News Roundup

Your favorite quickie news flashes of the week:

1) Goalie wins AK-47 for being badass — my kinda team award altogether;  although he’d better not bring that bad boy with him to the U.S. or else “Beta” O’Rourke will take it away from him.  [eyecross]

2) Trannie fired for classless attack on conservative woman — only fired?  He/she deserves a whipping.  Nebraska ain’t the state I remember — although this happened in Lincoln, which is to Nebraska as Austin is to Texas.

3)  Trump will “probably” support some kind of gun control legislation — I was going to say something about this, but I have to go buy some more AK ammo right now.  Back in a moment.

Okay… now where was I?

4)  All Democrats would ban fracking — as if higher taxes, gun control, [299 other bullshit policies]  aren’t sufficient reason not to vote for any of these fucking loons.

5)  “Genitalia is not an indicator of gender and it can be harmful to assume so” — ummm no;  actually, I’m pretty sure that ownership of a dick is the primary way to determine that someone’s a bloke, whether he uses it the Elton John Way or the John Holmes Way.  Ditto the vag — although Beto “Gimme Your ARs and AKs” O’Rourke (despite the alleged ownership of a penis) is still a total cunt, regardless of which way he swings.  Frankly, this so-called “gender fluidity” is a symptom of mental instability, not something to be proud of.  And to hell with the whole LGBTOSTFU rabble, while I’m on the topic, because it leads to insane shit like this.

6)  Climate change assholes admit to a fucking great liequelle surprise.  This one was about the vanishing polar bear population scare, which was based on a single photograph.  Sadly, there will be no floggings.

7)  Gun Sales Spike Despite Democrat Efforts To Slow It Down — substitute “because of” for “despite”, and you have a more truthful headline, RedState.

8)  Frogs and Brits go on strike, as usual — and Kim points to his earlier suggestion to re-institute flogging for unionized workers, as we do here in Texas*.


*Okay, we don’t actually  flog unionistas  in Texas, but it’s not for lack of trying.

 

Judicial Insanity

Just when you thought Teh Law couldn’t get any more stupid, you get rulings like this:

A man who died from a heart attack after having sex with a woman he met on a business trip is a ‘victim of a professional accident’, a French court has ruled.
This ruling means that the employer of the man, known as Xavier X, will have to pay hefty compensation to his dependents.

No wonder the Brits want out of the EU — although their own courts are not exactly paragons of justice, either:

A teenage thug who killed a stranger with a single punch during an unprovoked attack outside a McDonald’s has been jailed for four years.

Fucking hell, if the penalty Over Here for killing someone with a single punch was only four years in jail (as opposed to 25-to-life or the chair), I’d have clocked Chuck Schumer twenty years ago.

Small Wonder

According to some organization, Vienna is the most “liveable” city in the world.  I can see why, and I could live there in a heartbeat.  I’ve often commented on my love for Vienna — to this day, it’s the only city that is so beautiful that the first time I went there, I walked the streets with tears running down my cheeks.

I don’t know what criteria the EIU set to decide livability, but here are mine:

1)  It must be beautiful.  Vienna has that, in spades.

2)  There must be lots of culture:  art, music and all the rest.  Feel free to tell me Vienna doesn’t have that  covered.  Here’s the Kunsthistoriches (Art History) museum, see also beauty (above)

…and as for music?  Even their street musicians are a cut above the rest (he was playing Mozart  tunes, FFS):

 

3)  The people must be well-mannered, well-dressed and classy.  Vienna:  check, check and check.  The Viennese are terribly formal, which suits me down to the ground.

4)  A relaxed lifestyle.  Vienna = café culture, maybe even more so than Paris.  And oooh the coffee…

5) Good food, and restaurants.  Here’s Vienna’s equivalent of Whole Foods, or maybe M&S Food Court.  Let me tell you:  I know  grocery stores, and Julius Meinl is the best in the world.

Let’s not forget the street markets:

So yeah:  if somebody stuck a gun to my head and said, “You have to go and live in Vienna!”, I’d snatch the gun away and shoot him before he could change his mind.

I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t list a couple of negatives about Vienna.  (A German I met once said, “Vienna would be beautiful, except for the Viennese”, and my only qualification of his opinion is that of the language.)

I speak German reasonably well, and can get around most of Germany without too much hassle (once I’ve been  there a few days and have caught up — you don’t use it, you lose it, and I’ve pretty much lost it).  That’s not true in Vienna, where the local patois is incomprehensible, even to a lot of Germans.  (In the early days in Munich, Hitler had to take a few elocution lessons because people couldn’t understand his Austrian-accented speeches.)

Also:  in winter, it’s witch’s tit cold.  Holy balls.  Even coming from Chicago as I did, Viennese winters are cold, Bubba.  The only good thing about winter there is that it keeps most of the tourists away — which brings me to my last quibble:  in summer, Vienna has more tourists per square yard than the average day at DisneyWorld.

