Author: Kim du Toit

Calm Invective

Culture, Writing

Here’s a little oeuvre which deserves airing, despite the appalling grammar:  Indiana Jones And The Last Franchise.

Even though I was not familiar with about 60% of his cultural allusions, the writing was enough to engage me.  After all, you don’t need to be a military strategist to understand that combat is awful, bloody and destructive.  I especially liked this little turn:

And, if you ever haul yourself out of bed and find that you have little to smile about… just look up Disney on Google News. It may not bring you joy, but the schadenfreude will most likely bring a smile to your face. At least a little grin.

That happens early in the piece, and it gets better.  Here’s the pre-climax exposition:

My great-grandfather was a mason. A brick-layer, I mean, not the… well, you know the other type. He was a master of his craft. Back in the 20’s, his skill was in such high-demand that he was paid to travel the world and build structures in places like Shanghai and Glasgow that stand to this day. In an age of cheap, third-world labor, it can be a bit difficult to imagine the artistry, skill, and talent of a good mason. There’s more to it than slopping mortar onto a brick and stacking another on top. You just don’t see a lot of work like what he was doing, these days. Men like him labored to build cities not just for themselves, but their descendants. They spent their lives – some of them gave their lives – so that their descendants would live in a world that they themselves could scarcely imagine. They build us sprawling, glittering skylines of glass and steel and lights. Man-made miracles of engineering and architecture that would be, quite literally, incomprehensible to most humans from before a certain time.

Yet, the cities they built for us, that they left us, are no longer ours. My great-grandfather did most of his work in Pennsylvania and the North-East. He lived in Philadelphia, in a neighborhood his descendants can’t walk through, day or night. His house is still there. I don’t know who lives in it now, if anyone does. I don’t really want to know, either.

All I know is the fruits of his labors, his house, his city — it’s not just that they don’t belong to his descendants, and, arguably, the country he built them for. We can’t even enjoy them. They were wrested out of the hands of the people, and, without consent, broken, smashed, and destroyed by wicked people, who now hand us the smoldering ruins of our predecessors’ lifetime of work, and say with a smile, Here! We made it better! And, if you dare say otherwise, you’re an ungrateful asshole who should be grateful that they’re deigning to give you a damn thing.

Excellent stuff, and well worth the long read.

Sporting Chance

Crime

Looks like the scumbags are upping their game:

The world’s deadliest drug cartels have taken the concept of monster trucks to a terrifying level by retrofitting popular pickups with armour, battering rams, and machine gun turrets.

These heavily armed vehicles are used in pitched gun battles between cartels and the police or rival groups. They are known as “monstruos,” “rinocerontes,” or “narcotanques.” The cartels aim to demonstrate their dominance and intimidate their adversaries.

 And a pic:

Now we all know that is precisely the kind of diet that the venerable .50 BMG cartridge is designed for (seen here next to a .30-06 Springfield, for comparison):

And of course, one wonders if the federales  have a few of these things lying around:

(I know that the Barrett rifles are undoubtedly effective, but man, they look like nothing other than industrial machinery.)

I don’t know how thick that armor plating is;  but I have some of that steel-core Austrian mil-surp Hirtenberg 6.5x55mm lying around, have seen its bullet go clear through both sides of a car — don’t ask — and I’m awfully curious to see how well it would work against one of these narcotanques.

Purely out of intellectual curiosity, of course.

When Panic Costs Money

Eco-Crap, Journalist Scum, Watermelons, Weather

The Greatest Living Englishman has turned his ire towards the BBC, and at climate fearmongers in general:

Amazon Prime star has slammed weather forecasters for spreading what he has described as “green propaganda” in his latest column.

The presenter, 63, went on to explain that due to inaccurate weather reports, he and many other farmers and been forced to “take a massive financial hit” for “absolutely no reason”.

Jeremy recalled how earlier this week, weather presenters had claimed “an apocalyptic storm would arrive in Britain on Tuesday night”.

The Former Top Gear host went on to explain how, due to predictions of weeks of “torrential rain and gales”, he had felt forced to harvest his crops even though they weren’t ready because the moisture content was too high.

“Yes, I’d have to pay £10 a ton to dry the grain after it was harvested but better to take that hit than have the whole lot ruined by the storm,” he wrote in his column for the Sun. 

“We worked tirelessly until 11pm and when I finally crawled into bed, utterly exhausted, I noticed that all of my neighbouring farmers were still out here, doing the same thing.”

Here’s what he was talking about:

But:

The ex-BBC star went on to express his outrage when he had expected to see “Armageddon” the next morning only to be greeted by “blue skies and a gentle breeze”.

“So the farmers had brought in their harvest early and taken a massive financial hit that they can’t afford… for absolutely no reason,” Jeremy fumed.

So he lashed out.

“They feel compelled, when it’s warm, to paint their maps dark red and talk about ‘extreme heat’. And similarly, to keep Greta and the snowflake army happy, they need to say when it’s a bit chilly, that we will all soon be buried under a 20-foot snow drift,” he complained.

