Author: Kim du Toit

Endless Capitalist Fun

Entertainment

I’ve had quite a lot of fun with the Monopoly board game on this here website over the years.  In case you’re new to this back porch, or your brain is as old-fartish as mine, see here for an explanation of Poor Man’s Monopoly, here for Feministical Monopoly, here for some updated Chance / Commmunity Chest cards, and of course we have our old favorite, Black Monopoly:

Now we have this kind of Monopoly:

Going back to the original Monopoly for a moment, we now discover this seldom-exercised yet official rule:

“Whenever a player lands on an un-owned [vacant] property he may buy that property from the Bank at its printed price. If he does not wish to buy the property it is sold at auction by the Banker to the highest bidder.”

I’m interested in the terminology “…it is sold at auction” — it doesn’t say “can be sold”.

Does this mean that the auction is mandatory?

I invite the Powdered Wigsters among my Readers to debate the jots and tittles, in Comments.

Smart Move

Culture, Health, Immigration

To many people, this little move would be astonishing, nay even incredible:

France will ban smoking in all outdoor spaces frequented by children, including beaches, parks and bus stops, the country’s health minister said.

The restrictions will involve creating a perimeter outside schools where members of the public will not be able to smoke a cigarette.

“Tobacco must disappear where there are children,” Catherine Vautrin, the health minister, said in an interview with the Ouest-France newspaper.

The freedom to smoke “stops where children’s right to breathe clean air starts”, she said.

The ban on smoking outdoors will come into force on July 1.

As one of many who has had to endure the clouds of smoke from the Gitanes/Gauloises that form a permanent fixture of any French establishment, I first asked myself:  The French?  Of all people, the French?

It’s like asking them to have only one kind of cheese, or banning wine.  C’est incroyable!

But they’re sneaky, the Frogs, as any old doughboy or G.I. will tell you.  Note this little wrinkle:

Café terraces will be excluded from the ban.

So that lifestyle choice — essentially, involving most of the places outside the home where Frogs would be found smoking — can carry on as before.

It’s the “outdoor spaces frequented by children” that’s the kicker.

If anyone loves them a good strong cigarette more than the French, it’s the… Arabs.  And where there are Arabs, you’ll always find hordes of screaming ill-behaved… children.

If you put those two facts together:  I think that this smoking ban is a subversive move to get Arabs to leave France in disgust.

Classic Beauty: Billie Dove

Classic Beauty

Silent movies, Billie Dove:  they go together like a horse and carriage, as the song goes.  And it’s easy to see why.  But first, she started out as a Ziegfeld Girl:


…at age 15, despite not being able to dance.

Then Hollywood came a-calling, and she was signed to a movie contract.  Apparently, someone complained to the studio head that she couldn’t act, either.  Whereupon the studio head said:  “Who cares?  Just look at her!”

You can kinda see his point, I think.

Bygone Times

History

Reader Old Texan sent me an email with this enclosed:

…and purely coincidentally, The Divine Sarah published Long Ago, It Must Be, which starts with the hypothesis (not hers) that time stopped in 1999, and everything that’s happened since then has been just a dream.  In that piece, Sarah talks wistfully about how 1999 was a time when some of her friends were still sane, and of other friends since passed away.

Well, 1999 was an okay year for me, I think:  living on the lakefront in Chicago with Connie, doing consultant work and traveling to Britishland occasionally:


(that’s the Bath Weir in the background)

It was a good year, no doubt about it.  But if I look back to my favorite years pre-2000, I’d have to choose 1981.

Oh man, 1981…. I had a job I loved — imagine that — which also involved travel (only all over South Africa, not the UK) and which earned me a decent salary:


(Cape Town)


(just north of Durban:  Umhlanga Rocks, where my Mom lived)


(Port Elizabeth “PE”)


(Kimberly, with its “Big Hole” diamond mine)

In 1981, I was still playing in the Atlantic Show Band — we’d pretty much given up playing clubs and were doing gigs at proms, wedding receptions and office parties etc. — and that, believe me, was a blast.  The music we were playing?  Bette Davis Eyes, Fire, Angel Of The Morning, Stop Dragging My Heart Around, Another Brick In The Wall, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, Heartache Tonight, You May Be Right… aaah, kill me now.

I was driving a very nippy little Opel Kadett (company car, ergo free), and I was still single, with a very active Little Black Book.

I was twenty-seven years old, and I ruled my world.  If I could choose a year to relive, then 1981 beats all the others, in spades.

Feel free to tell me in Comments which year you’d like to go back to, with reasons.  (Email if Comments are still screwed up for you, and I’ll post it.)

Caveat

Business, Drive Time

Here’s a little nugget from the Trump Tariff Front:

General Motors (GM) announced plans to invest $4 billion in three new U.S. assembly plants, including the production lines for the Chevrolet Blazer and Chevrolet Equinox, which the company currently builds in Mexico.

Yay and all that.  Another reaction:

The United Auto Workers (UAW) praised GM’s decision, calling it a validation of the effectiveness of global auto tariffs.

Yeah, fine, whatever.  Let’s just hope that you union assholes don’t jump on this opportunity to make unreasonable wage demands, which is what drove GM to move the plants to Mexico in the first place.

I’m not at all confident that this won’t happen, but as I am not and never will be a target customer of General Motors*, I personally will not be affected, especially as the newly-replanted assembly plants will be building Chevrolet Equinox, Chevrolet Bolt EV, Chevrolet Blazer, Cadillac Lyriq and Vistiq EVs and the Cadillac XT5.  (Lyriq? Vistiq?  WTF kind of names are those?)

I see that GM, with its customary foresight, has slated its EV models for some of the new plants, despite customer demand for said excrescences falling through the floor.

Pathetic.

The only GM car I’d ever consider buying is the Caddy CT4 Blackwing, except that while its engine is admittedly excellent, the CT4 looks like a primitive 1978-era CAD drawing:

In earlier times, we would have described that thing as “uglier than a bucketful of burst assholes”.

As for all GM’s other models:  pass, with extreme prejudice.