Month: October 2020

Dept. Of Righteous Shootings – International Division

Righteous Shootings

So over in Brazil, these three mopes decide on doing a little undocumented clothes shopping, and call on a local emporium, waving a gun in the owner’s face etc. etc.

Whereupon Our Hero pulls out his own gun and shoots all three dead.  [pause to let the massive applause and cheers die down]

Now there are a couple of noteworthy aspects to this happy little episode.

 1) El Grandes Huevos had the gun pointed at him when he pulled his own gun
2) from his waistband, and
3) kept shooting until it was all over.

To recap:  no sexy quick-draw holster, no quick reloads.  Just eight(?) bullets and two brass balls.

We should all be so manly.

Good Guy 3, Choirboys 0.

The 1750

Drive Time

Most men like powerful cars (e.g. Jeremy Clarkson:  “POWWWWERRRRRR!”), and among the power-hungry there is a common thought nowadays that a 3-liter six-cylinder engine is the basic starting-point for any performance car, and four-cylinder engines are inferior (hence nicknames like “four-banger” and the like).

Not so.

Back in the late 1960s, Alfa Romeo came up with a four-cylinder engine of only 1,779 cubic centimeters (actually rounded down to the 1750 nomenclature, unlike the standard Italian exaggeration) which was an absolute screamer.  So efficient and racy was it that they used the same engine across all their “105” chassis models;  the GT Veloce:

…the Spyder:

…and even the Berlina sedan model (with a human figure, for scale):

Ahem.

I’ve driven all three, and not once did I ever say to myself, “Oh, if only this were a 3-liter six!”

The point was that all three models were lightweights, and the four-cylinder engine was perfectly adequate for the task — which in each model was to go fast, and they did.  And in normal Alfa Romeo fashion, they went through corners as though on rails, and the peppy little four-banger engine and five-speed short-throw gearbox made every trip an adventure.

Provided that they started, or didn’t lose non-essential parts like rearview mirrors, door handles and what-have-you along the way.  (I once had the experience of the interior mirror coming off in my hand as I was adjusting it.)

I also once drove a Marauder (Lotus 7 knock-off) equipped with the 1750 engine.  Now the Alfa GTV was no heavyweight, coming in at just around a ton, but the fiberglass-bodied Marauder could be lifted with ease by only two men, and carrying no weight at all, so to speak, the 1750 engine was a monster.  I actually lifted off the throttle at the end of the Kyalami racetrack straight, whereas with the GTV I’d always been able to keep the pedal to the floor to make the first right-hand corner.

Four-banger?  Sheesh.  (Of course, the main reason for a four-cylinder-engined car’s poor performance nowadays has nothing to do with the lack of powerpower, but with the extra weight that has to be added to all cars because of all the safety regulations that have been mandated by Nanny Gummint since the 1970s.  But I won’t discuss that topic further as I’ve just finished clearing up the wreckage from my last RCOB episode.)

I love the 105 Alfa Romeos and their 1800cc engines, all of them.  I would drive one today quite happily.

News Roundup

Bad News

None of the news that’s fit to print.


…welcome to our world, Limey bastards.


…pretty much the same as you’d get if your taxes were super low, only you’d have more money in your pocket.


…so in other words:  it’s just like influenza and the common cold, is it?


…I have an abiding wish that we were actually as bad as they say we are.  Wouldn’t we have fun?  Instead, we’re law-abiding, vote and have jobs, which prevent us all from cutting their throats.


…so theft is okay, as long as only a few people are affected?  Got it.


…it’s called the “grasping at straws” tactic.


…couldn’t happen to a nicer Socialist.


…he could pick the Tooth Fairy as his AG:  still not gonna happen.


…could we import a few of these judges into the U.S.?  They have a better idea of freedom than most of ours.  And they speak Spanish, and everything.


…Mommy, why were all the boys following me around the playground?


…it’s a strange way to say, “I haven’t had a man inside me for six months and I’m starting to ache”, but whatever.


…somebody remind me of all those arguments against the death penalty.

And just to show that it’s not all bad news:

No need to thank me, it’s all part of the service etc. etc.

The Consequences Of Bad Education And Ignorance

Beauty, History, Lies and Untruths

I actually laughed out loud when I read that some idiots are going all outraged-wokey at the fact that Israeli beauty Gal Gadot has been cast to play Cleopatra in yet another remake of the Egyptian queen’s saga.  (Here are the details.)

Actually, it would have been more justified for blondes to get upset about the role going to a brunette, because as a Ptolemy (and therefore of ethnic Greco-Macedonian heritage), Cleopatra was most likely fair-skinned and blonde.

It is, as they say, to LOL.

