It doesn’t take much to restore my good humor, especially when there’s a huge helping of Schadenfreude involved.
See the posts below…
Month: February 2023
Missing The Point, Somewhat?
You see, I always thought that wind vanes were supposed to generate power. Silly me:
Scotland’s green-obsessed left-separatist government has been left with egg on its face by revelations that dozens of gigantic onshore wind turbines are having to be hooked up to diesel generators, leaking thousands of litres of hydraulic oil into the countryside.
All this because — and I know this will come as a shock to many — Scotland is fucking cold during winter, and the turbines can’t function despite the fact that Scotland is also fucking windy (all the time), as attested to by Combat Controller and Doc Russia during a fall hunt in the Cairngorms.
I think that to be fair, it should have been mandated that fall-back protections for the turbines had to be powered not by diesel engines but by solar energy (something that Scotland does not have a lot of, at any time of year).
The only way we’re ever going to eliminate all this Green bullshit is if we constantly rub the Greens’ noses in the shit every single time their policies fail, and make them live with the consequences.
So Much For The “Working Class Hero”
A leading Bruce Springsteen fanzine has announced it will cease publication after 43 years because the artist’s fanbase became disillusioned by unaffordable concert tickets.
Backstreets magazine said both its editorial staff and fans had become ‘dispirited’ and ‘downhearted’ after prices for some tickets to the artist’s 2023 arena tour reached $4,000 each last year.
‘These are concerts that we can hardly afford; that many of our readers cannot afford; and that a good portion of our readership has lost interest in as a result.’
And:
Springsteen’s humble beginnings in New Jersey and the relatability of his music once earned him the reputation of being ‘the voice of the working man’.
In his early years, Springsteen played at any bar in which he could make money. He earned the nickname the Boss because he would collect and distribute gig money among band members, Andrew Delahunty, the author of the Oxford Dictionary of Nicknames, told the BBC in 2009.
Mark Kemp of Rolling Stone magazine once described Springsteen as ‘a working-class hero: a plainspoken visionary and a sincere romantic whose insights into everyday lives – especially in America’s small-town heartland – have earned comparisons to John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie.’
Yeah, well now he’s just a woke dollar-chasing asshole, like so many of his ilk.
I never cared for his tuneless bellow anyway, so I have no dog in this fight. But these people need to be brought back down to earth by the people who were actually responsible for their success. Nowadays, their success seems to be driven by those bloodless fucks at TicketMaster, and a pox on them too.
Dress Code
One way that British pubs have tried to cut down on hooligan behavior is to ban the kinds of clothing that the typical hell-raiser wears: hoodies, sweat pants (“track suits”) and so on.
I like this trend.
So you can imagine my response when I read this sad little tale:
Jo, from Paris, was on the hunt to sample some traditional Scottish food and drink with her husband. They decided to head for the George IV Bar after hearing rave reviews from locals, Edinburgh Live reports.
Jo said: “My husband and I are from France and for a first night in Edinburgh, we really wanted a nice pub where we could eat food and listen to music at the same time.
“The place was very well noted and the food looked delicious so we tried to get in. My husband was refused entry by the security guard that deemed his pants ‘inappropriate for a restaurant.’
“Very disappointed and I definitely won’t recommend it. We’re currently eating at a pub that doesn’t have live music, too bad for us, but at least we are welcome and we’re eating well.”
The response:
However, the bar’s general manager hit back, writing: “We have a policy of no tracksuits/cottons/jobby catchers in the bar in the evenings.
“Many bars in Edinburgh have the same policy. We work hard to cater for our clientele.”
Once again, my policy of always dressing well when traveling is vindicated.
As it happens, I’ve been to the George IV a couple of times, and it’s a lovely place — not the least because it’s free of trashy yobs and their equally-trashy cock holster girlfriends. And the food is brilliant.
Add the George IV to your “the next time I’m in Edinburgh” list. I’ll be going back, for sure.
Anger Day
My normal mood when considering the outside world is one of, at best, irritation — on a scale on 1 to 10, I wake up each morning at about 5 — and especially so when I haven’t finished my first cup of coffee.
I am furious.
Perhaps a little background is in order. For my birthday last year, my kids chipped in together and bought me a Seiko Sports wristwatch with an automatic movement.
It’s a lovely watch, not too expensive, not too showy, and of course I replaced the silly canvas strap (which scratched my oh-so delicate skin) with a nice black leather one which didn’t.
All went well until I actually started using the fucking thing. You see, the nice thing about an automatic movement is that you don’t have to wind it, and it doesn’t have a battery which runs down and needs replacing just about every year, which are the reasons I wanted one in the first place. According to the specs, this watch, when the mainspring is fully wound up, so to speak, has a “reserve” power of about 36 hours, which means you can leave it lying around unworn for about a day and a half before you need to wave your arm in the air to recharge it.
So I wore the thing for a couple days to charge the spring up, then took it off at bedtime and went to sleep. And found the next morning that the watch had stopped after about six hours. No amount of arm-waving could get it charged past that paltry reserve.
So I sent the watch back to Seiko USA to get it fixed under warranty, but discovered yesterday that despite the proof of date of purchase, the watch was considered “out of warranty” because nobody had actually sent back the registration card.
The cost of repair was about the same as the original price of the watch.
So this morning I called Seiko and told them to send the thing back to me un-repaired — fuck ’em — and told the customer “service” rep that I would never consider buying another Seiko product, ever. Of course, as the Seiko repair shop is in New fucking Jersey, my comment was met with complete indifference.
I’ll hand the watch back to Daughter and let her decide what she and the others want to do.
Now add this little irritation to my wake-up Irritation Level 5… and none of the posts which preceded this one helped matters at all.
If anyone wants me, I’ll be at the range.
Update: Daughter informs me that the place where she bought the watch has a 3-year warranty on all new Seiko watches, so all I have to do is send it there for the repairs to be effected. Now I just have to wait for it to get back from Noo fucken Joizee.
Leviathan
Via Insty, I see that our Stasi have grandiose plans:
The federal government is proceeding with plans to build a new FBI headquarters complex twice the size of the Pentagon building.
Riveted into the colossal new project are woke regulations to ensure that the FBI center will comply with diversity, equity, LGBTQ+, and climate change political goals.
The plan, unveiled last September, has received little attention. For years the FBI has sought to vacate its present headquarters, a brutalist concrete bunker on stilts and occupying two city blocks between the White House and the Capitol.
Plans for the new FBI headquarters specify that it will be built on one of three sites in suburban Virginia and Maryland. Those sites are large parcels of 58, 61, and 80 acres.
You motherfuckers. You can’t even do the job you’re supposed to do — but now we have to pay for a gargantuan edifice to house all your un-American activities (spying on angry parents, scanning social media to track down people who make “hurtful” comments, etc.)? A pox on you all.
To our elected Republican representatives in Congress: fund this bullshit, and expect voter fury. And if you do decide to risk your political futures and fund this gross example of bureaucratic overreach, make sure that it’s located not on expensive real estate in Virginia and Maryland, but on inexpensive land in, say, northeastern Wyoming, eastern Montana or central North- or South Dakota — split across three states so that the states are not suddenly faced with a massive influx of undesirable Democrat-bureaucrat voters, and powered only by a wind farm and rooftop solar panels located on the property itself (because climate change).
I’m still in favor of the no-fund option, because fuck knows how we’re going to find the money to pay for this extravagance.
And fuck the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in case someone has any doubt of my utter loathing for this bastard bureaucracy.