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Not-So-Vintage Beauty

Drive Time

While wandering along the various highways and byways of Ye Olde Internette (i.e. looking at stuff that wasn’t written yesterday by some illiterate / ignorant Millennial), I stumbled upon something that I hold near and dear to my heart:  a Maserati 4200 GT from the early 2000s.  Here’s what it looks like, in both Coupé and Spyder configurations:

 

Now here’s why I love this creature [2,000 lines of drooling foolishness redacted]:

  • 4.2-liter V8 Ferrari engine giving
  • 385 horsepower (395 in the later GranSport)
  • Skyhook suspension system
  • manual transmission
  • proper 4-seater (not 2 adults + 2 amputees, like most of the ilk)

But those are just the technical specs, and impressive though they are, a whole bunch of cars today can produce the same or better.

However, what gets my various body parts tingling, moving and enlarging is the sheer beauty of this car.  This guy (who uses his twelve-year-old Mazza 4200 as a daily driver!!) puts it perfectly:

I’m a huge fan of the beautiful styling. I believe it’s a timeless design. When the 3200/4200 was initially released it may have seemed a bit bland for the time. But today with every new car resembling a transformer mated with largemouth bass fish front end, it really makes me appreciate the elegant smooth aerodynamic curves of 90’s vehicles.

I just hope he doesn’t mind if I steal “a transformer mated with largemouth bass fish front end”, because I’m gonna.  And a reminder of the topic under discussion:

I absolutely love the smooth, elegant lines that flow gracefully, compared to the angular offerings of most of today’s sports cars.  And I actually prefer the “standard” styling above over the later GranSport’s, which while also lovely, is starting to look dangerously fish-mouthed:

I am also completely cognizant of the fact that “older Maserati”  and “daily driver”  are not terms that should be combined in a single sentence.

But you could do worse.  A whole  lot worse.

Want.

No Need To Wonder, Love

Men & Women

Continuing with my ongoing fascination for sexbots and how they’re going to change society comes this conclusion, from a chick writer no less:

The human experience of love, companionship and unconditional acceptance we often expect from our pets is being hacked, replicated and ultimately replaced by dolls who live in the cloud during the day and function as your robot wife/sex slave/ couch buddy at night. She can be anything you want her to be and demands nothing (unless you want her to). Soon she’ll be able to make sandwiches. I can’t help but wonder if a large majority of men won’t opt for the conflict-free humanoid over the real thing, with all of our baggage and hormones and mothers-in-law.

I don’t think it will be a majority  of men, but it’s going to be a bigger number than anyone would expect — and for this, we can thank the Feministicals, woo hoo.

Prediction:  It’ll be all over when the sexbots can make us sandwiches.

And pour a decent gin & tonic.

And reload our favorite .45 ACP cartridges… [okay, that’s enough, Kim.]

Then again…

Applause, Please

Good Stuff

Tell me that you haven’t felt this way about corporate (or government-) intransigence at least once in your life, and I’ll call you a liar.

Bereaved relatives confronted staff at an insurance company with the body of their loved one after the firm refused to pay out until they proved he was dead.
Two women were filmed carrying the corpse inside a branch of the Old Mutual financial firm somewhere in KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa, this week after their claim on a funeral policy was initially rejected.
Horrified bank staff watched on as the women took the body inside, having driven it to the branch from the morgue, and demanded a payout.
Alongside the corpse the women handed over paperwork for the man’s life insurance claim along with his ID and death certificate, local media reports.
Witnesses said the ladies told staff they would not leave the branch until Old Mutual paid out the death claim in full.
After hurried discussions between Old Mutual management and phone calls to head office, it was decided to agree to honour the insurance claim – as long as the ladies removed the dead body.
The witness said: ‘As soon as the ladies were promised they would be paid they marched back inside the office and in front of the counter grabbed an end each and carried the corpse back out. Two men went to their aid and helped them manoeuvre the body bag into the boot of the car that they brought the body in and people were just watching open mouthed as all this was played out. The women said a loved one was inside the body bag and that bringing him to the Old Mutual office seemed to be the only way to prove their claim to them that he had actually passed away’ he said.

But before you start applauding, there’s this:

Responding to the viral video on Twitter, Old Mutual said that the incident was ‘most unsettling’ and they insisted that they were ‘sympathetic towards the family during this difficult time’.

I’ll bet you were “sympathetic”, you pencil-pushing motherfuckers, which is why these poor people had to resort to such an extreme measure.  I hope you were so “upset” that you have nightmares for a week.

Now  y’all can applaud.

Nah, Bring It On

Politics, Two-Minute Hate

Found via Insty (thankee, Stephen) these words of wisdom come from Bill Maher:

“Lately we’ve been hearing more and more about a second civil war which sounds impossible in this modern, affluent country. It is not. We talk about Trump as an existential threat, but his side sees Democratic control of government the exact same way. When both sides believe the other guy taking over means the end of the world, yes, you can have a civil war.”
…
“We are going to have to learn to live with each other or else there will be blood.”

Well, we conservatives have taken over (sorta), and the world hasn’t ended.  Much to my disgust, cops haven’t started shooting down Pantifa rioters in the streets, the editorial board members of the New York Times  haven’t been sent to the guillotine and we haven’t planted millions of landmines along our southern border — to name but three areas of disappointment.

Something else Maher said:

“And never forget, the single shining truth about democracy: it means sharing a country with assholes you can’t stand.”

Which would be absolutely true, except that we have Democrats trying their level best to subvert democracy with massive voter fraud and a sham impeachment of an elected President — and we’re not even going to mention the disgusting attempts to make America a land of popular majority government instead of the representative republic that it always has been, as laid down in the Constitution.

And speaking of subverting the Constitution, we also have Democrats attempting to end our First Amendment right of free speech with nonsense like hate speech codes, and we all know that Democrats everywhere want to overturn the Second Amendment by disarming Americans — to name yet another  two areas of conflict where the Left and conservatives are irreparably separated.

Simple truth for the Left?  I don’t want to live with Leftists, Communists, Progressives or whatever you call yourselves today.  The essence of the matter is that the two sides have radically different perspectives as to how this country should look, and the two are mutually contradictory.  Your side leads to Venezuela and Cuba, even though you say it leads to Sweden.  Our side just wants us all to live as the Constitution promises.

So why should  we live together?  For fear of revolution?

Don’t make me laugh.  We already had one Revolution in 1776, and the Constitution won.  The Russians also had one in 1917, and the Bolsheviks won — but only readers of the New York Times  could possibly think that Russia ended up better than we did.

Don’t even think you can emulate Lenin in the U.S. because you can’t, and you won’t.

We don’t have to learn to live with you;  you  have to learn to live with us.  Or else you can go and live in Sweden, Russia or Cuba because this is our  country, you Commie bastards.  This is the country of the U.S. Constitution, not Das Kapital.