Here’s the serious part of this.  In their struggle to claim some fragment of cultural worth, Black Africans have always tried to appropriate Egyptian civilization as “African” — specifically, with regard to sub-Saharan Africa, which had no civilization at all to speak of.  In this, of course, they have been abetted by Western “African Studies” academics, who have performed all sorts of intellectual gymnastics to conclude that yes, ancient Egyptians were really just like the Masai, promise.

The plain fact of the matter is that Nilotic people are as different from sub-Saharan Blacks as Scandinavians are from Aztecs.  The fact that Egyptians too have dark skin is a matter of geography, not racial kinship.  And the northern Greek tribes of Macedonia have closer genetic, linguistic and cultural ties with Serbs than with Arabs, let alone Black Africans.

Anyway, I don’t care.  These wokesters have shown their asses yet again and given us yet more reason withal to make fun of their ignorant little wokish philosophy (such as it is).

I’m just curious to see how Gal Gadot measures up to Elizabeth Taylor.  It’ll be a tough job.

Under The Knife

Food & Drink

I remember the day I quit exercising.

I was thirty years old, in really good shape, and while visiting my mother I went for my regular morning jog.  At the time, she lived in Umhlanga Rocks, a little seaside resort town just north of Durban, and to say that the Indian Ocean coast has a tropical climate is to understate the thing.  It’s not only hot, it’s humid — so humid that I, a Joburg boy, actually had trouble breathing the thick, moist air (Johannesburg is 6,000ft above sea level).

But I had to stay in shape, and I liked the way I looked, so off I went.  I kept the jog short, maybe two or three miles up the coast road, and then I turned around and went back, taking a little detour along the concrete boardwalk that runs past the luxury hotels and separates them from the beach.

By now, I was deeply uncomfortable and miserable:  the sweat was pouring off me, I was tired and more than a little sunburned because while I usually jogged without a shirt up in Johannesburg, it was not an issue there — but down here, in the blazing tropical sun, my fair skin was going extra-crispy, and fast.

I was coming up to the last leg of the trip, where I could make the turn and head back to my mother’s house.  At that point, one of the hotels had a patio cafe right on the boardwalk, and sitting at a table under a large Cinzano umbrella were two rather pretty younger women.  As I ran past, one whistled and called out in Afrikaans, “Nice bod!”

I waved over my back at her, ran about a dozen more yards, and stopped dead in my tracks, chest heaving and my breath wheezing like a beached whale as the epiphany struck me.  I was doing all this — the tiredness, the sweatiness, the sunburn, the aching muscles — just so a stranger could compliment me on my “mooi lyfie” ?

I walked back to my Mom’s house, and never jogged again.

All this came back to me when I read the story of how Ozzy Osbourne’s daughter Kelly has had gastric sleeve surgery and thus lost over 80lbs.

Now I’m not going to go into some stupid amateur psycho-analysis as to why she would want to do this.  She was always a plump little thing, and clearly she didn’t like the way she looked (hence all the tattoos she had inflicted on herself, tattoos which she is now having removed — draw your own conclusions).  And she looks quite fetching now (see the link above)… but that just leads me to my earlier conclusion:  why would she undergo so radical a surgery, just so a stranger like me could think she was “quite fetching”?

I know several women who have had gastric sleeve surgery, and every single one has told me that had they known what the consequences were going to be (other than the massive weight loss), they would never have done it.  You see, the weight loss may be all very well, but what the gastric sleeve does is make eating food a profoundly uncomfortable experience:  nausea, pain, discomfort and a general malaise all follow if you eat so much as a single forkful of food too many, and after a while you begin to hate the sight of food.  Any food.

And what happens next is that some of the joy goes out of your life.  Eating is such a wonderful and enjoyable experience, really:  nothing quite compares to the feeling of satisfaction, of well-being and happiness that a good meal gives you.  It’s one of life’s simple, and paradoxically one of life’s greatest pleasures.  And with gastric sleeve surgery (which is irreversible), it’s gone forever.

So while everyone — and every one a stranger — is complimenting Kelly Osbourne on how great she looks, know too that her previous unhappiness at being overweight has been replaced with a much greater one.

And frankly, I never thought she was that fat to begin with.

Chart-Toppers

Funny Stuff

Every so often, something is said or written that deserves to be memorialized in stone.  Since the start of the new millennium, I’ve identified two — one from each decade — that I think are the best.

2001 – 2010:  “Democracy — Whisky — Sexy”  (Iraq)
There is no better encapsulation of the benefits of Western society.

2011 – 2020:  “Don’t Trust China — China Is Asshole”  (Hong Kong)
Six words that can (and should) direct U.S. foreign and domestic policy, forever.

That both were written on signs displayed by foreigners means that we need to up our game.