Author: Kim du Toit

I Like This

Business, Lifestyle

I remember back when Wal-Mart and their ilk were building stores everywhere, and small-town businesses everywhere were being put out of business by their erstwhile customers falling prey to the fallacy that Price Is King, and lured into the soulless caverns that were Wal-Mart, Home Depot and so on, all for the chance to save a couple bucks on nails and screwdrivers.

I was heartened when I visited Britishland for the first time, back in 1997, and found that there were still plenty of ironmongers (hardware stores) dotted in the main streets of British towns.  Invariably, I’d drift into one, and wish that I lived somewhere nearby because of all the cool stuff they sold, stuff which I hadn’t seen in over decade of walking through Lowes or Home Depot, let alone Wal-Mart.

Let me be clear here:  to men of my generation, hardware stores are to us like drugstores are to women.  Yet while you can find a CVS, Walgreens or Osco drugstore within spitting distance of your house in any town, you will not find a hardware store which caters to men.  Oh sure, drive a few miles and get drawn into a Wal-Mart, only to find that if you want a couple of #2 self-tapping screws for that project on the honey-do list, sorry but they’re only available in the 50-pack, $5.99 instead of a buck for the two you needed.  (And yes, I know all about economies of scale and bulk savings — but at the end of the day, you end up spending six bucks instead of two, and are saddled with four dozen screws that you may or may not need in the future.)

It doesn’t have to be that way.  Here’s a story from, of all places, Wales, where the local ironmongery was about to close its doors after years of serving the town, but the locals, realizing what they might miss if the place disappeared, did something about it.

Note how carefully they structured the financing, so that GlobalMegaCorp Inc. couldn’t sink their ravenous fangs into the place and turn it into something other than what they wanted to keep.

I wish we’d done something like this in small towns Over Here, but that bullet’s gone through the church and we’re stuck with megastores, damn it.

There are about three or four posts that burst the banks of this stream of consciousness, but they can wait for another time.

Monday Funnies

Funny Stuff

Ah yes, Mondays;  when you need to get to work, but there are just a few things you have to fix first…

So to help the process along, here are a few things that might make you feel better… or not.

Mystery solved:

And there you have it.

Oh, I almost forgot:

I was going to say something witty in conclusion, but BOOBS.

Diddly Squat

Business, Gummint

Ben Ainslie and his wife Georgia Thompson are probably not known to many Murkins, although in the yachting world he’s very well known as the most successful Olympic sailor of all time, not to mention the head of Britain’s America’s Cup team.

So during the Covid Lockdown Silliness they created a podcast / TV show called Performance People in which they talk to various successful people such as F1 Mercedes AMG team principal Toto Wolff and his equally-accomplished wife Susie — surely the absolute exemplars of the “power couple”.

The show that got me, however, was their interview with The Greatest Living Englishman and his man Kaleb, on the Diddly Squat Farm.  Funny as always, the pair are wonderfully entertaining, right up until the discussion moves to farming, and what farmers have to deal with.

I have no idea whether our farmers have to put up with the same degree of red tape as the Brits do, but when Jeremy Clarkson points out that the suicide rate for British farmers is the highest of any profession in the U.K., things get really serious.

If you do nothing else today, watch this show.

Two Old Guys Chewing The Fat

Friday Feature, Movies, The Gun Thing

…about revolvers, and what they love to shoot.

What’s so different about this one?  It’s Ken Hackathorn and Bill Wilson.

“Shooting should be fun.”

That episode was Ken’s favorite guns to shoot.  Here’s what Bill likes to shoot.

“Every gun guy should own a Model 19 Combat Magnum.”

And then if you want still more Hackathorn and Wilson, here’s an earlier episode, about 1911s.

“Rarely does the capacity of the gun have anything to do with the outcome… unless you’re a really bad shot.”  (Although it should be said that Bill Wilson himself carries a Wilson SFX-9 with a 10-round mag — and a 15-round backup mag.  And nobody could call Bill Wilson a bad shot.)

I could listen to these two gun guys talk all day.  And in putting this post together, I did.

Today’s Earworm

Music

You know, whenever I hear someone say nonsense like “Only Black people can sing soul music, dude”  I’m tempted to

a.) beat them over the head with my souvenir Janis Joplin mike stand
b.) poke them in the eye with an Eric Clapton guitar pick, or
c.) play them Dave Mason’s We Just Disagree.

…and apart from the lyrics, Mason’s voice and the astounding harmonies, it has one of the best bass lines, ever.  All that in just three minutes, and it should have been fifteen because it would save me hitting the replay button so much.