Month: July 2025

In Search Of Lost Time

Men & Women

No, this has nothing to do with Marcel Proust, but it’s a novel perk from a Spanish company for getting off work, so to speak:

Unless you’re a butcher, beating your meat is a practice that has never been welcomed into the workplace — which I’m sure an overwhelming number of employees are happy to adhere to.

It’s something that we see often in the movies, in the Rocky montages and in The Wolf of Wall Street to name a few… but if you’re a worker at one Spanish company, then you might be a little more familiar with a certain half-hour ‘masturbation break’.

The organization grants its staff 30 minutes of private time for ‘self pleasure‘ in a dedicated ‘masturbation station’ room, and it even got written into company policy in 2022 after completing a successful trial run during lockdown.

Speaking about why she gives her employees the option of a half-hour ‘masturbation break’ during work hours, owner Erica Lust [sic] explained: “The truth is masturbation can help people manage stress, regulate their sleep, and connect with their body and sexual desires, among other advantages.⁠”

In staff feedback from the unusual initiative, many admitted they felt “less aggression” and were “more productive”.

I’ll bet they do.  The best part of all this?

Lust, who is also on a mission to ‘reinvent’ ethical porn, added: “Sexual wellbeing is deeply intertwined with your overall mental health and physical health and should be treated with the same respect and resources.”

…and a new expression enters the lexicon:  “ethical porn”.

Random Totty

Gratuitous Chick Pics

Apparently 20-year-old totty Jessie Murph is causing something of a stir in country music circles with this video.

Not quite yer Patsy Cline-type, is she?

Of course, all the Usual Suspects are going nuts, calling her all sorts of names and accusing her of glorifying violence against women and all the other tired tropes which people trot out whenever they see something that’s different and shocking to the accepted stereotype.

Don’t care.  She’s brought punk to country… and why not?  Plus she’s as cute as hell.

Restraint

Heroism, Psychos

So apparently there’s a Good Guy With A Gun involved in the taking down of our loony stabber in Traverse City MI — not that you’d ever read or hear about it in the Messed-Up Media, of course.

Here’s Our Hero, and that’s the situation he found himself in.

Now good for him, in that he restrained himself from ventilating the nutcase.  (I’m not quite sure what’s going on with that hold on the gun, mind you, but whatever.)

Apparently, he told the loony to drop the knife “several times” before the asshole saw the light of reason and dropped the knife

I have to say that if I were in his situation, standing what looks like three or four feet away from the nutcase, I’m not sure that I would have acted the same.

He’s standing very much in range of a stabbing lunge, and as we all know, that’s way too close for comfort.

I may or may not have issued a “Drop the fucking knife!” order, but I sure as hell would have popped three into his chest after the first refusal to do so.  Standing close to a nutcase holding a bloodstained knife, with the screams of his victims echoing all over the place…

Like I said, the man showed admirable restraint.  Others might not have.

Oh, and semper fi, Marine.

Sidestep

Corporate Fuckery, Marketing / Advertising

I’ve spoken about this topic before, but this is a parallel thought.

Whenever I click onto a link which leads me to a PJMedia outlet, I’m often  / always confronted with a message blocking the article, said message requiring me to turn off my ad-blocking software before I may proceed.

Uh, no.  To quote Dubya, “Nahguhdoodat.”  It’s not that I have anything against advertisements, per se — hell, I’ve worked in the ad agency business myself, and I know that ad revenues help media companies remain in business.  What I object to, with a screaming passion, is that digital ads don’t just announce, they shout at me and intrude on my reading with pop-ups, loud audio and all sorts of other bullshit.  And let’s not talk about ads which have tracking software built in, which leads to all sorts of unpleasantness and bastardy down the track.

Side note:  To be frank, I also don’t want to be led to other ads which “relate” to any specific product in which I might show an interest.  Fucking Amazon’s “if you bought this, you might also be interested in this” trope heads the list, but other websites — e.g. Bud’s Guns FFS — also perpetrate this nonsense, even when my interest in, say, a .22 Beretta pistol generates a “suggested list” which includes a Glock 17 and Bergara rifle.

Anyway, I’m not interested in “allowing” ads into my reading of news items, thank you very much, because my indulgence does not extend to being abused by the advertisers.  So fuck you.

