Author: Kim du Toit

“Dear Dr. Kim”

Advice

And yes, by popular demand, we bring to you a feature from Kimblogs passim, Dr. Kim.

Obligatory warning for stupid people: Dr. Kim isn’t a doctor, doesn’t play one on TV (but has been known to do so with unsuspecting women on an ad-hoc basis). His advice should be taken with a metric tonne of salt and two metric tonnes of humor, and should be followed with extreme care. Dr. Kim takes no responsibility for outcomes of separation, violence, divorce or strange diseases stemming from the adoption of his advice.

“Dear Dr. Kim: Ever since the election of 2016 and Donald Trump’s victory, a strange thing has happened to me. Some of the people in my social circle seem to have gone quite nuts about Trump, and about his administration. In the past, we were a mix of liberals and conservatives, but we all got along quite well. Now, however, things have changed, and a few of them have made it clear that any kind of support for President Trump is a barrier to friendship. Is friendship worth losing over silly politics?” — A Friend In Need Of Advice

Dear Friend: The problem is that it’s no longer “silly politics”. What we have in the U.S. today is an irreconcilable difference as to how our country should exist — a republic as envisaged by the Founding Fathers where freedom of the individual is paramount, or a modern-day Western state where the government decides how people should best live their lives. Ultimately, you have to decide whether friendship is worth this conflict, but I think the answer is simple.

History — that would be the actual history of the world, not that bullshit peddled by Howard Zinn and Simon Schama — has proved that our Constitution has created a vastly better system of government than has, say, Marx’s Communist Manifesto. For recent proof of how socialism / communism / progressivism sucks, one has only to look at the difference between the car industries of West Germany (Mercedes, BMW, Porsche) and the former East Germany (Trabant). Same people, same engineering acumen, but different political philosophies and a totally different outcome. Your liberal friends would prefer to live in a state like, say, modern-day France — where daycare is free but where until very recently the government regulated the names which one could give one’s children — rather than under the Donald Trump administration, which is doing its best to reduce the number of annoying government regulations. So here’s my advice.

Refuse to be friends with stupid people who think that socialism is cool, guns are evil, high taxes are fine, big government is okay, political correctness should run our colleges, and that “diversity” is a viable social option. Why should you indulge their childish, moronic fantasies when the only outcome is death and ruin?

You will be the better for it, and so will the United States.

— Dr. Kim

And About Time, Too

Guy Stuff

Knife rights seem to be headed into Texas state law. I always wondered why carrying a knife would be streng verboten in Texas (can anyone say “Jim Bowie”, children?), while carrying a Glock with a 15-round magazine is somehow no problem for our lawmakers.

If you have the one, you gotta have the other — and lest we forget, long before guns were invented, a knife was a weapon, or as they called it in the olden days, an arm; and therefore a knife, any knife, falls neatly into the Second Amendment’s “right to bear arms” aegis.

I’m not sure how often I myself will actually carry a knife around if this bill becomes law — but it sure as hell would be nice to know that if I did, the cops wouldn’t have prima facie cause to toss my wrinkled old ass into jail. Besides, I have quite a few “Governor’s Barbecue” knives, as we call them in Texas, and I’d love to show them off on special occasions. Here are some of my favorites:

From the top: Puma White Hunter II; a Kershaw Skinner (currently on permanent loan to a friend for his African safaris); an Anza Skinner* made of file steel and my #1 favorite knife of all time, and a Kershaw Commando boot knife.

*Don’t bother looking for the Anza on their website; they stopped making this model in 1999.

Before You Go Any Further (repost)

Housekeeping

If you’ve never read my scribblings and rants — in other words, you’ve not been exposed to my blogs before, you may want to peruse the “About” and “Welcome” pages just above the header. It might save you from unpleasantness later on, in the Comments.

