Oops

Some wise man once wrote:  “To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”  (Clearly, he never knew what happens when a wife catches her husband bonking her sister.)

Anyway, here’s the latest episode in the annals of “Whoa!  We never saw that coming!

Three million face masks are discarded every minute as a result of mass adoption during the coronavirus pandemic, and experts warn it could soon lead to environmental catastrophe.
Face coverings are being worn by the majority of individuals around the world in order to curb the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus which causes Covid-19.
However, they pose a greater risk to the environment than carrier bags because of their ubiquity and the fact there is no way to safely decontaminate and recycle them.

It is, as the kids say, to LOL — and given the ways of the world, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the vast bulk of the face-condom trash emanates from the Third World (and most likely, from China withal).

So when you see me cooking hotdogs over a fire made from my face masks, you can rest assured “it’s for the environment”.

Choices, Earlier

With all the brouhaha surrounding the Ginger Prince’s choice of bride and concomitant embarrassment of The Oprah Interview, allow me to highlight a couple of his earlier long-time girlfriends:

 

I can’t help thinking that either of the above would have been better choices.  But that’s not all.

See, in the old days, the royals didn’t so much find soulmates as diplomatic alliances, arranged by the respective families.  So had the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Windsors followed established precedent, the Royal Ginger would now be hitched to any one of the following, for example:

Princess Alexandra of Luxembourg:

…although I think this multilingual diplomat would have been way over the Royal Ginger’s intellectual punching weight.

Princess Elisabeth von Thur und Taxis:

She’s older than Harry, but then so is Duchess Whinge.

Princess Theodora of Greece and Denmark:

The last is actually related to the current Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, but the royals have never let that kind of thing get in the way.  And she’s also an actress, so maybe that would have given her the inside track.

And had Harry wanted to be all woke ‘n stuff and marry outside the Ango-Saxon tent, there was always an outside chance of an arrangement with Princess Sirivannavari Nariratana of Thailand:

“Princess Siri” would cause all sorts of problems with Apple People nowadays, which just adds to the fun.

In any event, I can’t help but think that hitching up with any of the above would have had a better outcome for old Harry than what he’s tied to now.  And I’m fairly sure the other members of the Britishland Royal Family would agree with me.

Of Course They Are

Let’s hear it for European Wokism:

More than 90 per cent of severely ill coronavirus patients in Germany have a ‘migrant background’, a leading doctor has said, prompting claims that the government is turning a blind eye to the issue to avoid igniting a race row.

‘There are parallel societies in our country. You can only put that right with proper outreach work in the mosques, but we’re not getting through. And that sucks,’ he said.

Guess those niqabs aren’t helping them much, huh?

Which leads to another interesting question:  Are face condoms worthless?

In related news, Texas will lose all the stupid Chinkvirus restrictions next Monday.  If I weren’t staying in a hotel, I’d be building a bonfire for all those stupid and, as it turns out, useless masks…

Oh Noes

More from the world of dietary science:

Regular meat-eaters are more likely to suffer from chronic health conditions than those who shun or ration animal products, a study from the University of Oxford has found.
The research found a meat-lover who eats 70 grams of meat — processed or unprocessed — more than a peer is at 15 per cent higher risk of heart disease, 30 per cent more likely to get diabetes and almost a third (31 per cent) more likely to develop pneumonia in the future.

I did the work so you don’t have to:  70 grams is about 2.5 oz…

Whatever.  According to this lot, I should have died about 15 years ago, given that my daily breakfast contains inter alia  a large piece of boerewors.

And yet, here we are.

Innumeracy

Oh FFS.  This simple question has apparently caused all sorts of mayhem among the innumerate:

The answer is of course “FALSE” — and to think otherwise is to be ignorant of two of the simplest definitions in mathematics, i.e.

  • “A right angle is defined as two straight lines meeting at a 90-degree angle”, and
  • “There are no straight lines in the circumference of a circle.”

And in the above picture, there’s only one straight line.

That anyone can even be fooled by the question means that math education has been completely screwed up.  I agree that it’s quite a tough question for a seven-year-old child (as posed in the article), but nobody with more than a seventh-grade education should be stumped by it, let alone a professor of mathematics.

By the way, ignore the red herring that a straight line consists of two right angles:  that’s only a partial definition of straight line.  (“The shortest linear distance between two points” contains only implied angles, not actual ones.)

And by the way:  the correct spelling is “two right angles”, no hyphen necessary.

I need another gin.


Update:  Oh FFS-squared.

For the above diagram to contain two right angles, one would have to add a third radius, thus:

Now the question “There are two right angles” has the answer “True”  (A0C, B0C).  If you were to answer “False”, giving “because there are four right angles” as your reasoning, you would (rightly) be given an “Incorrect” because there are only four right angles in the imaginary world (i.e. Thales’ Theorem et al.).  However, we are not in an imaginary world because we are not talking concepts, we are talking about an actual diagram.  And to cap it all, we are talking about a question posed to a seven-year-old child, for whom Thales has no existence.

As I explained to a Reader in an email on this very topic, it always pays to remember that mathematics has little basis in reality, e.g. where a line can have direction but no thickness and a point has a position but no size.  And I’m not even going to touch on division by zero… [eyecross]

Screwing Up The Brand (2)

Following on from yesterday’s post about Stella Artois peeing in their own soup comes yet another example of marketing silliness:

Country star Luke Combs has apologized for appearing with Confederate flags, saying he is now aware of how painful that flag is.

Ummm Luke, bubba:  the Confederate flag may be painful to some, but it is not painful to your audience.

And just so we’re clear on the concept:  that “audience” would be the folks who buy your albums, attend your concerts and wear your T-shirts;  and in a pure head count they probably outnumber the flag-hating weenies by 25,000 : 1.

Now I don’t know if continuing to display the Stars and Bars at your concerts would disenchant folks in the crowd — just in passing, I bet your next concert will reveal an absolute sea of Confederate flags in the audience — but I’m pretty sure that a whole bunch of your fans are going to be mightily pissed off that you took a knee towards the Politically-Correct Set.

And the problem with doing that is that these woke bastards are never satisfied, especially after you do it once.  Expect your lyrics to come under scrutiny from now on:  references to cheating women will be labeled “gender-hatred”, singing about booze will be considered as encouraging alcoholism, and forget your pickup truck, that gas-guzzling ozone-destroying monster.

And if a country singer can’t sing about love, booze and trucks, there’s fuck-all left for him to sing about.


Oh, and a postscript:  just wait till the vegans see this pic…

I should also point out that until I wrote this post, I’d never heard of Luke Combs.