Now there are ways to sidestep this little device.  The one I use the most is to Ctrl-X the link, and in the blank thus created, type in “archive.is/” and then CTRL-V the original link and hit enter.  This generally leads to a page like this:

Click on the blue link, and voilà!  you get the article:

Now some websites have found ways to confound this method or the alternative archiving software products, in which case I do something radical.

I just close the page and OMG forget reading about the topic altogether, in that form.  Why?

There is no topic in the news that is so important.

PJMedia is not the only culprit, of course:  it seems as though almost every “newspaper” has created a PPV setup on the basis of:  “if we can’t derive income from ads, we’ll have to get the moolah from membership.”

Fair enough, I concede the point.  It always made sense back in the old print media days, but even then there were work-arounds.  Buying a magazine each week for $1.25 gets spendy — so the print companies made insanely-discounted offers such as “Get two years’ worth of magazines for only 25c per edition if you pay $6!”

And yes, the magazine contained ads — but those ads didn’t require you to read them before you could turn the fucking page, which is largely what digital media requires.

Finally, let me be completely honest about this.  If I’m going to pay to read a publication of some sort, my polymathic nature demands that I don’t confine myself to a single topic, unless it’s a topic I’m insanely interested in.  It’s why for many years I had subs to Gun Tests, G&A and the like.  (I also had a sub for TIME magazine, back before they became irretrievably leftoid, because they carried articles on lots of topics, not just political ones.)

But if I’m going to pay for a daily read, I want the publication to contain topics on just about every topic — and this is where Breitbart News  and PJMedia  fail, because there it’s 90% politicspoliticspolitics — and politics only constitutes about 40% of my interests.

And to be brutally frank, finding out someone’s guess about Georgia’s next senator is woefully insufficient for me to consider paying for the privilege.

Even more to the point, Redstate‘s top 6 articles have so little interest to me that I’m not going to bother opening any of them, regardless of whether there’s a paywall / ad unblocking demand involved.

Okay, #3 might be sorta interesting but hell, we all know that the Democrats aren’t going to give an attaboy to the good guy with a gun, so why bother?

So that’s why I do the digital sidestep.  And if the sidestep is eventually completely blocked, well then fukkem:  I’ll just go to the range or watch an unblocked video on why military pistols don’t matter.  Way more fun.

That Consummation

Travels, Two-Minute Hate

…devoutly wished:

…comes home to roost:

Spanish officials have admitted that a relentless campaign of anti-tourist protests in Majorca is ‘scaring away visitors’ – with locals claiming some resorts are now ‘completely dead’.

With British holidaymakers seemingly among foreigners turning their backs on the island, its tourism industry is in panic mode as officials overseeing the nightlife sector and tour companies warn that guests no longer feel ‘welcomed’. 

The restaurant association president, Juanmi Ferrer, gave a stark warning that the messaging of the protests is ‘scaring visitors away’. 

Ya think?  Then there’s this priceless bit of wisdom:

Miguel Pérez-Marsá, head of the nightlife association, told Majorca Daily Bulletin: ‘The tourists we’re interested in are being driven away; they don’t feel welcome and are going to other destinations.’

Well, yes;  except that those tourists you’re interested in — the hard-drinking, hard-partying Brits and Germans — are the ones who sparked all the protests in the first place.

Rock, meet hard place.

Here’s the ironic part.

I don’t actually blame the locals for trying to end the seemingly-endless summer invasions of their home towns — it’s as true for Amsterdam as it is in Majorca — but if your sole income is pretty much derived from tourists (unlike Amsterdam, for whom tourism is important but not critical), then I guess the full-time residents of the party places just need to endure… or move.

Unsaid in all this is the fact that young people (the partiers and drinkers) are almost by definition going to be louts and sluts when far from home and full of cheap booze, and so of course you can’t expect them to behave themselves.  While older tourists may be more desirable socially, the old ‘uns don’t spend anything like what the kids do — unless of course they’re buying themselves a holiday apartment, thus driving up the prices of local real estate and making the place unaffordable to the locals.

See where all this goes?

Equally ironic is the fact that a huge proportion of the local population are greatly dependent on those tourist dollars to stay alive, whether cab drivers, bartenders, waitresses, tour operators or restaurant owners.  And they’d all be harmed financially — i.e. bankrupted — as well as the rest who reap the “soft” benefits of tourism such as lower taxes and civic improvements, all made possible by the dollars / pounds / euros of the hated turisti.

Like I said, about those rocks and hard places…