Mumbles In The Darkness

Here’s an article which resonated with me:

Why are today’s TV shows and movies so GRAY?

I’ve now got to the point where the movie has been consistently dark during the first five or ten minutes, off I go to somewhere else.  Ditto the Brit movies in which the dialogue is either mumbled, spoken in an unintelligible accent or both.  Also, the ones where impenetrable slang is in more than half the dialogue — I know, it’s realism, but still — I don’t expect characters to speak Received English via the Royal Shakespeare Company either.

And for gawd’s sake, S-L-O-W D-O-W-N when you speak your lines.

Pardon me if I just want to know what the hell is going on in your precious Work Of Art.  Cinema is becoming like modern art, where the expression is so personal that it needs explanation by the auteur.  And don’t give me that “mood” jive, either.  You wanna see a mood, just watch my expression as I hit the “outta here” button on the remote.

I do make an exception for the Scandi-noir movies and TV shows, because the Scandis only ever get about two hours of sunlight a day, so an average production would take years to shoot if they waited for sunny days.

But even that’s a problem:  in every police station I’ve ever been in (and there have been quite a few hem hem), the rooms are brightly lit to almost daylight levels.  In the movies, I’m constantly yelling at the screen for someone to hit a light switch.

No wonder they miss so many clues:  they can’t fucking see them.

And no wonder so many people are ditching Netflix, Prime et al., when so many movies are being made according to the Intangible / Unintelligible Sludge formula.

“Dear Dr. Kim”

“Dear Dr. Kim:
“At age 50, I recently got divorced from my husband of twenty or so years, and since then I’ve been reading about the Orgasm Gap, which points out that men have more orgasms than women during sex.  Is this something worth looking at?  Quite frankly, I haven’t had sex with my husband (nor anyone else) for about the past ten years, so I’m not exactly up to speed on the topic.
“Hubby and I had sex about the average — once or twice a week — until the kids arrived, when I was too tired for that kind of thing and so our sex life sort of faded away.
“After the kids left home I decided to start my life again, so I got divorced.  Hubby seemed relieved rather than surprised, and signed the papers with quite indecent haste.
“Anyway, I see that lots of women are in my situation, and also have issues about sex.
“Do you have any advice?” — Sex Curious, Florida

Dear Curious,
So you’ve left Hubby to get on with bonking his secretary or whoever, and now you want to reignite the sex life of your teenage / 20s years?  Okay, here we go.

Are you one of those women who are capable of multiple orgasms during a single sex act?  (Assuming you can remember that far back, that is.)  If you are, then you’ll be just fine, as long as you bat in your own league and don’t do the Emma Thompson thing and start shagging 20-year-old boys.

If you’re a “once-and-done” kinda gal, you need to work on it with your partner before you start the actual bonking (what’s known today as “foreplay”, I believe) so that you can get to your Magic Moment before he gets to his, so to speak.

If you’re one of those women who take ages to arrive at Ecstasy Central, you may have to use toys (i.e. vibrators) to help the process along, because quite frankly, most men lose patience after a while and either reach their finish line “prematurely” (i.e. before you) or else quit your bed altogether and search for ahem greener pastures.

However, these are murkier waters than I care to swim in, and I see that there’s a growing trend of so-called “sexual intimacy coaches” (ha!) who claim to be helping many women such as yourself with their orgasm issues.

I would recommend that you contact one of these coaches, and in fact I happen to know one — Jasper Longstroke — who may be able to help you out.  Email me for contact details, although he seems to be quite busy at the moment.

Also, beware of imposters.  If he asks you to send him a few pics of your Pleasure Palace so he can “study the problem”, he may not be the kind of intimacy coach you need.  Ditto the guys who want to spend time in your bed, teaching you intimacy from a practical perspective.

Good luck — you’re probably going to need it.

— Dr. Kim

Bravo

After the Great Wetback Episode Of 1986, one of the biggest changes in societal customs I had to face was this business of “eating on the run”, or indeed even “eating quickly”.  This made about as much sense as “traveling tastily” or “delicious walking”:  the melding of two disparate activities actually made me angry.

Where I came from it was understood that when you eat, you sit down down to do so, in a place which caters [sic]  to eating and not in a car (exceptions made for a drive-in place like Sonic).  Even when traveling, when it came time to eat, it would involve pulling off to the side of the road — preferably at a rest area, but otherwise well off the road to avoid a collision, and then eating your (prepackaged meal brought from home), preferably outside the car at a table (rest area) or right there (tailgating).

Don’t even get me started about the custom of “brown bagging” whereby one eats at one’s work desk.  Ugh.

After a while, though, I got sick of ranting about it, and just went along with the strange foreign practice, although in the three or so decades since, I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve actually eaten a meal in the car when it was in motion.

At college, I was astounded at the number of kids who would bring their Big Macs and what have you right into the classroom, and gobble it down while waiting for the lecturer to show up, or sometimes even during the class (if the professor didn’t care).

Nothing is more disgusting than being subjected to the smell of someone else’s food in a place that isn’t a restaurant.

So when I read this story, I gave the man a (virtual) standing ovation:

A young London woman travelling alone at night was told she wasn’t allowed on a bus – because her fried chicken wings would ‘stink’ it out.

Predictably, all the usual moans about safety and such were trotted out — but to no avail, because:

Stagecoach’s website states: ‘You can’t eat or drink anything that will cause offence or upset other passengers.’

