The only reason to watch morning TV in Britishland: Cat Deeley.
Author: Kim du Toit
ASUS Delenda Est
Quick recap of my laptop woes:
- Several weeks back the thing bricked on me. One minute typing, the next thing black screen, totally dead and unresponsive. All efforts to revive are fruitless, including long chats with online support staff. Off to Best Buy (an ASUS repair facility).
- The Geek Squad informs me that they don’t do any warranty repairs on ASUS machines that they themselves have not sold. Nice. So I send the thing to ASUS, imagining fondly that since I only purchased this POS in January of this year, that it is still under warranty.
- It isn’t. [50,000 very bad words redacted] So I tell ASUS to return the brick to me, because I’m not comfortable having repairs done at a remote location (Indiana, incidentally) when, if I’m going to have to pay for the fucking repairs, I’d prefer to have the job done locally. So off I go to Micro Center (Dallas). This was yesterday (Monday) morning
- Micro Center gets on it right away — I mean, I got a sitrep text message only an hour after I got back home. That’s about the only good news.
- Apparently, the motherfuckingboard is kaput. On a brand-new computer. Cost to replace: $380 (part) + $150 (labor). For a machine that cost around $500 new. But:
- None of Micro’s vendors have the board in stock, and ASUS themselves are looking at a 4-17 week resupply time.
My options seem to be:
- Grit my teeth and have the repair done, continuing to stumble along for the next 2-4 months on my old HP laptop with its occasional freezing-up, malfunctioning keys and broken chassis.
- Buy a new replacement machine* from Micro Center — average cost for a similar-to-my-ASUS machine, about $600-$700 which I don’t have.
- Try to reinstall my whole fucking life onto some other (secondhand) laptop, of which a couple of you generous souls sent my way, but which I cannot get to function. (I have the best Readers on the Internet.)
- Migrate to New Wife’s desktop PC, which is tucked away in a dark corner of our tiny apartment, and has NONE of the features of any laptop, and by that I mean a decent keyboard, sufficient power and storage, Win10 (okay, I can live with that), all while I’d have to sit on an ancient office chair which will cause me to have back problems, guaranteed.
To say that I am angry does not begin to describe my mood right now.
And oh, by the way: if anyone out there is thinking of buying an ASUS machine in the near future; DON’T.
*New Wife has okayed this option, but it still sticks in my craw.
From Comfortable Heritage To Modern Banal
We’ve all seen how modernist logo design has turned the proud familiar into simplistic trash:
…and of the recent Cracker Barrel rebrand we will not speak, as they’ve been forced into a U-turn.
Now if one thinks of modernistic Philistines and Wokery Gone Mad in the civic sense, it’s hard to imagine a better example than that “blueberry in a bowl of tomato soup”, Austin TX. Who have “progressed” from a traditional city seal to… well, a 1970s-era representation of a homeless person’s tent shelter:
Bloody hell. It’s an encapsulation of everything that’s wrong with the Left: ahistorical, simplistic and ugly.
Stable Door
I see that the psycho who fatally stabbed that Ukrainian refugee girl on a train in Charlotte NC has been caught and charged with murder.
That’s all well and good; but I don’t think we should stop there. Apparently, Our Stabby-Boy has a long and storied history of psychotic behavior, well known to the Awfforiteez in Charlotte.
I wanna go all Hammurabi on the assholes who let this bastard loose to roam the city. Let them be charged with murder too — or at minimum as accessories to murder — because they are as culpable as he is.
And I don’t care if he is “mentally incompetent” or any of the excuses dreamed up by doctors and lawyers for cases like this. Fucking hang him, shoot him or give him the Cyanide Ride. Now.
Because as sure as I’m sitting here, you have to know that at some point the details of his hideous crime will be forgotten and he’ll be released onto the streets, again.
In which case I will definitely be calling for the immediate execution of all the people who enabled this to happen.
News Roundup
Like Cracker Barrel and Jaguar, the old label is still better than the stupid new one. But that’s not important; this is:
...these findings are supported by IPCC models, so it’s actually safe to assume that the Gulf Stream is in excellent condition.
...I’m going back to using aerosol deodorants, to do my bit to combat Global Warming Climate Cooling Change.
How about some ICE NEWS:
...but but but CalGov Newsom says there’s no crime in California. Could he be lying?
Speaking of crime:
...South Africa? Nope: California.
...as MN’s strict gun laws aren’t working, the federal ones will work so much better, you see.
Speaking of lying little bitches:
Poor Little Immigrant Girl Makes Good
...and all it took was to be elected to Congress. In Minnesota.
On the same topic:
...yeah; not gonna happen, not even in Minnesoduh.
More stupidity, Celebrity Division:
...stick to selling yoga pants for fatasses, dimwit. And:
...clearly, this one hasn’t been reading the newspapers recently. So out of the frying pan and on to the gas ring she goes.
And in the Great Cultural Exchange Experiment:
...yeah, that’s going about as well as you’d expect.
On the Domestic Resistance Front:
...yeah, the response from all those White Gold Coast liberals (like Fatboi) must have the Guard really worried.
...thing is, most Americans actually support what ICE is doing, unlike the fucking Commies.
Still more from the Crime & Punishment Division:
...female prison guards will be renamed “prisoner comfort staff” any day now.
In Education News:
...tragedy or irony? I report, you decide.
Next comes link-free 
...don’t even ask for a link. No man should.
And in 
:
...and I still couldn’t sing one of her songs at gunpoint.
And on that sour note, we end the news.
Another Pointless Panic
Some doctor bloke has come out with a chilling warning about two everyday analgesics, taken by… well everyone except him, it seems:
Dr Dean Eggitt, GP and CEO at Doncaster Local Medical Committee, warns patients against taking paracetamol, which is also known as acetaminophen in some countries, and ibuprofen anything more than occasionally, saying that they can cause serious harm.
He said: ‘All these simple over the counter medications can actually prove fatal in the wrong doses—and some, like paracetamol, within a week.
‘It’s a huge problem and people just don’t recognise the risk.’
I should point out that the article also says this:
Paracetamol and Ibuprofen—used by millions daily to treat everything from headache to fevers—[are] safe when taken correctly.
No kidding. As my good friend Doc Russia always says: “Dosage is important.”
The whole point of analgesics is that they offer temporary relief from pain — e.g. a headache — so popping a couple for that purpose poses no problem to pretty much anyone.
But if you’re suffering from a permanent raging headache, the solution is not to pop ten pills a day ad infinitum; in that situation, you need to get checked by a doctor toot sweet because you may have a brain tumor or similar.
Excuse me for asking, but what fool doesn’t know this?
Of course, if you’re suffering from permanent crippling pain — from sciatica or some other ailment that isn’t curable by surgery or therapy — then you have a different kind of problem, and I feel terribly sorry for you. (My own gout — since mercifully abated — made me quite sympathetic to this situation, believe me.)
But let’s face it: overdosing on anything is going to have a bad effect on your health, whether aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen or even water.
The old saying “Everything in moderation” is as valid today as it ever was. There’s no need for “chilling warnings” unless people are being completely stupid about the situation.
Wait…