The “Right” Time To Get Busy

The last time I found myself in this particular situation was during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, and I have no intention of ever being in this situation again. So I think I’m probably outside the target audience for this article. But hey, in the interests of Sex Day:

How long should you wait to have sex? Nearly 50 percent of straight couples in a new survey reported holding out one week to a month before getting it on with their partners.
What’s more, 21 percent of the couples waited up to two months and 10 percent waited up to half a year to have sex, according to the survey of 1,000 Americans and Europeans from DrEd.com. Only 18 percent of the men and women surveyed reported waiting less than a week to have sex.

Actually, I’m rather heartened by this study (here’s the original) — I thought the “can’t wait” number would be a lot higher these days. Although I’d like to see the age breakdown of the various responses, because I suspect that there’s a considerable difference thereby. Anyway, all the data is suspect because people lie like dogs when it comes to interviews about sex. What managed to arouse my ire, however, was this Clintonian paragraph:

“I know plenty of couples that did a bit of a courtship dance around sex and took the slow road,” he said. “They learned to appreciate each other, and they learned to enjoy kissing, touch, oral sex, and all of those activities that don’t get consumed by intercourse.”

For the last fucking time [sic]: oral sex is not part of the “courtship dance” — blowjobs are sex acts, despite Bill Clinton’s casual assertion that they aren’t.

And frankly, if oral sex isn’t “consumed by intercourse”, you’re not doing it correctly. That, or you’re doing it in parking lots or behind bus stops instead of in bed.

Or am I just being hopelessly old-fashioned about all this? (Wouldn’t be the first time.)

One Dozen

Some people were asked what they thought was the “magic number” of sex partners — more than X being too many, and less than X showing likely sexual inexperience.

The number X: twelve (or to be accurate: not X but XII).

My guess is that most of the respondents weren’t around in the 1970s. “Twelve” would have been an annual average, back then.

Here’s a totally gratuitous pic of a Seventies girl (Christina Lindberg), just to show what we guys had to deal with, temptation-wise, in those days:

Yeah, call me old-fashioned (take a number), but I love the clothes women wore back when I was in my late teens and early twenties.

 

Bucket List Entry #4: Old Battlefields

Back when I still lived in South Africa, a couple of my jobs required car trips to small towns to check on stores or visit cooperating agencies. Several of these out-of-the-way places happened to be near old battlefields of the Boer War, so I’d try to set aside a day or two to visit them and “touch history” (my shorthand expression for such activities). Over time, I visited Spion Kop, Paardeburg, Ladysmith, Mafeking and Majuba. I also got to see a couple from the earlier Zulu Wars, Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift (described in the movie Zulu) . I wrote about my trip to the last one years ago, but it’s buried in the archives and if I can find the thing, I’ll re-publish it sometime.

Anyway, one week from today is Memorial Day, and as always, it’s the day I remember my late grandfather Charles Loxton, who fought and was badly wounded at the Battle of Delville Wood in 1916. As the saying goes, it’s “where 25,000 men marched in; and one week later 2,500 marched out.” Here’s Delville Wood now:

..and as my grandfather probably saw it in 1916:

After battle for Delville Wood France

So #4 on my Bucket List is to visit not just Delville Wood, but as many old WWI battlefields as I can. Time permitting, it’s one of the activities I’d like to get done during my upcoming sabbatical in Britishland, because to see most of them would require a trip of only a few days across the Channel.

Mr. Free Market suggests that I do my pilgrimage during late November or early December, “…when the weather is foul and one can appreciate the absolute misery — the cold, the rain and the mud — that the poor infantry had to deal with.”

Sounds like a plan.

Bedside Guns

Over the years, many people have written to me asking what I would consider the ideal home-defense handgun. (And yes: I know that a handgun is what you use to fight your way to a shotgun. But sometimes your shotgun in locked away in your safe. So let’s just stick with the handgun, for the moment.)

Now, let’s understand what I mean by “home defense”. I don’t mean that your house is under siege by Al-Qa’eda fanatics or even the local neighborhood homeowners’ committee (California residents will know exactly what I mean).

No, what I mean is that you’re fast asleep, when suddenly you wake up and realize there’s mischief afoot, inside your house.

Let me be perfectly clear about what I’m going to say next.

If you have practiced and practiced and practiced with your trusty 1911 or SIG whatever, and the operation thereof is as automatic as breathing, by all means keep a semi-auto in your bedside drawer.

But unless you’re a total loony, if there’s a round in the chamber you should have the safety engaged. Or, if there’s no round in the chamber, it means you have to chamber one first — noise and fumbling may ensue. In other words, operation of your gun is a two-step process.

Or you can just do it the easy way, and use a double-action revolver. Nothing to think about, nothing to operate except the trigger (like that wonderful line: Smith & Wesson — the original “point and click” interface).

Ultimately, of course, you’re going to do what you want to do, with the gun that feels the most “comfortable” to you — i.e. the gun that you feel is most likely to get the job done.

And that’s fine. Just be aware of the potential drawbacks and advantages of all the options.

