August 2023 – Page 6 – Splendid Isolation

Quelle Surprise II

August 23, 2023 Kim du Toit Travels

You know you’ve pissed off the locals when you arrive at your holiday destination to see signs like this scattered all over the place:

And as the signs are printed, not handmade, enough of that sentiment exists that someone’s making money off it. Whatever could have driven the locals to feel this way? Well, here’s one possible reason:

A man shared his frustrations after being rejected three-times by restaurants with plenty of free tables in Barcelona. Resident (!) Eudald said: “On the first terrace that I got a table, a waiter quickly arrived and told me that it was reserved. It was not. As soon as I got up, a group of foreigners who were behind me sat down,” he explained.

“In the next one, they warned me that I would only have 20 minutes. I specified that I wanted to have dinner, but they insisted that I should do it within that time frame.”

Giving a Spaniard only 20 minutes to eat his meal… isn’t that against the law, Over There? And don’t these guys know who keeps their doors open when the touristas aren’t there?

Then you have this situation:

Ximo Lorenzo, the manager of the Clandesti bar in Valencia, said he’s tried other methods to stop customers from hanging around and not paying for drinks – but they failed. He told Levante-EMV: “This is a cheap place where we had board games for people to play, but I’ve seen people arrive at 6pm, stay until 12pm and only order a coke. That’s not profitable.”

At first, Lorenzo said board game players were required to order a drink every 40 minutes, but customers didn’t listen. He then limited glasses for shared drinks and took away the board games, which he said was a “shame”. He said: “In general, people do have common sense and order several drinks if they are there for a long time. But on the days when we brought live music, some people came in to see the concert and didn’t drink anything, so I had to put up a compulsory consumption sign.”

Nothing worse than a cheapskate tourist, I agree. Even I, a devoted flaneur, will order either a meal, some pastries and/or several cups of coffee or aperitifs if I stay awhile. However, ol’ Ximo could have the other kind of problem:

Boozy Brits vomit & brawl on streets of new party capital as
girls flash for free drinks & down 10 shots in 10 seconds

You have to read the whole story to get the full extent of the awfulness, but here are a couple of choice snippets:

British visitors Stacey, from Manchester, and Londoner Katy, had been left feeling a little disgusted after trying out the Anus Burner shot made up of tequila, orange juice and Tabasco.

And:

One person has a plastic phallus strapped to their head and if other punters can land three neon hoops over it, the whole bar gets a shot for free. If they fail, the reveler wearing the penis has to pay for everyone to get a shot.

Nothing says “class” like walking into a pub to find someone wearing a penis on their head — although I suspect the term “dickhead” slips easily off the tongue.

Oh well… scratch Split from the “Travel Bucket List” — or maybe I’d just go during late fall or winter, to avoid the wild animals (see above).

How Significant?

August 23, 2023 Kim du Toit Drive Time

I came across this article recently, and it made me think:

Classic Ford Cortina dubbed ‘most significant vehicle EVER’ hits auction for eye-watering price

“Most significant vehicle ever?” Ah don’ theenk so, Scooter.

Granted, the Cortina Mark 1 was a sensation when it first came out in Britishland, despite being as ugly as sin and underpowered.

But (and I can attest to this, having driven more than one in my life) they were fun to drive, in no small part because of their all-syncromesh gearbox (a real innovation for the time). Sure, that 1200cc (later 1500, then 1600cc) four-banger was not a muscle-car engine — the peppiest version, the GT, developed a manly 78 bhp. But of course, because the Cortina wasn’t encumbered with all the safety-Nazi bullshit of the modern era, its curb weight of only 1,700 lbs made it very nimble (at about 100 bhp per ton).

And now to the point of this post. I will acknowledge up front that the Ford Cortina Mark 1 may very well have been one of the most significant cars of 1960s Britain.

What, O My Readers, do you think was the most significant American car of the 1960s?

Included would be its technical advances, its effect on car drivers’ psyches, its effect on future car design, or whatever you think would constitute “significant”.

Not having grown up Over Here, my guess would be the 1965 Ford Mustang pony car:

…but I will willingly accept some rebuke from devotees of other cars of that decade.

Off you go to Comments, and show me the error of my ways.

Today’s Earworm

August 22, 2023 Kim du Toit Music

Considering who’s playing it, this may be the most poignant ballad ever made.

Still Relevant?

