Author: Kim du Toit

One Man

Drive Time

Question:  what do all the following cars have in common?

Porsche Carrera

Audi Quattro

VW TDI

Porsche 917

VW Golf VR6

Mercedes 350 S Turbodiesel

VW Phaeton

Bugatti Veyron

Lamborghini Aventador

Bentley Continental Speed GT

VW XL1

Here’s the answer to the question:  a crazy Austrian who gave the world its best cars from the 1960s until… well, yesterday.

In my opinion, the only mistake he ever made was a marketing one:  positioning the Phaeton as the VW Phaeton, instead of (say) an Audi A12.  Had he done the latter, Audi would still be selling them.

Never let an engineer near the marketing plan.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD

From Kenny:

While I’ve never had nor wanted one, Lisa enjoys her gay coffee drinks from Starbucks, insisting on getting one every time we go to Gallatin where the nearest Starbucks is located.
Naturally it’s in a spot that’s a royal pain in the ass to get into or leave due to traffic, and to add insult to injury, they take forfuckingever to make it. I’m serious, there’s always a few cars in front of us, so we can figure on at least a 20 to 30 minute wait. It may be a shorter time if I was to park and go inside to get it, but I absolutely refuse to step inside due to liberal germs. It’s bad enough a liberal company was getting our money.

You had me at “gay coffee drinks” and “liberal germs”…

News Roundup

Bad News

Speaking of fresh meat, there’s news from The Great Cultural Assimilation Project©:


...I’m thinking:
followed by: 


...and the same as above for whoever signed off on his release.


...and in other news on NPR, Hitler commits suicide.

Some SEX NEWS:


...because of course they are.  Can hardly be worse than the real thing.


...or, as the old advert goes, “UNION — OUI” Of course, they’d only be messing up the Paris Olympics, so


...and the people are sad:


...and her answer is always:  “I just use Scotch instead.”


...more like Dubai-on-Thames, but we’ve talked about that before.

In local news:


...and about damn time, too.  However, the full court will no doubt override the panel.
#9thCircuitAreCommies.

Then from the Department of Education:


...I’m guessing because that if he could, he’d be too old for her.


...I can’t decide whether “witch” is more objectionable than “genderqueer”.  Taken together, of course, there should be a hanging.  Of whichever school official thought this was a neat idea.

Time for some EVERYBODY PANIC!!!! News:


...note:  “could”.  Or… “probably won’t”.
#WeaselWordAlert

And for some totally

    

...not Salma Hayek?  Then nobody cares, honey.

And in our stroll down :


...did somebody say “LINGERIE”???

And that’s the news covered.

Snap Of The Fingers

Travels

Watching the Brit TV show “24 Hours In The A&E” the other night, one of the characters asked an intriguing question of another:

“If you could snap your fingers and be anywhere in the world, where would you choose?”

New Wife and I talked about it for ages.  Where to go?

  1. A place that you’ve been to before, and loved?
  2. A place you’ve never been to before?
  3. By yourself, or with a partner / wife / buddy etc.?
  4. For how long?  A day, weekend, week, or a month?

Here are mine:

  1. Never been to Lake Como, always wanted to, also a week.
  2. By myself: on a driven bird shoot, somewhere in southern England, for a day or two.
  3. With New Wife: somewhere scenic in the U.S., either where I’ve been before and she not, or where neither of us has been.  Whatever the choice, for two weeks.
  4. With my buddy Trevor: somewhere in Europe where neither of us has been to before, for a week.

(New Wife, by the way, chose only one locale:  any Indian Ocean island — Mauritius, Seychelles, Maldives — for two to three weeks.)

And now it’s your turn.  Feel free to work the conditions, any way you please.

Snap your fingers…

Requiem: Browning BPS

Gratuitous Gun Pics

I read with some melancholy that Browning has decided to discontinue their pump-action BPS.

I always loved the look and feel of the BPS, but as with so many Brownings (of all types), I could never quite get past the “Browning premium” price.

Which, as Phil Bourjailly explains, is largely the reason why it’s been discontinued:

So, what happened to the BPS? Times changed. Semiautos were still called “jam-a-matics” in 1977, and many hunters back then preferred to shoot pumps even if they could afford a semiauto. As semiautos got better, the reliability gap between pumps and autoloaders shrank. Costs rose. The real advantage between pump and semiauto shotguns became price. The pump market adjusted. Remington responded with the Express in the 1990s, a cheaper version of the Wingmaster. Benelli introduced the very affordable Nova around 2000. Mossberg kept cranking out the same humble, durable Model 500 it has always made.

The BPS wasn’t intended to be a cheap pump, and Browning stuck by its gun for a long time. While it’s too bad the BPS was discontinued, honestly, it stayed around a little too long. In the last years of the BPS, it was readily apparent that costs had to be cut to keep the price down, and the gun no longer looked like the glossy 20-gauge that I bought so many years ago.

One wonders what would have happened had Browning followed Remington’s lead (or even preceded them) with a budget version of the BPS, but that’s really not the Browning Way, is it?

So why am I melancholic about the BPS’s demise?  I hate to see ANY gun discontinued, is why.