Month: July 2017

5 Worst Things To Find In Your Teenage Daughter’s Bedside Drawer

Friday Feature, The Worst

There can be few things more horrible for a father than to discover what his innocent young teenage daughter is actually up to. Here are the five worst things to find in her bedside drawer, ranked in ascending order of awfulness:

  • a 60-pack of condoms, half-empty
  • a personally-signed photo and love note from some rapper you’ve never heard of
  • a book entitled “10 First Steps To Becoming A Furry”
  • a pregnancy test stick showing positive
  • a letter of acceptance from Oberlin College’s Department of Feminist Studies

Your suggestions on the topic in Comments, please

Good Question

Men & Women

This had me howling:

I remember once having a conversation in a staff cafeteria with a woman who stated without embarrassment that she had a 54-point checklist that she applied towards any guy who wanted to date her. One of the guys at the table (and no, it wasn’t me) asked her pointedly: “And what do you bring to the party?”

As she was not particularly attractive, she had nothing to say other than, “My intelligence and good conversation.”

Afterwards, another of the guys said, “She doesn’t even have those,” amid murmurs of agreement.

Ladies: you need to do a clinical self-assessment of why any man would want to date you, before you draw up your list of desirable attributes in a mate.

Missing The Point(s)

Beauty, Gratuitous Chick Pics

Apparently all these women are desirable, according to scientists, because their figures have the ideal waist-to-hips ratio:

…which only proves that scientists don’t know diddly. None of the women can be called attractive.

Here’s a pro tip from a longtime lecher (that would be me): put Nigella Lawson in the lineup, and those other women wouldn’t rate a single look.

The perfect ratio is: big boobs, small waist, wide hips. Otherwise known as an “hourglass” figure, you pencil-pushing dweebs.

Afterthought: I bet that some of these purported “scientists” were female — which would explain everything.

 

 

MS Paint Is Dead — Errr, Wait A Minute

Business

So Microsoft announced that MS Paint was going to go the way of Outlook Express — i.e. die because they just aren’t interested in maintaining the old horse anymore, and it’s to the glue factory it will go.

Then, 24 hours later, after a storm of protest from longtime Paint users, Microsoft backtracked and said that Paint wasn’t going to disappear completely; it would just not be included in future releases of their operating software — it would have to be downloaded as a separate operation.

What bullshit is this? I’ve written before that Microsoft’s corporate strategy team, if they have one, should get a kick in the teeth for fucking over longtime customers just at the behest of Engineering who, despite Dilbert’s efforts, should never, ever be allowed to set policy. And product longevity is precisely what should be decided by Marketing, not by Engineering or Production, because the people most affected will be customers — and despite Dilbert, again, Engineering doesn’t understand customers.

I’ll spell it out for Microsoft (and I won’t need SpellCheck either): you guys are a bunch of fucking idiots.

There are millions of software users who don’t need sophisticated software to address their everyday needs. This is true whether it’s word processing (people who are only interested in writing letters, papers or novels), doing basic budget preparation (households and small businesses) correspondence (people writing simple letters or memos to a few people), and basic photo / picture editing (family photos, articles, blogs) . In other words, LetterPerfect 1.0, Lotus 1-2-3 v.3, Outlook Express… and Paint. In Microsoft parlance, it’s not the bloated juggernaut known as MS Office, it’s the MS Works crowd. And just to repeat the original thought: there are millions and millions of such people and I, one of the earliest Microsoft PC customers, am one of them.

I fucking hate Outlook, Office and (just to be fair) Adobe Photoshop. They’re all too much for my needs, and I’m sick of having to learn to go through a multi-step process just to be able to do something that used to be a one-click operation.

My only comfort is that I’m no longer young, and my time to have to deal with all this nonsense is shrinking. But it gives me no comfort whatsoever to think that Microsoft believes that this is the reason not to worry about me — that I and my kind are a shrinking market, which gives them the right to fuck us, and ignore us.