August 22, 2023 Kim du Toit Bad News

I’m going to make my position on this quite clear right at the beginning: I love cities. I’m a city boy by birth (born in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, kinda like the Bronx in NYfC, and at one point, one of the most densely-populated places per square mile on Earth).

(Hillbrow/Berea, circa 1970)

Even though my parents moved to the suburbs when I was a kid, I missed the city and moved back as soon as I could.

I love city life. Whether it’s walking along a rainy London street en route to a cozy pub, sitting in a Paris bistro drinking coffee or buying a snack at a Viennese imbiss — you put me there, and ol’ Kimmy’s one of the happiest men on the planet.

That’s the ideal, of course; but the plain fact is that city life isn’t like that anymore, when walking along a rainy London street means that you’re going to get robbed of your watch, when sitting in a Paris bistro will result in gypsies stealing your shopping bags, and buying a snack at a Viennese imbiss will end up with your pocket being picked.

There was a time when I wanted to live on Paris — oh, how I longed to live in Paris — but the truth of the matter is that the Paris I wanted to live in doesn’t exist anymore. (Of Johannesburg, we will not speak.)

Granted, there was always the risk of those things happening, in any city and at any time. But nowadays, the risk of being a victim of urban crime has risen exponentially — not to mention the risks one takes when trying to navigate a street filled with homeless encampments, and avoiding the piles of trash and the detritus of drug addicts. In circumstances like these, the appeal of city life evaporates pretty quickly.

So on to a recent article which asks the question:

America’s Urban Desolation: Does Anyone Really Care?

The problems in urban America are at their core, policy problems. Politicians end vagrancy laws, attack law enforcement efforts to enforce property crimes (in many cases decriminalizing retail theft), and de facto if not actual drug legalization are making many cities unlivable. When combined with local education systems which simply fail to educate anyone as the teacher union power brokers pick their local elected bosses through sparse turnout elections, America’s cities are in distress.

And unfortunately, the very politicians who benefit from their votes don’t seem to care.

But that’s not the real question. We know that urban politicians don’t care, not really, about the state of the cities they’re supposed to be running because they’re unqualified, feckless Democrats and socialists [some overlap]. And the recent activities of some city managers haven’t exactly made the prospects of living there any better:

Fourteen major American cities are part of a globalist climate organization known as the “C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group,” which has an “ambitious target” by the year 2030 of “0 kg [of] meat consumption,” “0 kg [of] dairy consumption,” “3 new clothing items per person per year,” “0 private vehicles” owned, and “1 short-haul return flight (less than 1500 km) every 3 years per person.”

C40’s dystopian goals can be found in its “The Future of Urban Consumption in a 1.5°C World” report, which was published in 2019 and reportedly reemphasized in 2023. The organization is headed and largely funded by Democrat billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Nearly 100 cities across the world make up the organization, and its American members include Austin, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Seattle.

And they hope to get all that “0 kg [of] meat consumption, 0 kg [of] dairy consumption, 3 new clothing items per person per year, 0 private vehicles owned” bullshit done in the next half-dozen years? I ask for the umpteenth time: how do they think they’re going to achieve that, and what planet are they living on?

Clearly, the real question is: in this modern era, and given their apparent suicidal tendencies, how important are cities to a nation as a whole?

Let’s be honest about this. With the growth of technology, a huge number of “office jobs” in a city have proven themselves to be irrelevant in terms of their location. The Covid nonsense, if it did nothing else, proved that. (Whether the actual output from those work-from home jobs is as productive as in-office performance is a topic for another time.)

So with the work force being dispersed to areas outside the city — heck, outside the state or even the country — one has to ask whether a tight concentration of workspaces and residences (a city) is all that necessary anymore. It used to be that cities were the places where factories and other such manufacturing activity were based. But no one would argue today that a Ford factory should be based in downtown Detroit rather than in Dearborn — that decision was made a long time ago — and as urban real estate prices have skyrocketed, more such moves have been happening for decades.

When I was still working, I liked working in the city — whether it was in the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, a giant grocery chain’s headquarters building, or at Leo Burnett Advertising in downtown Chicago — there was something about the bustle of the city which created the right frame of mind to work, and work hard. The Great Big Research Company’s headquarters, in suburban Chicago, was less exciting; and later on, working from home still less so.

But the question remains: given that cities — all cities, not just Chicago, L.A. or NYC — seem to be in an irreversible decline, are cities still relevant, or even necessary?