Gentleman Adventurer

…or at least, that’s the part Roger Moore played most often, as this obit notes.

I was never a huge fan of Moore, mostly because I thought his acting as a little thin — as he himself said about himself — but I generally liked the movies and TV shows he played in.

My favorite of all Moore’s roles was in The Persuaders!, where his gentleman-thug “Lord Brett Sinclair” was the polar opposite of Tony Curtis’s working-class-made-good-thug “Danny Wilde” (an inspired bit of casting, for both men). Their initial meeting, and ensuing fistfight over the correct number of olives to be put into a martini, was truly one of the more memorable scene-setters in any TV series.

Ditto their choice of cars, where Sinclair’s yellow Aston Martin DBS contrasted strongly with Wilde’s rosso Dino 246GT:

The Persuaders! show is probably responsible for my lifelong love of the Dino 246, still the most beautiful Ferrari ever made, and quite possibly the most beautiful car ever made, period. (It wasn’t that good to drive, by the way: stiff clutch and clunky gearbox, the Dino was Ferrari’s attempt at an “affordable” Ferrari, and it showed.)

But I digress.

I was never a great fan of Moore’s James Bond — mostly because I thought the later Bond movies were crap — but also because I preferred the crueler, more earthy Bond of Connery and even Daniel Craig to the witty, urbane spin given the part by Sir Roger.

Let me not quibble, however, because in the end, you could always be assured of good entertainment when Roger Moore was the star (or even the co-star), and for an actor, surely that’s praise enough.

 

 

So Much For That Theory

As any fule kno, I have long advised people not to believe any of the so-called “scientific” studies out there, because when you get down to it, they’re all done with an agenda and are therefore untrustworthy. The worst, of course, are all those “medical” papers which tell you that doing X will cause you to die horribly from Y, because nowadays doctors are a bunch of insufferable busybodies who, like Democrats, know just what’s best for you and can’t wait to tell you all the ways they do.

There was one study a while ago, however, which gave me a little hope: I don’t remember the exact study or even the data, but it showed that a glass of red wine with dinner (not as dinner) was actually good for one’s health. Needless to say, I was overjoyed because as I often say, a meal without wine is… breakfast.

Of course, that study (which was published by some Italian doctors, perhaps a warning sign) has since been summarily debunked. Red wine, apparently, is now worse for you than chewable morphine, sharing a needle with Milo Yiannopoulos, or mainlining Drano. (That’s not what this new study says, of course; I’m making it all up, probably just like they’re doing.)

Screw that. As some smart guy (Joe Jackson, not one of the Jackson Five) once wrote: everything gives you cancer. And he’s probably right, in that just about anything taken to excess will bugger up your health. Sheesh, drinking two gallons of water at a gulp [sic] will kill you; however, I’ve drunk close to two gallons of red wine in an evening (back in the 1970s, uh-huh) and all I got was shit-faced drunk and a two-day hangover. And lost, when I tried to drive home.

Here’s my take on all of it. Eat and drink whatever you want. Just don’t overdo it, and do a modicum of exercise. (I’ve taken to walking a couple of miles a day, and I haven’t felt this good in years. Also, I’ve lost 20lbs since November last year.) Go ahead: eat that Twinkie. Just eat one occasionally, and not the whole frigging box in one go, and you’ll be okay. Ditto wine, cheese, bacon, chocolate, and all the stuff that’s supposed to kill you.

And if you lack the willpower to eat just a little instead of it all? Well, it will kill you. But I’m not going to chide you, because for so many years I had no willpower either, and it was going to kill me. So there ya go.

From Reader Old Texan comes this beauty, which I’ve called “Heart Attack Jenga”:

Go on; you know you want to.


Update: Apparently, chocolate works for men’s hearts (6 days per week!). If this is true, when I die they’ll have to beat my heart to death with a stick. But be warned: next week some other guy will discover that chocolate gives you incurable syphilis, or something.

Despair And Rage

After the bombing at the concert in Manchester, Katie Hopkins wrote a despairing article about carrying on:

After the Westminster terror attack on March 26 I said we were cowed. That we were like ants, carrying on as normal, waiting for the next footstep to fall.
And today I see this to be true. Ants, squashed by a car, hewn in half by a truck, bounced off the bonnet of a 4×4, punctured by ballbearings and shrapnel from a hardware store.
And the only thing we ants can do is act busy. Whip ourselves up into a frenzy of activity. Move this way and that. Scurry about carrying things. Film ourselves walking to work. Make posters about ‘having a cup of tea’, get cross about what is said on twitter.

The terrorists want us dead. They want the infidel to be slaughtered. And they spread their message most effectively by targeting our children, our little girls.
Try and deny you don’t feel a change in the mood of our country. Try and deny you don’t feel we are a little bit less.
Tell me you don’t feel like you’ve taken a battering, made it to the twelfth then someone punched you square in the stomach, drawing the air from you in one long ooof.

When the only option is to carry on as normal, what the hell else are we going to do?
Carrying on as normal is not defiance. Or strength. It is the default.
When someone dies in our family, we carry on as before because the alternative is to lie down under our duvet and hope the world goes away.
And sometimes we even try that for a bit, too.
But in the end, reluctantly, we default and carry on as normal. This does not make us strong. Or united. It makes us desperate to feel better.
This country is sick. It is calling out for a doctor. We need to know what will cure us. What action do we take? What do we do? How can we stop the hurt?

