Mr. Free Market writes to inform me that he’s off to the North for a spot of bird shooting [jealous], and has laid in an adequate supply of the necessary, to whit:
Off-camera: the case of Scotch.
Remember: there’s no danger of Chinkvirus infection at a driven bird shoot, seeing as the shooters are spaced thirty-odd yards apart.
It’s the after-shoot activities that should give cause for concern… just not to me nor, it appears, to Mr. FM and his shooting buddies.
According to Some Survey Or Other (Science!!!), this is what most Brits dream of when thinking about their ideal garden:
Okay, some of them are just daffy — a maze? — and good luck getting the go-kart track past the neighbors (unless you’re going to be racing electric go-karts).
I am as given to dreaming and wishful thinking as any, and probably more than most; but I can’t help thinking that having so many outdoor activity features (yoga areas, outdoor gym etc.) are not going to be used that often given a climate in which Britain’s principal export is rain.
Also, excepting bloated plutocrats such as Mr. Free Market (whose estate holdings make Prince Charles look like a slum dweller) and Top Gear’s Richard Hammond (who has a castle), most Brit houses have an average outdoor area which can be measured just as well in square inches as feet — and not the 88-foot “desirable” backyard they dream of.
In Kim Terms, 88 feet couldn’t even accommodate a 25-yard indoor pistol range, which leads me to my next point.
Notably absent from all the Brit dream gardens is anything devoted to shooting. I know that the BritGov (a pox be upon it) seems to frown on the shooting sports, but nowhere on the above do I see listed even something as innocuous as an archery range. (I have a well-founded suspicion that a similar list taken from a poll of my Readers would have a 100-yard rifle range near the top, followed closely by a 1,000-yard playground where one could happily play with Barrett rifles etc.)
So, on to just such a poll. In Comments, please list — in order — the top 10 most desirable features you’d like to see in your “back yard” (define it however you wish: “back forty” is also acceptable). Don’t bother with explanations or exposition; the inclusions should be pretty much self-explanatory, e.g. “four-bay 25-yard air-conditioned indoor pistol range” (which would be in my own top 3, incidentally).
No mazes. Also exclude strange exotica such as “hippie burial ground” and the like. This is a serious poll. [eyecross]
Have fun with it, and limit ten, please.
Grownup talk, here. Approach at your own peril. Read more
It occurs to me that of late this here back porch of mine has been too preoccupied with political shit such as rioters in Portland / Seattle, asshole politicians [redundancy alert] , the Chinkvirus and in general, the looming end of the world that is 2020.
So today I’m going to ignore all that, and put up some posts that are so trivial, so inconsequential and of so little lasting value that you, O my Readers, may be excused if you leave immediately for Breitbart, Insty or whatever, shaking your heads in sorrow while saying, “The old fart’s gone Biden on us.”
Enjoy…
This was never sent, but it damn well should have been.
Oxford Rebukes Black Activists
The letter (below) is a response from Oxford University to black students attending as Rhodes Scholars who demand the university removes the statue of Oxford Benefactor, Cecil Rhodes. Interestingly, Chris Patten (Lord Patten of Barnes), The Chancellor of Oxford University, was on the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 on precisely the same topic. The Daily Telegraph headline yesterday was “Oxford will not rewrite history”.
Lord Patten commented: “Education is not indoctrination. Our history is not a blank page on which we can write our own version of what it should have been according to our contemporary views and prejudice.”
Dear Scrotty Students,
Cecil Rhodes’s generous bequest has contributed greatly to the comfort and well being of many generations of Oxford students — a good many of them, dare we say it, better, brighter and more deserving than you.
This does not necessarily mean we approve of everything Rhodes did in his lifetime — but then we don’t have to. Cecil Rhodes died over a century ago. Autres temps, autres moeurs. If you don’t understand what this means — and it would not remotely surprise us if that were the case — then we really think you should ask yourself the question: “Why am I at Oxford?”
Oxford, let us remind you, is the world’s second oldest extant university. Scholars have been studying here since at least the 11th century. We’ve played a major part in the invention of Western civilisation, from the 12th century intellectual renaissance through the Enlightenment and beyond. Our alumni include William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, William Tyndale, John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, Erasmus, Sir Christopher Wren, William Penn, Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), Samuel Johnson, Robert Hooke, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Emily Davison, Cardinal Newman, Julie Cocks. We’re a big deal. And most of the people privileged to come and study here are conscious of what a big deal we are. Oxford is their alma mater — their dear mother — and they respect and revere her accordingly.
