When I wrote yesterday’s piece about Pedro, I mistakenly scheduled it for today — hence its late arrival — and I only caught the mistake when New Wife asked me where the Saturday post was hiding. Sorry.
Month: August 2025
Modern Classic Beauty: Winona Ryder
She’s been around for so long, and had such a memorable early career, that it came as quite a shock to me that Winona Ryder is now in her early 50s. It’s also no surprise that she is almost always better than any of the movies she’s appeared in, with the possible exception of Beetlejuice and The End Of The Innocence. (Small surprise that she got an Oscar nomination for the latter, too.)
Nevertheless, you will find Winona in the dictionary under two headings: Gamine Beauty and Haunting Beauty, because she qualifies under both — just at different times in her life.
She is, I think, one of the most beautiful women ever filmed.
Pedro
Back in 2004, one of our training trips took us to Chile. We’d just come back from two weeks in Germany/Austria, and only a few days later saw us in the skies again, this time towards South America. None of us had ever been there before, so we looked forward to the chance keenly.
Santiago was nice, but the job kept us very busy, and I was only able to spend one day downtown with the kids, but whatever — we loved it and all said they’d be happy to return someday.
Then we added on a few days in Viña Del Mar, just over the river from Valparaiso, and that place we really loved.
Climate-wise, we were just heading into winter — May in the southern hemisphere — but that meant only light coats and sweaters, so we set about exploring Viña on foot.
What a lovely place.
One of the things we noticed about Viña was the plethora of stray dogs. Coming from the Land Of The Free (and most recently from Yurp) where all dogs are on leashes or indoors, this was a strange sight. There were scores, maybe even hundreds of dogs wandering about in the streets, some in groups/packs, others on their own. None of them gave any sign of being dangerous, so we just did what everyone else in Viña did, and ignored them.
On our third day there, however, one dog attached himself to us. He was a tan puppy of (duh) indiscriminate ancestry, and he trotted along with our little group, stopping when we stopped to window-shop or take pictures, then resuming the trip when we started walking again.
He was as cute as hell, and the kids named him Pedro. They would have petted him, except that Dad threatened them with death if they did so, because I sure as hell was not going to deal with the inevitable flea infestation that ensued.
After while, he would dart ahead of us towards the next street corner. The first time caused us a little panic because we thought he would run out into the street and get run over by a car, but Pedro was streetwise: he’d stop and sit at the edge of the sidewalk, glancing back over his shoulder, waiting for us to catch up. Then he’d walk across the street with us, his street smarts obviously telling him that he’d be safe with us.
Anyway, we got to the street that ran along the beach, and eventually we came upon a fishing pier that stuck out into the bay. Halfway along the pier was a hamburger stand and a long queue of people waiting to get served. (I know, Third World street food is muy peligroso, but the number of people reassured us.) So we got our burgers, and good grief they were among the best burgers we’d ever eaten, anywhere in the world (not to mention costing us only about 75c each). It was also the first time I’d encountered fresh avocado used as a spread on a hamburger bun… delicious.
So of course I had to get a burger for Pedro. What astonished all of us was that he didn’t snatch the food away, but took it gently from my hand and then lay under our table to eat it. He didn’t gulp it all down either, but ate it like a human: tearing off mouthfuls one at a time, eating slowly — much slower than my ravenous kids, come to think of it — and when I tossed him a few of the thick, wonderful fries, he ate them in similar fashion.
Anyway, we made our way back to the hotel, but Pedro got a shock because when he tried to follow us in the entrance, the doorman shooed him away, gently but firmly.
I will never forget the look of disappointment and sorrow on Pedro’s face.
He wasn’t waiting for us outside when we went out the next day, and as we walked around, we all kept looking for him, but he’d vanished; and every one of us was devastated.
The day after that we got in the car and drove up the coast. I’m pretty sure that had Pedro showed up and asked, we would have welcomed him, fleas and all, into the car for the trip.
We never saw him again.
Today’s Earworm
Wishbone Ash — and I loved playing this ditty, back in the day.
Another Sick Asshole
So the sicko responsible for the recent Minnesota school shooting has been identified as some trannie or other. Most notable about this sorry tale has been the response from both sides of the political debate.
To the Left, of course, it’s all about eeevil gunsgunsguns and How They Should All Be Banned.
To the non-Left, is just another example of how the Great Trannie Craze has unhinged kids’ minds.
I’m indifferent to both camps. Of course, the “Bans Guns Now!” bullshit doesn’t work for me for all the usual reasons (stop me if you’ve heard them all before): gun bans don’t work because evil people will always find a way to get them, and a universal gun ban would be impossible to implement and/or enforce, etc.
I’m also scornful of the “Trannie-ism Poisons Minds” mantra. I mean, yes it might well do that — and there seems to be an awfully high percentage of recent mass shootings / stabbings recently committed by trannies, despite the efforts of the police and Leftists to disguise the trend — but the simple fact of the matter is that the cause of mental illness is largely irrelevant. Some asshole might go on a spree because his girlfriend just left him, because he can’t get a girlfriend (the “incel” syndrome), because he recently got fired by the company where he ended up playing his reindeer games, because the victims are part of a group he hates, because a black dog told him to do it… or just because it was Thursday.
The reasons for the atrocity, therefore, are less important than the outcome of the the thing: innocent people got killed or wounded by some sick asshole. And looked at clinically, the weapons used (guns, knives, bombs, whatever) are largely irrelevant: whatever the tool selected, bad things happened.
Everyone seems to be obsessed with discovering the motive of the sicko, when in fact the motive is irrelevant: whatever drove the male/female/combination mass murderer to go all Texas Tower on innocent people, there’s not a whole lot we as a society can do about it.
And that’s the tragedy of the thing. Bodyguards all over the place — whether the Secret Service, police or Rent-A-Cops — will tell you that the hardest situation to prepare for is the Random Sicko because he gets to pick the victim(s), the place and the time.
As I see it, the only way one can try to prevent the mass shooting/stabbing/clubbing event is to be alert, be prepared and to be armed — whether as individuals carrying a gun, or by extension as an organization employing an armed security service. It may not be possible to prevent the atrocity, but it may be possible to contain it.
It really sucks that a Catholic school such as the one in Minneapolis should have to do the latter just to safeguard the children it’s looking after, and it sucks that I should have to carry a gun and three magazines to the supermarket on every visit, but that seems to be the way of the world these days.
Stable Door
Following on from the Minnesota Catholic school shooting we have this bullshit:
FBI director Kash Patel used a post on X to make clear the Minneapolis Catholic school shooting will be investigated as a “hate crime targeting Catholics.”
FFS. Talk about a waste of time.
In the first place, the thing is over. The sicko trannie shot up a church, killed and wounded a bunch of people and then offed himself/herself/whatever. I hate to sound cold about it, but what’s to “investigate”?
Of course it was a “hate crime targeting Catholics”, numbskull. The fucking loony talked all about it a hundred times on social media beforehand. But even if it was a “hate crime”: so what? Does it add to the posthumous legal punishment?
Kash, ol’ buddy: quit wasting your organization’s time on this idiocy. Use your agents to go after the Clintons, Soros, the H-1B fraudsters, the real estate fraudsters — you know, the people who committed crimes and are still alive to prosecute.
And by the way, if all this leaves you short of agents, then I have another word of advice: close down the ATF and reassign those agents into something that doesn’t involve harassing FFLs and other law-abiding gun owners.
Yer welcome.