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Reasonable Suggestion

Shootin' Time

I was struck by the attitude of this woman (as linked by Insty), who feels that Trump supporters should be put in a large room, like a gas chamber.  (She doesn’t actually advocate dropping the Zyklon-B crystals, of course;  she just wants to see Trump supporters wail and grovel.)

Of course, she’s living in some benighted delusion, unencumbered by the reality of what she’s suggesting.  It’s actually laughable, for all the right reasons:

  • That’s a big-ass room she’s talking about.  Even something the size of, say, Madison Square Garden would only hold about 25,000 people — of approximately 60 million Trump supporters.  I suppose she’d want to round up Trump supporters on a piecemeal basis, which leads us to:
  • Who is the “we” she’s talking about?  Who, exactly, is going to do the rounding  up?  The police?  The Army?  Has she considered the possibility that Trump’s support among these agencies might make them reluctant to go to a Trump-supporting household and politely ask us to go on a little one-way journey?  Of course, that reluctance may also manifest itself in fear for their lives, because of the next point.
  • We Trump supporters, by and large, may constitute the single-largest group of armed civilians on the planet, and would probably decline the offer of a trip to MSG from some ill-defined  Totenkopf agents.
  • Clearly, some kind of universal disarmament program must first be enacted, which in itself would be somewhat interesting.

Really, what she wants to see is Trump supporters cower in fear.  I wonder if she’s ever considered that we, as a group, are not especially fearful people?

So here’s my simple suggestion.

Even for someone as deluded as this AWFL, some testing needs to be done first, to ascertain the feasibility of what she’s advocating — a sample study, if you will.  Let’s see how disarmament and deportation to Madison Square Garden works out for them.

I will quite happily sign on to be one of the sample group.  In other words:  start with me, bitch.

Of course, what her little tirade shows is the actual depth of hatred these people have for us conservatives.  Fine:  let them hate away all they want.  But she and all her little cohorts need to understand that hatred alone will not be sufficient to enact what she’s suggesting.

But reality was never a strong suit of leftism, anyway.

Memoirs Of A Busker — Epilogue

Friends and Family, Music

(Previous: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5,  Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14)

Memoirs Of A Busker: Epilogue

For several years after we emigrated, my South African buddy Trevor and I would pick a random part of the United States every year – somewhere neither of us had been before, and drive around for a few days with no planned route or plan, looking at this part of our adopted country with new eyes, and reminding ourselves just why we’d taken that big step across the ocean to start our lives all over again.

On one occasion, we found ourselves in Maine, traveling up and down the coast.  On our last night we ended up at some hotel on the coast, with an outside bar.

Turns out there was a family reunion or maybe a class reunion of some sort, and their party was loud and raucous, as these things are, the participants were all about my age — mid-thirties — and letting loose without the kids to hold them back.  At one point, a couple of guitars were brought out and they started singing songs.

The problem was that the two guys playing the guitars knew hardly any songs:  in fact, I think they ran dry after only three or four.

When they started repeating songs, Trevor nudged me and said, “Why don’t you go and play some?”  I started to protest, but the skunk went over to one of the guitarists and said, “Hey, my buddy can play guitar and he knows a whole bunch of songs.  D’you mind if he plays a bit?”

Well, the guitar was handed to me and thus, after not having touched a guitar of any sort, nor having sung a note outside the shower pretty much since I’d left South Africa, I started playing.

I have no idea how it happened, but somehow the old songs all started coming back to me: the ones I’d learned from Ricky Hammond-Tooke’s songbook back at the College, a whole bunch of the old rock ‘n roll songs from American Graffiti, and more than a few of the songs out of 101 Hits For Buskers that I’d played in the cocktail bar at the Hunter’s Rest Hotel. They all flowed out of me as though I’d only just played them the day before:  I remembered the music, the lyrics, the little touches I’d devised to make them sound different:  it turned into a real show, and I ended up playing nonstop for two whole hours.


(note the groupies)

And so, after nearly a decade of silence, I played my last gig pretty much as I’d played my first:  busking away like I knew what I was doing, on an instrument I could barely play — but this time (thanks to many years’ experience) I did manage to fool pretty much everyone.

The End

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Dragging

Drive Time

I love videos like this one, where Jason Cammisa compares a bunch of speedsters in a drag race.  The best part?  All are nominally available for under $35,000 — which sticks in my throat, of course, but these are the times we live in.  The cars tested:

  • Ford Mustang Ecoboost
  • Subaru WRX
  • VW GTI
  • Hyundai Elantra N
  • Mini Cooper S
  • Mazda3 Turbo, and
  • Toyota GR86.

All but the Mustang and the Mini have available stick shifts.  (No stick option on that Mustang?  WTF?)

Longtime, or even recent Readers will know of my abiding love for the old-fashioned manual transmission*, so the new double-clutch quick-change autos leave me unmoved… because I’m not interested in drag racing.

Come to think of it, I’m not interested in any racing;  but I tend to prefer rather more powerful engines over anemic ones, which is why I was interested in the video.

So:  if the above were the only cars I could pick from, which would get my dollars?

Probably the VW GTI, because I have a long and cordial relationship with VW cars in general, and the GTI is still acceptably quick (even though it got skunked in this drag race) and it has room to hold all my stuff (gun bags and cases, grab ‘n go bags, etc.)  I know that the latter was not part of the criteria for the video, but it’s one of my major criteria, so there.

I don’t hate any of the others, mind you:  I think they’re all pretty good cars, by and large, and wouldn’t feel hard done by with any of them.  A few are just too small for me (Mini, Subaru and Toyota GR86) and the Mustang is just too heavy (despite being the fastest of the above, by far).  But taken as a whole, it’s not a bad group of cars.

That Hyndai Elantra surprised me.  I had no idea the N model was a pocket rocket, but then again, I’ve never been interested in Hyundai ever since renting an Elantra for a weekend road trip and having my back and ass ache for days afterwards.  That was a long time ago, though, so maybe they’ve improved.

I kinda wish that Jason had included the Honda Civic Type R, but it fails the $35k criterion miserably so I understand.

*for the same reason I prefer revolvers to semi-auto handguns**, bolt-action to semi-auto rifles, and manual-wind watches to Duracell models:  I like to operate and control my machinery.
**yes, I know I generally carry a 1911 semi-auto, but if somebody said I had to carry a large-caliber revolver instead, I’d be perfectly happy with that.