And what were your ancestors doing in that period? Living in mud huts, mainly. Sure, we’ll concede you the short-lived Southern African civilisation of Great Zimbabwe. But let’s be brutally honest here. The contribution of the Bantu tribes to modern civilisation has been as near as damn it to zilch.
You’ll probably say that’s “racist”. But it’s what we here at Oxford prefer to call “true.” Perhaps the rules are different at other universities. In fact, we know things are different at other universities. We’ve watched with horror at what has been happening across the pond from the University of Missouri to the University of Virginia and even to revered institutions like Harvard and Yale: the “safe spaces”; the black lives matter; the creeping cultural relativism; the stifling political correctness; what Allan Bloom rightly called “the closing of the American mind”. At Oxford however, we will always prefer facts and free, open debate to petty grievance-mongering, identity politics and empty sloganeering. The day we cease to do so is the day we lose the right to call ourselves the world’s greatest university.
Of course, you are perfectly within your rights to squander your time at Oxford on silly, vexatious, single-issue political campaigns. (Though it does make us wonder how stringent the vetting procedure is these days for Rhodes scholarships and even more so, for Mandela Rhodes scholarships). We are well used to seeing undergraduates — or, in your case, postgraduates — making idiots of themselves. Just don’t expect us to indulge your idiocy, let alone genuflect before it. You may be black — “BME” as the grisly modern terminology has it — but we are colour blind. We have been educating gifted undergraduates from our former colonies, our Empire, our Commonwealth and beyond for many generations. We do not discriminate over sex, race, colour or creed. We do, however, discriminate according to intellect.
That means, inter alia, that when our undergrads or postgrads come up with fatuous ideas, we don’t pat them on the back, give them a red rosette and say: “Ooh, you’re black and you come from South Africa. What a clever chap you are!” No. We prefer to see the quality of those ideas tested in the crucible of public debate. That’s another key part of the Oxford intellectual tradition, you see: you can argue any damn thing you like but you need to be able to justify it with facts and logic — otherwise your idea is worthless.
This ludicrous notion you have that a bronze statue of Cecil Rhodes should be removed from Oriel College because it’s symbolic of “institutional racism” and “white slavery”. Well even if it is — which we dispute — so bloody what? Any undergraduate so feeble-minded that they can’t pass a bronze statue without having their “safe space” violated really does not deserve to be here. And besides, if we were to remove Rhodes’s statue on the premise that his life wasn’t blemish-free, where would we stop? As one of our alumni Dan Hannan has pointed out, Oriel’s other benefactors include two kings so awful — Edward II and Charles I — that their subjects had them killed. The college opposite — Christ Church — was built by a murderous, thieving bully who bumped off two of his wives. Thomas Jefferson kept slaves: does that invalidate the US Constitution? Winston Churchill had unenlightened views about Muslims and India: was he then the wrong man to lead Britain in the war?
Actually, we’ll go further than that. Your Rhodes Must Fall campaign is not merely fatuous but ugly, vandalistic and dangerous. We agree with Oxford historian RW Johnson that what you are trying to do here is no different from what ISIS and the Al-Qaeda have been doing to artefacts in places like Mali and Syria. You are murdering history.
And who are you, anyway, to be lecturing Oxford University on how it should order its affairs? Your “rhodesmustfall” campaign, we understand, originates in South Africa and was initiated by a black activist who told one of his lecturers “whites have to be killed”. One of you — Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh — is the privileged son of a rich politician and a member of a party whose slogan is “Kill the Boer; Kill the Farmer”; another of you, Ntokozo Qwabe, who is only in Oxford as a beneficiary of a Rhodes scholarship, has boasted about the need for “socially conscious black students” to “dominate white universities, and do so ruthlessly and decisively!”
Great. That’s just what Oxford University needs. Some cultural enrichment from the land of Winnie Mandela, burning tyre necklaces, an AIDS epidemic almost entirely the result of government indifference and ignorance, one of the world’s highest per capita murder rates, institutionalised corruption, tribal politics, anti-white racism and a collapsing economy. Please name which of the above items you think will enhance the lives of the 22,000 students studying here at Oxford.
