Speed Bump #922

When did the noun “gift” become a verb?  “I gifted her a birthday present” sounds retarded, not to say redundant or even worse, pretentious.

It’s even made even worse by adding the superfluous preposition “with”.  “I gifted her with a birthday present” sounds so stupidly convoluted and verbose, it could be Jesse Jackson speaking.

There’s a perfectly good word to describe the act of giving:  it’s called “giving”.  By definition, when one gives something to someone, it’s a fucking gift.

I know that I am somewhat guilty of turning a noun into a verb is that I call this same foul trend “verbing” — but of course I’m being ironic by turning the concept against itself.

Don’t get me started.  Every time someone spouts that nonsense, I want to gift them with a kick in the groin.

Silver Linings, Gloomy Futures

Not every business has been adversely affected by the Chinkvirus and Gummint lockdowns:

A businesswoman who sells sex dolls has revealed how her company has been thriving throughout the pandemic, and that she’s noticed an increase in sales each time a new lockdown restriction comes into place.
Jade Stanley, 36, from Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, launched her company Sex Doll Official in 2018, and sells and rents plastic sex companions, some of which can cost up to £8,000, to ‘lonely’ customers.
The mother-of-four explained that due to widespread isolation during the coronavirus crisis, she saw surges in sales every time there was a change in lockdown rules, insisting customers want ‘more than just a sex toy’.

However:

She also revealed that she’s noticed a much bigger demand for male and transgender sex dolls, and told there’s a ‘big market’ for couples who want to involve a ‘safe third party’ in the bedroom.

That might just be the thunder of horses’ hooves you’re hearing in the distance.

So just what does this little hotbed town of kinky sex look like?  Something like this:

…and further down the High Street:

However.

Alert Readers may have noticed in the above pic one of Kim’s Favoritest Places In Britishland:  Greggs, purveyors of  fine pies and finer sausage rolls.  Things are not so rosy there:

Since reopening on July 2, the Newcastle-based firm’s like-for-like sales averaged at 71.2 per cent of its levels from 2019 for the 12-week period to September 26.
Greggs was performing well before the crisis its shares hit a record high of 2,550p in January. But they closed yesterday at 1,219p, down 47 per cent in the year to date.

So to all my Brit Readers, I beseech you:  start Kim’s “Every Meal With Greggs©” program with immediate effect, and to hell with your waistlines.

Your sex dolls won’t complain, I promise you.

Control

Regular Readers all know that I treat the Internet Of Things (IOT) with deep and hostile skepticism.  I hate the idea of driverless cars, “remotely-controlled” appliances and -household systems, and don’t even get me started on “smart” guns with embedded chips.

Here’s a decent takedown of the concept:

After a week of tinkering, he effectively turned the coffee maker into a ransomware machine.  When the user tries to connect it to their home network, it triggers the machine to turn on the burner, spew hot water, endlessly spin the bean grinder, and display a pre-programmed ransom message while beeping incessantly.  The only way to get it to stop?  Unplugging your now seemingly possessed coffee maker entirely.

I know that all this is The Coming Thing, and we should all just bow down and accept its inevitability.  My standard response to this kind of attitude has always been quite simple:

  or the more heated

or even

Stick shifts and car keys, bolt-action or pump action rifles, revolvers, “dumb” coffee machines, house keys, pen and paper… y’all get my drift, right?

Fuck automation, and fuck the Internet Of Things or Skynet or whatever the hell they want to call it.

This post comes to you courtesy of the Internet… goddamn it.

Vanishing Point

I have spoken often of my distaste for much of modern life, and here’s just one more thing to make me want to pack a picnic lunch and an assault rifle, and go find a tall building somewhere.

Sadly, the end of the manual transmission is near, and the unfortunate truth is few people will miss it. Most young adults don’t know how to drive a vehicle with a manual transmission, and they aren’t interested in learning. Many modern automatics offer better fuel efficiency and quicker acceleration than their manual counterparts. Porsche now delivers 75% of its 718 and 911 sports cars with automatic transmissions. The new C8 Corvette is only available with one. When the stick shift loses Porsche and Corvette buyers, you know it’s quickly heading for the rearview mirror.

But it gets worse.

In the future, cars won’t only be automatics; it appears they’ll increasingly be automated, electric vehicles. The satisfying throbbing of the exhaust and the pleasure of driving will also become victims of progress. Traveling in a personal vehicle will be as exciting as riding in an elevator with windows.

And this guy adds his take, talking about

the dystopian future in which you’ll sit passively in your computer-driven car with government-mandated speed limits and instantly-revocable travel permissions programmed in.

In the next year or so I’ll be needing to get a new car because the old Tiguan has north of 115,000 miles under its belt.  Don’t be surprised if I get something with a stick shift (assuming I can find one, and even if it does limit my choices), if for no other reason than to shake my fist at the Empire.

  

And just let some future asshole government mandate “smart” guns with chips embedded so that they can be “controlled” by some central source — essentially, the same principle as automated cars.

At that point, my prospective trip up to the rooftops won’t just be a joke anymore.

