She passed away just this past week, at age 87. I’ve featured Claudia Cardinale before (here), but this magnificent woman truly deserves a full post all to herself. Let’s start with the black & white series:
And still beautiful, even as she aged:
Next week, Claudia in color.
Yup, it’s time for yet another of Kim’s Insane Trip challenges. This one, however, is completely different.
Your trip is to drive along this course, taking as long as you want, during the months of June and August.
The starting point is Phoenix AZ, and you are at liberty to take either the easterly side (in an anticlockwise direction) or the westerly side (clockwise).
Now Alert Readers will note a couple of things about this trip, namely:
Which is a critical part of the challenge, because:
There will not be any paved roads. The route will consist of gravel, rural or tracks only, and will include shallow river crossings, mountain passes, steep climbs and descents as well as long stretches of desert or semi-desert roads. The route, while testing, will not include any of the ridiculous “climb over boulders” or “cross that ravine” nonsense. Any of the vehicles listed below can make the trip easily.
Each car will be fitted with a GPS device that will prove that you actually drove through the various checkpoints that will be scattered along the route.
The cars/trucks may carry spare tires and a decent complement of spare parts of things that are most likely to break. You may stop along the way in any of the small towns you get to for gas, running repairs, oil changes etc., but the costs are out-of-pocket.
In the finest Top Gear tradition, you will be accompanied by a maintenance / repair vehicle (which has to be able to follow you on your chosen road) to make medium-serious repairs en route. (Think: modern-day Range Rover or Toyota Land Cruiser.)
You may take as many or as few companions for the trip as you wish, constrained only by the passenger capacity of your vehicle. (Suggested list: best friend, mistress/wife/girlfriend, mechanic etc.) Or you can just go solo, for that matter. Specify in Comments.
Overnight accommodation will be provided as needed, or you may want to just pitch a tent and camp wherever you are. Remember: there is no time limit.
Now what kind of vehicle, you ask, should you consider to make such a trip? The choices are listed below, and they come to you gratis (see below for the stipulations). In other words, when you follow the link (in the pic) to see the car’s specific details, ignore the price. What you’re looking for are the following:
Needless to say, this being my challenge, there are no new cars — in fact, there are no cars made after 1995 — although some of them are ground-up rebuilds or restomods, but there ya go. And you may not make any substitutions: stick to the list. Also, whether pictured or not, each will be fitted with a winch of sufficient power.
And while this is not a race, if you make it back to Phoenix inside a certain time frame you get to keep the car. It’s your choice whether you want to race for that prize, or just enjoy the trip for as long as it takes. What the hell, it’s a free car, right?
Finally, assume that all vehicles are in top-class running order.
Here, then, are your choices.
From Kurt Schlichter:
“Quick, everybody care what a bunch of impotent, fussy foreigners think about us! No, really, we should give a damn that some herring-gobbling fjord jockey is mad about Donald Trump. Yeah, Norwegians totally matter. But not really. No foreigner matters. Not Canadians, not the English, not the Arabs (especially of the nonexistent Palestinian variety), not the Papua/New Guineans. Here’s the reality. Most foreigners are trash. Most people who aren’t Americans suck. And treacherous Americans who presume to leverage the puny outrage of second-rate cultures against ours deserve our contempt and mockery almost as much as the foreigners themselves. They think we’re dumb, New World rubes with too much in the way of guns, calories, and Jesus.
“In contrast, we barely think of them at all.”
And that’s only the beginning of his most excellent rant. Read it all, and chortle.
Snappy rejoinder #257:
I was reminded of this when I paid my monthly visit to the butchery (Hirsch’s Meats in Plano) a few days ago.
Some background: Hirsch makes South African boerewors (farm sausage), and they make it really well, to a recipe provided to them by a South African customer as a special order, but which turned out to be a gold mine for them when they made more and put it for sale in the freezer. Unsurprisingly, they have a large clientele of Seffricans, and one of the basket characteristics (told to me by Nancy Hirsch) is that it is the only product in their freezer which is bought in multiples — i.e. more than one pack per customer. I usually buy four at a time, which yields 12 boerewors sausages for my monthly consumption (New Wife doesn’t eat boerewors, never has, so I have them all to myself yum yum).
Now these are not your typical skimpy things like Nathan’s or Oscar Meyer hotdogs. Even after cooking, these are monsters and sometimes I can’t eat a whole one in a bread roll, but have to slice it longitudinally in half to be able to finish it. (The other half goes into the fridge for next day’s brekkie.)
Now this stuff is not cheap. A pack of three boerewors costs about $7.50 – $8.00, which sounds expensive and it is, but it’s a delicacy, made by hand (because of the very specific recipe) and as such very much worth the money. So I typically buy those four packs with a total ring of about $32.
Until the last time I went into the butchery, and discovered that the packs now cost $11 each.
So from now on, I’ll only be buying three packs at a time, yielding nine sausages for the month instead of twelve. Same amount of money, three-quarters of the product.
Which, by the way, is what I told the folks at Hirsch.
Look, I understand the business of retail product pricing; when it comes to foods, I understand it as well as anyone on the world because I did little else but study things like price elasticity and promotion pricing, for well over forty years.
But the plain fact of the matter is that now in my sunset years, I can no longer afford just to pay whatever the price sticker demands. I have a (very) fixed amount of money I can pay for groceries, which means that at some point, I have to cut back — as above — and make do with less. Fortunately, New Wife is an outstanding cook, so making meals from scratch and eating stews, curries and pasta dishes instead of boerewors hot dogs is not that much of a sacrifice, believe me.
But here’s the thing: once a year I host the family Christmas dinner (on Boxing Day and not the 25th), in which I myself prepare a prime rib roast. In the past, that prime rib has always come from Hirsch’s Meats because I’m not prepared to stint on quality for what is, even more than Thanksgiving, our family’s premium gathering of the year.
Well, this year and probably for the entire future, that prime rib roast will be coming not from Hirsch but from Walmart — something which I also told the Hirsch people.
Sic transit emptor.
If this one doesn’t make your blood boil, we can’t be friends.
An 11-year-old boy in Michigan did something most adults would hesitate to do. He saw a classmate pull out a loaded gun in a school bathroom, and instead of freezing in fear, he lunged, disarmed the student, and prevented what could have been another tragic headline.
Nazzo fast, Guido.
The Lansing School District announced that the child will face “disciplinary action” for his bravery. Why? Because the district’s beloved “zero tolerance” policy doesn’t distinguish between a kid wielding a gun and a kid taking it away to save lives. Bureaucrats love to tell us they’re “keeping schools safe.” But in reality, they’ve created a system where blind adherence to rules matters more than actual safety.
And the philosophy behind this bastardy is quite simple:
The message to this boy, and to every other student paying attention, is clear: Don’t be brave, don’t take risks, don’t step in to help. Just sit down, stay quiet, and hope someone else will save you. That’s the lesson public schools are drilling into kids: obedience over courage, paperwork over principle.
My personal opinion is that the school administration — every single member who voted for this expulsion — should be stripped naked and flogged in the school gym, in front of the entire school.
I don’t just want pain, I want humiliation for these bastards as punishment for trying to turn our kids into quivering cowards — into Europeans, if you will — and even worse, punishing heroism instead of rewarding it.
Feel free to suggest your own ideas in Comments. Be as creative as you want.
Your suggestions in Comments.