O Sage One, please call your office so that we may send you your “new” item of gunny goodness.
Congratulations to you, and many, many thanks to all who participated. Thanks to your generosity, the Widow Irish will be getting $1,000 in her account tomorrow.
I have spoken before about how I get celebrities confused with other celebrities when reading about them. Here’s a recent example, that being between Emma Watson and Keira Knightley:
I know, they don’t look anything like each other when seen side by side. But when I read about one, I’m thinking “petite Brit brunette with no boobs”, and I think you’ll acknowledge my confusion when those criteria are applied.
So now I have to apply a discrete mental tag to each one, such as “skinny Brit brunette with no boobs in Harry Potter” and “skinny Brit brunette with no boobs in that pirate movie with Johnny Depp”.
Of course, my life would doubtless be simplified if I just ignored reading about them altogether, but that would probably require that I quit reading my guilty pleasure, the Daily Mail. And I don’t really want to do that, because the very definition of “guilty pleasure” is something that one gets pleasure from even though one shouldn’t.
What’s even worse is that I don’t find either of the above that attractive because “whiny voice / skinny / no boobs” (all of which they both have in common) is generally speaking a total turn-off for me.
What a mess…
It’s difficult to imagine just how much more could have gone wrong in this situation:
Jay Conway, 33, was spotted dealing drugs by two plain-clothed officers in a park in May.
They tried to apprehend him but he got away before another uniformed officer, who was on patrol in a police car nearby heard a radio alert and took up the chase.
Dramatic bodycam footage shows brave Constable Dan Clayton hauling Conway off a stolen push bike, before pulling out his taser and ordering him to “Get on the floor now.”
But Conway, who was wearing a balaclava, ignores him and instead pulls a loaded pistol out of his sock.
Conway is immediately tasered but, as he falls to the ground, he points the gun directly at Constable Clayton, who can be heard shouting, “No, no” and “gun, gun, gun,” as he sprints for cover.
Of course, all my Murkin Readers are no doubt going “WTF? Why didn’t the cop just shoot the asshole dead when he pulled the gun?”
If I were to tell you that this didn’t happen in the U.S. but in Britishland, then it all becomes clear.
Pro tip: If a scrote points a gun at you, the correct response should be “Blam! Blam! Blam! [repeat as necessary] ” and not “No! No! No!”
If, however, your police force refuses to provide you with a “Blam! Blam! Blam!” option, perhaps you should reconsider your career choice.
Just sayin’.
Here’s a very perceptive look at the current fun and games in Iran, and the U.S. strategy behind them:
This isn’t one war, but two.
There is a regional chessboard, on which Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the other Gulf states all play. Iran’s proxies, its drones and ballistic missiles, its nuclear ambitions, its funding of Hezbollah and the Houthis. All of that belongs primarily to this smaller game. Israel has always understood this board. So have the Saudis. So has everyone in the neighbourhood.
But there is a second chessboard, vastly larger, on which the United States and China are the primary players. On this board, the central question of the next 30 years is being worked out: whether the American-led global order survives, or whether China displaces it. Every American foreign policy decision, from the pivot to Asia to the tariff wars to the posture in the Pacific, is ultimately a move on this board.
America is in this fight because of China. Specifically, it is about dismantling the most significant Chinese forward base outside of East Asia.
Read the whole thing, I beg you, because it shows that far from being a silly cowboy playing with a loaded gun, Trump’s grasp of global strategy is so far removed from that of his political opponents (and even of most of his nominal political allies in the West) that it defies belief.
We often joke about Trump playing four-dimensional chess while his opponents are stuck to a chessboard. The above article shows exactly how that 4-D chess game actually works.
I am very impressed that this appeared in the normally-silly Daily Mail. As far as I can tell, not one American news publication has come close to this succinct analysis, instead busying themselves with the minutiae of the campaign.
And in Teh Classics:
Let us now fix things with some laughter:
…most men will recognize this phenomenon.
And let’s hit the road now:
HEY, LET’S KEEP IT CLEAN!
Okay…
Satisfied?
