Warning Bells

The Intarwebz connection Over Here has become somewhat unsteady again. Two posts have already been swallowed and sent to the Black Cave of British (so-called) Telecom. Please bear with me while I… never mind, these pricks have no sense of humor when it comes to murmurs of discontent.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to practice doing something.

Update: Looks like I may have to errrr untie the ropes. The problem may have been on my end, as I discovered earlier today when my laptop bricked on me. Dead battery, requiring trip to amazon.co.uk. Battery price:

  • In the U.S.(delivered next day): $70
  • Over Here (7-10-day delivery, no other option): $106.

(Rant to follow.)

In the meantime, my apologies to the families of the BT workers dangling from the tree in the backyard. My bad.

Not The Desired Climax

So this guy and two women were having an intimate little threesome someplace in Germany. I’m not going to go into detail because from what I understand, when Germans start to do Teh Kinky, there’s no telling what’s going to happen, and I’d like to eat sometime in the next two days.

However, as events reached a climax, so to speak, things started to go wrong for the three participants, to whit:

  • Woman #1 was so ecstatic about her climax that she fell over the balcony railing (!), breaking several bones
  • Woman #2, still naked, ran for help — whereupon she fell and broke several bones too
  • Man did not reach his climax.

Okay, I made the last one up, and I’m probably wrong anyway. Being that he’s German, the sight of two women screaming in agony because of a sex act almost guarantees that he did.

Comment of the day was to the German newspaper who suggested that next time, the hapless threesome ought to try bondage instead.

Roadsters (1)

The concept of “roadsters” began, bizarrely I think, in 1930s Britain. In a country not known for its copious sunshine (or perhaps because it has so little thereof), car companies began to make small two-seater open-topped cars, modestly powered with a front-mounted engine and rear wheel drive, that could take a young man and his girlfriend on exhilarating trips through the country side, on the tight, twisty and narrow roads so common on this Scepter’d Isle. Thus you had cars like the MG TA:

…which after the slight disturbances of the early 1940s, became the MG TF:

…which turned into the MGA of the late 1950s:

Now you have to understand the concept behind these cars. They were never intended to be racers, nor were they tourers (in the Grand Touring style). They were sports cars — in the literal sense, in that one drove an MG for fun, on short road trips (all road trips in the UK are short: it’s a tiny island, remember) — which meant that the drivers were not going to be stranded hundreds of miles from home by the inevitable mechanical breakdowns and electrical failures, not to mention the fact that these cars leaked like a bucket hit with buckshot; and as we all know, it can rain a bit here in Britishland.

Excuse me while I explore a branch line in my train of thought. Why is it that the Brits can come up with all these excellent concepts, and yet their engineering can suck so badly? Mr. Free Market (who has owned many British cars) once commented that a long trip in his Triumph Stag could move the share price of BP, so much oil did his car consume. For any owner of this type of car, essential items to be carried in the tiny trunk/boot were: a set of wrenches/spanners and other tools, spare hoses, a can of water to refill the radiator every few miles, a can of oil to refill the leaking sump, and a pan to catch the leaking oil while the car was at rest.  (It’s easy to see why these were known as “bird and a sponge bag” cars — there was no room for anything else.) My absolute favorite example of this silliness was in an episode of Top Gear, when Jeremy Clarkson had a meeting of a local MG club at some remote town in the country. Every single driver had oil-stained fingers and hands as a result of having had to stop and tinker with their cars on the way down. And speaking of silliness: if you look back at the pic of the 1949 TF above, you will note the huge gap between the windshield and door window — a veritable funnel for driving rain to soak the inhabitants. My only conclusion is that the British nation is a bunch of masochists who have an abiding distrust of things like comfort and reliability when it comes to roadsters. One should not have too much fun when enjoying oneself, after all.  [end of branch line]

Of course, the Italians went for the small sports car concept in a big way, incorporating even the unreliability factor (and anyone who’s ever owned an Alfa Romeo Giulietta of that era knows what I’m talking about).

Let’s be honest, here. The concept of a sports car (roadster) is a brilliant one. Of course, it took the Japanese to make the roadster concept truly enjoyable, as Mazda proved when they made a modern copy of the MGA, called it the Miata and sold tens of thousands of them all over the world:

There it is: small underpowered front-mounted engine, stick shift, rear wheel drive, two seats — only with astounding reliability and functionality. From Clarkson again:

The fact is that if you want a sports car, the MX-5 [Miata] is perfect. Nothing on the road will give you better value. Nothing will give you so much fun. The only reason I’m giving it five stars is because I can’t give it fourteen.

That’s the reason that I’m going to buy one of these sports cars, when I finally have a few pennies to spare. Unfortunately, my British heritage (from my mother’s side of the family) means that I’m going to buy not the Miata, but the Fiat 124 Spider derivation:

Because one should not have too much fun when enjoying oneself, after all — and I’m pretty sure that Fiat will provide the appropriate levels of failure.

Bonking By The Numbers

It seems like most Americans are fairly conservative in their attitudes towards sex, at least, according to this survey (found here).

