Bloggus Interruptus

Last night my website went dark because my hosting service (blessings be upon their name) decided that it was Server OS Update Time, and that they would require the server’s uninterrupted attention for several hours.  Neither I nor Tech Support 2.0 were informed of said decision ahead of time, which meant that today’s serving of anger and invective could not be loaded — indeed, I will have to reformat all of the pieces before posting them.

Aaaaargh.

It’s 4.00am local time as I write this, I have to go and Uber in a few, so everyone will just have to be content with a “filler” post in which I merely offer up various pics that have caught my eye recently.

 

 

 

See y’all tomorrow.

News Roundup

1)  Eating beaver is an aphrodisiac, Polish minister claimswhy yes, yes it is.

2)  Instagram crashes AGAIN: Users around the world hit by outage, leaving them unable to login or load the appFirst World problem

3)  Indian man is killed in fight to the death over WATERThird World problem

4)  Man is run over (twice) and is robbed while lying at the side of the road just wasn’t his day, was it?  

5)  After a $1 million restoration, historic ship collides with container ship and sinks wasn’t their day, either.

6)  Man Guarding Miners From Pride Of 14 Lions Is Killed — By An ElephantAfrica Wins Again.

And to end the carnage:

7)  Some stupid bitch screams abuse at a Trump supporter, loses her job as a consequenceand as sure as night follows day, some asswipe takes umbrage because Oh My We’re Better Than That, not realizing that unless we continue to use the Left’s own rules against them, they’re going to not only carry on being assholes, but get worse.

Screw them both, the Left and the Appeasers.  There are consequences for acting like an asshole, and it’s time the Left experienced that.

Not Much

The Washington Times reveals their list of the most exciting handguns of 2019.

So why am I not excited?

Okay, let me break the list down for you.  I see some “exotic” guns (e.g. Chiappa), a couple of line extensions (e.g. Glock 43/48. Springfield XDe), a “new” Colt .357 Mag revolver, a Ruger .357 that attempts to fix Ruger’s notoriously shitty revolver double-action trigger, firing the bullet through a skinny barrel which looks like it’ll droop like a wet noodle after a few dozen rounds — and don’t get me started on the little revolver that shoots two rounds of .22 WMR simultaneously.  (Has the world gone crazy?)

Then there are the two “pistols” which look like chopped AR-15 rifles — I mean, seriously:  does anyone outside Hollywood think these things are worth a damn?

And finally, a new Nighthawk 1911 which looks lovely, will work flawlessly and probably costs as much as a small Florida Keys beach cottage.

These guns don’t “excite” me.  To be quite frank, I wouldn’t accept a single one of them as a gift.  This gun, however, does  excite me: 

It’s a S&W Mod 35 in .22 LR, made sometime in the 1950s.  Sadly, because it’s somewhat rare, it sells for about the same price as a new Kimber 1911.  But it still excites me because a) it’ll shoot the eye out of a gnat and b) it’s nicer-looking than any of the 2019 guns.  And yes (hint to Son&Heir ), I would accept this gun as a gift for Father’s Day (even though I don’t observe Hallmark holidays).

Feel free to enlighten me, though, about the 2019 guns…

Turnabout

Texas comedian Ron White summed up the state of Texas’s attitude towards someone who comes to Texas and commits murder — “You kill someone in Texas, we kill you right back.”

Soooo… let’s just review the track record of Muslims when it comes to setting up shop in another country and killing people:  Somalia, Nigeria, Chad, Congo… and that’s just a few in north Africa, because history shows quite clearly that as soon as Muslims grow to more than 10% of the population, the killing starts.  Let’s not even talk about what their track record has been in countries where they are the majority:  Egypt, Libya, Iran, etc.

All this taken into consideration, therefore, it would be only natural for non-Muslim countries to start, shall we say, resisting Islam from getting out of control in their homelands.  And it would be only natural for said countries to form alliances to combat this festering disease, n’est-ce pas?

“But oh noes!”  the Tolerant Left wails, “That’s so evil and intolerant ‘n stuff!”

