Incentive And Compromise

How would you like to own a house like this one, set in 1,100 acres of the gorgeous Wiltshire countryside:

According to its Wikipedia entry:

The grounds of the house are noted for their re-established wildlife, including fallow deer.  The grounds are also noted as one of the top game bird shooting venues in the country:  The Field  magazine voted it one of the UK’s ten top venues for pheasant shooting.

Sounds all very pleasant, doesn’t it?  As it happens, Ashcombe House belongs to movie director Guy Ritchie (of Lock Stock and Snatch fame), who came into ownership of the place as part of his divorce settlement from Madonna.

Which leads me to this question — posed to me originally by The Fiend Englishman — and, I think, it’s really a difficult one:

Would you sleep with Madonna for a couple-three years (as Ritchie did) if you knew that at the end of it all, you’d come to possess this fantastic estate?

Just so we’re clear on the topic, though:  we’re not talking about this Madonna:

…nor even this Madonna:

No, we’re talking about this Madonna:

Now before everyone runs screaming from the room, I should point out (as did The Englishman) that along the way, you would probably have learned more than a few revolting naughty bedroom tricks which may (repeat may ) have made the eventual ownership of Ashcombe House a little less unpleasant;  and indeed, Ritchie seems to have escaped more-or-less unscathed from his years-long encounter with Madge, along with possession of both his venereal health and his genitalia (which I admit thinking would have been a long shot in both cases).

So, Gentle Readers:  a magnificent estate with lots of prime birdshooting, in exchange for a few years of plunging into Madame Grotesque’s well-trodden pudenda?  Or is no real estate worth that sacrifice?

Your thoughts, in Comments.

Monday Funnies

Monday, Self-Isolation Week 3:

So let’s try to find a little humor in our predicament:

On a lighter note:

Make it Southern Comfort, and I’ll spray every fifteen minutes.  One can never be too sure…

I’ve volunteered.

And from Old Texan:

And the last straw:

So to cheer everybody up, some outdoor pics:

Oh wait… you want an outdoor pic with no “social distancing”?  Oh what the hell, why not:

And you have no idea what nearly  went there… it’s getting pretty ragged in this zip code.

Monday Funnies

As Week 2 of self-isolation begins, we go Full Absurd:

And stuff like this happens when you have to endure self-isolation:


and the offending article:

and from Britishland:

Ground Zero:

Now, a test:

Question:  If you had a choice from whom you’d rather contract coronavirus sickness after six hours of bed-bending sex, which of the following potential partners would you choose?

Okay okay okay… that was just a sample  set of choices.  Here are the REAL choices:

Option #1 (Classy):

Option#2 (Home Girl):

Option#3 (MILFY):

Option #4 (Cutie-Pie):

Hint:  there are no wrong answers.  However, if your final choice is from the Sample  set of pics, go and stand in the corner with the “Pervo” hat on.

Gospel According To Clarkson

One of the best parts of Top Gear and its Grand Tour successor is to watch when one of the trio launches into a rant about something or other.  And this one from Jeremy Clarkson ranks right up there:

INCREDIBLY, my email inbox is still being filled every day by people ­wanting me to give money to help… ­Australia’s homeless koalas. That’s like asking for money to help save Joan of Arc’s dodo.
What are they thinking? They reckon I’m going to look at the world and all the terrible ­problems affecting it then think, “Right, the thing that’s most deserving of my spare cash is some lightly grilled marsupial in Wombawombaland”?

The fact is that many of those Australian fires were started by drunken misfits in vests who wanted to see their handiwork on the news.
While global warming was blamed for the way the blazes took hold, the real reason is because environmentalist law- makers wouldn’t allow the level-headed to create fire breaks.
It was, therefore, the eco-mentalists who burned the koalas, so it’s up to them to buy the Savlon.

Read the whole piece to get some reality-based thinking.

Story Of The Day

Courtesy of the Powerline folks comes this Ammo Grrrl story:

Long before the COVID-19 Panic, I had a dread fear of not being able to feed my loved ones. Once in San Francisco when our son was a baby, there was some sort of long-forgotten dairy panic and all the milk disappeared from the shelves of the grocery stores. Or at least the one I could walk to since we didn’t own a car.
One barefooted dirty hippie girl had just finished loading all twelve remaining gallons into her cart. I said, “Look, I have a six-month old. I breast-feed him, but I need the milk for me to make the milk. May I please have just one? You will still have eleven.” She refused. She said she didn’t even have kids and just planned to scalp it to other desperate people. I said, “Well, you haven’t paid for that yet, so if you are going to be a [several bad words], I will just take one then.”
And so I did. She screamed in outrage and, frankly, shock, but there were no cameras in stores yet, so what could she do? She briefly considered fighting for it, but thought better of it. I mean, what kind of scary lunatic takes stuff out of another woman’s cart? Without so much as a Swiss Army Knife? Better to cut your losses and move on.

Coffee, meet nostrils.  Best part is that because Hippie Chick hadn’t paid for the stuff yet, it wasn’t technically  hers — cameras or not — so anyone could have done that to her.

It’s funny how the hippies never seem to realize that without a power equalizer (e.g. a 1911), you’ll always be at the mercy of someone stronger than you are.