Tag: Suckage

Things that totally suck

Grown-Up Sippy Cups

Guy Stuff

This is a silly topic to discuss, but whatever.  Even though I am by no means triskaidekaphobic, it’s nevertheless Friday the fucking 13th, so here we go.

Back when I worked in an office, I always used a coffee cup with a lid, because knocking an open cup over your PC keyboard was not one of life’s pleasantries, both in terms of the actual mess, and the hassle involved in cleaning the gunk out from under the keys.  Likewise soft drinks:  never a can, always a bottle with the screw-off top.

It’s a habit I’ve carried into my private life too, not only for all the spill containment, but also because these thermal cup thingies keep my coffee hot in case I forget to drink it quickly.  (I’ve talked about this topic before, under different auspices, but note the El Cheapo Magellan thermal cup I mention in passing.)

But it appears that this is no longer enough.  Advancing age has brought with it advancing clumsiness, and the problem with all these wretched thermal cup thingies (as you will see) is that very few of them have a screw-on lid — they all, even the nosebleed stuff like Yeti, have a simple press-in lid with a rubber gasket to hold the lids in place should the thing be knocked over.

And alas, with continuous use do the rubber gaskets deteriorate and loosen their grip, which means that if you do knock your adult sippycup over, the result is the same as if you’d just been using a regular plastic glass filled with the drink and (if necessary) ice:  a veritable flood of sticky liquid all over the floor.

Which is what happened to me the night before last, when in trying to move my tall Magellan sippycup over so I could see the beloved face of New Wife, I knocked the fucking thing off the side table and yea did the lid come off the cup, emptying the contents of ice and OJ all over the frigging carpet.

So yesterday was spent visiting various retail establishments, trying to find a container with a screw-on lid that wasn’t the size of a Thermos flask and resembled more a coffee cup, like the Magellan.

Total failure — and I went to Academy, Cabela’s and finally, Wally World, where I got what I was sorta-looking for, except that it’s tall and skinny rather than short and squat.

It’s also too capacious, at 16oz where I was looking for something in the 10-oz-12oz range.  But at some point one has to resign oneself to what the world actually provides rather than what the world should provide.

Earlier on I did find (and purchase) one such thing with acceptable dimensions and the proper screwtop from Cabela’s, but it’s so fugly that I was worried that New Wife would forbid its use in the public domain, and confine it to doing duty as my night-time cold-water source on the bedside table.  Surprisingly, she agreed that it’s kinda fugly, but likes its patriotic theme.  So she agreed to let me use it.

(Yes, she’ll be becoming a U.S. citizen as soon as the DHS/State Department/whoever gets their collective ass in gear.)

All this could have been avoided, of course, were I just to apply a leetle care in the handling of coffee cups — I could use actual china cups or ceramic mugs like civilized people do, and not have to look like an overgrown child with an expensive fucking metal sippycup.  But that’s the world I live in, and so it goes.

Anyway, having said all that, I’m off to make myself another cuppa in the tall black thing.  And by the way, it works really well at keeping its contents hot — actually, a little too well, as my scalded tongue will attest.  I might just go for the Patriotic Barrel instead… alert the media!

If I get too irritated by these two replacements, or if New Wife Puts Her Foot Down With A Heavy Hand© after all, they will be sent off in disgrace to live in our travel trunk, which we break out when heading for an open-road adventure and style is not a prerequisite.  They will join the regiment of other utensils which have been found wanting.

Whereupon the whole bloody search for the impossible sippycup dream will resume and my irritation, never far below the surface, will explode once more, to the consternation of New Wife and the chortles of my Readers.

You bastards.

Not Just China

Bad News, Economics

Via Insty, this little snippet:

The danger for China is deflation could snowball by encouraging households reeling from falling paychecks to cut back on spending, or delay purchases because they expect prices to fall further. Corporate revenues will suffer, stifling investment and leading to further salary cuts and layoffs, bankrupting families and firms.

China?  How about right here in the U.S.?

The Fed’s beige book, a survey of economic conditions in the US compiled by the regional Fed banks, suggested that the US economy was slowing. Five out of the 12 Fed districts reported flat or declining economic activity, three more than in May’s survey.

And just for (bitter) laughs:

“Inflation has also fallen faster than expected, hitting 3 per cent in June.”

Tell that to my grocery, fuel and utility bills.

Tommy’s Tale

Heroism

Anything produced by Jordan Peterson is worth watching.  His interview of Tommy Robinson, the bête noire  of British politics is very much more than that.

