Author: Kim du Toit

Break Time

General

Time for me to take to the air again…

 

Yeah, today’s American Airlines economy class looks just  like that. [/sarc]

Anyway, I’ve decided to take a little vacation time, to show New Wife around the country a little.  Angie’s only been to most of north and west Texas, northern New Mexico and the bottom half of Colorado, so I decided to take her off to New England for a belated honeymoon.  Also, she loves the sea and beaches are in short supply in this neck of the woods.

As with most of my vacations, there’s very little planning involved other than a putative destination and well, that’s it.  We’ll be flying up there courtesy of frequent-flier miles, renting a car, then heading out to wherever.  I know New England pretty well, having been there several times since I first saw it in 1985, so I have a short list of places to go to.  Most of the trip, however, will be spent eating lobster, seafood bisque, clam chowder and fish ‘n chips, all washed down with copious amounts of Sam Adams / white wine.  She also wants to do something she calls “walks on the beach”, so I’ll have to let her show me how this is done.

 

Blogging will be sporadic, depending on where we are and whether wifi is available, but I’ll be back in the saddle next week sometime.  In the interim, content yerselves with some old-time rock ‘n roll pieces from the archives (some old links may not work, but that’s not critical, mostly).  See y’all later.

Wrong Direction

Business, Nannies

Now there’s this little trinket:

Amazon is selling a bracelet that gives you an electric SHOCK you when you eat too much fast food, bite your nails or spend too much time on the internet

Hmmm… I have an idea:  how about selling one of these little behavior-modification devices which is triggered when you’re spending too much time browsing the merchandise at amazon.com? 

No?

Then fuck off and die, you corporate fucking nanny pricks.  And take your little Stasi girlfriend Alexa with you to the crematorium.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD

“Here we are, after nearly 1,500 years of achievement in philosophy, poetry, architecture, science, music, art, and religion, yet we allow cultural troglodytes and other such ‘cool’ types to set the agenda.” — Taki

 

Best Of All

Entertainment

I see that director Franco Zeffirelli died a couple days back, and as always the Jackals Of The Press are talking about his “love of excess” and all the other irrelevant nonsense that they spout when they are confronted with genius.

The fact remains that of all movie adaptations of Shakespeare’s works, Zeffirelli’s Romeo & Juliet is the greatest — the closest to the original play, some of the best characters / casting (the Nurse and Mercutio being the best examples), with excellent cinematography and costuming.  It is quite possibly the perfect movie.

And then there’s Olivia Hussey:

 

And if for some inexplicable reason you’ve never seen Zeffirelli’s Romeo & Juliet, buy or rent it today.   No thanks needed;  it’s all part of the service.

Birth Year V: The Murkins, Part 2

Drive Time

This week as promised, we’ll look at the smaller U.S. car companies and their 1954 offerings:

DeSoto Firedome

DeSoto Powermaster

Hudson Hornet

Kaiser Special

Nash Metropolitan

Packard Caribbean

Studebaker Commander

I know the “Studdy” has many fans, but it’s only the best of a very bad bunch.  By popular demand, here’s the 1954 Corvette:

Thanks, but if we’re going to do 1954 sports cars, I’ll still take the Mercedes 300SL, thank you:

Which brings to the end of the 1954 Birth Year series.  Thank you all for playing along.

…and even though I don’t do Hallmark holidays, here’s one for all us dads, today:

And for the record, here’s Your Humble Narrator and the Son& Heir, each pic taken at age 23:

Didn’t even bounce.

Dangerous

Crime

[sorry this post is late — I set it to appear at 6pm, not 6am]

Apparently, the U.S. is not a safe place to be — in fact, there are 127 countries safer than ours.

I guess that it all depends.

Here in Plano, I see sights like this every morning in the pre-dawn hours — dozens of them, mostly jogging all by themselves, and I seriously doubt that you’d see much of this in, oh, Qatar (#31) or Oman (#69), let alone in Jamaica (#83).

Of course, I wouldn’t imagine you’d see many of the above in the South Side of Chicago or in Detroit, either, which just proves how dangerous averages can be.

What comes to mind immediately, by the way, is that according to the study, San Salvador and Honduras are ranked higher than the U.S. — begging the question as to why, then, thousands of their citizens are supposedly fleeing crime and persecution and flooding our southern border.

Actually, I call bullshit on the whole thing.  Reason:

South Africa is ranked one place higher than the U.S., at #127.

While there may be safe and unsafe places in the U.S., there are no  safe places in South Africa whatsoever.  As I said:  bullshit.