Author: Kim du Toit

Calling Bollocks

Drive Time, Lies and Untruths, Numbers & Statistics

Here’s an example of “studies” that just set my hair on fire:

The LEAST reliable used cars revealed
Warrantywise has published data from its Reliability Index for older cars
A minimum of 100 examples of each car is needed to provide a reliability score

…but here’s where the turd hits the punchbowl:

It measures reliability based on the volume and cost of repairs to vehicles

Including cost of repairs means that.. wait for it… cars like Bentley and Audi are going to fall to the bottom of the list, regardless.

Here’s the scenario:

  • one of their “reliable” cars (e.g. the Dacia Sendero, a complete POS) may have ten problems after its warranty expires, but because the average cost of repair is $100 (Dacias being made of plastic and scrap metal), its score comes to 1000
  • an Audi A7 breaks down only twice, but its average cost of repair is $1,500 (because when quality stuff does break, it’s expensive to fix), giving it a score of 3000 — so the Audi is three times less “reliable” than the Dacia, according to the study.

But in terms of actual (instead of cost-weighted) reliability, your Dacia was in the shop ten times, compared to the Audi’s twice.

I’m not saying that’s what happened in the study (I don’t have access to the raw data), but that’s the problem when you add irrelevant factors to an equation.

The real problem lies with the title.  If Warrantywise had called their study “Total Cost Of Post-Warranty Ownership”, it would have given the output a better foundation.

Or if they were going to stick with reliability, they should have ignored cost and instead stressed weighting factors of “frequency of breakdown” and “magnitude of failure” (brake lights fail, no big deal;  transmission dies, much more serious).  That, at least, would have given prospective buyers a clue.

All that said, I’d still get one of these (with only 12,000 miles usage)

…over a poxy Mitsubishi anything.

(See what I did there?  About the same thing as Warrantywise did.  It’s called “bias”.)

Anyway:  if you can afford to buy it, you should be able to afford to maintain it.

And can ignore silly studies.

Portent

Anarchist thugs, BaconLettuceMayo, Righteous Shootings

As the Left ramps up its little reindeer games, expect more of this kind of thing:

“As we’re walking down passing Fourth Street, a blue car just come swerving out into the middle of the street almost runs over a bunch of protesters and everybody around starts like smacking the car trying to get him to slow down,” the witness said.  “He pulls down his window and he fires three shots into the guy.  From point-blank.  No words no nothing.  And then rolls up his window and zooms off.”

I’m not saying this is a good thing — despite my Yosemite Sam online persona, I dread having to shoot someone again — but at some point, the “kill everybody” switch is going to be thrown by ordinary people, especially when these rioting thugs start blocking roads, stopping cars and trying to assault the drivers and passengers.

Used to be that peaceful protests were confined (by the police) to sidewalks, with lots of chanting, signs and so on.  Peaceful stuff.  But that police action seems to have gone by the board — whether by negligence or design I can’t say — and inevitably, as police presence diminishes, the thugs will become bolder and more violent as they get the impression that “We own the streets!”

So I blame city management for this — muzzling police has long been a hallmark of Leftist government — and if the winds have been sown, both rioters and their government backers can expect whirlwinds;  which will invite rioters to start carrying guns to these “peaceful protests”, and off we go on the hurricane of violence.

Which, by the way, is exactly what the Leftist nomenklatura wants to happen.

Monday Funnies

Funny Stuff

Well, the weekend fun is over.

Now the cleanup begins, with a little humor to alleviate the drudgery.

And remember, if you see a helpless young lady stuck with a broken down car:

…her boyfriend is probably hiding behind the bushes with a gun.

One Name, Two Different Bands

Music

When you hear the name “Fleetwood Mac” many people are unaware that there have been essentially two, maybe three versions of the band, all containing the brilliant rhythm unit of Mick Fleetwood on drums and John McVie on bass guitar.  That engine room remained unchanged for decades, and powered the band through all its various incarnations.

But the music that surrounded that rhythm unit was changeable.

Most people equate the Fleetwood Mac name with the drippy 1980s version which pumped out bouncy neo-ABBA megahits like “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” and “You Can Go Your Own Way”, and people who think this was the best version of Fleetwood Mac make the mistake of equating commercial success with musical value — “They sold a lot of records, so they must be good” (cf. Elton John, Britney Spears, Taylor Swift etc.).  (That’s actually the opinion of the recording industry, only those reptiles put it more honestly:  “Those longhaired assholes made us more money than the Small Faces or Steely Dan”.)

But the better band, by a country mile, was the first version — originally called “Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac”, which differentiates them from the later popcorn Mac.

And all this came from the notice yesterday that Mac’s founder Peter Green had just died, at age 73.

