Month: December 2025

Good Point

Bad News

This is an excellent point:

I couldn’t agree more.  I find it particularly depressing that even aggregators like Insty link mostly to these places — and I understand that Insty was the actual founding blogfather to the original PJMedia (Pajamas Media) so his loyalty and ties thereto are perfectly understandable.

But that whole media conglomerate known as

may be starting to get up my nose.

Apart from anything else, they’re an incestuous little bunch, journalistically speaking, and cover the same news items as each other, swapping columnists and opinions like it’s some 1970s suburban Connecticut key party.

I’m not suggesting that they merge into some ur-Fox News organization because that really would be a dangerous single point of failure.  And yes, I understand that writers need to be paid, reporters’ expenses reimbursed, bandwidth costs covered and so on.

TANSTAAFL, and we conservatives are not freeloaders — except that when our exposure to news is slowly disappearing into the coils of a paywall python, that is not a healthy thing.

Right now, conservative media is tiptoeing along the tightrope that many mainstream news outlets are, trying to strike some kind of balance by making some articles free while lodging others behind a paywall.

That’s fine;  but of late, if I find that a particular news item seems to be worth my reading but it’s behind a paywall — any paywall — I then just resort to searching for an outlet that carries it without that restriction, or getting access to an Internet archive.  And I’m usually successful.

That’s not true of the commentary / editorials at all, because I’m perfectly capable of forming my own ideas on a topic;  so any paywalled opinion piece (e.g. Vodkapundit) is simply ignored.  (And Stephen and I go back many, many years together, so it really pains me to have to say this.)  It’s especially true when I know that my own opinion is likely to parallel or coincide with that of the author, because then I’d simply be paying for something akin to my own thoughts.  That’s just silly.

I’d get a Twatter account, only I don’t need to be exposed to the madness of crowds.

I don’t even mind advertisements, as long as they’re passive (like the old newpaper/magazine type) and don’t pop up shouting at me or linking me to their buy-me website (and thereby having me become part of their consumer giga-database exploitation schemes).  Fuck that for a tale.

I don’t have a solution to all of this, other than to suggest that appealing for the occasional donation (in place of drip-drip-drip bank account bloodletting subscriptions) might be a better approach.  Given my age and therefore precarious financial state, any subscription is a non-starter.

But I absolutely share Mr. George MF Washington’s opinion, so I think the Big Conservative Brains* need to figure it out.

*you can quit that derisive laughter, now.

News Roundup

Bad News

There isn’t one because I’ve been too busy.  Take comfort in the one piece I did manage to (un)cover:


...not at all bad for a 53-year-old granny, and nobody cares what she eats anyway:

Till next week.

Sand In The Shoe

Corporate Fuckery, Drive Time, Technology, Two-Minute Hate

Over here, a couple of guys gripe about ten most irritating things about modern cars.  To save you time, I’ve listed them here, with my thoughts:

  • Beeping — It’s like being locked in your car with a nagging Catholic/Jewish mother:  do this, don’t do that, why haven’t you etc. etc.  Whether it’s seatbelts, lane changing (more of that later) or any one of the many things that someone else thinks that you should/shouldn’t do, I am often tempted just to cut the fucking wires to the speaker.
  • Wireless phone chargers — I haven’t come across this nonsense myself because I last bought a car in 2015, but the guys in the video sum it up perfectly:  it makes your phone hot, and doesn’t perform as advertised unless your phone is perfectly positioned.  It’s all part of making everything bluetoothed instead of cabled.
  • Artificial engine noise — First they soundproof the car, and then because some drivers would actually like to hear the sound the car makes, or want their car to sound all shouty without the necessary engine to make it so, the car pipes in fake engine noise.  If that’s not a good analogy for the A.I./fake/digital/artificial times we live in, I can’t think of a better one.
  • Voice-activated assist — I call this “creeping Alexa”, where one has to rely on some fucking software to recognize your voice (which it often can’t, with comical / disastrous consequences), all instead of you just turning a switch or pushing a button.  And speaking of which:
  • Screen buttons instead of actual switches — There’s no excuse for this, and this has nothing to do with “safety” (the usual excuse) because the plain fact of the matter is that screen switches are cheaper than mechanical switches, and that saves the manufacturer money (which savings are never passed on to the customer, needless to say).  And speaking of safety:  the screen buttons require that one be at the correct screen to enable the things to work;  if not, one has to scroll backwards or forwards until the correct screen puts in an appearance — and all this requires taking one hand off the steering wheel for an extended period, and taking one’s eyes off the road.  Anyone else see a potential problem here?
  • Modern headlights are too bright — I’ve noticed this trend, and it’s fucking dangerous to other drivers, especially in rainy and/or night-time conditions.  You’re not having to land an airliner on a narrow runway;  you’re driving down a street, FFS, with oncoming traffic.  (And if you’re out in the boonies and need brighter lights, add a spotlight bar.)
  • High-gloss finishes (e.g. piano black) — I don’t even like shiny finishes on gun stocks (hello, Browning!), and I see no need for something similar in a car that is basically a dust/fingerprint collector.
  • Subscription services / features — Once again, just another way for auto manufacturers to bleed money out of the customer once the car has been sold.  The nice part of this is that not having some of these features (seat warmers, etc.) has the effect of taking us back to earlier times when we managed perfectly well without all these luxury geegaws.  But I await with bated breath the time when things like windshield wipers, turn signals and high beams all become something you have to pay monthly fees for, instead of them just being part of the (horribly-inflated) sticker price of the car.  And when I say “bated breath”, I mean when the breath becomes “unbated”, that will be a signal to load up the AK.
  • Start/stop buttons — I have ranted about this piece of automotive excrescence more times than I can count.  Yes, I know that you can disable the thing;  but the latest wheeze from these godless fucks is to make it reset every time you switch off the car, which means you have to disable the function as part of the starting procedure every time you want to drive somewhere.   The days of getting in, turning a key and moving on are so far in the distant past that one wonders how the Three Wise Men made it to Bethlehem without satnav — which, by the way, is fast becoming yet another subscription service.
  • Lane assist / traffic distancing — It’s one thing when these functions beep at you as a warning;  it’s another thing altogether when the functions takes over the driving for you.  Apart from the foul nanny philosophy behind the thing, it can also be life-threatening.