And for the old-timers and Loyal Readers of yore: welcome to my back porch once again. Pull up a chair, grab yourself a drink at the bar over there, smoke ’em if you got ’em, and enjoy yourself. Just mind your manners, as always. (If you want, feel free to look at those same pages too, just to refresh yer memories…)

My new Tech Support (BobbyK, for those who remember him as a commenter at the old blogs) is an ultra-geek with unbelievably nasty system skills, and owns lots of guns. He’s been a good friend over the years, and for some reason feels very protective towards me, this blog and my previous Tech Support’s memory. He has the keys to my kingdom and therefore my absolute trust. Believe me: you do NOT want to fuck with this man, who will be prowling through the Comments like a tiger with toothache.

With all that said, now is the time to celebrate… enjoy what follows.

Only In Kim’s House

The Gun Thing

Many years ago, we had a Christmas party at our old house, and after everyone had said all the greetings, settled down and got their drinks, it was Show & Tell Time, whereby the guests got to fondle and coo over my latest gun acquisitions. For some reason, this always took quite some time.

Anyway, at some point the place looked like some 1930s-era gangster’s hideout, with rifles, shotguns and handguns scattered all over the place. Whereupon one of the lady guests looked around, and said: “Aaahhh… Christmas at Kim’s!”

Much laughter followed.

It’s not only at Christmas. The other night I was busy cleaning out our walk-in closet off the bathroom. Basically, it’s a room which has seen very little traffic over the past few years, because Connie had moved the few clothes she needed into the spare room next to the den, and I generally live out of the armoire in the bedroom anyway.

So there I was, doing some archaeological research into the detritus that had gathered in one corner, and discovered the following:

Yes, that’s two hundred rounds of Winchester .45 ACP hardball. No idea when I bought it, how it got there or anything else. (Finding Random Ammo in my house is not that unusual; I once found five hundred rounds of 5.56mm ammo in the garage — and I’ve never owned an AR-15.)

But that wasn’t all. Underneath the ammo was a little blue box. Inside:

Yes, a little Heritage Arms single-action revolver in .22 LR / .22 WM. No idea how that got there. I have a vague memory that it once belonged to one of the kids, but how it got into that forgotten corner of the closet? Like the fathers of Madonna’s adopted children: a complete mystery.

More alarming still, there’s still one more corner of the closet as yet undisturbed…

Overheard At The Supermarket

Men & Women

This was at Central Market in Plano. The guy was in his early forties, the woman maybe late thirties. Clearly, they knew each other but hadn’t seen each other for a long time.

He: Hi there, kid! Long time no see!
She: Yeah… it’s been years!

[pause]
He: So… are you still married?
She: Yep.
He: Happily married?
She: (laughs) Yes.
He: Okay. Well, that takes away my third question.
She: (laughs) [pause] So… what was your third question?
He: (looking at watch) Oh damn, I have to get going. Maybe some other time.

I love it when a guy knows how to flirt.

Culture Clash

Seen On Campus

While I was attending our local community college, I struck up a friendship with a kid in our Physics class. Hassan was Moroccan, about 20 years old, and had a wonderful sense of humor. He looked like any American kid, behaved like one and without his slight accent, you’d think he was born in Ohio or something.

So one day Hassan and I were hanging out in the corridor outside the classrooms, when two girls sat down next to us and started chatting away in some foreign language. They were, in a word, exquisite (in a trashy-Kardashian kind of way) — dark, expressive eyes, long black hair beautifully styled, fashionable clothes and expensive shoes. They looked more as though they were about to go out on a date than attend class.

Anyway, at some point a Muslim guy walked past us — Muslim, because he was wearing that silly skullcap thing and the white shift over long trousers. He looked at the girls, said something in Arabic to Hassan, and walked off.

Hassan bent over double with laughter, and when I asked him what the guy had said, he replied, “Persian whores.”

And there you have it, in a nutshell. Three recent immigrants (Hassan and the girls) who’d come here and assimilated (a little too much in the case of the girls, but still), and one asshole who’d brought over his 11th-century culture and would never assimilate.

And if you think for one minute that he’d inflict some Islamic-style caning on those two pretty girls if he could, you’d be perfectly correct. I saw it in his eyes.