Kettle Woes

New Wife is a tea drinker.  Actually, to call her a “tea drinker” is akin to saying that her husband rather enjoys shooting guns, except that she drinks tea more often than I shoot a gun.  Hell, she almost drinks more cups of tea than the number of bullets I send downrange in a typical session.

As I’ve mentioned before, she drinks Yorkshire Gold tea, which is my fault because I turned her onto it when we were together in Britishland all those years ago, and she prefers it over all others.  Fortunately, the teabags are fine — unlike my children, she’s not a teapot fetishist, thank goodness — so we just buy the bags in bulk and all goes well.

Except for the kettle.  We use a cheap ($25) electric kettle with an auto cutoff switch rather than a stovetop-with-whistle type simply because it’s more convenient, in that when we go on a car trip, we take both kettle and teabags with us (plus my small Keurig, but that’s a story for another time).

(Aside:  I should divulge, en passant, that I make the tea in our house simply because I’ve been making tea since I was seven years old — I used to make it for my mother every day because she too was a guzzler rather than a sipper, and I enjoyed spoiling my Mom, just as I enjoy spoiling New Wife — and I make tea better than anyone I know, including Daughter and New Wife, whether using bags in a cup, or loose tea in a pot.  I also make it when guests come over, even if they know little or nothing about tea.)

Recently, however, the kettle started to misbehave:  not switching on consistently, leaking a tiny bit, not switching off automatically at the boil, and so on.  So off I went to Amazon to order a new kettle, which is where the problems started.  Here’s the executive summary.

All kettles, whether electric or stovetop, are made in China nowadays.  All are crap (probably for the aforesaid reason) in that they are quick to rust, break early and often, don’t work as advertised, and so on. Even the so-called “Japanese” kettles are made in China, and suck.  Ditto Le Creuselt, the snobby Frog brand, which is now made in China, and for $75, I would expect them to last forever and never break — except that according to the consumer comments, they’re as bad as the rest of them.  When you consider that a kettle has only ONE JOB — boiling water — this is obviously a matter of concern.

Well, I wasn’t going to be put about like this, so I decided to buy a high-quality stovetop kettle, made somewhere other than China.  Of course, the first place I looked (Williams-Sonoma) did indeed have a quality kettle not made in China, except that it costs $400, no doubt because it’s made in England[pause to recover from the fainting spell]

Never mind kettle, what was needed was Ketel One.

However, a glass of gin and a moment’s reflection provided me with the solution.

I have had the current (faulty) kettle now for just on two years.  Given the number of cups of tea that New Wife imbibes on a daily basis, an approximate calculation revealed that this El Cheapo kettle has boiled water around four thousand times — and is only now starting to show signs of age/use?  I’ve had guns that didn’t last that long, and they’re made of stainless steel and everything.

So I went back to Amazon and bought another kettle just like it (down to the color even), noting that the price ($25) was about the same as the first one I bought back then.

Yeah, it’s made in China, but they’re all made in China so there you go.  I should point out that if there were a kettle of comparable standard made in the U.S., I probably would have spent double the amount — and if we in America cannot make a simple and reliable electric kettle carrying a retail price of $50 because of greedy unions, burdensome government regulations, high operating costs, etc., then we deserve to have the Commies make all our stuff.

Let’s just hope the fucking thing doesn’t break on Day 3.  New Wife will be severely pissed at having to do without her Yorkshire Gold while I go and find something else (not made in China, FFS) to replace it.

Darwin Tourism

I see that some idiot was trapped on a volcano, can’t be rescued and will no doubt be dead by the time you read this:

A tourist is stuck close to the crater of the highest active volcano in Eurasia with rescuers unable to reach him by foot or helicopter.
The ailing man is stranded some 650ft below the rim of the giant 15,580 ft Klyuchevskaya Sopka in Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula.
Spewing volcanic activity and a melting high-altitude glacier is preventing rescuers getting close to the tourist, aged 35.
A helicopter bid to lower rescuers onto the rim of the volcano so they could climb down to the man had to be aborted due to extreme toxic gas and vapour emissions and atrocious weather.

I have the same reaction to this as when some mope is eaten by a shark while swimming among a bunch of them, or when some “adventurer” falls off a mountain while climbing it “because it was there”:  they were asking for trouble.

I have a simple policy when it comes to travel:  don’t do stupid shit that will endanger your life, and don’t go to dangerous places (e.g. an active volcano, a shark-infested lagoon or any Middle Eastern- or primitive Third World country, some overlap).

That’s my own personal policy;  yours may differ in that you get off on danger or want to see exotic (read: shithole) places and so on.  I am never going to be bitten by a shark, for instance, because my idea of a maritime adventure is sitting in a dockside restaurant in Cannes or Boothbay Harbor drinking a fine wine and eating the local delicacy — not swimming in a sea full of riptides and stuff with spikes or sharp teeth.  Of course, said restaurants are not without their own set of perils, e.g. prices where you need a magnifying glass to find the decimal point, scrofulous Frenchmen or New Englanders and so on, but on the whole, the mortal peril thereof is somewhat lower than coming face to face with a fucking tiger shark in its own habitat.

Call me a coward, or “unadventurous” if you will, but I will point out that I was once surrounded by Puerto Rican gangsters in Hell’s Kitchen simply because I had an urge for a pastrami sandwich from the local deli.  (That story for another time.)  So I’m not that much of a coward, and sometimes there is a decent risk/reward balance.

But the reward of a wonderful deli sandwich is far greater than a “look, I’m standing on the crater of an erupting volcano” moment, and in any event, I’d rather risk death by choking while trying to inhale the entire sandwich than knowing I’m going to be cooked alive by molten lava.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but you’re not going to change my mind.