Now go and watch the video — especially the last couple of minutes — because those guys are funny where I’m just fucking enraged.

Un-Cluttering

Friends and Family, House & Home

The last time I spent in the company of The Divine Sarah (and her hubby, shuddup you dirty-minded sods) was when she lived in her Colorado house.  It was a lovely place, and I have to confess I did feel the occasional pang of envy.

Her new place?  Apparently, not so lovely.

Of course, what hurt Sarah was that she moved the entirety of her old house’s contents into (I assume) a house of similar dimensions, and she and Dan brought everything with them.  That, I could have told her, was always going to be a mistake, because a rule of thumb when moving is that you always repeat always de-clutter before the move.

When New Wife and I moved a couple years back, it helped that we were losing a bedroom (and its closets and its bathroom), so we had to get rid of an unconscionable number of things that we decided we were never going to need again.  (Sarah talks of a couple SUVs of stuff headed to Goodwill:  that’s beginner activity where I come from.)

What’s interesting is that of course I had to de-clutter bigly, back after Connie died and I had to empty our enormous Plano house (seven 30′ dumpsters… how’s that for clutter?) so I could remodel and sell the place.

And New Wife and I moved into an apartment, she bringing only a couple of suitcases-worth of her stuff from Seffrica, and I bringing only the remnants of the stuff I’d kept from the old house (less than a quarter of a single-car garage’s worth).  And we still managed to accumulate possessions during our time in that apartment so that when we last moved, there were many trips made to Goodwill etc.

I might as well have been in the Army for all the moves I’ve made in my lifetime — the biggest one being from Seffrica to the Land Of The Free in The Great Wetback Episode of ’86 (three suitcases, from a huge townhouse in Johannesburg), and the next biggest was the aforementioned one from the Plano house.

Obviously, in terms of stuff let go, the Seffrican move caused the most:  stereo set, a thousand or so albums, furniture, 400 bottles of wine — what the hell was I thinking? — clothing, a garage-full of tools and two cars.  (Now that I think of it, even the relinquished clothing was ridiculous:  a dozen suits, a dozen pairs of shoes, two dozen dress shirts… oy, it hurts my brain just to think about it.  And by the way, all the clothing still fitted me, so it wasn’t even that any were particularly old or threadbare.)

Recently though, I’ve learned to be absolutely ruthless in paring back stuff.  It helps that we have an apartment that cannot contain anything more than what we have, so whenever we see something we’d like to buy for the house, the first question is always what we’ll have to toss out — new stuff is replacement, not additional.  This includes clothing, even.

Anyway, let me just give y’all an example of what I’m talking about.  This is our breakfast nook/dining room:

And no, it wasn’t posed or set up, but completely impromptu:  I was lying on the living-room couch and thought it would make an interesting still-life pic.  (That’s why the side pieces of art aren’t hanging symmetrically, sue me.  They are now, though.)

In Comments, feel free to share the details of your most wrenching move.  Or just tell me what caused you the most anguish to let go…

End Of An Era

Gratuitous Chick Pics

Like so many of that age, La Bardot has moved on and joined her world of happy bunnies and kittens, so to speak.  And few embodied those two species (sex kittens and copulating bunnies) as well as she:

So let us pause, and pay tribute to some other French kissers from the days of yore:

Anouk Aimee

Capucine

Corinne Calvet

Catherine Deneuve

Michèle Morgan
 

Françoise Hardy

Claudine Auger

Dominique Sanda

…etc.