I can suggest a few actions, Katie, but you’re not going to like them because they’re difficult and harsh.

Outlaw the Muslim religion in Britain. Close the mosques, then tear them and the minarets down. Deport the known radicals — start with the imams, even the “moderate” ones — and go from there. Reestablish Christianity as the official State religion. Start persecuting the remaining Muslims: make it difficult for Muslims to hold State jobs — start with the Muslim members of Parliament by mandating that no Muslim can hold elected office (like you used to do with Catholics, by the way), then spread that ban out to any State job, national or local. Close their bank accounts, stop all welfare payments and withdraw council housing privileges. Confiscate their real estate properties out from under them if they refuse to leave Britain. Outlaw halaal establishments. Make it more difficult for Muslims to stay in Britain than to leave. Confiscate their British passports, revoke their citizenship and make them “stateless”. Reverse the “refugee” flow back into the other direction by giving all Muslims thirty days to leave the country — and make sure they can only go on to Muslim countries, because we sure as shit don’t want more of them over here, and I’ll bet most of Europe doesn’t want them either.

In case you’re wondering why I’m suggesting something so brutal, and where I’m getting all these ideas, the answer’s simple: it’s what the Arab Muslim nations have been doing for over sixty years to the Jews (and in some cases to Christians too) living in their countries.

Yeah, they’re going to hate you. Stop being pussies about it.  They hate you already. Try hating them back, in greater measure. If the incidence of terrorism increases, speed up the deportations, imprison them until it’s their time to go — hell, the British invented the concept of “concentration camps” in 1900 in South Africa, remember? — and if they start screaming about legal protections, change the laws.

And if you don’t have the national will (what we Septics call “balls”) to do all that, then give up, submit to the will of Islam and lick the hands of the religious police of Islam who beat you in the streets for wearing short skirts or eating pork pies, because that’s all you deserve.

Yeah, it’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt your economy, your famed sense of decency and even your fabric of nationhood. Sometimes, when you fight fire with fire, everyone gets a little burnt. That’s still much better than being the only one who does. And right now, your children are the only ones getting burnt by the fire of Islam. Do nothing, and all this — 10/10, Manchester, and the many atrocities to come — will never end.

Yes, this is horrible. But remember: you didn’t cause this, or start it; they did. You just need the resolve to finish it.


Update: Yes, you may consider this a “backlash“. The first of many.

Bird & Bees

For no reason at all, I’m declaring today to be “Sex Day” on this here back porch of mine. Yes, what the hell: the entire Zeitgeist and its acolytes the media seem to have declared every day to be about sex, vid.:

So why should I not follow this trend for just one day at least?

In any event, it’s got to be more interesting than talking about Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and those other tools. Oh, and by the way, speaking of tools: No-Class Michelle Obama dresses like a slut when visiting a cathedral in Italy. I know that this last bit has nothing to do with sex per se, but it’s all part of the coarsening of society, innit? More articles and thoughts on sex below… if you can stand it.

The “Right” Time To Get Busy

The last time I found myself in this particular situation was during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, and I have no intention of ever being in this situation again. So I think I’m probably outside the target audience for this article. But hey, in the interests of Sex Day:

How long should you wait to have sex? Nearly 50 percent of straight couples in a new survey reported holding out one week to a month before getting it on with their partners.
What’s more, 21 percent of the couples waited up to two months and 10 percent waited up to half a year to have sex, according to the survey of 1,000 Americans and Europeans from DrEd.com. Only 18 percent of the men and women surveyed reported waiting less than a week to have sex.

Actually, I’m rather heartened by this study (here’s the original) — I thought the “can’t wait” number would be a lot higher these days. Although I’d like to see the age breakdown of the various responses, because I suspect that there’s a considerable difference thereby. Anyway, all the data is suspect because people lie like dogs when it comes to interviews about sex. What managed to arouse my ire, however, was this Clintonian paragraph:

“I know plenty of couples that did a bit of a courtship dance around sex and took the slow road,” he said. “They learned to appreciate each other, and they learned to enjoy kissing, touch, oral sex, and all of those activities that don’t get consumed by intercourse.”

For the last fucking time [sic]: oral sex is not part of the “courtship dance” — blowjobs are sex acts, despite Bill Clinton’s casual assertion that they aren’t.

And frankly, if oral sex isn’t “consumed by intercourse”, you’re not doing it correctly. That, or you’re doing it in parking lots or behind bus stops instead of in bed.

Or am I just being hopelessly old-fashioned about all this? (Wouldn’t be the first time.)

One Dozen

Some people were asked what they thought was the “magic number” of sex partners — more than X being too many, and less than X showing likely sexual inexperience.

The number X: twelve (or to be accurate: not X but XII).

My guess is that most of the respondents weren’t around in the 1970s. “Twelve” would have been an annual average, back then.

Here’s a totally gratuitous pic of a Seventies girl (Christina Lindberg), just to show what we guys had to deal with, temptation-wise, in those days:

Yeah, call me old-fashioned (take a number), but I love the clothes women wore back when I was in my late teens and early twenties.