Now Green was an absolutely brilliant blues guitarist — at the time, technically quite the equal of people like Jeff Beck, Paul Kossoff and other British blues players of the era — but like most lead guitarists, he was a hopeless head case so his music never achieved the level of Beck et al.  That doesn’t mean they were bad — anything but — but his blues-drenched music, lyrics and psychodelia were not, to put it mildly, commercially attractive.

Take a listen to Man Of The World, and pay especial attention to the lyrics — and that was about as commercial as they got.  Even old standards like I Need Your Love So Bad were given the Peter Green treatment.

And let’s not forget Black Magic Woman — the original Green version, as it turns out, not the salsa Santana copy.

And when this Fleetwood Mac weren’t doing old-fashioned slit-your-wrist blues, they were causing record industry executives to tear their hair out with instrumental songs like Albatross and incomprehensible free-form ditties like Oh Well (which came in two parts, thus ensuring it would never get airplay on the radio stations of the time).  Needless to say, it’s one of my favorite Mac songs.

Of course, it didn’t last.  Peter Green lost his mind, lived on the streets, and Fleetwood Mac went into their 1b) version, which I also rather liked because shortly before he quit, the band had got guitarists Danny Kirwan (who wrote their only truly commercial hit Green Manalishi) and Bob Welch, as well as the incomparable blues singer Christine Perfect (who’d sung Chicken Shack’s I’d Rather Go Blind, and later married bassist McVie).

Then it all went to shit.  The band broke up, all the guitarists and singers were fired, Fleetwood and the two McVies moved to the United States, and out of the shit eventually came the version containing the warbly Stevie Nicks and commercial songwriter Lindsay Buckingham, and the rest, as they say, is history (as chronicled here).  And I’m not interested in it.

When you have Bill Clinton using one of your songs as a campaign anthem… well, that says it all, really.

But any guitarist of any worth knows all about Peter Green, his virtuosity and his contribution to music.

R.I.P.

Screening

BaconLettuceMayo, Entertainment

I see that Amazon Prime has added a movie category:

…etc.

Of course, putting a “Black” identifier also allows Eeeevil Raycissss to put their own filter on the thing (“I’m not gonna watch any of that shit” ), which is kinda sad.  What it does do is help identify which “Black” movies are decent movies in their own right (Flight, Out of Time  etc.) in that the movies are watchable and the appearance of Black lead actors is incidental and not an essential part of the movie.  It also helps identify which movies are just BLM-style agitprop (e.g. Hurricane , which is to actuality as Braveheart  was to Scottish history or Inglourious Basterds  was to WWII — a wild approximation).

Speaking of wild approximations and Nazis, last week I watched the first episode of Amazon’s The Hunters  (about hunting down old Nazis in the 1970s), and won’t be watching any more of them. (The episode synopses alone in that link should justify hanging for whoever wrote such shit.)  Fucking hell, what a load of bullshit.  Never mind casting Al Pacino (!) as an old Jew — his thick Noo Yawk accent covers a multitude of sins — but the plot seems to have been written by a teenager, full of holes, glaring historical inaccuracies — inspired by true events my ass — and improbable situations.  (Quentin Tarentino has a lot to answer for.)  Worst of all, it’s positioned as comedy — which it is, a little — but frankly, it is to its subject matter as Blazing Saddles  was to the settling of the West.

I read a meme a couple weeks back which stated despairingly:  “I finished Netflix” and I’m starting to get there myself.  The problem with movie streaming is that the demand for fresh content is insatiable, which means that a lot of shit is being made that should never have got past the first read-through — good grief, the stand-up comedy show offerings alone need about a 70% culling, what a load of unfunny people — and just because Amazon and Netflix have more money than the Vatican doesn’t mean that they should be turning out all this dreck.  I can just see the executive meetings:

“We need ten new movies by next month.  Any new scripts?”
“Yeah, there are two which talk about rednecks fighting Blacks and Jews.”
“Documentaries?”
“Could be, if we need docs instead of features.”
“Okay, greenlight both.  We’ll decide where to put them later.”

I’m not even going to mention the outright propaganda movies which talk about eeevil banksters and Global MegaCorp, to name but two favorite topics of AmaFlix’s offerings.

The nice thing about modern technology is that we’re given lots of choice when it comes to entertainment.  Unfortunately, the choice is often between a plate of dogshit and a bowl of cold puke.

Better And Better

Men & Women, Righteous Shootings, The Gun Thing

Remember the Afghan girl who shot two Taliban assholes dead after they’d killed her mom and dad?  Good stuff, huh?

But wait:  there’s MOAR!

A teenage girl hailed a hero for gunning down two Taliban extremists who shot her parents dead in Afghanistan ‘killed her own husband’ when she opened fire, according to fresh reports.
Qamar Gul, 15, was married to one of the two attackers she shot with an AK-47 after he tried to seize her back in a family feud.

Well, that’s going to be a tough one for gun-confiscating feministicals to get their heads around…