After all the hundreds of hours and many thousands of rounds I’ve spent with my beloved 1911 pistols, my bedside gun is a double-action .357 Magnum revolver, chambered with Federal Hydra-Shok 125gr. JHP (jacketed hollowpoints).

Ultimately, as I’ve said before, it all depends what you’re comfortable with—and if you’d rather park your Glock 17 next to the bed, be my guest. Just be sure when you’re half-awake and fumbling for the thing that you don’t hit the magazine release by mistake (it’s been known to happen, more than once)—and that can happen with any semi-auto pistol.

A revolver is like a fork: you pick it up, and it works. Here’s my old S&W Model 65, just to illustrate the concept:

 

Now for some other thoughts:

I talked a little about ammo earlier, and I need to offer some advice to people who own guns in GFW states like Massachusetts, California or New York.

If you whack a goblin in your home in a Righteous Shooting, there’s always a chance that some asshat prosecutor (or lawyer for the dead goblin) will go after you because you used “killer” ammo.

Yes, I know, all ammo is supposed to kill, but there’s no arguing about this when you’ve just used a full cylinder of Black Talons you picked up at that gun show in Alabama. If that happens, you’ll be painted as a “bloodthirsty vigilante killer” quicker than Tom Sawyer’s fence.

Here’s a tip: Use the same type of bullets as your local police force does. If you use “police” cartridges, then no one can paint you as a vicious killer.

Ask one of your neighborhood cops what kind of bullet (not just caliber) his department uses. Mostly, they’re going to use CCI/Speer Gold Dot, Winchester PDX or Silvertips, Remington Golden Saber or Federal Hydra-Shok. The caliber may vary, but the bullet type is probably going to be one of those brands. Generally, the same bullet type will be available in your caliber.

(Ditto shotgun shells, by the way—you may think it’s a really cool idea to BBQ the goblin with one of those “Dragon’s Breath” rounds, or turn him into a pincushion with a “flechette” shell, but, regrettably, it’s not a good choice. Use “game” loads: you’ll be a “sportsman”, not Rambo, and he’ll be just as dead.)

And one last caveat for everyone: whatever you’ve got in your bedside drawer, make sure that your kids or grandkids can’t get hold of it.

How you arrange that is up to you.

My kids, even when small, knew better than to go into my bedside drawer — but even so, I used to lock my bedside gun away during the day anyway, and take it out again at night. Did I ever forget to do that? Not once. After a while, it becomes a ritual, like cleaning your teeth in the morning and at night.

Trigger locks are okay, I guess, if you don’t want to mess with locking the gun away — just remember to lock it every morning, and unlock it every night. That I have forgotten to do (unlock it, I mean) — and it’s no fun to be fumbling with a trigger lock when all hell is breaking loose in your house, which is why I prefer to lock it away during the daytime.

I can’t stress this enough. A gun is a lethal object in a kid’s hands. A dozen or so kids, and their parents, find that out every year, and I just want to smash my head against the wall every time I hear about another incidence of that, because it’s so unnecessary.

And when the kids get older, teach them about guns and about gun safety. The incidence of accidental shooting deaths among kids who have been trained in gun safety is almost zero. Follow the stats, folks.

But most importantly of all, if your kid have friends over to play, lock the damn gun away. You may be able to trust your kid, but a group of kids has the collective responsibility of a treeful of drunken chimpanzees, and that will include yours.

Don’t give yourself a broken heart by your carelessness — and don’t give the gun-fearing wussies more ammo to use against other gun owners, either.

Here endeth the lesson.

No Chance

When I was at university in South Africa back in the early 1970s, our group of friends developed a game known as “Poor Man’s Monopoly” using a regular Monopoly game, but wherein each contestant started off with no money whatsoever, collected only $20 (not $200) when passing GO, and the winner was the the first player to own any property at all. (Let me tell you, those little brown properties next to GO became much sought after.) And of course, the “Chance” cards which casually allowed a player to collect $5 from each of the others could cause a fistfight. The only “Chance” or “Community Chest” cards we stripped out were the ones requiring income tax payments — because, obviously, no one earned enough to pay taxes and we didn’t want to see our friends committing suicide. The games took forever to spit out a winner — kinda like life itself, really — and were played in an atmosphere of grim desperation — once again, kinda like real life.

Which brings us to this wonderful concept.

According to Black Lives Matter (and their White liberal supporters), this is their life, according to the White Man’s Monopoly rules:

Suggestions for the “Chance” and “Community Chest” cards in Comments, please. As always here on my back porch, political correctness and trigger warnings can be safely ignored as long as it’s funny.


By the way: I didn’t spell “Monopoly” with the little circled R after the y because a.) I don’t know how to create it in WordPress and b.) fuck you, Parker Brothers’ lawyers or whoever.

Same Ol’, Same Ol’

From Longtime Reader Ed:

Sorry to say, but you have become redundant. Reading your “New” blog is like going back to High School thirty years later and seeing the people who never left and are bitching about the same shit. AMF!

I have no idea what AMF means, but whatever. Anyway, Ed… let me not keep you here and bore you. Feel free to find something new and exciting, somewhere else.