Shorter Degree

Via Insty I saw the redoubtable Joanne Jacobs’s take on this topic.  Back when I decided to go back to college, I was astonished to learn that a simple B.A. degree would take me four years to attain.  Four years?  Everywhere else in the world only requires three.

Then I studied the curriculum, and started to understand why the late Joseph Sobran lamented that in a single generation, our society had “progressed” from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English at university — a.k.a. the “core curriculum” which required a full year to be wasted on shit like “how to write a sentence” (English 101), “how the U.S. and state governments work” (Pol Sci 001/002), “Math For Dummies” (Math 001), and so on.  Even a “trimmed” course load for this mandatory study looks dubious, as Jacobs notes:

[Greg] Poliakoff would require all students to take “expository writing, literature, a college-level mathematics course, a natural science course, an economics course, a survey in U.S. history or government, and three semesters of a foreign language.”

What a total waste of time, in my case at any rate.  Fortunately, there are ways to “test out” of various courses — for some reason, the fact that I had published three novels somehow persuaded the English Department that I wouldn’t need English 101, for instance — so I was able to reduce some of the bullshit course load, but still not enough to shorten the four years into three that way.

Next, I ran into the stupid restriction that only allows students to take on four courses per semester which, when I studied the course content, made it plain that I would be prevented from tackling five and even six, even though it was easily doable.  My pleas to the Arts Faculty to do so were rejected Because Rules — clearly, the rules are there to protect the Grease Pit Set and Snowflakes from actual hard work, whereas I could see at a glance that the content for all but the 4-level History courses was not only light but superficial.  (Without exception, my requests for a supplemental reading list for a course were met with a “you’re not from this planet” look from the various professors — one admitted to me that she had never received such a request from a student before.  At Wits University in Johannesburg back in the 1970s, every liberal arts course had a supplemental reading list which, while not officially required, was necessary if you wanted to actually pass the course.)

So I attacked the degree with ferocity, taking all the summer / winter vacation classes I could.  (Strange, isn’t it, that professors can teach a course in three weeks that takes a full semester otherwise?)

Anyway, with all that my B.A. still took me three and a half years*, simply because the course schedules often didn’t jell with my degree plan — the one course I needed for a French sub-major (Business French) wasn’t taught in any “summer-mester”, and clashed with a History class during the regular semester, so I ended up taking instead a useless class of English short stories (during which the professor admitted to me privately that I could have taught, let alone studied) and passing up on a French sub-major.

The cynic in me thinks that the overly-long undergraduate degree is driven simply by financial greed — one less year equals a loss of $30,000 in revenue per student — but I will concede that without the bullshit core curriculum, the failure / dropout rate would probably be much higher than it already is.  (And that, of course, is the fault of the high school education kids get these days, but don’t get me started.)

It’s a racket, pure and simple.


*summa cum laude (for my non-U.S. Readers, that means a 90%+ final grade for every course)

Screening

I see that Amazon Prime has added a movie category:

…etc.

Of course, putting a “Black” identifier also allows Eeeevil Raycissss to put their own filter on the thing (“I’m not gonna watch any of that shit” ), which is kinda sad.  What it does do is help identify which “Black” movies are decent movies in their own right (Flight, Out of Time  etc.) in that the movies are watchable and the appearance of Black lead actors is incidental and not an essential part of the movie.  It also helps identify which movies are just BLM-style agitprop (e.g. Hurricane , which is to actuality as Braveheart  was to Scottish history or Inglourious Basterds  was to WWII — a wild approximation).

Speaking of wild approximations and Nazis, last week I watched the first episode of Amazon’s The Hunters  (about hunting down old Nazis in the 1970s), and won’t be watching any more of them. (The episode synopses alone in that link should justify hanging for whoever wrote such shit.)  Fucking hell, what a load of bullshit.  Never mind casting Al Pacino (!) as an old Jew — his thick Noo Yawk accent covers a multitude of sins — but the plot seems to have been written by a teenager, full of holes, glaring historical inaccuracies — inspired by true events my ass — and improbable situations.  (Quentin Tarentino has a lot to answer for.)  Worst of all, it’s positioned as comedy — which it is, a little — but frankly, it is to its subject matter as Blazing Saddles  was to the settling of the West.

I read a meme a couple weeks back which stated despairingly:  “I finished Netflix” and I’m starting to get there myself.  The problem with movie streaming is that the demand for fresh content is insatiable, which means that a lot of shit is being made that should never have got past the first read-through — good grief, the stand-up comedy show offerings alone need about a 70% culling, what a load of unfunny people — and just because Amazon and Netflix have more money than the Vatican doesn’t mean that they should be turning out all this dreck.  I can just see the executive meetings:

“We need ten new movies by next month.  Any new scripts?”
“Yeah, there are two which talk about rednecks fighting Blacks and Jews.”
“Documentaries?”
Could be, if we need docs instead of features.”
“Okay, greenlight both.  We’ll decide where to put them later.”

I’m not even going to mention the outright propaganda movies which talk about eeevil banksters and Global MegaCorp, to name but two favorite topics of AmaFlix’s offerings.

The nice thing about modern technology is that we’re given lots of choice when it comes to entertainment.  Unfortunately, the choice is often between a plate of dogshit and a bowl of cold puke.