“They see their weather forecasts now as political weapons. Baseball bats which can be used to beat the oil companies into submission. And they’ll mangle statistics if that’s what’s necessary.”

He then went on to beg weather forecasters to share “the truth” with farmers and to save their “propaganda forecasts” for people who need to “turn the heating down”.

“They think that the constant wrongness doesn’t matter, because a wonky weather forecast only affects people planning barbecues,” he stated. “But to farmers, it bloody well does matter.”

Frankly, if I were a British farmer, I’d subscribe to an actual meteorogical service and learn to interpret the data for myself.

And refuse to pay the BBC license fee, like millions of other Brits are doing.

News Roundup

Bad News


And speaking of quickies:


...candidate for “Most Misleading Headline Of The Year” competition.


...pick and cut?  What happened to flaying and impalement?  Oh wait… those watermelons. My bad.

Some Political News:


…


...a simple glance at past Soviet leaders would emphasize that Commies never give up power voluntarily:  they have to die.


…

In International Monetary News:


...three words guaranteed to cause mocking laughter:  Euro bailout fund.  And speaking of money:


...wait:  cash-sniffing dogs?  What new totalitarian hell is this?

From the Great Cultural Assimilation Experiment:


…I prefer the old-fashioned term “concentration camp”, myself.


...as opposed to “un-sinister” sex attacks on women?

From the True Crime Dept.:


...I know that criminals are seldom PhD candidates, but… seriously?

In the Woke Chronicles:


...am I the only one getting an ever-larger Schadenböner out of this sorry tale?

Never mind;  this next one will cause all boners to wilt like two-week-old lettuce.


...fat, stupid and pervy is no way to go through life, son.

And now it’s time for INSIGNIFICA (and you’ll be SO glad there are no links):

      …who they, again?

Finally:


...it’s been a while since we looked at the former newsreader and now Hottest Conservative Babe On The Planet, so here we go:

Is there a better way to end the news than with a pic of Tomi in denim shorts?  I think not.

Gratuitous Gun Pic: Weatherby Orion Side-By-Side (20ga)

Gratuitous Gun Pics

Sent to me by the eagle-eyed Gun Professor is this welcome news:

Of course, they’re not just offered in 20ga.:

Weatherby has had a sort-of on-again-off-again history with their side-by-sides, having had them made variously in Spain, then in Italy, and now, according to the Professor (who contacted them) they’ll be made by Tiblis in Turkey.

Street price for these guns is likely to be slightly under a grand, which will make them competitive with CZ’s offerings — which are also made in Turkey.

As one who has seen the ancient and venerable side-by-side shotguns fall from favor over the past couple decades, all this is good news.  To quote some non-professorial gun guy:

“Shotgun barrels need to be side by side like a man and his dog, and not over and under like a man and his mistress.”

Off My List

Entertainment, Two-Minute Hate

I’ve moaned about this nonsense before:

Since hitting UK cinemas last month, the atomic bomb thriller Oppenheimer — which stars Cillian Murphy in the titular role — has been given a slew of five star ratings while critics branded it Nolan’s ‘best and most revealing work’.

However:

BBC News star Jane Hill revealed she walked out of Christopher Nolan’s film halfway through after spotting a major flaw that left her ‘disappointed’.

I was thinking “historical inaccuracy” or “gratuitous sex/violence”, but no:

It appears Jane was certainly not in agreement as she shared that she was frustrated at not being able to hear the film’s dialogue properly due to the loud soundtrack — and was even more astounded to learn that the issue occurs in almost ‘all’ of Nolan’s films.

She told her followers: ‘Saw Oppenheimer. Well, managed half of it. Disappointed that music & effects often drowned out the actors, I missed whole chunks of dialogue. 

Well, that takes the movie off my “to watch” list.

Till fairly recently, I thought that this degraded sound in movies was simply the result of my age- and tinnitus-ridden hearing, but now I know the truth.  It seems that the new trend in cinema verité  is now to muddy up the dialogue either by having the actors mutter their lines — and sometimes in thick, incomprehensible accents withal — or else to submerge the speech with over-loud sound effects and / or “background” music.  Or in the case of this weasel Nolan, both.

Sorry, but there’s not much verité  when you can’t hear it being spoken.

I know, the answer is to wait for the movies to appear on a streaming service, and then tap the “subtitles” button.

Nah I’m not going to do that.  If I’m going to have to use subtitles, then I’ll just watch furrin stuff like gloomy Scandi detective shows or Belgian whodunnits, which quite frankly are often better than their “English” competition anyway.

The Son&Heir suggested that I get a sound bar for my TV so that I can turn up the “mids” (mid-range audio) and compensate, but I’m not going to do that either.

This little trend is like an artist covering his painting with sheets of thick gauze so you have to strain your eyes to see what’s on the canvas.  I wouldn’t bother looking at those, and I’m not going to watch these shitty movies either.

A pox on all of them.

Related:  Oppenheimer  director Nolan tells us all to fuck off.