Handful O’Justice

The Gun Thing

No, that’s not the name of a Louis L’Amour or J.T. Edson gunslinger, it’s what came to mind when I saw the latest offerings from Defender Outdoors over in Fort Worth country. It’s a mini version of the Taurus Judge revolver in .45 Long Colt / .410ga goodness:

Now I know some people are going to wince at the thought of popping a .410ga shell out of a little thing like this: “Oh noes, Kim! It’ll break yore pore lil’ hand!” they’ll exclaim. Actually, it will do nothing of the sort.

What causes recoil, as anyone will know who’s ever fired a .375 H&H Magnum rifle before, is the pressure build-up in the barrel as the boolet gets propelled from the casing. But with an ultra-short barrel, the bullet has left the barrel almost before any pressure can build up. There’s some recoil from the gun’s inertia being overcome by the propellant, but that’s not much to write home about. How do I know this?

Because I’ve fired a .410ga cartridge out of a Bond Arms Derringer, that’s why:

Yes, it was a little bit of a handful… the first time I fired it. But I have to tell you, I fired another dozen or so rounds immediately afterwards, and there was no sore wrist, no sore hand, nothing. It was, in fact, a pleasure to shoot — and I really enjoyed watching the snake-shaped outline on the target almost disappear after the second load of shot hit the paper. I imagine it would do a similar job if fired into a goblin’s face at halitosis range, you betcha.

I like the cut of the Judge’s grip, too: more substantial than the Derringer’s means that the recoil is going to be even more manageable, and there are another three cartridges in the cylinder withal, if needed (doubtful). If there’s a better pocket pistol for varmint reduction (of any physiology, mind), it’s hard to think of one.

If any of my Readers in the DFW area has one for me to try out when I return from Britishland, let me know. I’ll supply the ammo.

Goopery

Bad News

I swear on my life that I had not read this before I made Gwyneth Paltrow the worst-possible dinner guest of all time. (And you must read it too, all of it. Yes, it’s long. Don’t care.) Here’s the opening salvo:

In retrospect, I find it rather odd that I never paid much attention to Goop. Goop (or is it goop?), as you might recall, is Gwyneth Paltrow’s beauty/health/wellness website (and, of course, online store) that’s been in the news a fair amount over the last several months. The reason is that Paltrow combines celebrity, beauty, and “wellness” with pure quackery, and every so often Goop publishes something advocating pseudoscience so outrageous that it attracts the attention of not just skeptics, but of the mainstream press and even late night comedians like Stephen Colbert. What I didn’t realize is just how broad the quackery is, and, more importantly, how it is facilitated by actual physicians working with Goop. Before I get to that, though, let’s take a brief trip down memory lane, where I’ll explain how I became aware of just how much a wretched hive of scum and quackery Goop has become.

Me myself, I don’t care about Goop, its expensive snake-oil products or the fact that it hides good old-fashioned snake-oil sales techniques behind Gwyneth Paltrow’s skinny frame. I don’t even care if The Perpetually Gullible (i.e. people who espouse the value of homeopathy) end up sticking expensive jade eggs up their vaginas and die from the agonizing infection this lunacy can cause. (Yes, such a product is available at Goop and yes, it’s solemnly pitched as an answer to various ailments such as Trump Derangement Syndrome. That last part is an absolute fabrication on my part, but it’s no less plausible than all the other earnest-but-bullshit nostrums put out by Goop.)

I bet there’s an absolute direct and full correlation (like, 1.0000) between people who believe Paltrow’s  bullshit and Hillary Clinton / Bernie Saunders supporters. Not all the above are Goop acolytes, of course — but all Goop acolytes are, without a shadow of a doubt, liberals of that ilk. If you can still believe that socialism is a cure for all society’s ills after all the proof extant that it isn’t, you’ll believe anything, So feel free to clean out your colon with a Goop-endorsed boutique ostrich feather if you believe it will make you feel better about your bowel movements.

And if Goop ends up being the latest Jonestown Kool-Aid to liberals, who am I to deny their right to be a bunch of stupid, vapid morons, even if it kills them?

Charles Darwin, call your office.