And then please explain what it is that makes your attention grabbing campaign to remove a listed statue from an Oxford college more urgent, more deserving than the desire of probably at least 20,000 of those 22,000 students to enjoy their time here unencumbered by the irritation of spoilt, ungrateful little tossers on scholarships they clearly don’t merit using racial politics and cheap guilt-tripping to ruin the life and fabric of our beloved university.
Understand us and understand this clearly: you have everything to learn from us; we have nothing to learn from you.
Yours,
Oriel College, Oxford
Like I said: it should have been sent. But because Oxford is now staffed by a bunch of timorous cowards and/or people who actually believe that these ingrates have a point, I can pretty much guarantee that it wasn’t even written by a current member of the faculty. If it was, I can absolutely guarantee that the heroic scribe would now be looking for employment elsewhere, and not finding any.
Sic semper infirmissima cum turba iratus est. I think the faculty will understand this — and they’d better, because their antagonists understand it only too well.
New Wife is a tea drinker. Actually, to call her a “tea drinker” is akin to saying that her husband rather enjoys shooting guns, except that she drinks tea more often than I shoot a gun. Hell, she almost drinks more cups of tea than the number of bullets I send downrange in a typical session.
As I’ve mentioned before, she drinks Yorkshire Gold tea, which is my fault because I turned her onto it when we were together in Britishland all those years ago, and she prefers it over all others. Fortunately, the teabags are fine — unlike my children, she’s not a teapot fetishist, thank goodness — so we just buy the bags in bulk and all goes well.
Except for the kettle. We use a cheap ($25) electric kettle with an auto cutoff switch rather than a stovetop-with-whistle type simply because it’s more convenient, in that when we go on a car trip, we take both kettle and teabags with us (plus my small Keurig, but that’s a story for another time).
(Aside: I should divulge, en passant, that I make the tea in our house simply because I’ve been making tea since I was seven years old — I used to make it for my mother every day because she too was a guzzler rather than a sipper, and I enjoyed spoiling my Mom, just as I enjoy spoiling New Wife — and I make tea better than anyone I know, including Daughter and New Wife, whether using bags in a cup, or loose tea in a pot. I also make it when guests come over, even if they know little or nothing about tea.)
Recently, however, the kettle started to misbehave: not switching on consistently, leaking a tiny bit, not switching off automatically at the boil, and so on. So off I went to Amazon to order a new kettle, which is where the problems started. Here’s the executive summary.
All kettles, whether electric or stovetop, are made in China nowadays. All are crap (probably for the aforesaid reason) in that they are quick to rust, break early and often, don’t work as advertised, and so on. Even the so-called “Japanese” kettles are made in China, and suck. Ditto Le Creuselt, the snobby Frog brand, which is now made in China, and for $75, I would expect them to last forever and never break — except that according to the consumer comments, they’re as bad as the rest of them. When you consider that a kettle has only ONE JOB — boiling water — this is obviously a matter of concern.
Well, I wasn’t going to be put about like this, so I decided to buy a high-quality stovetop kettle, made somewhere other than China. Of course, the first place I looked (Williams-Sonoma) did indeed have a quality kettle not made in China, except that it costs $400, no doubt because it’s made in England. [pause to recover from the fainting spell]
Never mind kettle, what was needed was Ketel One.
However, a glass of gin and a moment’s reflection provided me with the solution.
I have had the current (faulty) kettle now for just on two years. Given the number of cups of tea that New Wife imbibes on a daily basis, an approximate calculation revealed that this El Cheapo kettle has boiled water around four thousand times — and is only now starting to show signs of age/use? I’ve had guns that didn’t last that long, and they’re made of stainless steel and everything.
So I went back to Amazon and bought another kettle just like it (down to the color even), noting that the price ($25) was about the same as the first one I bought back then.
Yeah, it’s made in China, but they’re all made in China so there you go. I should point out that if there were a kettle of comparable standard made in the U.S., I probably would have spent double the amount — and if we in America cannot make a simple and reliable electric kettle carrying a retail price of $50 because of greedy unions, burdensome government regulations, high operating costs, etc., then we deserve to have the Commies make all our stuff.
Let’s just hope the fucking thing doesn’t break on Day 3. New Wife will be severely pissed at having to do without her Yorkshire Gold while I go and find something else (not made in China, FFS) to replace it.