As Cathy Gyngell says of Robinson:

It also made me think of the many far more sullied characters on our political stage who have got away with it, and never been subjected to the across-the-board branding, silencing and curtailment of freedom he has been treated to. No epithet has stuck more effectively than those words thug, racist and far right have to him. You have to look quite far to find someone to whom you mention his name who doesn’t judge him so, who doesn’t assume he is the hooligan the press have told us he is, who doesn’t call him an idiot or simply display the distaste they feel for him on their faces. But ask those with these attitudes what they actually know about him and whether they have any idea of his story, and what his ‘beef’ is actually about they go quiet. They have no idea. Their judgement, as was mine in the past, is an unthinking one – based purely and simply on how the MSM cast him, and the fact he is actually working-class (unlike the elite politicians like Starmer so desperate to claim this background). This is a ‘tarring’ that is so universally accepted that anyone defending him in any way also risks being so tarred and outcast.

Of course no one ever sees him interviewed by the mainstream UK press or broadcasters: he is never allowed to defend himself, let alone be asked to tell his story. So there is nothing and no one to challenge the official Tommy characterisation as a law-breaker, inciter, thug or crook. Any out-of-context ‘angry monologue’ clips that people may have seen confirm their prejudice. It’s only when you hear his whole 20-year story that you start to understand it and empathise and are horrified by the cover-up. And understand his anger. There is such a thing as righteous indignation, and that without doubt is what Tommy feels.

The more the elite authorities want to suppress him, the more people like me want to know more about him.

And this was before the recent riots in the U.K.

This interview is quite possibly the most important insight into how the news is being shaped that I’ve ever seen.  Ignore that it’s primarily about a “racist” attack that took place in Britishland, because it concerns all of the news we’re being fed.

And by the way, if you start to feel the burn of anger when Robinson describes the fate of the hapless family, then you may begin to understand the background to the Stockport riots.

Age Limit

Old Age

Most people, men especially, consider themselves to be excellent drivers.  If truth be told, however, most people aren’t even good drivers, as witnessed by the appalling number of car crashes that occur every year on the roads and streets of the world.

I’m not even referring to crashes that occur through outright stupidity or recklessness, and I’m certainly not going to open the festering can of worms known as “Wimmen Drivers”;  not in this post, anyway.

I consider myself to be a competent driver in that I’ve only ever had a couple of serious accidents in well over four decades of driving — not serious in that people were injured, but serious enough that cars were either written off or close to being so.  And yes, some were technically the fault of the other driver, but once again, I can also assume at least a little culpability in that perhaps I wasn’t paying enough attention to the traffic.

What bothers me — and I’ve noticed it a lot recently — is that as I’m getting older, my driving skill is declining.  Some of it is physical:  my neck and body are stiffer, making it more difficult, for example, to turn to look behind me;  and my reflexes certainly aren’t what they used to be either, which means I can’t drive on auto-pilot anymore and have to concentrate really hard on what’s going on around me.

The latter certainly came to mind when I read about this little tragedy:

A man and woman were killed after an Audi ploughed into them as they were visiting a popular seaside resort at the end of the summer holidays.

The pair, in their 60s, were walking in Anglesey when the car swerved to avoid a horse and carriage before ploughing into them. The driver, a man in his 80s, also died at the scene.

(I don’t know what the car’s make has to do with the story, but it is the awful Daily Mail, after all, so maybe a little gratuitous class hatred was needed to make the story a little more spicy.)

From an eyewitness:

One local said: ‘The Audi swerved to go around a horse and carriage, mounted the pavement and hit pedestrians who were walking past a house – they didn’t stand a chance.’

It seems pretty clear that the Olde Phartte was going too fast — this didn’t happen on a freeway but on a narrow city street, after all — and that he either didn’t leave enough room to brake, or else he lost control during the swerve and smashed into the luckless pedestrians before hitting the wall.  (And in a modern car (like the Audi), you have to be going really fast to be killed by crashing into a wall.)

Or else his octogenarian reflexes were like mud, and he left it all too late.

I know that Olde Pharttes get a bad rap for the heinous sin of Driving Too Slowly, but I’ve noticed myself slowing down a lot when I drive these days, because I’m fully aware that my reflexes are those of an older man, and not some young whippersnapper in his forties.

There’s a reason why modern F1 drivers don’t carry on racing into their fifties.  Even once-world champs like Fernando Alonso (43) and Lewis Hamilton (39) are quite aware that their days of F1 racing are very much numbered.  (I know:  the peerless Juan Manuel Fangio raced almost into his fifties, but the F1 cars of his day ran at less than half the speed of today’s.)