Well, fuck ’em, say I.  We didn’t start this jihad  shit:  they did.  So if this killing non-Muslims in their host countries, expelling non-Muslims from their own countries and in general acting like fucking Nazis in 1940s eastern Europe is their modus operandi  then we need to react in the same way as General George Patton would have done, let alone the way Aung San Suu Kyi (Buddhist) and Viktor Orban (Christian) are doing.

And if the liberals / Left / whatever these pricks are calling themselves these days think it’s so wrong, perhaps a one-year sabbatical in, oh, Saudi Arabia or Iran may help their thinking.

Moving Trends

Now this came as a surprise to me:

Why Some Americans Won’t Move, Even for a Higher Salary

Apart from the Great Wetback Episode Of 1986 (emigration, for those who haven’t been paying attention), I’ve moved around the U.S. on several occasions, mostly for job reasons (better job, more money), and every one of them was wrenching.  And of course none of my moves in the U.S. was from my home town, so I can well imagine that someone who has grown up and spent most of their life in (say) Indianapolis would be reluctant to leave family, friends, business contacts and so on to start all over again in a new location.

Many people, of course, take moving as part of life (I’m excluding Armed Forces folks from this, because moving is part of the deal), and I suppose I’m probably one of them — but that’s because my first move was so comprehensive and so final, the uprooting was total.  Subsequent moves, while somewhat disturbing, were much easier by comparison.

After Connie passed away, I gave serious thought to starting all over again, not just in another town, but even in another country.  During my sabbatical travels, I discovered that the cost of living in the south of France, for example, was about the same as living here in Plano, and for the briefest moment I considered it.  I love France, always have, and with little or no language issue, that part would have been easy.  The cultural change, however, would not  have been easy, and so I didn’t move Over There.  (Interestingly enough, while I love Britain even more than France, that was never an option, because the cultural change would have been even more  pronounced.)

And finally, I realized that the urge to move, to start all over again somewhere else, was more a factor of bereavement than from any desire for change:  so I stopped considering it.

Going back to the chart, however, I am very interested in the downward trend of the phenomenon.  If we assume that when America was still an agrarian, immobile society until the Industrial Revolution caused the mass migration to cities, could it be that the beginning of the study (in the late 1940s) was simply the crest of the wave, and that people were once again preferring to remain settled than to move?

And in recent years, of course, the technology has increasingly been able to support work-from-home or work-from-home-city, so one would expect the incidence of moving to slow even more.  That said, however, if one is able to work from home, then it doesn’t really matter where home is — so people could be expected to move elsewhere to improve their standard of living, say to cheaper housing.  So what do the numbers say about that?

Even the “housing” number has been falling — and I suspect that if one were to take away migration away from high-cost areas like the Northeast and California, the trend would be even more pronounced.  Interesting indeed:  I would have assumed the precise opposite trends, from both  charts, but apparently not.

As always, your thoughts are welcome.

Birth Year IV: The Murkins, Part One

I never saw any of these cars while growing up in South Africa, and I might as well be talking Sanskrit as about them and their characteristics — nor am I that keen to learn much about them either — so I’m counting on my GearHead Readers to step up to the plate and add their thoughts in Comments.  All I can say is that as far as I’m concerned, pretty much all of these behemoths are as ugly as a boil on  a pretty girl’s face.  And just remember:  it’s not a complete catalogue, just a list of cars that came onto the market in 1954, and that caught my eye for one reason or another.

Cadillac Eldorado

Chrysler New Yorker

Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight

Ford Crestliner

Pontiac Star Chief

Chevrolet Bel-Air

Plymouth Belvedere

Lincoln Capri

Mercury Monterey

Ye gods.  And I thought that modern car design was Clone Central.  If someone were to tell me that I had  to pick one of the above for a daily drive, I think I’d go with a Colt 1911 Single Bullet model.

Next week we’ll be looking at the products of the smaller car manufacturers of the time (none of which have survived till today).  Maybe there’ll be some design differences there… but somehow, I’m not optimistic.

I think I’ll just revive my artistic aesthetic with a look at the Mercedes 220A of the period:

Ahhh… that’s better.