The 5 Worst — An Introduction

The other day I came across a book written by some dorky Brit hipster [redundancy alert] called “The Worst”, which comprises lists of the 5 worst people or things to do anything with, ranked in order of awfulness. I think it’s a good idea, and I’m going to steal it and make it a regular Friday Feature.

Let me kick the thing off with:

5 Worst People To Have Dinner With

  • Any vegan
  • Any vegan with gluten intolerance
  • Any vegan with gluten intolerance and diabetes
  • Any vegan with gluten intolerance, diabetes and bulimia
  • Gwyneth Paltrow

Feel free to add your five worst dinner guests in Comments.

Footwear Fashion

Allow me to present an essential difference between boots as worn in the western U.S.A., and boots as worn in western Britishland:

Now let me explain why the ugly green ones on the right are not an affectation in These Yerrrr Parrrrts (as they call it here).

For most of my trip thus far there has not been a drop of rain fallen on my head. At least, not while I’ve been awake. So all my excursions have been dry, so to speak, and I’ve even been able to wear my Minnetonka moccasins (Kim’s go-to footwear) on a couple of shopping trips.

Then last night it rained — buckets, apparently — but I barely noticed it because I was sunk in semi-drunken slumber after Mr. FM and I had semi-indulged, so to speak. Today dawned bright and clear, but hidden underneath the oh-so green grass was… mud.

Good grief. It wasn’t just yer everyday sandy Texas mud; oh no, this was vile, clingy, chalky mud, the kind that needs not washing off but chiseling off if allowed to dry on the shoes. Anyway, after but a few steps in this stuff, my boots had completely disappeared into snowshoe-looking things of brownish gunk — it took the shoe boy almost an hour to clean it off (and if you look closely, you can still see a trace or two on the soles of my cowboy boots; I dare not tell Mrs. FM of this shortcoming or else the hapless youth will be flogged again).

Clearly, one needs a different kind of boot out here, so Mr. FM took me “wellie-shopping” at an emporium known as “Countrywide” which caters to the farm- and country-folk. And this was how I knew I was in Hardy Country.

You know how in Shepler’s Western Wear stores there’s an entire section dedicated to cowboy boots of all shapes and styles? That’s Countrywide’s policy towards Wellington boots (as rubber rain boots are known in Britishland). Yikes. And just like cowboy boots, wellies range in price from $100 a pair to $500 — and Mr. FM pointed out that “bespoke” wellies can demand still more than that.

I decided to go for fit over price: my sturdy calves (“more like full-grown bulls”, as my old dad once said) have given me trouble with tall boots all my life — but wonderfully, the wellies which fit me best were a “budget” brand which cost me only about $120, and are the ones featured in the pic above.

As for the bilious color of the things: Mr. FM assures me that hunter’s green is by far the most popular shade out in the field, as evidenced by this picture of his hunting party*, taken last year. Note the overwhelming choice of footwear:

So that’s okay, then.


*The bloke on the left (shirtsleeves rolled up, tieless and not wearing wellies) is apparently Lord Freddie Someone-Or-Other, whose family was given permission to be thus casually attired by the King, back in 1800 or something.

Selling It Short(s)

Apparently, the LPGA is cracking down on female golfers’ attire, because dignity or something.

Clearly, this is to make professional women’s golf even less attractive to male TV viewers and -spectators.

If we take the lovely Paige Spiranac, for instance (and who wouldn’t?), we’d be going from this:

to this:

All nonsense, of course. As I’ve often said before: if anything, the LPGA should loosen dress codes on their circuit — hell, let them play topless — if they want more men to watch the women play their inferior golf (and thereby get more sponsorship and TV money).

Imagine if we could watch the lovely young Paige playing in this (forbidden) outfit:

Okay, maybe she could lose the heels, just for the tournament. But let me tell you, even without the heels I might be persuaded to watch women’s golf again…

 

Not Quite Guilty As Charged

The whole discussion of being labeled a “White nationalist” over at Insty’s place makes me reflect about the thing a little.

Yes, I’m white (or White). Accident of birth, both parents and sets of grandparents, great-grandparents etc. were all White. So: White.

Nationalist: a little more difficult, this one. Having been born in one nation — also accidentally, by the way: my parents were going to emigrate from South Africa to Canada before I was born, then didn’t when Mom discovered she was pregnant with me — I changed my nationality when I in turn emigrated, and became an American. [goes off for a quick Happy Dance, then returns]

Now, as to that nationalism thing: unlike the “open borders” idiots, I think that nationalism is important when the nations are culturally distinct — and I mean really distinct: the difference between a Scot and an Irishman is far less than between, say, an Italian and an Austrian. We’re talking shared cultures and common backgrounds, albeit with a somewhat different language for the Scots/Irish, and a much greater difference for the Austrians/Italians. It’s even more complicated by the fact that the Scots and Irish, mostly, have different religions (an important cultural factor) while the Austrians and Italians mostly share Catholicism. So national separation can be linguistic, or religious, or both.

