Stay with me on this one.
If I were many years younger, and if I were not married, and if I lived in Colorado; and if this woman wasn’t already married, and if I happened to meet her, and if she wasn’t utterly repulsed by me to the point of shooting my fat ass — if all that, then I’d give her a big kiss on the cheek.
Which woman? This one.
And I bet I’m not the only man who thinks this.
I have had a relationship with British clothing store Marks & Spencer for twenty years. Every time I go to London, I visit M&S and buy underwear, socks, shirts and trousers — enough to last me until my next visit. While I’ve occasionally bought a shirt or two from U.S. outlets like Target or Kohl’s and casual trousers from Sam’s Club, fully 80% of my wardrobe carries the M&S brand — and because in terms of its fit and endurance no other brand has come close to M&S, over the past twenty years, I’ve never worn underwear or socks from anywhere else,.
Nor have many Brits:
One in three British women buys their bras from M&S — 45 bras are sold every minute in-store — while two pairs of knickers fly through the tills each second, which equates to more than 60 million pairs a year.
And from memory, about 50% of British men in the 1990s bought their socks at M&S, simply because they were the very best you could buy, at any price. With that kind of market share, how could they fail?
M&S also screwed up royally before 2000, by the way, by not accepting any credit cards other than their own charge card. It was that, or cash. I discovered this blithering idiocy the very first time I went to their flagship Oxford Street store, went to the cashier with about six hundred pounds’ worth of merchandise, only to have to leave most of it behind because they wouldn’t accept my Visa card and I only had a hundred-odd pounds in cash. I remember ranting at the floor manager at their arrogance — “throwing good business away” was the phrase I used — and meeting with complete indifference. Later (much too late, I think) they changed their policy to accept other cards.
At some point in the early 2000s, things began to change, and not for the better. Instead of selling the M&S brand exclusively, M&S started to sell branded clothing — “tied” brands (exclusive to M&S), but the boutique stuff was more expensive than the house brand, a lot more, but with no discernible difference in quality. Actually (and this is just a personal observation) I think the M&S allowed their brand’s quality to slip so that they could use the lower prices to compete with the cheaper High Street- and online competition. Underwear that I’d bought in the mid-1990s lasted for at least five years, while the M&S underwear I bought in 2017 has already started to fall apart.
When online sales came along, M&S was always going to be the first one clobbered, and they were. Probably the only thing that saved them was the expansion of their business into takeout convenience foods (which, in all fairness, are excellent albeit rather pricey).
Now the company has been kicked off the FTSE 100 (the Brit equivalent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average — DJIA) because their corporate value has declined to the point of disqualification. (And note BBC TV personality Jeremy Paxman’s complaint, because it’s very much the way I feel about their loss of quality).
The nearest American example of a corporation’s similar fall from grace is Sears — which once had a market share and customer esteem similar to that of M&S in the U.K., but is now in its death throes, for pretty much the same reasons.
I don’t think that M&S is going to fold any time soon — gawd, I hope they don’t, because where am I going to buy undies when the ones I have start falling apart in five years’ time? — but they have a hell of a job ahead of them.
Here’s something I might be interested in supporting:
Sadly, Mad Dog has categorically denied the rumors.
Somebody buy this bad boy a drink:
Gianluca Vacchis litters Instagram daily with videos of himself dancing with scantily clad women.
But the Italian 52-year-old millionaire playboy has run into a social media backlash after posting a video of himself hitting the bikini clad models’ behinds on his private yacht.
Vacchi has recently taken up music and the video shows him bouncing his hands off the model’s derrieres to the beat of his newest track ‘Mueve.’
LOL
But the video has been met with criticism.
Many of the comments posted under the video said the video was ‘demeaning’ and a ‘sad moment,’ and that his behaviour suggested a lack of respect towards women.
Some asked whether his girlfriend Sharon Fonseca, who he’s been with since April 2017, approved.
Others said the women filmed did not respect themselves and that they were ‘following your money.’
Good grief: the feministical snowflakery is strong with this one.
But Our Hero responded in the proper way:
Vacchi used more than words to respond to the negative criticism of his video with a follow up released around a week later.
In the video, four women dressed in stylish business suits discipline the silver haired multi-millionaire by returning the spanking.
Vacchi, dressed in a leopard print leotard and high heels bends over twerking in high heels.
Somebody buy this man another drink.
I admit that I can’t see the appeal in ginger nebbish Ed Sheeran’s music — I mean, it’s not horrible in the way that, say, Taylor Swift’s music most certainly is, but I find it… pleasant, yet unremarkable.
My opinion, though, doesn’t matter: the little bugger has made more hit records and more money than he can burn with a flamethrower, and clearly, his music has touched a lot of people despite his looking like Third Dweeb From The Left in a Harry Potter movie, so I have to give him that.
What gives me the giggles, however, is that when he studied music at college, he failed.
It says a lot about him that he hasn’t bought out the college, fired the entire faculty and burned all the buildings to the ground. I guess that being a zillionaire is its own revenge.
When I saw this sentence from BritPM Boris Johnson, my heart sank:
You can’t just arrest your way out of a problem.
Then he redeemed himself:
It certainly helps, but it is only part of the answer. You need to tackle all the causes and incentives that are encouraging the criminal mentality, and that means first of all exploding any sense that the law is weak, or that criminals can get away with it. When the police catch a violent criminal, it is vital they get the sentence they deserve.
At present, there are too many serious violent or sexual offenders who are coming out of prison long before they should.
In the past five years, we have seen literally hundreds of convicted rapists who have come out of prison commit another sexual offence. There are thousands of ‘super prolifics’ – criminals with more than 50 convictions to their name – who are being spared jail altogether.
This cannot go on. I am afraid that as a society we have no choice but to insist on tougher sentencing laws for serious sexual and violent offenders, and for those who carry knives.
Our first duty is to protect the public in the most basic way – and that means taking such people off the streets.
[pause to let the applause and cheering die down]
Of course, policies like “stop and search” are going to cause palpitations amongst the liberals and criminal-symps [lots of overlap], but the plain fact is that when the police can do their job — i.e. try to prevent crime before it happens — and the justice system is allowed to work — i.e. impose jail sentences that keep criminals off the streets — society as a whole improves.
Just ask the denizens of NYFC when Mayor Giuliani and Police Chief Bratton did just that, back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. And if it made it worked there, it can make it work anywhere.
And to let the BritPM have the last word:
Yes, in the short term it will mean more pressure on our jails, and that is why today I am also announcing that we are creating another 10,000 spaces in our prisons. The Chancellor, Sajid Javid, has agreed to invest up to £2.5 billion to deliver this commitment.
Get going, Boris.