Wait… what? Sunday’s OVER?
Oh well, let’s at least TRY to work up a smile:
And something to raise your… well, spirits:
Now get in the car and move.
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Gratuitous Gun Pic: Savage Model 99
American Rifleman magazine once put the Savage 99 in its list of “Ten Rifles Everyone Should Own“, and while I disagree somewhat with lots a couple of their choices, the Savage 99 is a slam-dunk listing — with one reservation, which I’ll get to in a while. But first, let’s look at this rifle and see what all the fuss is about:
I’m going to make my prejudices known up front. I think the “99” is hands down one of the most beautiful rifles ever made, period. That swooping stock as it leaves the receiver, the way the lever snuggles into the underside of the stock… ooooh, mommy. And if you can find one like mine, with the “schnabel” front stock…
…and that’s before we start talking about the brilliant rotary magazine, which, unlike for some lever rifles we could mention (Winchester, Marlin coff coff ), allows one to load this rifle with pointed (and not be limited to flat- or round-nosed-) bullets.
Which brings me to my only quibble with the 99. While it can handle medium cartridges (.308 Win, .300 Savage, .375 Win etc.), I don’t think the recoil is worth it. My .308 Win model is, honestly, painful to shoot. The angle of the thin stock pushes it right into the soft part of the shoulder, and for me anyway, it’s owie after four or five rounds. I think the perfect cartridges for the 99 are either the .250 Savage, or if you want something a little cheaper, .243 Win. Those, I can shoot (and have shot) all day. (I could have put a soft rubber pad on the rifle but I didn’t because wrong.) But the Savage is not an all-day shooter, anyway. That thin, elegant barrel heats up really quickly, and it will start to whip on you after a dozen rounds or so.
What this exquisite gun is, is a hunter. It’s light, accurate, quick to reload (in my case, about half a second or more quicker than my Mauser 98K), and quite honestly, I can’t think what more one could ask for a deep-woods rifle.
What sets Savage 99 owners apart from the rest is the fact that they love their 99. In the Rifleman article linked above, the writer laments:
I once had a lovely mid-50s Model 99 in .308. It was my favorite Texas whitetail rifle and in a weak moment I traded it for some rifle I can’t even remember. Lesson: Never sell or trade a good gun.
I’m one of those losers, and what I should have done was sell my .308 and immediately got a replacement in .243. But I didn’t because I’m an idiot. I should have just gone without electricity for a couple months…
Because of all this, Savage 99 rifles are relatively scarce, and quite expensive. Their owners don’t want to relinquish them, and anyone who’s ever fired one, let alone hunted with it, will know exactly why.
Forward Buying
This term defines when one buys something in greater quantities than normal, in anticipation of the supply thereof being interrupted, or to hedge against price increases. Which was all brought to mind by this post of Insty’s:
“The U.S. plans to swiftly impose tariffs on $7.5 billion in aircraft, food products and other goods from the European Union after the World Trade Organization authorized the levies Wednesday, citing the EU’s subsidies to Airbus. . . . The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said it would impose the tariffs starting Oct. 18, with 10% levies on jetliners and 25% duties on other products including Irish and Scotch whiskies, cheeses and hand tools.” [emphasis added]
In other words, this weekend should be devoted to laying in a hefty supply of yer favorite single malts, and those snot-textured Frog cheeses (if you’re that way inclined).
Aaaargh. As always, this is never a simple operation for me. Do I go for variety?
…or volume?
And don’t give me that “embrace the power of and ” nonsense. If I do both, then I can’t buy any more of this:
It’s hell being in the working class, I tell ya.
Tripping Up
So BritPrince Rufus Castratus and his wife Caring-Slut head off to Africa to do Noble Things, said things including but not limited to hugging Black chilluns, waving their own baby around, and giving inspiring speeches to Third-World Yoot, telling them not to despair but to strive to achieve the kinds of things otherwise only available to people born into noble families, or married into them, or to those of inherited wealth.
The problem, though, is that the African Adventure was supposed to be a giant PR stunt to assuage the storm of opprobrium which burst out when the Royal Ginger addressed a climate-scold conference, telling everyone to lower their carbon footprint, when in fact he’d swanned over to the conference on a series of filthy, polluting private jets.
And the African Adventure certainly started out that way for them; adoring crowds at every stop, lickspittle Press reports and millions of cute baby pics everywhere.
Except…
Because of royalty (his) and celebrity (hers), a certain amount of security would be needed because Africa, and (forgive the unconscious racism) there is no such thing as an “armored SUV” anywhere on the Darkie Continent except as owned by various criminal thugs of the Mugabe stripe who (quite sensibly) were not going to hand over their armored vehicles and leave themselves vulnerable to, well, the rest of Africa.
So the BritGov arranged for a few of these rhino-trucks to be flown over to Darkest Africa, creating in their wake a carbon footprint equivalent to the Krakatoa eruption (some slight exaggeration, but that’s the leitmotif of the International Climate Fear Set, isn’t it?). Needless to say, all the Perpetually Indignants are beside themselves with fury.
I kinda feel sorry for His Gingerness. He’s tried so hard to Do The Right Thing (as defined by his Hollywood slutwife): announced that they’re only going to have two children because social responsibility; given up birdshooting, boozing, foxhunting, eating meat, carousing and all the other stuff which made him lovable, and gone pretty much Full Woke (and we all know what perils lie there).
And that’s the problem right there. If you’re going to set yourselves up as the Duke and Duchess of Wokeshire, you’re always going to fuck up disastrously in some way or another no matter what you do, just because of the nature of your job (such as it is) and the minefield that is wokedom.
