Sublime, Meet Ridiculous

Readers may remember this little bit of news from last week:

A driver who was trapped behind the wheel of an out-of-control Jaguar I-Pace has revealed to MailOnline how he almost cheated death as his car accelerated up to 100mph on the busy M62 motorway without brakes.

Nathan Owen, 31, was on his way back from his first day at a new job when his 2019 electric car started malfunctioning, sparking a huge police operation to bring his car to a stop after 35 minutes of hell.

But in a shock revelation, Mr Owen told how his car had also gone rogue on the motorway in December, this time reaching up to 120mph.

Well, if you thought that was the end of the story, you forgot that this happened in Britishland, so of course there’s a sequel:

Police have arrested a Jaguar I-Pace driver on suspicion of dangerous driving after his ‘out-of-control’ car had to be rammed off the road by officers when it ‘went rogue’ at speeds of up to 100mph.

Nathan Owen, 31, was arrested by Merseyside Police in relation to the incident on the M62 on Wednesday, March 6.

He was arrested on suspicion of dangerous driving and causing a public nuisance and taken into police custody to be questioned.

Mr Owen claimed his £80,000 electric car went gone rogue on the motorway that day, sparking a huge police operation to bring his car to a stop after 35 minutes of hell.

His arrest comes after a detailed investigation was carried out by police and Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) – who said it ‘seeks to investigate all reports of issues relating to product safety’.

Yeah, surrounded by umpteen police cars, he just carried on speeding — of course it’s his fault, even though ’twas Owen himself who called the rozzers for help.

Once again, I’m reminded of the incident in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, when MPs burst into a hotel room where Aarfy has just thrown a whore out of a window to her death — and arrest Yossarian for being AWOL.

Fucking hell.

Can’t Go With That

Here’s a headline that made me scratch my head:

Are Nephilim Still Ruling the World?

Wait, Nephi-what?  Oh FFS, I wish I hadn’t looked this one up:

Genesis 6:1–4 tells the readers that the Nephilim, which means “fallen ones” when translated into English, were the product of copulation between the divine beings (lit. sons of god) and human women (lit. daughters of Adam).

I know, I know… it’s in the Bible, so it must be true.

So that means that all those Greek “myths” weren’t actually mythical at all?

Zeus and the other Olympians were constantly and permanently knocking up princesses, queens, nymphs, sirens, lesser goddesses, warrior women and just plain fair maidens who bathed in the pool with their handmaidens. And the handmaidens, too, sometimes. Zeus even managed to impregnate mortal women when he was a swan or a bull.

Hercules was the illegitimate child of Zeus and a mortal woman, as were Perseus, Helen of Troy and Minos (among other very, very famous offspring of Zeus). Yep, the Greek God family tree is very, very tangled. The genealogy is near impossible to try to map.

And ancient Greeks who literally believed in their religion also believed that Zeus could produce offspring with human women in the real world; among the many people who did was Alexander the Great’s mother, who claimed that Zeus had fathered her son. Alexander the Great was alleged to have actually believed this himself.

I can see why Alexander might have believed it of himself, but I cannot believe that anyone in this day and age would even be discussing this bullshit.  And yet they are, and I perforce must pass comment on their drooling fantasies.

Talk about yer animal husbandry…

No Right At All

Here’s a story which is guaranteed to get me going, and it’s a topic I’ve discussed before.  Seems as though this Old Phartte popped his clogs at age 91, and decided that because his grandchildren had never bothered to visit him while he was in hospital, that they weren’t worthy of getting any of his loot once he was gone.  So instead of cutting them out of his will, he left them each only a few bucks.

Needless to say, the grandchildren sued the estate, claiming that they were “entitled” to a third, rather than the 0.0001% thereof specified in his will.

Where do these people get the idea that they should be entitled to anything?  FFS, his estate, lest we all forget, is his own property — something that people (and governments, a rant for another time) seem to forget.

So if Grandpappy wants to leave his dough to Someone Not His Foul Grandchildren because they ignored him while he was alive, he’s perfectly within his rights to do so — just as if he were to give a birthday present to one person and not another.

This business of heredity “entitling” someone something is all well and good when it is, ahem, an actual title (e.g. royalty / nobility), but in the cold hard world of law and finance, descendants are entitled to nothing, if the owner of said estate says so.

Anyway, this group of ingrates lost their case, and a damn good thing it is too.  And for the record, they’re as ugly as they are greedy.

Small Wonder

The last time I was in an office supply retail store (Staples, Office Depot etc.) was shortly before I took down my consultant’s shingle and beat a client to death with it.

A frequent customer of such establishments, therefore, I am not.

So when New Wife asked me to swing by one and buy a half-dozen plastic clipboards while she was doing the laundry, I obliged with pleasure.  Here’s the item under discussion:

I know, we could just have bought the things from Satan’s Warehouse Amazon, but they were needed urgently, i.e. the next day, so we would have to buy at full retail.  But the price stuck in my mind, because that meant that the clipboards would price out at just over a couple of bucks each.

So I went over to Staples, who had the product not at all, nay even unto other colors.  “Maybe next week?” was the helpful response from the stock clerk of whom I made the request.

No big deal:  this is America, land of choices sufficient to make you puke.  So pausing only to knee the surly peasant in the groin, I went over to Office Depot, literally across the road.

Okay, they didn’t have any blue ones in stock (school uniform color, in case you’re interested).  But they did have clear ones which, when I checked with Herself, were judged “satisfactory” albeit grudgingly.

But no price in the shelf, so I grabbed a passing flunky by the ear and told him to scan the UPC code with his little scanner thingy, which he did after only a little moaning.

Then he told me the price of the piece of plastic with tin clip up top:

Thirteen (13) U.S. dollars… EACH

…and then it was my turn to do the moaning.

Fucking hell.  If a piece of mass-produced-made-in-China shit can cost in-store what can be purchased online at one-sixth of the price, something is wrong somewhere.  It could be the office supply store’s pricing policy, it could be the cost of shipping, it could be that the price was entered into the store’s price file at 10x the intended (that added decimal place matters, you know), it could be any number of things.

Anyway, New Wife was as appalled as I was, the teachers will just have to settle for something other than a blue plastic clipboard, and I’m sure that Office Depot’s fire insurance policy can replace the store… or not, I don’t care.

Because it will be another decade before I bother to set foot inside one of them again.