Anyway, I am (perhaps surprisingly) in favor of stricter driving tests for Olde Pharttes like myself.  When my current license expires, I will have to retake the practical and theoretical tests as though I were a newbie driver, and I will do so willingly.  Because I would hate to be like that 80-year-old in the above tragedy, killed (and killer) because I was, quite simply, driving beyond my capabilities.

As Dirty Harry (himself quite an Olde Phartte) said once:  “A man has to know his limitations.”  And I’m certainly aware of mine, when it comes to driving anyway.

It’s called maturity, and it’s well past time that I started showing some.

Work Ethic

Good Stuff, Gummint

The State (i.e. governments large and small) can always find ways to stifle individuality, especially when that individuality manifests itself in young people.  Here’s a recent example:

Bored and looking for something to do this summer, Danny Doherty hatched a plan to raise money for his brother’s hockey team by selling homemade ice cream.

But a few days after setting up a stand and serving up vanilla, shaved chocolate and fluffernutter to about 20 people, Danny’s family received a letter from the Norwood Board of Health ordering it shut down. Town officials had received a complaint and said that the 12-year-old’s scheme violated the Massachusetts Food Code, a state regulation.

No surprises there, this being Massachusetts.  (My only question:  who complained?  Some goody-goody, or someone fronting for the local ice cream shop?  Either way, they need a swift slap.)

Back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, I lived in in one of the Chicagoland suburbs — Palatine, a modest middle-class neighborhood of the kind that’s so Norman Rockwell it’s almost a caricature.  And while my house itself was small, it sat on just over a quarter-acre, which meant a large lawn in the backyard.  Said lawn took well over two hour to cut and edge, and in the short but warm, fecund Chicago summers, the grass grew quickly, meaning it had to be cut at least weekly;  actually, I would cut it about five times a month.  And it was a hot, sweaty business:  Chicago’s summers can be sticky, especially when contrasted with its icy winters.

At that point I was working from home (long before it became the cool thing to do) because the company was based near Fort Lauderdale.  And I really couldn’t afford to spend the time doing the lawn.  Anyway, one afternoon I was just about to go out and cut the thing when the doorbell rang.  When I opened it, there were two boys standing there, aged about ten.

“Cut your lawn for ten bucks?”

Hell, yes.

Whereupon these two little buggers (each had their own, okay, most likely Dad’s lawnmower) cut the lawn — good grief, they ran behind the mowers, and the grass was cut to almost professional standard in just about fifteen minutes.  They didn’t do edging (“Our Dads won’t let us because they say it’s dangerous”) but that was really just a half-hour job, and easily done after 5 o’clock.

“See you again next week, boys?”

They actually sounded surprised.  “You want us to come back?”

Hell, yes.  And over the next couple years, I never cut my own lawn again. And nor did a lot of my neighbors, once I told them about these kids at the next block party.  These boys made an absolute fortune, and worked their tails off.

And if the local council gauleiters  had ever tried to stop these kids from earning some money from good, honest hard work, I do believe that the neighborhood dads would have burned down their offices.  They didn’t interfere, of course, either because they never learned about these budding entrepreneurs or because they just ignored them (as they should).

Now I’m not suggesting that whenever Gummint does what they did to young Danny Doherty above, the neighborhood dads should torch their offices or tar and feather the bastards.  That would be incitement, and I’m never going to do that no sirree not me not ever.

But I sure as hell wouldn’t try to stop those irate folks if they did.  I would offer to hold their coats, however, just as a good neighbor should.

Speed Bump

Law and Order, Surveillance Society

…and this one isn’t grammatical.

It turns out that when local law enforcement offered the SecServ their drones to overfly the Trump rally in Butler PA, the SS (perhaps unsurprisingly) turned down the offers, repeatedly.

“According to one whistleblower, the night before the rally, U.S. Secret Service repeatedly denied offers from a local law enforcement partner to utilize drone technology to secure the rally. This means that the technology was both available to USSS and able to be deployed to secure the site. Secret Service said no,” Senator Hawley wrote in a letter Thursday to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. “The whistleblower further alleges that after the shooting took place, USSS changed course and asked the local partner to deploy the drone technology to surveil the site in the aftermath of the attack.”

So far, so good.  Fleeing horse, meet stable door:  standard Gummint cock-up.

Here’s what caused me to choke on my morning G&T, though:

The failure to deploy drone technology is all the more concerning since, according to the whistleblower, the drones USSS was offered had the capability not only to identify active shooters but also to help neutralize them.

Wait, WTF?  Are we to understand that the local Barney Fifes in Fucknuckle PA have drones that can take out targets?  Like what the Ukes are using on Russkis, or the CIA uses on Muzzy terrorists?

Fucking hell.  I thought Meal Team Six was bad news…

Or am I misreading the thing?