Tag: Me Myself I

Personal stuff

ZA Factoids

Africa

ZA, of course, being the international acronym for South Africa.

Cape Town is one of the world’s most beautiful cities:

The people somewhat less so, but that’s true of just about any city.

Durban looks like Miami Lite:

The Drakensberg range is quite spectacular:


They were named thus by Boer settlers who thought the mountains looked like dragons’ teeth.

The Wonderboom (Wonder Tree), a fig tree that is over a million years old:

…which is why you need to prune your fruit trees.  (It’s that thing in the center that looks like a bush.)

South Africa has its own version of the Grand Canyon, called the Blyde River Canyon:

Not as deep, but then again it’s a couple hundred million years younger.

Now for some other size comparisons:

Relative to the U.S. Lower 48:

Relative to Texas:

And here are the Big Five:

Anyway, those were some of the slides I made for New Wife’s “Where I Came From” presentation to the kids at her school.

So Much For That

Health

New Wife just came out from an Omigodicron episode.  As she described it:  “Three days of a bad flu”, and I knew she was better on Day 4 when she did the washing and ironing, and made me clean the kitchen floor and take out the trash.

Of course, she had the Covid vaccine in December (as did I), so there we go.

And despite us living together, sleeping together and all that stuff, I haven’t got sick (so far).

BFD.

Update:  Just had a chat with Doc Russia.  Apparently he’s recently diagnosed scores of patients with Covid at his ER, but hasn’t had to admit a single one.

Gloom

Bad News

It’s getting on top of me.  The world’s going to hell at breakneck speed, and for the first time I feel powerless to prevent it happening.  Read the headlines of today’s Instapundit — just the headlines, not the stories — and tell me why I should feel any other way.

This feeling has been growing for some time now, which is why these pages have featured so many scantily-clad women, news snippets with snarky commentary, cars and other such trivia.

The weekend’s two posts about the future of the car business sum the whole thing up, really:  change, really bad change, is coming down the pike and there’s not a single thing that I or anyone else can do to stop it.  Standing athwart the tide of history shouting “Stop!” is a completely pointless exercise when yours is the only voice against a cacophony of voices cheering the tide along as history plunges inexorably along towards the abyss of pointless chaos and Dark Ages II.

The barbarians aren’t just at the gates, they’ve chopped the gates up and are using them for firewood to burn up not only our rights, but all those things which give us some small measure of joy.  Modern movies are total shit, modern cars are shapeless and emasculated, modern handguns are like the cars, indistinguishable from each other and underpowered by being chambered mostly for the rat-shit 9mm Paralympic.

The once-Stout Bulldog Brits are being told to cancel Christmas dinners and parties because of a virus that’s more akin to a bad cold — and they’re going to comply meekly, the gutless bastards.  And speaking of gutless bastards, the Australians, once renowned as the most ferocious warriors in the world, are being arrested in parks and confined to house arrest, all for the heinous sin of not wearing a piece of useless paper over their faces — and they’re doing fuck all to resist it.

The only good news of the day is that liberal asshole Chris Wallace has left Fox News;  except that Fox News has become more like NBC since the halcyon days of Roger Ailes, so even the good news is sprinkled with shit sugar.

I need a day off, maybe two.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the range, because that seems to be one of the few joys left.  I’m going to shoot my Mauser’s 8mm ammo till my shoulder aches — I don’t care where the bullets land, I just want to shoot until I can’t anymore.  Then I’m going next door to the pistol range, and I’m going to shoot my 1911 to pieces, or my wrist, whichever breaks first.

My only regret is that I can’t get to the range in a truck with a loud, gas-guzzling V8 engine.

Apologies

Old Age

Because I thought Sunday’s date was October 30, yesterday’s post would have appeared today, except I caught the mistake late last night.

Everybody got that?  (I can go over the middle bit again…)

Sorry about that.  Here’s a pic of a gun to make everyone feel better:

Hey, Winston Churchill used one to kill fuzzy-wuzzies, so how bad can it be?

Out Of Touch

Deep Thoughts, Entertainment

One of the besetting problems of getting older is that much of what passes for the modern-day zeitgeist  simply passes one by, either unnoticed or else rejected without even attempting to follow.

I must have been getting old when I was still young, because:

  • I have never watched a single minute of Dr. Who
  • …or the Kardashian women’s show
  • …or any of the “competition” shows like Dancing With The Stars
  • I never watched any of the Rocky shows after Rocky II
  • I’ve only ever watched the first three Star Wars movies, and even The Return Of The Jedi  sucked
  • I pretty much stopped listening to “new” popular music when grunge appeared (at age 40-ish)
  • I have never played an online computer game, of any description
  • and so on.

At some point, therefore, I must have started looking at new trends, and decided, “Best not” (in the words of Lord Salisbury, circa  1894).

Don’t even ask me about politics, cars or clothing.  (Longtime Readers will know all about my antipathy towards those modernistic monstrosities anyway.)

I know that everyone gets this way in their later years, but it seems mine started long before I actually reached my seniority, way sooner than when this happened to my friends of like age.

If I’d owned a house at that time, I’d probably have been yelling at the kids to get off my lawn when I was in my late twenties.

None of this means that I reject all things new, of course, just that I am extraordinarily picky about adopting any of them.  This is being typed on a laptop that is hundreds or times more powerful than the corporate IBM 360/40 I worked on as an operator in the mid-1970s, and I love the cord-free existence of Bluetooth and wi-fi.  But if I had to, I could easily revert to an earlier generation of comm technology.

I’m even getting bored of writing about this topic right now, so I think I’ll quit.  There are a couple of books that need reading — paper books, not that Kindle nonsense.