Democrats’ plans in Virginia…?

Beefeaters

Food & Drink

In my Boxing Day post, I omitted to acknowledge the source of the main pic (of a mouthwatering roast beef) — “omitted” in that the pic wasn’t labeled, and the now-forgotten website where I found it hadn’t labeled it either.  (Under copyright law, by the way, such copyright infringement is called “inadvertent”, which in my case it certainly was.)  So I fixed that.

But that’s not the point of this post:  this is.

The pic originally came from a crowd named Carnivore Style, and I urge you all to visit their website.

This referral has not been forced on me by legal assholes, by the way:  it looks like an excellent place and I for one am going to spend a lot more time there as I devote yet more time to eating red meat in the future.  (This is an interesting take on Keto vs. Carnivore diets, incidentally.)

AND of course, bedehr gesocht, it might cause mass suicides among vegans, Extinction Rebellion loonies and other such filth.  Which can only be a good thing.