Tag: Things that totally suck

Dangerous Shitholes

Numbers & Statistics

Here’s an interesting article, which ranks cities by the number of homicides per 100,000 population.

I am amazed by only two exclusions from the list: Chicago and Johannesburg, which I would have thought would be a lead-pipe cinch for top 10 placings, let alone being out of the top 50 altogether.

As for the U.S. cities that did make the list: they’re all run by Democrats, ergo all run according to Third World governance principles. There’s one other common factor, but I’m not going to say it because rayyyyciss.

Fudging The Numbers

Lies and Untruths, Numbers & Statistics

Oops. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been caught with its dirty little fingers in the fudge drawer… again.

NOAA has been cooking the books. Yet again – presumably for reasons more to do with ideology than meteorology – NOAA has adjusted past temperatures to look colder than they were and recent temperatures to look warmer than they were.
We’re not talking fractions of a degree, here. The adjustments amount to a whopping 3.1 degrees F. This takes us well beyond the regions of error margins or innocent mistakes and deep into the realm of fiction and political propaganda.

This all started when some smart guy looked at the raw data covering the recent polar vortex storms in the Northeastern United States, and found the disparity as noted above. The data had been “smoothed” (weasel statistician word meaning “altered”) and guess in which direction? Why, to support the Glueball Wormening narrative, of course.

And by the way: you know how the Arctic ice cap is at its lowest level in history? Ummm not so.

And you know how it never snows in Rome? Also not so. And Naples?

And you know how The Independent said that British children will grow up never having seen snow? Not this generation, anyway.

Enjoy the read.

Real Barbarians

Culture, Politics

So a whole bunch of school districts are going to drop Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn because he uses the word nigger and thus is guilty of doubleplusungood racism and that might hurt the tender sensibilities of someone. The irony, of course, is that Twain almost singlehandedly changed the way the entire United States thought about race, with this very book. But he says the dreaded word nigger so therefore he is eeeevil and must be taken out of the canon. What a bunch of crap.

I was going to write a post about censorship — the fact that the Left and their Social Justice Warrior Brownshirts want to censor everything because [deep breath] raaaaycism / feminism / hurt feewings / patriarchism / White-ism / [enter the hate-motif du jour here]. But then I read this fine article at Gates Of Vienna, which begins thus:

The barbarians are among us. They are not lurking on the right or lower edges of society, they are not among the uneducated or the educationally failed, they do not come from under-developed regions. They are sitting at the levers of influence in art and science, they write in quality publications, discuss at universities, manage art galleries, dominate the talk shows. Nonetheless, they are barbarians, for in their innermost being, they despise art.

I have to tell you, I can’t do better a better job than he has. The fact that this was written by a European (German, no less) makes me feel a little better too, even if he is a lone voice among the Euro-censors. It’s an excellent piece; read all of it.

It’s time these bastards start to realize just what it is that they’re doing to our culture — and if they acknowledge that it’s a conscious act of subversion, then we need to scourge them with pen and tongue (also with whips, but that’s a topic for another time).

Black Hole

Housekeeping

For some unknown reason, the foul MS Outlook has been misbehaving over the past couple of months. For no reason, emails from some people were getting through, while others languished, uncollected, on my webmail server.

So I tried to re-install the blessed thing from MS Office, whereupon Outlook apparently got into a snit and disappeared from my laptop forever. (It would also have taken my address book as part of the divorce settlement except that in a moment of rare foresight, I’d backed up my contact list a little while ago, so while I may be missing a few recent additions, the majority of them have been saved.)

Thanks to Tech Support Wizard (TSW) BobbyK, I waved goodbye to Outlook

and managed to install and configure Thunderbird as a replacement, getting in the process something like seven hundred emails that I’d never seen before.

So please excuse my apparent rudeness in not replying earlier, but I never saw your emails because Outlook. [200,000-word rant deleted]

All those who were unable to register to comment here have had their emails passed on to TSW for his attention. If you’re still waiting for a response from me on some other issue, please do me the favor of re-sending your emails if it’s still germane or necessary. Ditto if you’ve only recently started to correspond with me, so I can add your addy to Ye Olde Addresse Booke.

As for MS Outlook:

Seriously Bad News

Bad News, Business, Music

I heard this news with the greatest shock imaginable:

Gibson guitar company, which has been a staple brand among various musical instruments since 1902, is facing bankruptcy.
According to the Nashville Post, Gibson’s chief financial officer, Bill Lawrence, left after six months on the job and just as $375 million in senior secured notes mature and another $145 million in bank loans become due if they aren’t refinanced by July. The departure of Lawrence was seen as a bad sign for a company trying to re-organize.
The company, which generates $1 billion a year in revenues, recently moved out of its Nashville warehouse, where it had operated since the mid 1980s. 

To call Gibson guitars a “staple” in music would be guilty of the world’s great understatements. The only equivalent I can think of would be “Mercedes Benz, which has been a staple brand among various automobiles since 1899, is facing bankruptcy.”

I have to say upfront that I’ve never owned a Gibson guitar myself — I was a bass guitarist and the Gibson basses never did it for me as much as my beloved Rickenbacker 4001S — but good grief, some of the greatest rock music ever performed was done on a Gibson. If I were to show pictures of famous rock guitarists playing their Gibsons, we’d need extra storage space for this website on the server. Let just one sample thereof suffice:

And the EDS 1275 isn’t even my favorite-sounding lead guitar, either: that honor belongs to the SG Deluxe.

I know, that’s not a Deluxe (it doesn’t have the three humbucker pickups, as below):

And I’m going to hear it from all the Les Paul fanbois now, but as a rock musician — and lest we forget, the Les Paul was originally designed as a jazz guitar by (duh) Les Paul — nothing beats the clarity and crunching sound of the SG at full throttle. (AC/DC’s Angus Young seemed to like it, and even though I hate the band’s music, Young’s guitar sound was beyond-words incredible.)

That said, I also loved the Les Paul when our guitarist Kevin played his (even though I preferred the sound of his Fender Stratocaster). This isn’t Kevin:

By the way: a guitar’s sound is such a personal thing; please don’t get offended if you prefer the Flying V.

…and don’t even get me started on the smooth, mellow sound of the venerable Gibson 335:

And even though I’m a totally crap guitarist (of the 6-string genre), I’ve always wanted to own a Gibson Montana Rose:

Yes, it has a voluptuous shape akin to Nigella Lawson. Go ahead and laugh at my oh-so transparent lusts…

Perhaps only now can you imagine the despair I feel at the terrible news above. I know, I know; the company may fall over, but the guitars will live on, somewhere, somehow. Still…

And never let us forget that Barack Bastard Obama spitefully (and illegally) unleashed his goon squad on Gibson for using “endangered” woods in their fretboards (they weren’t), simply because Gibson’s boss was a Republican donor. Just to make up for that piece of political thuggery, Gibson Guitars ought to live forever.

Dramatis personae:
On the SG: Nancy Wilson of Heart
On the Les Paul: Gretchen Menn of Zepparella
On the Flying V: Grace Potter
On the 335: Miki Berenyi of Lush
Not on the Montana Rose: Nigella Lawson