Un-Summarizable

It’s not often that I can read an article without being able to summarize it with a few words or sentences, but this post by The Captain is one of the exceptions.  Here’s but an excerpt, but there’s so much more gunny goodness:

To begin with, it’s always been a myth that the police were there for protection. Regular readers, and most other educated men and women, already know about cases Warren versus D.C. and Castle Rock versus Gonzales. There are more, but these two cases demonstrate that police are not duty bound to offer anyone protection.
But at least it’s a myth that many people have believed. The riots, looting, pillaging, beatings and murders of late have convinced many uninformed folks that maybe they do need protection in lieu of police. In short, that myth has been shattered.

And it gets better, wif grafs and stuff.

Replacement Time

This just goes to show how ignorant some people are:

It seems that residents wanting to defend their homes from a mob are no longer allowed to exercise their Second Amendment rights in the city of St. Louis. On Friday, KSDK reported that local prosecutor Kim Gardner got a search warrant for the McCloskey home. And based on the court order, police seized the rifle used by Mark McCloskey, the St. Louis resident who used the weapon to defend his home from a group of protesters who threatened to kill him and his wife. They also seized the handgun Patricia McCloskey used, which was being held by their former attorney.

The ignorant people, in this case, would be this loathsome prosecutor Gardner and the people who “advise” her.

If I’d been in this situation (assuming I only had one gun, which I do, following that terrible canoeing accident on the Brazos or maybe Colorado rivers), I would have replacement guns in the house about, oh, half an hour after the cops left.  Only this time, I’d hide the some of spares where the cops would need a pneumatic drill to get access to them.  Or not.

So from this unhappy situation we should deduce the following:

  1. Never have just one gun per person in the house
  2. Hide a couple of backup guns — not just inside your own house, but in those of a couple trusted friends
  3. Don’t forget to do the same with the ammo for the guns.

If you haven’t made such arrangements already, do it now.

Bad Choices, Lousy Consequences

It’s not often that a post falls into so many of my categories (see above), but this one certainly does:

Actions have consequences. So do inactions. Just ask Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.  Walz had asked the federal government for $500 million to help the city of Minneapolis rebuild after riots destroyed or damaged more than 1500 buildings. The government refused.

Excuse me for a moment…

Ooooh, the Schadenboner is great with this one — all the more so when we hear the sniffling and whining:

“The Governor is disappointed that the federal government declined his request for financial support,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s office said in a statement. “As we navigate one of the most difficult periods in our state’s history, we look for support from our federal government to help us through.”

…and the response:

In a statement, a FEMA rep confirmed the request had been denied, saying it was determined that “the impact to public infrastructure is within the capabilities of the local and state governments to recover from.”

Yup.  You fucking loony Lefties thought you could fuck around and play your little utopian games without consequences, and now you’re going to have to pay for the repairs yourselves.

And for those who think that this will cause Trump to lose Minnesota in November:  the people who are in the deepest shit now weren’t going to vote for Trump anyway, and the right-thinking people of Minnesota are probably just as pissed off with Walz and his cronies as everyone outside the state is.  In the cold-blooded electoral calculus, this will probably turn out to help Trump, not only in Minnesota but everywhere else.  The Left needs to have the effects of their lunacy and misgovernment rubbed in their noses good and hard, and most of all, publicly.

Wait till New York hands in its bill… if they have the nerve to do so, after this.

In the meantime, I’m going to have a couple-three quiet lunchtime cocktails of this stuff.

Welcome Wagon Offer

I see that the Brits are going to offer asylum residency to something like 200,000 Hong Kongers, and I have no doubt that we Murkins are going to do something similar.

I think that’s excellent — as long as both countries structure the offer so that people of proven means and talent get to the front of the line, because we want immigrants who will want to work and be successful, and not come here simply to suck on the various government teats that we have misguidedly allowed to grow and fester, once again in both countries.  And if there’s a nation of people who have a track record of not wanting or needing the Helping Hands Of State to stick it in their asses  give them benefits, that would be the citizens of Hong Kong.  (Their attitude, in a nutshell, appears to be “Stay out of my way and let me make money”.)

There will be considerable culture shock, by the way, when these newcomers arrive in the U.K. and U.S. with relief to have escaped all that repression and control, only to discover that instead of paying 5% income tax once a year, they’ll be bent over and raped repeatedly by the fascist goons of Her Majesty’s Department of Customs & Revenue and our own Internal Revenue Service (“service” as in what stud bulls do to heifers) so that both nations can continue to provide free medical care, education and money to the ungrateful, shiftless and unemployable.

But hey:  democracy, whisky and sexy carries a cost, too.

All that said, however, I think that both the U.K. and the U.S. need to be extremely careful in vetting the people we welcome aboard, because China is asshole and it would not surprise me to learn that the godless fucking Commies would include a few (or many) spies and agents among the would-be immigrants so that they can continue their campaign of espionage and the undermining of Western democracy.

Any efforts of our own home-grown Commies to start wailing about “diversity” and “helping the needy” should be brushed off with utter contempt because, you see, they want to help the godless Chinese Communist Party to undermine our Western democracy.  All their yelpings, therefore, need to be seen in that context.

In fact, what we should do — both the Brits and ourselves — is to offer not asylum but an exchange of people wanting to live in a democracy with people who would prefer to live under Communism.

Hell, I’d give them a two-for-one offer:  two Ivy League university professors or two Portland/Seattle pantifas for every one Hong Kong entrepreneur.  Fuck it:  how about a five-for-one exchange?  I’d happily lose a million “Democratic Socialists” like Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, the entire faculty lounge at Oberlin College and the wokeist New York Times editorial committee in return for two hundred thousand hard-working Hong Kong capitalists.

Change my mind.