Tag: Things that totally suck

News Roundup

Bad News, Good Stuff

…wherein I’m too lazy to make a full post about stuff:

1)  Valerie is saved! — Thank goodness.  Now I can continue to add inches to my waistline by eating their pastries every time I go to Britishland.

2) Rio cops execute violent choirboys on the spot — Now quit that cheering and applause.  And no, I have no idea when ICE are going to implement the same policy when faced with armed cross-border drug smugglers.

3) “If [an active shooter] walks onto this campus, they’re going to be shot and killed.” — It’ll be interesting to see if school shootings ever occur in these schools from now on.  And if any of my south Floriduh Readers are looking for a part-time gig…

4) Sexbots could be hazardous for your health — Oh puh-leeze.  I know more than a few women (including some ex-girlfriends) who would pose a far greater threat than a collection of latex and transistors.  Think:  Terminator, with tits.  (Yes, Cheryl, I’m thinking of you.)

5) Amazon tells NYC to fuck off — These are the perils of trying to do business in a Socialist environment.  Frankly, I think Amazon should breathe a sigh of relief, because they just dodged a BIG bullet.

5 Reasons Not To Go To Australia

Travels

So it looks like our April trip to Oz has had to be called off, or at best postponed for a long time.  Here are the five reasons why:

1) They won’t let me take any of my guns into the country

2) Crocodiles in the streets

3) No cricket (the season has ended)

4) I hate snakes

…and the actual reason:

5) Angie can’t leave the country until her permanent residence visa gets approved, minimum six months’ time.

Now ask me whether we got a refund for our canceled air tickets from Qantas Fucking Airlines…

Tragedy

Bad News, Business, Food & Drink

As Longtime Readers may know, one of my favorite stops when I’m in Britishland is Patisserie Valerie, which makes some of the best pastries I’ve ever tasted (along with outstanding croissants at breakfast time).  Apparently, quality merchandise hasn’t been enough:

Patisserie Holdings plc announces today that, as a direct result of the significant fraud referred to in previous announcements, it has been unable to renew its bank facilities, and therefore regrettably the business does not have sufficient funding to meet its liabilities as they fall due.
As a consequence, the directors have appointed partners at KPMG as administrators to the company and its various subsidiaries.
The Chairman Luke Johnson has personally extended an unsecured, interest-free loan to help ensure that the January wages are paid to all staff working in the ongoing business.
This Loan will also assist the administrators in trading as many profitable stores as possible while a sale process is undertaken.

Needless to say, stores will be closed and people will lose their jobs.

This after one of its senior executives siphoned money out of the place to support his jet-set lifestyle.  And if I could get hold of the asshole, his legal and financial problems would be the least of his problems.

Yes, I take my pastries that  seriously.

Opting Out

Bad News, Technology

According to this report, our household appliances are about to become snitches on just about every aspect of our lives:

One day, finding an oven that just cooks food may be as tough as buying a TV that merely lets you click between channels.
Internet-connected “smarts” are creeping into cars, refrigerators, thermostats, toys and just about everything else in your home. CES 2019, the gadget show opening Tuesday in Las Vegas, will showcase many of these products, including an oven that coordinates your recipes and a toilet that flushes with a voice command.
With every additional smart device in your home, companies are able to gather more details about your daily life. Some of that can be used to help advertisers target you — more precisely than they could with just the smartphone you carry.

And the news just gets better and better:

Despite the fact that there’s plenty of information available showing how these devices collect data about every aspect of your life and the manufacturers both use and sell that data on the open market, the majority of people seem to either not care or are willing to accept this “new reality” as part of living in the modern world.

Once again [sigh], it appears that I’m in a minority.

No doubt, there will appear at your local drugstores condoms which measure the number of thrusts, such data sent back to the manufacturers of K-Y “Duration” gel, said antidote for premature ejaculation to arrive at your bedside by special delivery within two strokes of initial insertion.  And that’s a benevolent  outcome for such intrusiveness.

Never mind that.  Here’s a situation already in being:

T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers’ location data, and that data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and others not authorized to possess it, letting them track most phones in the country.

I don’t often agree with church leaders about, well, anything much.  But I’m in absolute agreement with this man.

Allow me to offer a suggestion for a brand-new industry.  When a new generation of “smart” phones arrived on the market and appeared to be “locked” to a specific carrier, within days we saw phones being unlocked by street vendors, sometimes right outside  the stores selling the damn things.

I’m calling on all privacy-minded geeks of the world to unite, and to design apps or hacks or whatever to bypass the Big Brother mechanisms of these new infernal fink machines so that people (like me) who aren’t interested in letting Global MegaCorp Inc. snoop into the most intimate areas of our lives may avail themselves of their inventions.

I will be at the head of the fucking line to buy them.  I promise.

Talk About Ugly

Modernism

My many rants about the shittiness of modern architecture are by now a fixture of this weblog, and I see no reason why I should end them anytime soon.  Take a look at Britain’s Ugliest Buildings, and tell me why I shouldn’t pray for a series of Muslim assholes piloting airliners on one final mission for Allah, with these dungheaps as targets.

My least favorite (and it was a tough decision, let me tell you) is the so-called “Walkie-Talkie” building, not because of its inherent ugliness — it would actually work quite well in a more modern city e.g. Abu Dhabi — but because of the violence it has done to the skyline of one of my favorite cities in the world, viz.:

Somebody hide the TNT, willya?

The Dying Of The Light

Behind Enemy Lines, Politics

[This should have appeared over a week ago, but I screwed up the posting date thingy, sorry.  It’s still relevant, and now updated.]

From the Diplomad, talking about the revolting French:

France is in real trouble. I mean REAL trouble.  That once great country, in fact, is dying.  It, along with most of the rest of Europe, has a worthless leadership class that, as we saw at the WWI commemorations, sees nationalism as a bad thing. That leadership argues that true patriotism means going along with the elite’s efforts to kill the sense, the very idea of nation;  it means allowing one’s culture, traditions, and history to be wiped away, and rewritten to justify the on-going social, economic and political destruction.  To object, for example, to the importation of hundreds-of-thousands of poor, illiterate and often violent migrants from some of the most failed countries on earth, many espousing an ideology of hatred for all that France and Western Civilization represent, makes you a vile racist and a deplorable, one who should not be heard, a “far right” pariah.  In other words, Citizen, fermé la bouche and let your betters decide for you.  Nothing to see, keep moving. Leadership should be left to the professionals;  do not attempt decision-making at home . . .

Before any of us start to crow at the Frogs’ expense, however, look carefully at the words “true patriotism means going along with the elite’s efforts to kill the sense, the very idea of nation;  it means allowing one’s culture, traditions, and history to be wiped away, and rewritten to justify the on-going social, economic and political destruction”  and try to deny that this is precisely what our own “leadership” class — political, academia and corporate — is doing to the United States.  [Hint:  you’ll fail]

Now go and buy some more ammo.

(Some of you may wonder why I haven’t suggested also buying a hi-viz jacket as used by the French protesters.  That’s because we Murkins don’t do hi-viz — we do camo.)