Author: Kim du Toit

Bonnie Scotland

Guy Stuff, Travels

Here’s where Mr. Free Market, Doc Russia, Combat Controller and I will be stalking deer for the rest of the week. The pics were taken in years passim, when the weather was fine (i.e. not freezing with rain/sleet/snow falling).




That’s Doc Russia and CC, suitably attired. I must tell you that if the weather turns anything like that, I shall be ensconced in our temporary home  with a roaring fire in front of my chair and a glass of a warming beverage in hand. Let the youngins freeze their thingies off; I’m too old for that nonsense. Fortunately, Mr. FM has arranged for suitable digs for us:

…and my bedroom, where I’ll huddle, shivering, if it’s too miserable to hunt:

And speaking of rogues, here’s Mr. FM on last year’s stalk, fresh from his day’s work:

…and lest anyone gets bent out of shape, let me remind everyone that what we’re doing is culling the game — injured deer and roes, not trophies — because without culling, the deer would overpopulate the estate and most would die of starvation as the grazing got sparser. And the meat goes into the estate’s freezers to generate income from venison sales to the public; we don’t get to keep any of it. (We can however, buy some from previous stalkers’ activities… watch this space.)

For those interested in such matters, the guns to be used are Mr. FM’s Blaser R98, Doc Russia’s blueprinted Remington 700 and Combat Controller’s Browning A-Bolt (all in .300 WinMag) and my Mauser M12 (6.5x55mm Swedish — because I don’t own a rifle in .300 WinMag).

Posting may be somewhat light over the next few days; there are no phone lines or cell towers, let alone an Internet connection, but I’ve put a few non-date-specific posts in the hopper to keep things fresh-ish.

See y’all next week.

 

Nobody Cares

Entertainment

Apparently, Rolling Stone magazine is on its knees (not to the Democrat Party, although that’s often been the case). Tim Sommer explains why that’s a Good Thing, and I can’t disagree with anything he says.

Even apart from its political stuff, I always thought that RS epitomized Frank Zappa’s trenchant comment about rock journalism: “people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t speak, aimed at people who can’t read.”

And their music critics were worse.

Read Sommer’s whole piece: it’s brilliant, and absolutely true.

You Motherfuckers

Politics, Two-Minute Hate

Even though I’m never going to qualify for this little “bubble” tax, it still makes me want to empty my gun into the TV the next time a Republican congressman shows his face.

Write to your U.S. Republican representative (if you have one), and tell him that if this piece of shit finds its way into law, you’re going to vote for his opponent next time round — because at this point, then, he’s no different from a fucking Democrat.

Your Money No Good Here

Bad News

I have long viewed the efforts of banks, retailers and government to make us a cashless society. I’ve heard all their reasons: money-laundering, efficiency and so on, and I remain unconvinced.

It’s even worse over here, and Ross Clark of the Daily Mail takes aim at the process:

The argument in its favour is convenience, but the truth is that it’s all about greed.
Firstly, there is the opportunity to collect fees. The Boston Consulting Group estimates that banks and payment companies such as Visa and Mastercard currently make $1 trillion annually worldwide in fees — typically paid by the retailer — for processing electronic payments.
…
And it won’t be just the retailers who are being fleeced. Currently, consumers are rarely charged fees to use credit cards and debit cards, but you can bet that would change if there was no option to pay in cash.
An even bigger prize is the opportunity that cashless payments offer to large corporations to collect vast amounts of personal information about individuals.
We are familiar with how tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Twitter harvest information about us via our internet searches and so on.
But few of us are aware that we are also feeding a vast data machine whenever we use our credit and debit cards.

It’s worth reading the whole thing, because Clark’s analysis is very good, especially hw going cashless makes us completely vulnerable to the vagaries of computer systems, their inefficiencies and the hacking thereof.

And while I share his cynicism about Big Business and its Marketing Department, I am even more cynical about Government and its attempt to make all transactions cashless — because as a former marketer myself I can at least understand the desire for more information about consumers (even if I don’t agree with the ruthless harvesting thereof) — but when it comes to government knowing every little detail about how I spend my money, certain part of my anatomy start to twitch uncontrollably.

And yes, we’re mostly talking about my various fingers.

Whenever I’m faced with any attempt to make a massive, wholesale change in society’s behavior, I get that same twitch — and this one strikes me as especially worthy of some digitized action. So I’ll start with the most innocuous one first.

Note to government and business: want me to stop using cash?

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the range, to rid myself of another twitch.

5 Worst Fiction Writers

Friday Feature, The Worst

These are the authors who are lionized by the Terminally Pretentious Set, for whom “literary” (a.k.a. boring) writing is met with squeals of delight every time a new offering from the authors below is published. Ranked in ascending order of awfulness:

  • Nicholas Sparks — essentially the same story, rewritten twenty times (and counting)
  • Annie Proulx — hates her own character creations, and despises her readers as well
  • Ayn Rand — okay philosopher, terrible writer who should have written textbooks, not fiction
  • Thomas Pynchon — writes the most turgid, unreadable prose of any author in the modern era
  • And special mention: Marcel Proust — wrote the most turgid, unreadable prose of any author before the arrival of Thomas Pynchon.

Your suggestions in Comments.

 

Correction #982

Two-Minute Hate

Okay, I must admit this was a funny one:

The Pratt Tribune, a tri-weekly newspaper out of Pratt, Kansas, printed the headline, ‘Students get first hand job experience’, over the weekend

I don’t know why Americans are so afraid of hyphens, because the rule is really simple.

  1. If you’re making a compound adjective (i.e. using two adjectives, one to describe the second), hyphenate the two if they appear before the noun being enhanced, e.g. “a laughably-stupid editor” (that would be the idiot working for the Pratt Tribune). If you don’t hyphenate the two words, the first adjective* (laughably) is left dangling out there, and sometimes you won’t know whether it applies to the following adjective (stupid) or to the noun (man). Linking the two words with a hyphen makes it quite clear.
  2. If you’re using the compound adjective separately from the noun, i.e. after a verb — “The editor is laughably stupid” — then the hyphen is unnecessary because laughably can only be referring to stupid.

The headline above is what we used to call a howler because the word hand could equally apply to the noun job, but in fact it refers to the previous word first. The sentence should read, “Students get first-hand job experience” (or even “firsthand”, in this case) but even then, the editor should have spotted the likelihood of the howler caused by the proximate occurrence of hand before job, and written “Students get job experience at first hand” instead.

What’s even funnier is that the hapless editor probably has an English degree from a college or university. Draw your own conclusions, but he’s clearly not a well-read man. (See how that works?)

And finally: in the U.K., “prat”[sic] means “stupid person”, which seems appropriate in this case.

*I know, “laughably” is actually an adverb, which is what one normally uses to enhance an adjective, but let’s keep the instruction simple.