Stop to eat some local delicacy at a roadside vendor? Don’t you know that the animal which gave up its testicles for you is on the U.N. Endangered Species List?
Attend a tribal dance festival, put on some of the dancers’ duds and join in the dance? OMG that cultural appropriation is SO disrespectful!
Watch your cousin ride in some equestrian competition? Don’t you KNOW how much the horses suffer?
And so on.
There’s a simple solution to all of this for old Harry:
- ditch the slutwife, keep the kid (and I have some support for this)
- start doing again all the things he used to enjoy before the Mulatto Actress Infatuation (boozing, bonking blondes, birdshooting, driving fast cars, doing all four of those things at the same time, etc.)
- tell the whiny wokescolds to fuck off — he’s a Royal, FFS, and he doesn’t need anyone’s approval to do anything
But he’s never going to go there, is he? Because in terms of becoming King of Britishland, his brother (and his expanding brood) has relegated Rufus pretty much to the 2nd XI, inheritance-wise; and without being the Woke Prince, therefore, all he would have left to do is open supermarkets, attend formal balls, go to church with Granny, and hand out the trophies at the Upper Twittering Boys Athletics competition.
Just like all the other minor royals, in other words.
But at least he’d get his balls back.
En Passant
In an otherwise-unmemorable piece on woke-scolds ending Comedy As We Know It, NRO mouthpiece Jay Nordlinger says this:
I received a note from my old friend Larry Shackley, a longtime NR reader and a great admirer of P. G. Wodehouse. In fact, Larry is reading through the complete Wodehouse — complete — right now.
…as though this were somehow unusual. Maybe it is, for Murkins who — for shame — don’t know who Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was.
To call P.G. Wodehouse one of the most-read humorist writers of the 20th century is to understate the thing — he is quite possibly the greatest humorist writer, ever. Here’s a personal indicator.
When I left South Africa in 1986, I brought with me three suitcases of clothes, my cameras and a few other things I couldn’t bear to part with. I brought only two books with me (from a library of well over a thousand), and those were The World of Psmith (a compendium of three books) and The Jeeves Omnibus (another compendium). Both were written by P.G. Wodehouse. I reasoned — correctly as it turned out, in those pre-Amazon times — that I wouldn’t be able to find them here.
And there was just no way I was going to live in a house without Wodehouse.
Now, a lot of people don’t “get” Wodehouse because most of his situations are concerned with utterly trivial concerns — trivial maybe to us, nowadays, and certainly only non-trivial to the English upper classes circa 1928. (One story involves the “theft” of a wonderful cook by one titled twerp from another titled household.) But that doesn’t stop the brilliant writing from making one burst out with uncontrollable laughter occasionally.
And it should be said that Wodehouse himself was very much a fervent socialist — his take on the peccadilloes of the English upper classes is almost invariably satirical — yet his satire is not the bitter waspishness of Private Eye magazine, but gentle and almost indulgent. Look at these idiots, he seems to say, see how foolish and inconsequential they are. One of my favorite lines from the Bertie Wooster stories comes when Bertie is beset with looming trouble and catastrophe, and says to his long-suffering “gentleman’s gentleman” Jeeves as he is being dressed for dinner:
“At a time like this, Jeeves, I wonder whether the length of one’s trousers actually matters,” and receives the gentle rebuke:
“There is never a time, sir, when the length of one’s trousers doesn’t matter.”
Wodehouse left England for a career as a Hollywood scriptwriter, only to become embroiled in the Cold War-McCarthyism of the Fifties. How ironic, then, that he, the one-time socialist, should write of that time:
“Humorists have been scared out of the business by the touchiness now prevailing in every section of the community. Wherever you look, on every shoulder there is a chip, in every eye a cold glitter warning you, if you know what is good for you, not to start anything.”
What was practiced on the socialists of that era is being repeated with even more venom and coldness by the P.C. (and mostly socialist) tribe of today.
Anyway, enough of that. I think I’ll marmalade a slice of toast, and go and read A Pelican At Blandings, featuring the wonderfully-named Galahad Threepwood of whom it was said (and I paraphrase) that he was so ardent a party animal that he hadn’t slept till age fifty. And if anyone should think that I resemble Galahad’s elder brother Clarence, the Earl of Emsworth, who looks with utter bewilderment on the modern world and prefers to retreat to his library and read — well, you’d be absolutely correct.
Literary Freedom
Apparently the Brits have got their panties all in a knot over a book. It’s called My Little Book Of All The Brexiteers I Want To Stab, and of course the fury is because Amazon offered it for sale.
Even though the “hate speech” bullshit is most often used by the Left against conservatives, on this occasion it’s Brexiteers using the liberal fascists’ cancel culture rule against the Remainers. But that doesn’t make it right, now, does it?
Let’s play a little game here, seeing as the Left seems not to mind calling for Trump, Scalise, Clarence Thomas et al. to be assassinated. I’m not going to play the “One Shot” game because quite frankly, we need more than one shot to eliminate most of the Leftist / Never Trumper assholes which infest our body politic.
Instead, we’ll use a popular motif on this here website:
Send me an email (NOT in Comments) in which you assign each of your favorite hang-worthy assholes a number, ranked from 1-15 in descending order of hangworthyness (i.e. #1=worst, #15=least objectionable), e.g. 1: Eric Swalwell, 2: Elizabeth Warren, 3: Paul Ryan, 4: Nancy Pelosi, 5: Beto etc etc all the way to 15: Wayne LaPierre. Nominate anyone you want (except me; compared to the pustules which infest society at the moment, I’m barely worth noticing). I’ll tabulate the responses over the weekend and post the results sometime next week. Emails arriving after Sunday won’t be tabulated.