Alternative Use

Looks like this is a week for alternatives, but this one is a little less… contentious, shall we say, than the one from yesterday.

While looking at this article about Harry Redknapp’s little beach cottage, one of the pics got me thinking.  While I think the house in general is awful (like Alyssa Milano:  quite lovely from the outside;  inside, not so much), this room is excellent:

Now I have little use for a wine cellar, being that I don’t drink a lot of wine and have no interest in collecting it either.  But a temperature/humidity-controlled room, with very limited access… can we all say “Gun Room“, children?

If I ever same into something like this (assuming it was in the Land Of The Free and not Hoplophobic Britannia), I know that one of the first things I’d do is turn to the interior designer and say, “Lose all those faggy shelves and stuff, and put in some glassed gun display cases, with room for a couple-three safes on the side.”  All that’s left is to have a decent, robust table somewhere with several clamps for gun cleaning and -smithing, and there ya go.

The same is true of houses that have projection rooms — in-home cinemas, as it were — which I think are a total waste of space.  Here’s one, from some mega-mansion on the market here in Plano:

Once again, a room with no windows, a single door access… who the hell needs stupid Disney movies that much. when you could have a primo gun room?

I know, I’m so hopelessly out of touch.

Lockdown Blues

Over a month ago I went to Trader Joe’s to buy a couple of things, but was told to go to the back of the (100-yard) queue because the store was only allowing a dozen or so customers at a time to go in.  The outside temperature that day was August-In-Dallas (i.e. there were lizards frying gently on the sidewalks), so I said (quite loudly) to the officious little asshole at the door:  “This is total and utter bullshit, and you guys are acting like hysterical children.  I don’t need your stupid products that much,” and walked away.

A couple of people cheered and gave me the thumbs-up — and a few even nodded and walked away themselves.  (Sometimes, it only takes one, and — this may come as a surprise to many — I’ve often been that one, in my lifetime.)

It’s bad enough when Nanny Government can’t stop telling you what to do:  stay out of here, only six people allowed to be together there, family reunions or events are banned, can’t shop here but there is okay, this work is allowed but that isn’t and so on, but don’t forget to wear your face-condom everywhere or else you’ll be fined / arrested / publicly scolded / tossed out.

When stores start fucking with people’s lives, however, it’s probably too much.  At least, it was too much for this wonderful woman, who after having been bullied by everyone in Government or a uniform for months, decided that being told to follow in-store one-way signs was a Nanny Too Far, and showed her displeasure:

Shopper becomes furious after Co-op staff in Lingfield, Surrey, ask her to observe social distancing rules and starts throwing items and knocking bottles of wine off the shelves. The video that was captured in CCTV shows the woman screaming at the shop’s workers, after being asked to use the one-way system.

And just to put this in perspective, here are a few pics of Lingfield:

   

Not exactly the kind of place where one might find agitators and troublemakers, is it?

If you follow no other link today, this would be the one.

Bravo, Madame.

Headache

Just when I thought I’d figured it all out, comes shit like this:

‘They are the sort of equations that arise when you try to study something that evolves in time but also depends on space.
‘For example, like the wind in a wind tunnel you want to model the flow of air then that of course depends on time because it changes over time but it also depends on space – the velocity of the air is different at different points in the wind tunnel.
‘So if you have a system like this which furthermore evolves under the influence of randomness.
‘So if you have randomness that enters the game then that’s described by stochastic partial differential equation.’

I used to work with people like this when designing predictive algorithms, and I would place bets with myself as to how long (measured in seconds) it would take before I lost track of the conversation completely and the speech became unintelligible.  Usually, it was about twenty seconds.

It gets worse.  The reason I used “20 seconds” in the above sentence is because I actually kept count, over the year’s worth of discussions and meetings, of the times.  Then I created a distribution chart — bell-shaped, of course, with the most common incidence around 20.

Yeah, I was a fucking geek, too.  Just a much more limited one.

By the way, if you read the article — and you should — there’s a glaring (but non-mathematical) error.  Call it the Obama Fallacy, and see if you can spot it.

DIY Security

Because we are not subservient Europeans who expect the State to protect them at all times, this development should come as no surprise to anyone:

About a 10-minute drive from Downtown Kenosha, two men stood this week with AR-15 firearms protecting their subdivision.
The armed men were Jason and Gilbert, part of a group of about 10 residents of the subdivision that have been out nights since Tuesday protecting their neighborhood in light of the unrest in Kenosha.

Gilbert, one of the armed residents standing guard, said, “All we’re doing is making sure the community here is able to go asleep, sleep fine and are not worried about anything.”
He noted that the armed residents use flashlights at night to alert approaching vehicles to their presence. If the vehicle pulls into the subdivision, the armed residents stop it and let the driver know he or she will be watched while in the development.

The message here is simple:  if government is unwilling or unable to provide security for the lives and properties of its citizens, the community will then take matters into its own hands.

And for the wailers who kvetch  about “taking the law into their own hands” and similar handwringing, let me remind you of this fact:  the law never left our hands.  We citizens deputize the enforcement of our laws to the police;  but if the police departments are unwilling, unable or ordered not to do so by their superiors (governors, mayors and so on), we reserve the right to enforce our laws ourselves.

I have to tell you, if our community was in a similar predicament, I would be the very first volunteer in line for such civic duty.  Happily, though, our local cops have told me in no uncertain terms to leave everything to them, because their superiors are not liberal asswipe Democrats.  (The actual quote was:  “If it’s at your house, then do what you have to;  but leave the damn streets to us.”)

I admit to sleeping better at night because of that.

Pushing Back

Here’s a happy ending:

A Los Angeles English teacher was forced to flee her home after receiving numerous death threats for wearing an ‘I Can’t Breathe’ T-shirt during one of her virtual class sessions.
The teacher at El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, California wore the shirt in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and included instruction about racial injustice in her teaching, which the school allowed.
But a parent upset with her class allegedly shared a photo of the teacher on social media along with her e-mail address and invitations to harass her.
The photo was later shared by Elijah Schaffer, the podcast host of YouTube’s ‘Slightly Offens*ve’, on his Twitter account, which led the teacher to receive hundreds of emails and threats.

Meanwhile, oh boo-hoo-hoo:

‘I can’t afford to go to a hotel and I can’t go home. My daughter’s a ninth-grader starting at this school. We can’t stay in our home,’ the teacher said to CBS Los Angeles.

Not so much fun when the Alinsky Rules are used against you, huh?

The last word comes from one of the good guys:

Scott Blodgett is one of the parents upset with the teacher’s curriculum that covers the civil unrest unfolding across the country.
‘I just want my daughter to go to English class and learn about English,’ Blodgett said.

Yup.  Stick it to them, good and hard.  And this happened in Califuckingfornia.