Month: July 2017

Wealth / Class Envy

Funny Stuff

So Mr. Free Market is wending his way home, after a week’s hard work exploiting the masses and keeping the working classes underfoot, when he pulls his Porsche 911 Cabrio up to a red traffic light which happens to be next to a bus stop.

Two yoofs are slouching there waiting for their bus, and in the time-honored spirit of British class-consciousness and wealth envy, start chanting “Wanker! Toff wanker!” at him.

Whereupon Mr. FM enquires of them, in his best upper-class accent:

“So… how’s that bus stop thing working out for you, then?”

Slack-jawed astonishment from his audience, followed by anger; but before they can do anything untoward, the light changes. Exit Mr. FM in a roar of Porsche goodness, leaving frustrated rage in his wake.

…And Speaking Of Wankers

Advice

It now appears that what we men have always thought was one of life’s necessities, in fact really is necessary. I speak here of frequent orgasms, as evidenced by this study (from Harvard, no less) which concludes as follows:

“We found that men reporting higher compared to lower ejaculatory frequency in adulthood were less likely to be subsequently diagnosed with prostate cancer.”

So there you have it: have orgasms, or die. The “suggested” frequency is twenty-one (21) orgasms per month. (Yeah, I know: “I’m not going to cut my wanking in half just to satisfy some Harvard tools.”) For the innumerate, that’s two every three days. And apparently they should be regularly spaced, so locking yourself in your bedroom over the weekend and bringing up your average by going on a two-day wank-a-thon won’t suffice. Wank-a-thons can also cause the condition known as Wanker’s Claw:

As with all things, moderation is better.

Therefore, the next time you’re overcome with lust after seeing a new picture of, say, Monica Bellucci:

…and yer wife / girlfriend isn’t interested in helping you save your life, you can reach for the Kleenex with no guilt whatsoever. (Incidentally, Ms. Bellucci’s latest movie is entitled On The Milky Road [sic]. If that isn’t a sign right there…)

I should point out, however, that this study was drawn from reported as opposed to (ahem) observed behavior, and as we all know that when it comes to talking about their sex lives, people lie like Clintons, even to researchers; so there should be a little caution attached to these findings.

You’ll also want to vary your technique a tad, or else you’ll end up with the dreaded Wanker’s Imbalance:

Still, if you want the plausible results to form part of your excuse when yer Missus catches you in flagrante delicto, they are:

Past research by the same university suggests that emptying the prostate of cancer-causing substances and infections may have some benefit. Ejaculation may also help to reduce prostate inflammation, which is a known cause of the cancer.

Caution should also be exercised if you enlist the services of a mistress or random pick-up at the pub to keep you healthy. For some reason, I suspect that wives are not going to be fooled by the excuse.

Dr. Kim also points out that the plea of, “If we don’t have sex tonight, I’m going to die!” is likely to be met with the usual sympathetic response:

And of course next month’s study from Harvard is doubtless going to find that frequent orgasms for men can cause blindness, just like yer mother told you.

You have been warned.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD

Seen in a unisex toilet stall not far from here:

“If you’re angry because I left the seat up after taking a pee, have a feminist explain to you why you have exactly the same right as a man to touch the filthy thing.”

Sic semper feministae.

No Frigging Rules, Except For

Culture, Travels

As much as I love my job Over Here, reporting from behind enemy lines, there are certain things which drive me nuts. Chief among them is pronunciation, because while there are some rules, there are almost as many exceptions. Should any of my Loyal Readers find themselves in Britishland, here are a few tips which may prevent you from sounding like a mawkish ‘Murkin. Most are place names.

The town of Cirencester is pronounced “Siren-sister”, but the town of Bicester is not Bye-sister, but “Bister”, like mister. Similarly, Worcester is pronounced “Wusster” (like wussy), which makes the almost unpronounceable Worcestershire (the county) quite simple: “Wusster-shirr” (and not Wor-sester-shyre, as most Americans mispronounce it).

Now pay careful attention. A “shire” (pronounced “shyre”) is a name for county*, but when it comes at the end of a word, e.g. Lincolnshire, it’s pronounced “Linconn-shirr”. The shire is named after the county seat, e.g. the aforementioned Worcester (“Wusster”) becomes Worcestershire (“Wuss-ter-shirr”) and Leicester (“Less-ter”) becomes Leicestershire (“Less-ter-shirr”). Unless it’s the town of Chester, where the county is named Cheshire (“Chesh-shirr”) and not Chester-shirr. Also Lancaster becomes Lancashire (“Lanca-shirr”), not Lancaster-shirr, and Wilton begat Wiltshire (“Wilt-shirr”). Wilton is not the county seat; Salisbury is. Got all that?

*Actually, “shire” is the term for a noble estate, e.g. the Duke of Bedford’s estate was called Bedfordshire, which later became a county; ditto Buckingham(-shire) and so on, except in southern England, where the Old Saxon term held sway, and the estate of the Earl of Essex became “Essex” and not Essex-shire, which would have been confusing, not to say unpronounceable. Ditto Sussex, Middlesex and Wessex. Also, the “-sexes” were once kingdoms and not estates. And in the northeast of England are places named East Anglia (after the Angles settled there) and Northumbria (ditto), which isn’t a county but an area (once a kingdom), now encompassing as it does Yorkshire and the Scottish county Lothian — which I’m not going to explain further because I’m starting to bore myself.

And all rules of pronunciation go out the window when it comes to Northumbrian accents like Geordie (in Newcastle-On-Tyne) anyway, because the Geordies are incomprehensible even to the Scots, which just goes to show you.

Now here’s where it gets really confusing.

