More Inclusive

I see that the Black Livers Matter protesters have banned Whitey from their planned riot in Philadelphia on April 15, to nobody’s surprise except perhaps the New York Sodding Times. Oh, did I say “riot”? I meant “meeting”, of course. (Anyone have a line on the over/under on a riot happening anyway? Or is nobody taking that bet?)

Now, I have heard rumblings from certain quarters that not having any White people at this “meeting” will be a Good Thing, because then when the BLU-82 “daisy-cutter” is dropped, there’s less chance of collateral casualties.

I have to say, I think that’s short-sighted thinking, and might even be rayciss. Perhaps. But here’s why I think that idea is flawed: considering the kind of White people who would attend such a “meeting” to show their solidarity with the BLT Movement, would you not want their molecules to be part of that daisy-cutter’s smoke cloud as well?

 

To ask the question is to answer it. Because inclusivity.

“Dear Dr. Kim”

“Dear Dr. Kim,
I recently discovered that when we were still married, my ex-husband was having sex with our child’s nanny. He got her pregnant and paid her a huge sum of money after she had an abortion. What can I do to feel better?”

Mel B, Los Angeles

Dear Mel:
I’m a little confused: are you upset because your husband fucked the nanny, or that he paid her 300 grand that he should have spent on you?
As for feeling better about the whole shambles, there’s not a lot I can say which will help you. However, I can make it easier for this situation not to reoccur in the future, by offering you this advice:

1. don’t let your next husband hire the nanny, and
2. when you hire a nanny in the future, try to hire one who looks like this:

…rather than one who looks like this:

You blithering idiot.

— Dr. Kim

No Excuse Necessary

With all the brouhaha about fake news, cooked data and other lies fed to us by politicians, scientists, government agencies, the media and so on, it should come as no surprise to anyone when I remind you all that my policy is not to trust information from any source, even when it’s apparently good news or supports one of my long-held beliefs or opinions. Like this one:

A glass of Merlot or Sauvignon Blanc could give your brain an all-over workout.
Drinking wine engages more of the brain than ‘any other human behavior’, according to one leading neuroscientist.
Professor Gordon Shepherd, from the Yale School of Medicine, said drinking wine sparks a reaction in both the sensory and emotional parts of the brain.

It is nice to have Science! endorse one of my long-held beliefs, although I must question whether Sauvignon Blanc has any of those properties (a decent cabernet or burgundy, however…).

And as I’ve always said, a meal without wine is… breakfast.

Lately, I haven’t been drinking much wine simply because I’ve been dining solo (Doc is working some insane hours at the moment), and I can’t drink booze by myself. (Can’t and not won’t. Seriously: no matter how much I may feel like a drink, if it’s not part of a social occasion the chances are excellent that at least half of it will be left untouched in the glass. I’ve been that way my entire adult life.) But if I buy those little single-serve wine bottles the next time I visit Ye Olde Liqueur Shoppe (say, this afternoon), I could probably overcome that habit and help my tired old brain out.

…even though next week I’m probably going to discover from some other doctor that drinking wine with a meal causes herpes or some such bullshit.

Screw ’em all; I’m going to do what I’m going to do, and a pox on anyone who wants to stop me. (I’ve been that way too, my entire adult life.)

 

Interesting Situation

Here’s an interesting situation:

A widower who lost his wife to cancer was accused of being a paedophile by Travelodge staff because he booked a double room for him and his daughter.
Craig Darwell, 46, was taking Millie, 13, to visit Thorpe Park and was forced to book the double room in Chertsey, Surrey, because there were no others available.
But when he checked in, suspicious staff demanded that he show them his daughter’s ID.
Mr Darwell, who lost his wife to leukaemia when Millie was just four, explained that he did not have ID for his daughter and instead showed staff pictures of them together when she was a baby.
But even after seeing them, staff called the police and he and his daughter were forced into separate rooms and interviewed by a police officer.

