Relativity

Saw this breathless statement over at Insty’s:

Big fat hairy deal.  Only 327x?  Going from memory, let’s look at some relative increases* in the costs of goods and services since the early 1940s, shall we?

Groceries:  353x
Gasoline:  417x
Electricity (when it’s not browning out):  330x
Apartment rental:  472x
Housing cost per sq.ft:  488x
Bourbon whiskey:  270x  (congratulations, Jim Beam;  yours is the only commodity that’s still more-or-less affordable)
Large automobiles:  634x
College tuition:  729x

In fact, our mythical “AI researcher”, even at his current earning level, still won’t be able to buy a car or a house;  rent an apartment;  pay his utility bills;  be able to drive cross-country without taking his bank manager along;  or pay for his kids’ college tuition.

Yet somehow Oppie managed to do all that, and more, on his pitiful Manhattan Project salary.


*Okay, I made all those numbers up, but I bet they aren’t far off the mark.  Hat tip:

Swinging

Via Ace of Spades, I see two lovely bits of information.  The second one comes first, and it involves swinging, but not the “ethical non-monogamy” kind.  We’re talking political swings:

Of course, my baleful gaze is immediately directed towards the bottom end of the chart, where the dying (not soon enough) Baby Boomers are still clinging onto their hippiedom:

Are you serious?

FFS, I’m 70 years old and I cannot conceive of any rhyme or reason why after all this time I would start wearing that old Che Guevara t-shirt again, or wearing a peace amulet and saying “Far out!” (except to embarrass my children, of course).

But if you look at pics of all the White morons screaming indignantly at ICE or whatever, they’re all grey-haired old farts waving their wrinkled arthritic fists in the air and chanting “Hey, hey, LBJ!  How many kids did you kill today?”  because their addled brains got all confused and they can’t remember the current idiotic chants because they forgot their cheat sheets (helpfully printed out for them by ActBlue) back at home, underneath their well-thumbed copies of the New York fucking Times.  Screaming old shrews and addled neo-Marxist fuckheads, the lot of them.

Not for the first time, I’m embarrassed by my own age group, and the sooner they all die the better.

And yes, I’ll gladly include myself among that number if it will help bring about the demise of the rest of them.

What we need is another Kent State Moment, but at The Villages this time.


Okay, I forgot the first piece of information from Ace’s post.  What was it again?  (It’s hard to remember when your senses are blinded by a Red Curtain Of Blood.)

Oh yeah, this priceless line:

Young Men Cannot Name a Single “Masculine” Democrat Except for Obama

LOL. If the most “recognizably masculine” figure in your political party is Barack Obama

…you may as well rename it the “Womyn & Girlyboys’ Empowerment Collective” — oh wait, that’s what they are already.

Pathetic losers, they and their addled 65+ supporters.

Not Wanting

In a recent poll taken among two thousand Gen Z Brits, the following are ones that these kids refuse to eat, ranking by the negative percentages, so to speak.

Liver (35% refuse to eat)
Blue cheese (32%)
Anchovies (30%)
Black pudding (29%)
Prawns (26%)
Duck (25%)
Tofu (23%)
Mushrooms (23%)
Olives (23%)
Plant-based cheese (21%)

My take, as a Boomer:

Liver — as a rule, I prefer liver in pâté form, but I love me some deep-fried chicken livers, with a passion.
Blue cheese — by itself, a tad strong;  crumbled over a burger:  yummy.
Anchovies — whether on toast or on pizza, I’ll eat them any day of the week
Black pudding — ugh.  The best thing you can say about black (i.e. “blood”) pudding is that it’s tasteless.
Prawns — or as we Murkins call them, shrimp:  love ’em.
Duck — little oily, but tastier than chicken.  (Duck fat, by the way, is the ultimate cooking ingredient.)
Tofu — nope.  Not ever.
Mushrooms — are you kidding me?  I must eat mushrooms of one sort or another at least three times a week.  My favorite:  a substitute for a bun in a hamburger (giant Portobella fried in butter, oh my).
Olives — nope.  Not ever.
Plant-based cheese — LOL, forget that shit.

The Daily Mail  article which fostered this post had the usual scare headline — “These Foods Are Going To Disappear!!!!!”

#

…but I don’t think we need to panic.  If it were only true of olives (never gonna happen), tofu (ugh) and that strange plant cheese (we can but hope, plus all “plant-based” meats), I’m fine with the prognosis.

Editorial Speedbump

I know I said I wasn’t going to do the Speedbump thing anymore, but that’s only because I was sick of correcting stupid spelling- and grammar mistakes.

But this is different.  (My game, my rules.)

Specifically, I want to address an editorial quirk that has me reaching for the 1911:  this nonsense of using the plural “they/their” instead of “he/his” or “she/her”.

Now there are times when this device is appropriate, e.g. when using generalities such as “Anyone should be able to call their congressman an asshole”, where usage of “his” instead of “their” might be taken to mean that only men may call their congressman an asshole, which is clearly not the case.  (We used to be able to use “his” in these cases, where the word was understood to mean either sex, but it seems that in our ultra-sensitive times, even innocent words like “mankind” can be adjudged as sexisss by the Ultra-Sensitive Set.)

Anyway, here’s a perfect example where this androgynous practice becomes ridiculous and in fact can cause confusion:


(I’m not at all interested in the content of the article, of course.)

Note that the use of “they” and “their” could easily be interpreted that both Ore and his sister committed suicide, which isn’t the case — unless they dressed him in tiny Pride pants and read out a statement of his sexuality after he popped the magic pills, that is.

But that didn’t happen.  Only the sister whacked herself, so the headline should have been written as follows:

Simple, with perfect clarity.  But this woke nonsense of using the impersonal plural terms has the effect of confusing the issue — not that the cloth-eared editors and writers could care, because who needs clarity when feeeeelings are at stake?

Tossers.  And a pox on them for making me irritated enough to have to write about this bullshit.