Villages used to be called “hamlets” (still are, in some places), so a village might be called Chesham (pronounced “Chezz’m” and not Chesh-ham), unless it’s the town of Horsham, which is pronounced “Whore-sh’m” (not whore-sham). In fact, Chesham might be an anomaly, because most villages where the name ends with an “s” create an “sh” dipthong — e.g. the lady in Great Expectations who’s called, Miss “Haver-sham” and not Havers-ham. Also, the “-sham” is pronounced “-sh’m” (or “-shim”), but let me not confuse you here.

The letter “l” inside a word is almost always silent. Palm and calm are pronounced “pahm,” and “cahm”, so the village of Calne is pronounced “Cahn” and not Cal-nee or Cal-nuh — similarly, the village of Rowde is pronounced “Rowd” (like crowd) and not Roadie, Rowdee or Rowd-uh.

Oh, and to end this thing: people are often confused by Welsh place names such as:

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwll-llantysiliogogogoch

…but you needn’t worry. It’s just that the Welsh, like the Germans, run several words (and even phrases) together into a single word. The name of the above town, which is on the Isle of Anglesey, simply means “St. Mary’s Church in the hollow of the white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the Church of St Tysilio of the red cave”. It used to be called by a much shorter name, Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll (“The Mary church by the pool near the white hazels”), but that wasn’t confusing enough to the English and Scots, and the Welsh do love to take the mickey, so in 1850 the town was given its full name.

The rest of Britain got their revenge with the invention of computers, where the (English) programmers were not going to create a 50-character field just to accommodate the Welsh, so the place is now known as “Llanfair” (or “Llanfair PG”, to differentiate it from all the other places called “Llanfair” in Wales).

 

On This Special Day

Patriotism

This will be the very first July 4th I’ve ever spent outside the U.S., and I find myself with mixed feelings.

Of course, Over Here the day is nothing special, and given the reason behind the day’s festivities, I hesitate to rub the nose of my host country in the loss of its greatest colony. Still:

I miss the 4th. I miss the parades, the patriotism, the July 4th TV shows and the Revolutionary War parades that are all over the place. So, from all the way over The Pond, and from one of your most grateful adopted citizens:

Happy Birthday, America.

Y’all have a hot dog and some BBQ for me today. And if anyone says anything ugly about the U.S.A., I give you my full and unconditional endorsement to kick his ass.

Missing The Whole Play

Politics

Imagine that you were a TV baseball sportscaster, and had been one for, say, forty years. All you’d ever done was baseball: you knew the rules backwards, you knew the plays backwards, and you knew everything about the teams — their franchise histories, their rosters, their managers, their fans and their cities.

Now imagine that you were asked, at a moment’s notice, to deliver TV commentary on a game of Calvinball on the planet Mars.

That was the feeling I got when I read P.J. O’Rourke’s aptly-named How The Hell Did This Happen?, his take on the 2016 elections.

I’ve always liked P.J.’s writing, by the way, because he uses just enough humor to make a political point insightful without being boring or snarky. But after reading this, his latest political work, I got the feeling that P.J., always something of a journalistic outsider but possessing a keen political sense, was almost in the same boat as the liberal mainstream media when it came to the 2016 results — he was caught between his distaste for Donald Trump as a person and his knowledge of our political system. The only thing that set him apart from the rest was his intense dislike of Hillary Clinton and most things Democratic, but in the end, he was betrayed because like our hapless sportscaster above, he only knew one game.

And if there’s a better analogy of last year’s election than Calvinball (for both political parties), I can’t think of one. The only difference between the parties was that on the Democrat side, the party bigwigs changed the rules as they went along (the Clinton campaign essentially cheating Bernie Sanders out of fully participating in the nomination process), whereas on the Republican side, the rules were constantly being changed by the voters — and as Trump was the only one who caught the “toss ’em all out” mood of the electorate, he was able to play it all the way to the White House. Nothing says “Change” like “Drain the swamp”, after all.

So all the way through P.J.’s book, I could see his complete inability to understand what was going on — why was Trump winning, how could voters not vote for Rubio / Bush / whoever wasn’t Trump, and so on. The fact that NJGov Chris Christie and OHGov John Kasich — mere distractions both — merited more than a few lines in the book was, I think, symptomatic of the media’s problem in general: they got caught up in personalities when what was really happening was a sea change in voter attitudes towards the whole political structure.

The same is true with P.J.’s casual take on the U.K.’s Brexit vote: a side issue, a non-issue even for America, when in fact what it meant was a fundamental shift in the polity — an advance warning of what was likely to happen in the U.S. when it became our turn to express a similar sentiment.

P.J. was always good when he stepped outside the country to look at the attitudes of foreign people, then applying those lessons to our local politics with devastating accuracy — which is what made his strikeout on the 2016 elections so unusual. (The same, in microcosm, is what happened to the rest of the media in the U.S.: by not venturing outside the coasts, they never saw the tidal wave coming.) But in How The Hell?, P.J. only seems to get a vague idea right at the very end of the book — and even then, he can’t bring himself to accept the fact that only a rank outsider like Trump was ever going to win the election — and because the Stupid Party has only ever nominated known political figures, their candidates of choice (Bush, Rubio et al.) never stood a chance. It’s telling that the only serious “insider/outsider” (political maverick Ted Cruz) got even close to the eventual nomination — but even that fact escaped the media, and P.J. O’Rourke.

Afterthought: What I find interesting is that the “outsider” on the Democrat side is Bernie Sanders, a self-confessed Socialist, whose interest is in changing American society into a socialist one, and who is finding favor with the Democrat version of “throw the bastards out” — only in his case, “the bastards” includes anyone earning more than $100k a year, hence his appeal to the Young & Stupid Set on the Left.