For all intents and purposes, there is practically no difference between, say, the peoples of the United States and Canada — they could merge tomorrow, and very little would change. [pause to let the Québeçois separatistes get over their vapors]

I would suggest that American nationalism — a fairly recent one, compared to, say, Britain’s Anglo-Saxon nationalism which has existed for millennia — is signified by a common language and a common Anglo-Judaic-Christian heritage. Unlike the British one, which stubbornly defies change despite Leftwing attempts to suppress it, the American one is fragile, as we have traditionally been a refuge for people who want to improve their lot in life. (Note that the same has become, lamentably, true as the combined efforts of the EU and NuLabour forced immigration of alien cultures into Britain.)

Both nations have traditionally welcomed immigrants who might not have shared the British or American heritage, but assimilated as quickly as they could into the dominant culture.

Which is where the post-Modernist (“pomo”) and anti-nationalists start getting their knickers twisted, because the idea of  “dominant” culture is toxic to their Utopian ideal of “we’re all the same people, really” — even though we absolutely are not.

I have said countless times that our American culture, with all its little flaws, is still the greatest culture which ever existed — it is found in our nation, and in no other. (There are similarities to others — notably, the Anglo-Saxon-Judeo-Christian societies of Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand, for example — but our American version is slightly better: I think.) Certainly, our culture is better than anything ever devised or inherited on the African continent, and has been more robust and more congenial than, say, the baleful and repressive cultures of Islam and Communism (as practiced in Slavic cultures), and the rigidly-conformist cultures of the Far East.

Ours is a culture worth preserving — and it is best preserved in our nation, because we’ve seen over and over again, it fails when attempted in other nations, with their markedly-different cultures and heritages.

The fact that our culture has its roots in “White” (European) populations is frankly irrelevant. It’s an accident of both history and geography, just like the color of my own skin, and I’m not going to go into the tangent of why: it simply is.

So my “nationalism” (a culture created largely by White people) is not something to be feared or despised: it’s both accidental and meritocratic. It most certainly is not an insult, as the Left would attempt to make it these days, because quite frankly, I’m proud of my cultural heritage and my nationalism (and my skin color is irrelevant). We find a similarly-disjunct attitude when Europeans refer sneeringly to the “American cowboy” ethos, when we Americans cherish the cowboy values of independence, self-sufficiency, hard work and, yes, being armed to sustain all the above. To us, it’s a compliment, not an insult.

And ditto my nationalism. I’m proud to be an American, I’m proud of my Anglo-Judaic-Christian cultural heritage — and I couldn’t care less about either the color of my skin or the fact that our culture was created by mostly White people, all those years ago. And I’m immensely proud of the fact that so many immigrants of different skin colors have assimilated into the dominant American culture and ditched most of their deficient home cultures for the greater American one. Like I did.

Sound And Fury, Signifying Nothing

That’s been my general media attitude to the breathless headlines about Trump, Russia and all that jive. I have been getting wearied of it all, because it seems endless. But The Coldly-Furious One nails it, right here:

And that’s what it all comes down to now, I think. The Left’s target isn’t Trump now; maybe it never was. The target is Trump’s supporters. They hope to demoralize us, to make us disengage, to inspire us to resignation and defeatism and acceptance of the eternal status quo. They want us to believe that the Swamp can never be drained, to believe that Trump is a fraud who never had any intention of draining it in the first place. They want us to throw up our hands and walk away.

Remember: the lie told often enough becomes truth. What the Left is doing is not uttering the same lie, but different shades of the same lie — Trump did something with Russia that enabled him to steal the election, and if it wasn’t this, then it was that, or that, or that. And all along, all those thises and thats were baseless, groundless and in many cases, pure fabrications and/or wishful thinking.

Using yet another old cliche: throw enough mud, and some of it will stick — to the point where even cynics like myself start thinking yet a third cliche: with all this smoke, there must be fire. But there’s no fire. There’s just noise and incoherent rage, and no substance to any of it. Which is the paraphrase of this post’s title.

Ignore this nonsense, therefore. In fact, ignore what Trump’s doing, too. Let’s focus instead on the Republican Congress, and ask them why the fuck they haven’t been able to come close to fulfilling a single one of their party leader’s campaign promises? Tax reform? Not a word. Repealing ObamaCare? Nothing.

The only thing the Republican Party has been able to do since Trump was elected has been whatever Trump has done by himself.

And guess what? Next year is primary season. Maybe it’s time for We The Voters to start draining the Republican swamp, and installing people who really do want to make America great, again.