Author: Kim du Toit

Define “Dangerous”, Asswipe

Gummint, Nannies, Two-Minute Hate

Just when I’d got my blood pressure down to healthy levels, this kind of shit (from Britishland) gets published and back we go to 500/400:

Parents who homeschool their children will be forced to sign a register or face possible prosecution, according to government proposals.
The Department for Education plans to hold a register of all children not in mainstream schools in a bid to protect them from ‘dangerous influences’.
The move will help crack down on religious fundamentalists who send youngsters to secret schools where they are at risk of radicalisation.

We all know where this regulation is aimed:  at Muslims who want to turn little Abu Buma into Abu Ben-Bomba.  The only problem, as always, is that the law won’t be used against Muslims, ever  — but it will  be used, often, against conservative parents, Christian parents, and anyone, in fact, who dares to raise their children to be intellectual, inquisitive and independent (precisely the qualities that all state education systems seek to eradicate).  All that is dangerous to the control freaks and nannies who infest our modern-day bureaucracy, and don’t for a moment think that they’ll hesitate to brand it thus.

What time does the range open?

What’s In A Name?

Modernism

It’s a good thing that the Bard is no longer with us, or else his question might instead read:  “WTF is it with all these stupid names?” 

I’m not just talking about nicknames, where anything goes (e.g. Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino from Jersey Shores  — note:  unless you’re in the Mafia, the word “The” in your name is an infallible indicator of douchebaggery, see below).  Mostly, they’re a play on names — “Elizabeth” becomes “Biffy” and “Edward” becomes “Ned” — or else, in the case of men, they’re affectionate insults:  Booger, Shitbrain, Nostrils, Hairball etc.

First names, especially in the Afro-American community, seem to be in a tacit competition for grotesquery — Jamarcus, Al’iyaa, D’Ante, Shaniquita etc. — but even amongst the Lily-Whites, things have been getting out of hand.  Try to see how many variations you find, just in the ancient and beautiful name “Brittany”, for example;  I ran out of inspiration at six, after — I swear — “Bryttenee”.  (Rough guess is that neither of her parents are in possession of a PhD.)

The latest seems to be inside the rapper fraternity (not the brightest bulbs in the make-up mirror to begin with) who have names like Offset, The Weeknd [sic], 50 Cent and (my favorite name) 6ix9ine, and more.

In the old days — say, in the 1970s — first names actually meant something.  Girls were named after flowers (Rose, Daisy, Alison, Lily etc.), for example, and old names actually had a heritage (“Gwendolyn” means “beloved”).  My own name, Kim, was not even a name, but a title  (“Chieftain” in early Anglo-Saxon) which is why it can apply to both men and women.

These new naming “conventions” (if one could call them that) drive me scatty — literally, I sometimes feel like flinging poo off the balcony at random passersby — because they seem to be just random groupings of letters out of a Scrabble set;  but at the same time, I’m not suggesting some kind of control over name selection.  Just remember that it took the French until the 1970s to drop their restriction on first names — you could have any first name you wanted, provided that it was on the State-approved list of first names — and I’m certainly not supporting that silliness.

Know, however, that naming your little precious Tre’esha Taniqua will have an effect on her future career prospects.  And if all she knows is Ebonics, the “glass ceiling” will turn to concrete unless she becomes a groupie in 6ix9ine’s retinue.  Not that I care.  Someone  has to do that kind of work.

Well-Earned Reward

Bad News

This kind of thing makes my head ache.

Father deserts family when kids are young.  Then, years later, kids (or one of them) becomes Rich & Famous basically through talent and/or luck.  Whereupon Runaway Dad, who did fuck all to help and has since Fallen On Hard Times, suddenly reappears (usually following some media discovery) and bemoans the fact that he’s No Longer Part Of The Family, or similar.  Like in this case.  Whereupon my reaction:

I remember John Lennon once telling that his father walked out on his mother and emigrated to New Zealand before John was born — and the next time he heard from Daddy Dearest was after the Beatles exploded onto the music world, when his father wrote to him asking for money.  Lennon’s response was as expected:  caustic and dismissive (think:  FOAD).