Needless to say, the daughter was traumatized by the whole thing,

Here’s why I think this is an interesting situation. I know, hotels should MYOB and all that: the days of refusing to let rooms to unmarried couples and such are long past, and we have Moved On.

However: pedophilia is a crime after all, and the hotel  staff has every right to be suspicious — they could be held culpable if they allowed a criminal act to be perpetrated on their premises when there was evidence that such a crime might be committed.

Where this hotel screwed up was involving the Filth (sorry, but it’s a Brit story) right from the get-go, instead of taking the father to one side, quietly explaining their concerns, and letting him have his say. The problem, of course, is that 13-year-olds don’t have ID, and proving paternity for a man (like this unfortunate guy) could be problematic. Nevertheless, having baby pics (as this guy did) is prima facie evidence, I think, that he’s just a proud dad and not Chester The Molester, and the hotel should have apologized and let the matter drop. I bet the guy would even have thanked them for their concern — I probably would have.

The reason that this story resonates with me is that it could quite easily have happened to me. Back when the Son&Heir was a youngin, we lived apart — I in New Jersey, and he with his mother in Chicago and later, Texas — and I used to fly down to spend weekends with him every month. And of course, we’d check into a local hotel as our base of operations. So had the above chain of events happened to me, it would have been unpleasant, to say the least, and proving my paternity equally problematic.

As I said, I can see the hotelier’s concern, but I am excoriating them for their insensitivity and clumsiness, and I am especially angry at the fucking police for treating this guy like a criminal when it was so obvious that he wasn’t. It’s a transparent case of bullying someone because you can, and not because it’s justified. The whole matter could have, and should have been handled discreetly and sensitively by both the hotel and the cops, but clearly, both sets of bureaucratic fools possessed neither characteristic.

Do you realize what would have happened to this man (and his daughter) had some bastard cop decided to arrest him? Court cases, legal fees, sex offenders list etc,. etc., etc. And don’t tell me that this couldn’t happen, because if we’ve come to learn anything in today’s 1984 society, it could.

I am generally loath to involve The Lawyers, and because this happened in Britishland, not much can be done because Britain. But these amateur Sherlocks need to get their pee-pees whacked, and this should be actionable, if for no other reason than that the man’s daughter was traumatized by their blundering actions — yeah, why not show concern for a young girl’s well-being post facto?

Grrr grrrrr grrrrrrr….

So Lemme Get This Straight

A bunch of people of the LGBTOSTFU persuasion had a little “gay” dance party outside Ivanka Trump’s house the other night. (That’s not the slant of the story, but stay with me here.) I guess this event was supposed to be “provocative” or “daring” or “Resist!” or whatever, you know, what with Trump planning to stick homos into concentration camps and all that [eyeroll].

The only problem is that the Trumps weren’t at home. In terms of relevance, therefore, the gesture makes about as much sense as this one:

…but maybe I’m just reading this all wrong.

Only In Cambridge

From The Englishman comes news of this atrocity:

A development of luxury homes in Cambridge has been daubed with graffiti – written in Latin, of course.
Vandals spray-painted the new five-bedroom river-front houses with the words Locus in Domos Loci Populum.


Locals have said the messages, which appear to be a protest against the development, could “only happen” in the university city.
The homes, in Water Street, Chesterton, priced from £1.25m are on the site of an old pub.
Cambridge University Professor of Classics, Mary Beard, said: “This is a bit hard to translate, but I think what they’re trying to say is that a lovely place has been turned into houses.”

Oh, good grief, it’s not hard to translate at all. What the graffiti actually means is “Private homes from public land.”  (What makes her mis-translation worse is that it’s a classical — i.e. republican Roman — sentence construction, and not Byzantine or European Medieval, so it should be well within her wheelhouse.)

Sometimes I fear for the fate of Western culture, when graffiti-protesters know more about Latin than do university professors. Or when I understand Latin better than Mary Beard, for that matter. They must have had a special deal on Classics degrees at Tesco the day she got hers.


Update: I got an email from a Brit Reader who says that the real atrocity is labeling those houses as “luxury”. I agree.