Author: Kim du Toit

Still Incommunicado

Technology

Sorry, folks… this is what you get when your apartment complex gives the sole contract to AT&T… resounding silence to my request for assistance.  (And don’t say “satellite”, because guess who owns DirecTV?)

Anyway, I have a few moments to write some stuff, and I’ll do so in a moment.  Regular programming should resume In’shallah when AT&T deigns to give it back to me.

Stopgap Women

Gratuitous Chick Pics

Okay, I took enough guff from y’all about my Sunday post of Toyah Willcox (sheesh, she’s almost my age, cut the old lady some slack, willya?) so here are a few random hotties floating around my hard drive.

If one of those doesn’t satisfy you, you need help.

Rip Hyphen Off

The Gun Thing

So Combat Controller and I went to the Fort Worth Gun Show over the weekend, and ugh.

I was looking for the stolen replacement Boomershoot rifle, and he was looking to sell a couple guns — more on that in another post.

I also needed a little ammo because that story to come later.

Ammo at gun shows has become the world’s largest ripoff.  What’s happening — and I had this confirmed by a secondary source later — is that ordinary guys are snapping up all the cheaper ammo from retail outlets like Academy, then turning it around, marking it up to nosebleed levels, and getting a table at a gun show to sell it at retail-plusplusplus prices to people who don’t buy their ammo online or who don’t know the difference.  (25 cents per round for CCI Blazer .22 LR, and don’t even ask about hunting- or self-defense ammo:  okay, the cheapest .308 Win I saw was running at $1.75 per round.)

All this in addition to the Biden/Harris-Panic gun- and ammo buying that’s going on anyway.  I estimated, by the way, that if you had the money, you could probably have put together from parts about a thousand AR-15s from what was on sale at this one show.  (And you’d need a PILE of money:  Palmetto State AR-15 lowers which cost $59 a while back were being sold for $379 by the asshole ripoff artists merchants.)  One guy boasted to CC that he’d made $40,000 in cash sales before lunch — and by the way, I saw a WHOLE bunch of “Cash Only” signs, at almost every other table.   Even if you want to sell a gun, the merchants will try to lowball you, then mark it up at least 50% and put it right back on their table.  There are no bargains to be found at gun shows anymore;  you may as well buy retail from your local Merchant Of Death.

Bottom line:  Stay away from gun shows.

Grab-A-Granny

Music

Seems as though some oldies still have something to offer us:

POP icon Toyah Willcox has become an unlikely hit on PORN sites thanks to her raunchy home music videos.
The 63-year-old singer has been donning risqué outfits while belting out cover versions on her YouTube channel with rocker husband Robert Fripp, 75.

Here’s an example… ZZ Top fans can wince all they want, but it’s funny as hell.

I always loved Toyah’s work, because she just never seemed to give a flaming fuck what anyone thought of her (yeah, I know).

And her music wasn’t bad back then, either.  (We won’t even talk about her husband’s band, King Crimson.)

Brilliant stuff.

So Much For The Bucket List

Travels

From Jenni Murray:

“Do you remember how exciting it used to be to arrive at the airport, stand in a queue for just a few minutes to check in, whizz through passport control, have a stroll around Duty Free, wander down to the boarding gate, find your seat on the plane where there’d be plenty of knee room and, full of anticipation, you were up, up and away?”

I think she’s talking about the 1960s.  Personally, I would feel pretty much the same as she does, because even before the Wuhan virus flying had become a post-9/11 nightmare.  As she puts it:

Hours of checking in and security.  Anxiety about whether any cosmetics might be confiscated if they were more than 100 ml.  The humiliation of removing shoes…[etc]
…
So my bucket list loses Peru, San Francisco, the Maldives, Japan, Australia and gorillas in Sub- Saharan Africa. I shall never fulfill my longing to dig my own opal from the mines at Coober Pedy, north of Adelaide, or delight in the cherry blossom in Okinawa.  And my trip around Kolkata, Calcutta as my parents knew it, is off.

In terms of travel, my bucket list is not the same (San Francisco?  Kolkata?  LOL), but in terms of places I still want to visit (for the first time), it’s essentially European:  Budapest, Prague, Dubrovnic, Milan, to name but some);  and I also want to revisit some of my favorite countries:  Britain, France, Austria, Holland…  All seem so far away now, so out of reach because of all the travel restrictions and other nonsense.

We won’t even talk about Australia, where I have cousins and a step-family via New Wife’s elder son, with grandchildren I’ve never met.  (She’s off to South Africa next month to visit younger son and his wife and baby — grandmothers will not be denied.)

Don’t even talk to me about local travel.  Certainly, New Wife hasn’t been to any of the major U.S. cities except to fly through, but answer me this:  if you were in my position, are there any U.S. cities you’d want to take your wife to these days?  We’ll probably end up going up to New England again in the fall, and maybe a trip up to Glacier National Park before the heavy snows, and she’d probably love that:

But compared to Amsterdam, Vienna, Lake Como and Villefranche-sur-Mer?  Well, that’s a little more to consider, isn’t it?

 

 

 

Part of me wants to say, “Ah, what the hell”, and let it slip.  Then there’s the other part of me that says, “Hell no — I am going to see all those places, both where I’ve never been and where I’ve been before.”

And all that despite the TSA bullshit, the crowded planes and airports…

I’m not like Jenni Murray.