But in summer, the weather is glorious and the whole city seems to sing.  The multitude of statues to Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms and Strauss (all of whom lived in Vienna) must have something to do with it…

Mein schönes Wien… I need to get back there, and soon.

As for the rest of the “ten most liveable” cities on that list?  Ugh.  As far as I’m concerned, it’s Snow White and the Nine Dwarfs.

And one wonders how anyone could put Vienna and Toronto (???!!!) on the same such list, with a straight face.

Fallen Giant 1

I have had a relationship with British clothing store Marks & Spencer for twenty years.  Every time I go to London, I visit M&S and buy underwear, socks, shirts and trousers — enough to last me until my next visit.  While I’ve occasionally bought a shirt or two from U.S. outlets like Target or Kohl’s and casual trousers from Sam’s Club, fully 80% of my wardrobe carries the M&S brand — and because in terms of its fit and endurance no other brand has come close to M&S, over the past twenty years, I’ve never worn underwear or socks from anywhere else,.

Nor have many Brits:

One in three British women buys their bras from M&S — 45 bras are sold every minute in-store — while two pairs of knickers fly through the tills each second, which equates to more than 60 million pairs a year.

And from memory, about 50% of British men in the 1990s bought their socks at M&S, simply because they were the very best you could buy, at any price.  With that kind of market share, how could they fail?

M&S also screwed up royally before 2000, by the way, by not accepting any credit cards other than their own charge card.  It was that, or cash.  I discovered this blithering idiocy the very first time I went to their flagship Oxford Street store, went to the cashier with about six hundred pounds’ worth of merchandise, only to have to leave most of it behind because they wouldn’t accept my Visa card and I only had a hundred-odd pounds in cash.  I remember ranting at the floor manager at their arrogance — “throwing good business away” was the phrase I used — and meeting with complete indifference.  Later (much too late, I think) they changed their policy to accept other cards.

At some point in the early 2000s, things began to change, and not for the better.  Instead of selling the M&S brand exclusively, M&S started to sell branded clothing — “tied” brands (exclusive to M&S), but the boutique stuff was more expensive than the house brand, a lot more, but with no discernible difference in quality.  Actually (and this is just a personal observation) I think the M&S allowed their brand’s quality to slip so that they could use the lower prices to compete with the cheaper High Street- and online competition.  Underwear that I’d bought in the mid-1990s lasted for at least five years, while the M&S underwear I bought in 2017 has already started to fall apart.

When online sales came along, M&S was always going to be the first one clobbered, and they were.  Probably the only thing that saved them was the expansion of their business into takeout convenience foods (which, in all fairness, are excellent albeit rather pricey).

Now the company has been kicked off the FTSE 100 (the Brit equivalent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average — DJIA) because their corporate value has declined to the point of disqualification.   (And note BBC TV personality Jeremy Paxman’s complaint, because it’s very much the way I feel about their loss of quality).

The nearest American example of a corporation’s similar fall from grace is Sears — which once had a market share and customer esteem similar to that of M&S in the U.K., but is now in its death throes, for pretty much the same reasons.

I don’t think that M&S is going to fold any time soon — gawd, I hope they don’t, because where am I going to buy undies when the ones I have start falling apart in five years’ time? — but they have a hell of a job ahead of them.

Long Weekend

As we Murkins head into the last long weekend of the summer, I thought it would be appropriate to see how others do long weekends — or specifically, how they do a “Bank Holiday” weekend in Britishland.

Last weekend, in fact, was the hottest such on record in the U.K., so of course the pasty-skinned Brits headed for the beach to get properly burned:

 

Okay,there were some  sorta-worthwhile sights along the way:

 

 

But if stuck in London, there was always the annual Notting Hill Carnival:

 

 

And for the sake of balance, just to prove that I can be inclusive:

Or, if it was too hot in daytime, one could always wait until night time and hit the pubs:

 

 

If I didn’t know better, I’d say this lot were having a pee through the windows:

 

You have to admire their stupidity bravery in balancing precariously (and, one assumes, drunkenly) over those anti-pigeon spikes, though.

But none of that is exclusive to Britishland, really — you could do all that anywhere in the world.  To make the thing British, you’d have to participate in the World Bog Snorkelling Championships, wherein one has to swim through a malodorous boggy trench — and this is what makes it truly  British — in fancy-dress costume:

 

 

Given the choices at the top of this page, I think I’d rather do the Bog thing, dressed as a Viking.

Still, in the same spirit:  enjoy the Labor Day Weekend, folks!

Not Quite The Look

Okay, I saw this pic while scanning the headlines:

 

I’m not going to bother with a link to the article because it isn’t relevant — the guy is semi-famous for being on some soft-core porno reality show in Britishland, ergo  of no interest to me or to my Readers.

But I have to ask:  is wearing what looks like a chick’s sport bra just to show off your flat stomach not the gayest thing since Elton John’s wedding?