Author: Kim du Toit

Under The Knife

Health

My eyes have been getting progressively worse over the past couple years, to the point where looking with my left eye is akin to peering through muslin. Yup; with age comes cataracts. So here’s what awaits me later today (squeamish warning):

…and I’ll be getting the right eye done too, in a couple of weeks. Fortunately, my eyedoc is an absolute artist at this surgery — he’s the same guy who carries a SIG 226 under his white coat… how bad could he be?

After a lifetime of shitty eyesight that not even Lasik could take care of properly, here’s hoping things will get better. Apparently, it does.

Wish me luck, y’all.

Update:  all done, no problems.  See you tomorrow.

Hall Of Shame

Bad News, Lies and Untruths

So PJMedia is an “objectionable” website, huh?

Wait till you go to Britishland. Here are a couple of websites I discovered were blocked, while I was Over There (in bold type):

I’m amused by the fact that weapons are lumped in with hate (or, for that matter, gore — as though Collectors Firearms have blood dripping from their antique bayonets or swords, FFS). It just shows how frightened these Brits are of… well, of everything. (Imagine being afraid of hatred.)

Amazingly, my website was not blocked under those auspices, because I surely feature all four of them on a regular basis* — a Good Thing they didn’t block me, or else I’d have gone over to Sky Broadband offices and shown them what “hate”, “gore” and “violence” really are. As for “weapons”:

Fuck off and die, Sky Broadband, you bunch of pussywhipped, nanny-hugging hoplophobe sissies. (Now that’s hate.)

I mean, if we can’t shoot ’em, can we at least flog them a little?

*I don’t do porn on these pages, but after seeing this timorous nonsense, I’m sorely tempted…

Gratuitous Gun Pic: Uberti 1873 & Stallion (.45 LC)

Gratuitous Gun Pics, The Gun Thing

In the comments to this post last week, Staff Martin mentioned that the glorious .45 Long Colt cartridge was “revolver-only” — meaning of course, that it couldn’t be chambered in a semi-auto pistol because of its rimmed cartridge case.

Of course, that only applies to handguns because there’s a plethora of rifles chambered for the .45 LC.

Which needless to say triggered one of my longtime fantasies of owning a rifle and handgun as “companion” pieces (i.e. with a shared cartridge chambering), such as these two exquisite offerings from Uberti: the 1873 “Sporting” rifle and the “Stallion” single-action revolver. Note the matching case-hardened finish, as a bonus:

Note too the octagonal barrel on the 1873, and the long tube magazine which holds twelve rounds. Now for the Stallion revolver:

Now I know that the purists are going to complain about my inclusion of reproductions rather than the original Winchester ’73 and Colt SAA , but have you seen the prices that the aforementioned are demanding these days?

And frankly, I love the case-hardened finish on these guns. They are drop-dead gorgeous.

Dangerous Shitholes

Numbers & Statistics

Here’s an interesting article, which ranks cities by the number of homicides per 100,000 population.

I am amazed by only two exclusions from the list: Chicago and Johannesburg, which I would have thought would be a lead-pipe cinch for top 10 placings, let alone being out of the top 50 altogether.

As for the U.S. cities that did make the list: they’re all run by Democrats, ergo all run according to Third World governance principles. There’s one other common factor, but I’m not going to say it because rayyyyciss.

Stupid Time

Two-Minute Hate

If you’re wondering why this post appeared earlier (or later) than you expected, it’s because you didn’t set your clocks forward.

Words cannot describe my dislike for the foolishness known as “Daylight Savings Time” (or, as Drew Carey [?] once described it, “Making yourself taller by cutting off your head, then standing on it”).

All the crap justifications for its creation (in the U.S., anyway) have been proven to be either false or else unknowable. Power savings, crisper vegetables (!), greater outdoor recreation: whatever was promised, it didn’t — and doesn’t — happen.

The only people who truly benefit from DST are retailers, who discovered that “increased” daylight hours caused more people to go shopping. (And of course, when Americans go shopping, they don’t walk across the street to the corner haberdashery, oh no: they get in their cars and zoom off en masse to the mall. So much for reducing power consumption.) So the Chambers of Commerce, naturally enough, are all over this silliness because dollars.

For the rest of us, it’s just a huge PITA — especially if, like me, you have a whole bunch of analog mechanical clocks in the house — and under the reign of Emperor Kim, the banning of DST will follow immediately after the Obama / Clinton / Pelosi / [insert your person of choice here] executions.

The Brits, by the way, are shackled to DST because in Scotland, the inhabitants really need the “extra” hour of daylight lest they become still more depressed and kill themselves in still-greater numbers. (Mr. Free Market suggests that instead of adding an hour, we subtract one to hasten this self-elimination process, but he’s still irritated that the British Army didn’t get to “finish the job” at Culloden, so we can ignore his fevered rantings for once.)

It seems as though at least one person at The Smithsonian agrees with me, not that I seek or need validation. And if The Donald wants to guarantee my vote in 2020, he’ll put an end to this crap by signing an Executive Order decreeing that the Federal Government will no longer observe DST (which, by the way, as the Chief Executive he is empowered to do). Besides, as any fule kno, time is malleable anyway.

Old Essays

Old Essays, The Gun Thing

I’ve had quite a few requests from Longtime Readers to republish some of my older essays, and sadly a lot of them seem to have crumbled into dust, digitally speaking. To my great delight, however, while paging through my archives, I stumbled upon all the old Gun Thing Articles I wrote lo those many years ago.

Unfortunately, a lot of them have become dated — overtaken by recent events, referring to obscure / forgotten public figures, and so on. So what I’d like to do is republish them, but I am going to “refresh” them with new perspectives, or else I’ll simply cut the offending passages out. In the next post you’ll see the first of these. I may make them a regular weekend feature; we’ll see.

What is quite interesting is how well a lot of them have stood up to time, whether in sentiment or, amazingly, in their predictions.

Enjoy.