Of course, the driver was found to be in the wrong and no doubt Head Office whacked his pee-pee.  But get this:  this stupid tart hadn’t come off the night shift, she’d been visiting a friend’s house.  Why the hell couldn’t she have eaten there instead of taking her stinky chicken dinner onto the bus?  Of course:

‘I have always eaten on buses, on the way home from school. There weren’t that many people on the bus anyway. Some people were just shouting at him to just drive the bus. I felt really embarrassed. People were looking at me eating and I felt so fat. I felt a bit depressed by it. I went and sat upstairs right at the front for extra safety.’

Oh boo fucking hoo.  You act like a mannerless lout, and then get upset about being made to feel ashamed?  (And by the way:  you are fat.)

It’s the fact that people have somehow become accepting of boorish behavior that nonsense like this is tolerated.

I should point out that I called out one oaf in a lecture room, and told him to go and eat outside.  “Why?” was the hurt question.  “Because I’m not interested in smelling your rancid food,” was my response.  He didn’t move, whereupon I said, “Do you want me to come over and take your food and toss it?”

He gave me an angry look and went out.  A couple of the kids looked at me like I was the bad guy, but one girl said, “Thank you for that.  He’s always doing it, and it makes me feel sick.”

He never did it again.

The structure of manners is society’s lubricant in that it allows us to get along each day without killing each other, and I am not going to be cast as the bad guy simply because I try to remove the irritant.

Paul Revere, Part Deux: The Calis Are Coming!

Now here’s a cause for alarm:

Musk’s electric car company wasn’t the only Silicon Valley giant to make the move and is unlikely to be the last. Bloomberg reports that Hewlett Packard made the shift after citing the difference in real estate expenses between the Golden and Lone Star states, with Oracle Corp also making the move. If other major companies also make the decision to leave Silicon Valley, it could spell disaster for the area — especially given how income and employee numbers are split. If just Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Cisco left Silicon Valley would lose 20% of its employees and billions of dollars in GDP. High taxes and living costs may soon drive companies and workers away from Silicon Valley, and towards cheaper states with Texas a regular target.

Frankly… no.

I have no desire to have those woke asshole corporations come to my beloved Texas, and change our way of life — already in some danger thanks to their predecessors — into something that more resembles California’s.  And change it they will, make no mistake, because they will come with shitloads of money:  money that will buy them politicians and local government officials, and their wokist, Green attitudes will gain a foothold — or, I should say, a stronger foothold — when in fact few Texans outside Austin want that crap to change their lives.

Here’s a little warning to liberal Californians:  EVERYBODY HATES YOU.  I mean really, really hates you.  Your insufferable liberal smugness and superiority, your ability to drive up affordable local real estate values fueled by the proceeds of your bloated California property prices,  your liberal mindset and your insistence that everywhere you move must change into what you just left behind — all that and more does not endear you to the locals.  So do not act surprised when your appearance is not only not welcomed, but treated with dismay or even outright hostility.

I remember chatting to a guy in small-town Idaho who had moved there to escape all the expat Californians in Colorado (seriously), and was horrified to learn that said insects were now starting to infest his new home town.  When I asked him why they would move there when there was absolutely no real industry to attract them, he just snorted and said, “Retirees.”

I wish you could have seen the expression of loathing on his face and heard the utter hatred in his voice.

It may come as some surprise to Californians, but most people don’t actually care if in their little towns there are no vegan restaurants, cute little gourmet bistros that sell kiddie portions at adult prices, yoga studios, Lululemon outlets and all the unnecessary shit that Californians seem to regard as critical to their precious “lifestyle”.  And by the way:  there aren’t going to be a lot of charging outlets for your precious Priuses and Teslas, so don’t complain about that when it can all be solved by leaving that shit behind and buying a Ford F-150.  In fact, that’s a perfect analogy for the changes that you have to make if you want to be accepted:  ditch the attitude and go native, because nobody cares how you did things in California, even if you feel that it’s so much better and can’t stop telling people that.

And by the way:  if you do move out of California and relocate to America, one of your first actions should be to buy a fucking gun (preferably several) and a truckload of ammo.  And if that course of action causes you to recoil or feel uncomfortable, then you may want to just keep on driving through Arizona, Texas and Tennessee until you get to Massachusetts or New York, where they feel the same way about those icky guns as you do.

Bloody hell, just the thought of Google moving to Plano makes me want to start looking at real estate in east Tennessee or rural Idaho.

I think I’ll go to the range.

News Roundup – Special Magic Dirt Edition

Brought to you by:

And into the arena of Le Grande Assimilation  we go:


the only reason this order would be acceptable is that we don’t want to endanger our Border Patrol agents because of the minefields we just installed.


ah yes, the Dream Team.  Next:  running for public office.


and of course, they’ll be able to use that ID to vote, right?


who cares?  Nobody.  Now, had someone destroyed that Muslim “call to prayer” system in a mosque, there’d be riots in the streets.


when asked to comment, an imam said:  “Scandalous.  He should have married her first.”

And in Hijab News:

Taliban: Women Not Wearing A Hijab Are “Trying To Look Like Animals”
…and this could be what we’re missing:

 

 

I know who the real animals are, and they ain’t these hotties.

A Good Vintage

Saw this over at Kenny’s place.

Your job, should you choose it (and you should), is to pick your five (and only five) favorites.

Mine (in no order):

  • Can’t Buy A Thrill — Steely Dan
  • Manassas – Stephen Stills
  • Ziggie Stardust — David Bowie
  • Thick As A Brick — Jethro Tull
  • Harvest — Neil Young

If it’s tough to restrict it to only five, welcome to my world.  The biggest problem was leaving off albums which contained one or two songs I really loved, but in the end, they weren’t enough to carry the album.  I listen to all the above at least every month, or at worst every other month.