As Longtime Readers know, I tend to look at most surveys with a jaundiced eye, and towards sexual surveys with even more cynicism, because a.) people who are prepared to answer surveys about sex don’t mind talking about it and are therefore more likely to be sexually liberal (as opposed to the many who think that some stranger asking about their sex lives requires showing them the door, with a shotgun as a persuader); and b.) because people lie like Democrats about their sex lives anyway.

All that said, this was a fairly large sample (which can eliminate much of the nonsense above) and I was somewhat gratified to see little nuggets such as the percentage of people who had sex parties / group sex (less than 10% — although I should point out that in a nation of about two hundred million adults, that’s still nearly twenty million swingers, most of whom, I suspect, are of the coastal habitat).

I liked the fact that among Americans, our sex lives involve innocent things like wearing sexy lingerie (75% of women) and lifetime masturbation and “ordinary” sex rated at 80%. (I suspect that if we took out the sexually-indifferent, e.g. married Jewish women, feministicals and several ex-wives of my acquaintance, the latter percentage would probably be a lot higher. [humorous stereotype alert])

I’m not going to go into more detail, because this is a family website* and you can read the salacious details for yourselves. Instead, let’s just look at something related to the topic, i.e. Claudia Cardinale:


*I’m kidding. Maybe the Corleone Family.

Dinner

…last night, before heading off for yet another piece of Friday Night Unpleasantness at the King’s Arms with The Englishman:

When I say I’m a “meat-and-potatoes” man, this is what I mean. A decent filet spiced with Salt Lick Rub (imported from the great state of Texas), and potatoes roasted in goose fat. It took 35 minutes in the Aga to create it.

In case you’re wondering, I had Free Market Towers to myself last night; Mrs. FM was off sailing, Mr. FM was doing Capitalist Things in (I think) the Far East somewhere, and the staff had the night off to recover from the Friday Floggings.

Food was courtesy of Waitrose. If I had one of these emporia near my house, I’d weigh 500lbs in a month.

Getting Happy

According to the NY Post, “buying time” can be the secret to happiness. Sarah Hoyt questions their methodology, as do I. Here’s the study’s methodology:

In the study, more than 6,000 people in four countries were given an extra $40 a week for two weeks.
During the first week, the participants were told to buy material goods.
The next week, they were told to save themselves time by paying someone to do their menial, back-breaking tasks.
Ultimately, people said they got more happiness by saving precious time than by buying more stuff, no matter how exceptional it was.

If anyone can think that $40 a week can buy you happiness, they’re doomed to vote Democrat and/or Labour for the rest of their lives. Hell, for $40 you can’t even buy someone’s time to do menial jobs for you, unless you live in India or some other Third World hellhole where labor is cheap. And unless you live in one of the aforementioned hellholes where $40 can buy you someone’s firstborn, you can’t buy much for a lousy forty bucks either. Good grief, a bottle of decent single malt costs more than that, and that won’t last you a week either (if you consume the lovely stuff like Stephen Green or I do).

Most often, the “money can’t buy you happiness” meme is applied to lottery winnings. The usual rejoinder is, “If you can’t buy happiness with $100 million, you just don’t know where to shop” (as witnessed by this picture, sent to me by Reader OldTexan):

But the idea of buying time when you have a boatload of money makes perfect sense, if you have sufficient money. Here’s an example, using the more appropriate sum of $100 million instead of that $40 rounding error.

So you’ve won the Big Lottery. Assume that you’re not going to waste it (on stuff like trust funds for your kids or donations to Greenpeace), and you decide to buy time with it.

Let’s say that you’ve always wanted to own an E-type Jaguar, because if no less a man than Enzo Ferrari called it the most beautiful car ever made, who are you to argue with him? A quick reminder of what we’re talking about here:

Nigella Lawson with wheels.

Now you have the money to afford it; but there’s a problem. You see, beauty doesn’t offset the E-type’s many flaws, to whit:

…which means that the thing often won’t start, the lights won’t work at night and ditto the windshield wipers when it rains, etc. Now if you’re one of those guys who loves working on cars, none of this matters, because you’re going to spend time fiddling with the thing.

Note that I said, “spend time”. If you’re like me, and want to drive the thing instead of fiddling with it and/or wasting time while other people fiddle with it, you’re not gonna get an E-type.

Fortunately, there is a way for people with boatloads of money to get an E-type and be able to drive it pretty much all the time. It’s an outfit in Britishland called Eagle Great Britain, and they rebuild E-types using all the modern techniques and using modern materials which will eliminate the Jag’s problems. If you’re in a hurry, you can get one of their fully-reconditioned E-types and drive it off the lot. If you can’t find one you like (and unfortunately, this will cost you some time), they will hand-build your E-type to the original (or your own custom) specs. Here’s an example:

Suffice it to say that none other than Jeremy Clarkson said that driving this particular E-type was one of the greatest driving experiences he’d ever had — and he’s had a lot.

I’m not to going to tell you the price, because you have enough. (BIG lottery win, remember?)

Just remember, this is all about buying time (which makes one happy, according to the study above) and I would suggest that time spent driving this piece of automotive beauty would be more exciting (and probably less expensive, ask Charles Saatchi) than driving Nigella Lawson. And that’s a hell of a thing for me to say.

Buying happiness just means knowing where to shop. And if you’ve just won a big lottery prize and owning an E-type is your dream, I’ve just told you where to shop for one.

You’re welcome.