Month: October 2021

Well Deserved

Entertainment

I have always loved Michael Caine’s acting work — whether his debut starring performance in Zulu, followed by Alfie, Educating Rita, Get Carter, and of course the exquisite Second Hand Lions, among countless others.

In fact, Caine has been one of the hardest-working actors of his, or any, generation — his first appearance on screen was in 1946 — so if Sir Michael has decided to pack it in at the ripe old age of 88, then good for him, say I.

What I always liked about Michael Caine was that he never forgot his roots — growing up in absolute poverty in London’s East End, he remained rooted in reality and unlike so many others, he never let the Hollywood bug get its claws into him.

I think I have more than a few of his movies in my DVD collection — ah, I see Zulu, Harry Brown, Pulp and Little Voice., not to mention appearances in A Bridge Too Far and Battle of Britain... choices, choices, choices.

Inexplicable

Wokism

Over There across the Pond, some people are getting all pissed off because a 300-year-old “shock jock” — apparently the Brit equivalent of Howard Stern [who?] — had the temerity to refer to TV Chef Gordon Ramsey’s plump young daughter, as she was competing in the ghastly “Dancing With Someone Or Other” Brit TV show, as “a chubby little thing”.  Here she is in the show, for reference:

Needless to say, all Steve Allen’s LGBTOSTFU co-workers are in a tizzy and want the man fired.

And as if that weren’t enough, some other fatties [not part of the show]  are testing the suspension system of the bandwagon by jumping on it, most notably this land whale:

…who invited Allen to “kiss her big juicy arse“.  (He won’t, of course, because he’d disappear in those vast wastelands quicker than Scott of the Antarctic.)

And all for telling the unvarnished truth.

Quietly Seething

Resistance

After reading this, I think I can safely say that I’m with the author.

We Americans have been asleep for a long time now, failing to surveil our politicians and bloated bureaucracy. As our Declaration of Independence tells us, “…all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
In the very next sentence, however, this same document states that when the people suffer from “a long train of abuses and usurpations,” then “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

I think we’re getting very close to that point, but what interests me, from a philosophical standpoint, is whether we’re going to do the “Irish democracy” type of rebellion — whereby laws are just generally ridiculed or ignored:

I don’t think we’ll go for the French “Aux barricades!”  stuff;  that’s more the Pantifa style, and we ain’t them:

…which leaves the American kind of rebellion:

It sure is going to be interesting, and if I were our modern-day tyrants, I’d be hoping for the Irish kind.  The last would be… interesting.

Belated Recognition

Gratuitous Gun Pics, Gun/Ammo Tests, The Gun Thing

I have to say that I have not been remiss in not talking about Othias and Mae at C&Rsenal before, simply because I only recently discovered this outstanding EeeewwChoob channel.

That said, an impossibly-long amount of watching has since followed — I probably spend about two hours a day watching this pair talking about, and shooting, the old rifles that I love so much.  Between Othias’s historical background on the guns’ development and manufacture, and Mae’s well-informed opinions on the guns’ actual operation, it’s just about a perfect show for an old gun geek like myself.  And when they’re talking about a gun which I own, I feel an irresistible urge to get it out of the safe and work the action while I’m watching.  (I won’t even talk about the irresistible urge to go to the range afterwards.)

Between this show and Ian McCollum’s Forgotten Weapons series, there is a veritable encyclopedia of information about guns — so much so that from now on, I’m not going to do any lengthy exposition on the guns I feature in my Gratuitous Gun pics, but simply hand them over to one or the other of these two channels where they are covered.  (If I do a range report, however, I’ll put my two cents into the mix.)

Damn, I love this gun thing.