Now, of course, someone like Adele (whose talent is astonishing and her success justified) is going to get some stick from the Bleeding Hearts Brigade because she somehow owes this asswipe a piece of her vast fortune.  I hope that her response is even more extreme than Lennon’s, and should be quite simple:  “He wasn’t my father;  he was just my sire — and he doesn’t deserve shite  from me.”  (Her Cockney frankness is one of her more endearing features.)

Stick to yer guns, darlin’.  Never mind all those Commiesymps at The Sun.

More Outrage

Food & Drink, Nannies

Of course, no festival could be safe from the Perpetually Indignant.  From the so-called National Obesity Forum (U.K. branch), we are told the following:

Super-sized Eater eggs are a risk to health because of the extraordinary amount of sugar they contain, [these fucking busybodies] have warned.
Over-indulging youngsters could do ‘real’ damage, they say, if they consumer an entire egg in one day – all too likely at Easter.
Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Crunchie Ultimate Easter Egg contains a whopping 330g of sugar. This is the equivalent of 17 days’ worth of sugar, based on the NHS recommendation for children aged four to six to consume no more than 19g in a day.

It makes me want to go out and buy six dozen of these bad boys, and hand them out to random kids at our local playgrounds.  I wonder if World Market has them in stock…

Difficult Choice

Drive Time

Over at Timewaster’s place, he puts up this poignant statement:

I have to tell you that quite frankly, the whole 50s-era obsession with large fins on cars left me cold.  Not really being infected with sci-fi/space obsession (which was what drove the styling motif of the era), I thought that the large finned American cars of the time were gaudy, ostentatious monstrosities.

However, of late, I’m starting to revise my opinion.  Loyal Readers will recall how I often gripe about the wind-tunnel-driven shape of modern cars which renders modern cars pretty much indistinguishable from one another.  So much do I detest this homogeneity that I find myself drifting towards a scenario whereby if someone were to offer me a choice between, say, an old Chevy Bel-Air:

…or a modern Chevy Malibu:

…I would most likely go for the ’57 Bel-Air despite  all the modern comforts afforded by the 2018 Mali-Boo-Boo.  The first has character, the second looks like a Toyota Camry.

Am I alone in this?

Another Victory For Automation

Technology

Somebody remind me again how this “self-drive car” thing is supposed to help us, save lives, end Glueball Wormening and bring Peace To Mankind, etc. etc. etc.?  Especially when we have crap like this happening to these “A.I.” systems?

The investigation into a fatal plane crash in Ethiopia has zeroed in on suspicion that a faulty sensor triggered an automated anti-stall system, sending the plane into a dive.
The Federal Aviation Administration received black box flight data from Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on Thursday, indicating that the MCAS anti-stall system was activated shortly before the crash.
The same system was implicated in the crash of another Boeing 737 Max in October in Indonesia, Lion Air Flight 610.
The MCAS is designed to push the nose of the plane down when sensors indicate that the ‘angle of attack’ is too steep, and the plane in in danger of stalling – but investigators are now probing whether a faulty sensor activated the system during a normal climb, sources say.

This, and especially after we hear that a.) the “safety” feature (i.e. pilot override) was available as an (expensive) option on the system, and b.) the pilots of said doomed airliners appear not to have had, shall we say, adequate  training on the system.

Don’t even get me started on cock-ups like the faulty reservation systems, which have been in place since at least  the 1970s, are one of the simplest programs in existence, and they still  fall over occasionally.  (Adding features which screw paying customers over*, however, doesn’t seem to have been a problem at all.)

Color me skeptical on all this stuff.  Hell, I don’t even care for automatic gearboxes, let alone “self-drive” systems.  “Faulty sensor”, my pale African-American ass.

*British Airways, among others, has a cute little sub-routine when you book two or more tickets at a time that automatically ensures that none of your booked seats are next to each other.  So guess what?  You have to go back into the system and pay extra  for that “privilege” of sitting next to your wife or kids.  That  automatic program, I’ll wager, works perfectly every time.