Dino-Palooza

As Longtime Readers will know, one of my favorite — perhaps my absolute favorite — sports car of all time is the (Ferrari) Dino 246 GT from the 1969-1975 period.  I’ve written before about the rights and wrongs of the thing, but all that aside, I am in love with the Dino simply because it is so drop-dead beautiful to look at.

Which is probably why Fiend Reader Darrell M. (who should know better) sent me a video of a Jay Leno’s Garage  episode which featured a modified Dino — modified not with a Porsche Cayman engine (as I’d thought about), but a Ferrari F40 V8.

Oh be still, my beating heart.  Go away and watch the video now, and when you come back, there’ll be some Dino eye-candy from my personal collection of pics filched from all over Teh Intarwebz.  (My only quibble with David Lee’s Dino is the color.  Black is beautiful, but not as beautiful as some of the others…)

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WHM III

When the history of the world is explored at some time far into the future, historians will scratch their heads at the collapse of an entire culture and civilization, and wonder how a society so successful, so prosperous and so advanced could have fallen into disrepair and decay, this little footnote may shed some light on the topic.

Now as we all know, today’s grannies are generally not the same as grannies of yore.  Here’s yore:

…and here’s today:

   

Sadly, however, this modern-day ageless sexiness seems to have washed away the modesty and reserve for which grannies were once renowned, and one arrives at this sad conclusion (warning: link contains extreme nausea risk):

A grandmother and self-proclaimed ‘prolific cougar’ who has dated hundreds of toy boys believes bedding men under 30 is the key to keeping young.
Gaynor Evans, 57, from Enfield, North London, has dated more than 200 younger men since she had a fling with a 23-year-old after divorcing her second husband in 2010.
The author, agony aunt and businesswoman never dates exclusively and said she has no intention of her love life slowing down – despite being a grandmother of four.

…and there you have it.  “Agony aunt” indeed.

Lest We Forget

As Britishland totters on the edge of Brexit/ No-Brexit/ Hard Brexit/ Soft Brexit/ Whatever-Brexit, it behooves us to remember just why they hate the EU enough to want to leave its clutches warm embrace.

Example #1:   Control

‘Intelligent speed assistance’ is at the centre of a European road-safety shake-up.
These systems are capable of automatically stopping cars from exceeding the limit or cutting the speed if they pass into a slower zones. But the Department of Transport insists that mandatory systems will not physically slow a car.
It says drivers will simply be alerted by a dashboard light and an audio alert, similar to existing warnings when seatbelts are left unfastened.
The technology will have to be installed in all new cars from May 2022 and in existing models two years later. Other features include automatic emergency braking and a system which keeps a vehicle in the centre of a traffic lane.
The EU Commission claims the mandatory devices could help avoid 140,000 serious injuries by 2038.

Note the weasel word “could”.  The infernal things “could” also cause still more deaths from equipment failure, because none of this shit has ever been tested, yet.

Example #2:   Hobbling the Internet

The directive, which passed by 348 votes to 274, seeks to update the EU’s copyright legislation in light of recent technological changes. Its most controversial elements, passed much more narrowly, are Article 11, a “link tax” requiring social networks and news aggregators to pay publishers to display snippets of their output, and most of all Article 13, an “upload filter” making larger online publishers like YouTube responsible for copyright infringements in material uploaded by their users.

This is akin to the “holding gun manufacturers responsible because a few assholes murder people with guns”  rationale.

Example #3:   Unstable currency

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde told a Paris conference that the currency union ‘is not resilient enough’ to emerge unscathed from ‘unexpected economic storms’.
Lagarde acknowledged that the currency union was now ‘more resilient than a decade ago when the global financial crisis struck.
‘But it is not resilient enough,’ she said. ‘Its banking system is safer, but not safe enough. Its economic well-being is greater overall, but the benefits of growth are not shared enough,’ Lagarde told the gathering, which was organised by the French central bank.
The warning comes as signs are multiplying of slower economic growth, especially in powerhouse Germany and the bloc’s second-biggest economy, France.
On Friday, indications of a weak first quarter for the eurozone mounted as a closely-watched survey pointed to March output being dragged further down by manufacturing weakness.
Manufacturers in the 19-nation single currency bloc ‘reported their steepest downturn for six years’ as pressure mounted from trade wars and Brexit fears, data company IHS Markit said.

This is what happens when you couple one or two “strong” economies (Krautland, Frogland) to fucked-up economies (Eytieland, Spicland, Porroland etc.) and expect good results.

So the Brits want out of all this shit (they’re quite capable of fucking their country up all by themselves, without any assistance), and no wonder.

The only thing which still puzzles me is why a “hard” Brexit — in essence, just telling the Europigs to FOAD  — is seen as a Bad Thing for the UK.  I’m sure there’s some sophisticated response to that simple question, but as said response would only come from the turds who lost the Brexit referendum (a.k.a. the Remoaners Remainers), I think we’re safe in ignoring it, and them.

WHM II

Yesterday we looked at a woman whose place in history was made by taking off her clothes.

Today we’ll be looking at a woman who took on the foul labor unions of Britain and the industries once nationalized by the socialist BritGov of the late 1940s (and denationalized them, saying “To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukaemia with leeches”).  And for good measure, she kicked the shit out of the Argies when they tried to invade and hold the Falkland Islands.  A political foe once described her as having “breasts like Monroe and eyes like Stalin”, and he was right.

We all know who I’m talking about, of course:  the Iron Lady herself,  Margaret Thatcher.

Needless to say, the Commies in the UK (i.e. a substantial proportion of the population) hated her guts because in her time, she constantly flayed the monster that was “democratic socialism” both by her words and by her deeds.

Britain needs her today more than ever:  I cannot imagine that the pantywaists in the EU government and the “Remainers” at home would last more than a couple hours against her — but lamentably, she can’t be there.  And her words, most of which were said over thirty years ago, ring all the more true today:

“Left-wing zealots have often been prepared to ride roughshod over due process and basic considerations of fairness when they think they can get away with it. For them the ends always seems to justify the means. That is precisely how their predecessors came to create the gulag.”

“Do you know that one of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas.”

“The choice facing the nation is between two totally different ways of life. And what a prize we have to fight for: no less than the chance to banish from our land the dark, divisive clouds of Marxist socialism and bring together men and women from all walks of life who share a belief in freedom.”

I miss her, and so should (big- and small-c) conservatives everywhere.

Future Models

I made fun of the new Ferrari Monza SP1 yesterday, but on a more serious note, it’s one of Maranello’s “Icona” series which, as the name suggests, will be cars based on iconic Ferrari models of the past.

Needless to say, only super-rich Ferrari fanbois will be able to afford them, but I have to say that if I had the dough, I’d not only buy the re-release of the 1959 Ferrari 250 (SWB) California, I’d kill anyone who stood in my way:

…as long as Ferrari produced an exact  replica of the old 250’s body shape, that is, and not some bloated modernist excrescence that looked like a 10-year-old’s Play-Doh model.