Splendid Isolation

Innocent Times, Part 4

August 25, 2024 Kim du Toit Classic Beauty, Funny Stuff

…in which we continue to look at earlier, more innocent times. That said, some of the cartoons below were not so innocent — and probably couldn’t get published today.

Which. of course, is why I’m posting them.

From the H.R. files:

In Medical Ethics:

And in the Groves of Academe:

Another from H.R.:

In Sporting News:

And In Flagrante Delicto:

See you all next month.

Forgot to mention: if you want to see the first couple of these, use the “Search” function at the top of the page and just type: Innocent Times then hit Enter.

That Garage Thing Part 1 – The British Invasion

August 24, 2024 Kim du Toit Drive Time

Former Drummer Knob wrote to me, enclosing a listing for a house in Plano, and mischievously asked: “It’s in your neighborhood. Would you buy it?”

I have no idea why Knob would be looking at a house in Plano (from his penthouse in Monaco), but whatever. I’ve shared the link but by the time this is posted, it will probably already have been sold — houses in the swanky Willow Bend neighborhood seldom last long on the market. Still, it provoked a train of thought in me because, unusually for a house in the $2.5 million range in that area, it had four garages (most have only two or three).

You can probably guess where this is taking us, because I’m a total slut when it comes to cars and my likes and loves change quite promiscuously depending on what I happen to be looking at.

Nevertheless, I’m currently locked on a mindset which asks the question: “If I wanted to escape the modern trend in cars of electronic everything, basically a four-wheeled laptop which has the added benefit of spying on your every move, would I be prepared to sacrifice some of the modern characteristics, e.g. reliability or handling, for that freedom?”

And the answer is, “Yes. But I’d have to have backup.”

It’s no good having a car you love and adore when it’s in the mechanic’s hands and you need to make a grocery- or liquor store run. One funny guy remarked on these very pages that if you collect vintage cars, you actually need more than one, for this precise reason. (“Two is one and one is none… actually, sometimes even three is none.”)

But a 4-car garage certainly gives you the opportunity to indulge yourself.

So here’s my current list — for some reason I’m on a British kick at the moment, so a couple may be familiar from recent posts — of three desirable beauties that would make parts of me throb every time I opened the garage door:

1966 Austin Healey Mk III

1956 Jaguar XK140

!968 Jag E-type Series 2

Alert Readers will notice some similarities: stick shift, wooden dashboard, leather seats etc.

“But Kim,” I hear, “didn’t you say you had a four-car garage available at your lottery-winning house in Plano?”

Indeed I did. But given the history of the above three when it comes to reliability, I would have to have a car that would be absolutely guaranteed to start every time I turned the key, and for that, I’m afraid I’d have to forsake British cars because

Yup, I’d have to go Japanese if I wanted a supremely-reliable sports car. And here it is:

1999 Acura (Honda) NSX

All the performance I’d ever need, matchless reliability, and as befitting its relative modernity, in crass shouty-yellow. Also with a stick shift, of course.

But I know that some people are going to laugh at my fondness for old British cars, so next week I’ll go all-European, applying the same criteria for my selections.

No Excuse?

August 23, 2024 Kim du Toit Sports

Here’s a little bit of silliness from Formula 1, from Lewis Hamilton:

Lewis Hamilton has called for a Formula One race to be held in Africa, claiming that there is “no excuse” for the sport not to return to the continent.

There has not been a Grand Prix in Africa since the 1993 South African GP, with Hamilton insisting that it is time for a comeback.

Asked if it was the right time for the F1 to return to Africa, Hamilton replied: “100 per cent. We can’t be adding races in other locations and continue to ignore Africa, which the rest of the world just takes from.

“No one gives anything to Africa. There’s a huge amount of work that needs to be done there. I think a lot of the world that haven’t been there don’t realise how beautiful the place is, how vast it is.

“I think having a grand prix there, it would really be able to highlight just how great the place is and bring in tourism and all sorts of things. Why are we not on that continent? And the current excuse is that there’s not a track that’s ready, but there is at least one track that’s ready there.

“In the short term, we should just get on that track and have that part of the calendar and then work on building out something moving forward.”

…because “equity”, you see.

Actually, I can see several reasons (not “excuses”) for Africa to be ignored by F1.

The only country capable of staging a Grand Prix is South Africa, with its Kyalami circuit north of Johannesburg. I invite Lewis to visit the place — but without any kind of security (no bodyguards etc.).

If Kyalami were off the table, then Cape Town could probably build a street circuit (it’s been mooted before), as they did with the Formula E race last year.

But Formula E isn’t Formula 1, and it should be noted that Cape Town is Eco-Green Loony Central (which would no doubt please Hamilton). The arrival of all those smelly, Gaia-destroying F1 cars is unlikely to find much support there.

Elsewhere in Africa, forget about it. Unless Liberty Media were to undertake to build a new track in, oh, Kenya — the only African city outside South Africa with a halfway-decent airport — and build in all the infrastructure (electricity, water, roads etc.) to support it, it would never happen.

Even if they did — and they won’t — it would take years before the project would be completed. With current trends, F1 will be racing wind-powered cars before that happens.

Don’t even think about any of the countries north of the Sahara either, because the infrastructure issues would be even worse than in South Africa, with the added flavor of radical Islam to spice things up.

Like all DEI dreams, the idea of a Grand Prix race in Africa sucks, for practical reasons. But of course, when it comes to DEI, that nasty reality has no place — and Lewis Hamilton is no different from any other dreamer.

Amen To That

August 23, 2024 Kim du Toit Gratuitous Gun Pics, The Gun Thing

SOTI, Chris Cypert talks approvingly about revolvers as self-defense weapons:

I set out to learn all I could about revolvers, their strengths and weaknesses, and how to use them effectively for self-defense. Did I learn that revolvers are obsolete relics of the previous century? That’s what I expected, but instead I learned that revolvers are still more than sufficient for self-defense and can even be the optimal tool in certain contexts. Let’s examine the strengths of revolvers for armed citizens and self-defense.

And then he goes on to list all of them.

As most Readers know, I keep a S&W Mod 65 next to the bed — my “bedside” gun — because in any kind of bad situation, a revolver is like a fork: you pick it up, and it works.

No scrabbling for a safety, no racking of a slide, none of that. You get it in your hand and pull the trigger… bang! and it’s all over. (Okay, bang! bang! bang! etc. as the need arises.)

It’s that instinctive action that makes me do the above. Gawd knows that I have practiced for countless hours with my 1911, and its operation is by now about as automatic and instinctive as I could possibly get it. And it’s the reason I keep it under the revolver… as a backup, because I do believe that by the time I’ve emptied the Model 65’s cylinder, I’ll be awake enough to grab and operate my 1911 (which is always kept cocked and locked anyway), should I need more than six shots.

This is my way, and if yours is different, that’s fine — whatever works for you, works for you.

But just as Cypert learned about the excellence of the revolver as a self-defense piece, maybe my argument will help you, and perhaps at a time of the direst emergency.

Think about it.

News Roundup

August 23, 2024 Kim du Toit Bad News

So from a nostalgic look back at the past, we return (very unwillingly) to the bullshit of today:

...I would suggest one-way tickets to Palestine (specifically Gaza) for all the above, but no doubt I would be labeled Krool & Hartless. And speaking of those Muslim assholes: