Category: Good Stuff

Catching Up

Food & Drink, Good Stuff

Stop the presses!  Here’s the latest kitchen fad:

Serious home cooks looking to create a restaurant-style kitchen in their own homes are lusting after yet another piece of culinary kit.

Surfaces may already be groaning under the weight of appliances such as air fryers, espresso machines and top-of-the-range mixers – and let’s not forget the pizza oven in the shed, but middle-class foodies are now adding deli-style meat slicers to their polished countertops.

The ‘industry’ style equipment, which ranges in price from around £50 for a budget version on Amazon to the early thousands for an all-singing, all-dancing one, can precision slice through everything from smoked salmon to hams and cheeses – and even sourdough – with ease.

And while they may seem like an indulgent addition to an everyday kitchen, top chefs say they’re worth the investment – because not only will your charcuterie taste superior, but you can also buy it in bulk, which almost always saves money.

There’s less waste too, because you slice what you need, ensuring wafer-thin sheets of Parma ham don’t go unloved in the fridge.

The slicers – both hand-operated and electric – work by cutting food to uniform sheets, as thick or as thin as you’d like, which can affect flavors significantly, say those in the know.

Well, yes.  The above article appeared in the Daily Mail  yesterday (February 12, 2026).

Then there’s this:

…which appeared in this post, dated Nov 25, 2023.

Good grief;  for once, I’m actually ahead of a trend.

No need to thank me;  it’s all part of the service.  (Oh, and don’t let the product description fool you.  I used the above machine to slice meats like salami, ham and beef for years.)

Christmas Present

Good Stuff

Wow, now this is interesting:

A single ticket sold in Arkansas won the second largest U.S. lottery jackpot in history, a $1.817 billion Christmas Eve bonanza in the Powerball game.

Ho ho ho, indeed.

Talk about a life-changer — and I didn’t buy a ticket, because reasons.

“What reasons, Kim?”

Here’s the thing.  The cash option on that beast was about $500 million, making the lucky winner a semi-billionaire.  And that life-changing thing is what stopped me from buying a ticket.

Don’t get me wrong:  it’s not that I wouldn’t be able to spend the money — I have plenty of relatives and friends, all of whom I could make extremely happy/wealthy.  But honestly, I don’t want to change my own life that much.

Believe me:  change it would.  With 500 big ones to your name, you become a target for all sorts of undesirable people:  kidnappers, scam artists, robbers, whatever.  You might think that you could disappear from public life and become anonymous, but you can’t;  that sum of money is just too big.  So you’d have to hire lawyers, accountants, financial planners and personal bodyguards… and that all adds up to a massive lifestyle change.

And speaking quite honestly, I’m too old for all that shit.  Not only that, but what would I want to buy?  A new house?  Two new houses?  An expensive vintage car?  Three expensive vintage cars?

Don’t even get me started on guns.  That hurts, because as much as I’d like to own some pretty shotguns and rifles, the truth is that the time in which I could shoot them is becoming increasingly shorter.  I’m in my seventies, FFS, and even though I’m in good health, my meeting with that old bastard Death is not a remote possibility, is it?  So a safe or three full of Purdeys or whatever is just not appealing, anymore.  Ten or twenty years ago?  Now that’s a different story;  but I am where I am and that’s all there is to it.

Bloody hell, I couldn’t even buy a ton of books either, because of the time it would take me to read them.

Here’s a bad one.  I don’t want to travel that much,because I’m pretty sure that most of my old haunts have turned to shit in my absence over these past few years.  London?  Paris?  Vienna?  Judging by what I’ve recently been reading about them, they’ve all turned into dangerous shitholes #Muslims #Africans #Gypsies #etc.  And cruises have never held much fascination for me, because at the end of the day, you’re in thrall to other people’s choices or itineraries and that is not the way I want to travel.  (Never mind the oceangoing part of it, because it just wastes time — that I don’t have, see above — and I don’t do sunbathing anyway.)

Frankly, the only thing that holds any attraction to me is a large-ish ranch somewhere in Texas where I could set up a few ranges of the clay pigeon, rifle, pistol and rimfire type, and blaze away to my heart’s content.

And I wouldn’t need half a billion dollars to afford that.

Anyway, I see that the Powerball jackpot has now returned to sane levels — just over $9 million for the cash option as I write this — and that would do me just fine.

Sure, my family and friends wouldn’t see much (or any) of that, once I’ve handed over the several pounds of flesh to the IRS and bought that ranch etc., but them’s the breaks.  Nobody has ever stopped them from buying their own lottery ticket, after all. Call me selfish if you want, but there it is.

And our lucky winner in Arkansas?  You’re going to need even more good luck to survive your windfall, buddy.  I hope it comes your way.

Nailbiting

Good Stuff, Sports

I know:  most of y’all have about as much interest in Formula One as I do about soap operas.

However:  the last race of the 2025 F1 season will take place this weekend on some track in the Arabian desert #DontCare, and it promises to be quite unlike the usual formation-lap snore fest.

At the middle of the season, current (and four-time) champion Max Verstappen was 100-odd points adrift of the top of the standings, driving a car which was not in the same class as the eventual manufacturer’s champions McLaren (who clinched the title a couple races back).

Thanks to his incredible skill behind the wheel, and aided by said McLaren team totally screwing up their race strategy in the past two races, Verstappen finds himself in actual contention for his fifth (consecutive!) driver’s championship in the final race.  He’ll need some help from McLaren, of course, but given their recent screwups that’s not completely out of the picture — and as both McLaren drivers are 1-2 in the standings and are after the same title, there’s also a good chance that they’ll collide with each other and take themselves out of the picture, leaving it all to Verstappen.  One thing is for sure:  if it’s just up to his own driving, he’s an odds-on favorite

Anyway, I told you all that so I can share this, said before the Las Vegas Grand Prix:

Me, I’m rooting for Max this weekend.

Replacement Workers

Good Stuff, Illegal immigrants

I have to say that Jamie Wilson has just been clearing the fences recently.  Here’s her latest:

“Americans just won’t do these jobs.” That phrase infuriated me from the first time I heard it. I knew it was a lie. I had done the tobacco work myself. My brothers had. Every teenager we knew had. Every adult performed the hard labor that kept the region alive. Americans didn’t suddenly lose their work ethic. The jobs were taken from them — not by immigrants directly, but by American employers who built a business model on illegal labor and by a federal government that looked the other way for forty years.

What Americans “won’t do” are jobs that have been made illegal in everything but name — jobs where wages have collapsed to exploit desperation, where safety standards are ignored, where workers are paid off the books, where insurance and taxes are bypassed, and where living conditions violate every regulation on the books. When the floor is lowered that far, legal workers cannot enter the market at all. That isn’t laziness. That’s math.

And her supporting arguments are terrific.  Read the whole article.

I remember when #2 Son was looking for some minimum-wage work back when he was in his late teens.  At the time, he was living in Dallas, and when I asked how things were going, work-wise, his response was:  “I just can’t compete with all the Mexicans who are willing to work well below the minimum wage.”

Eventually he quit that, and fortunately found his niche in online gaming quality control, but had to move down to Austin, enduring a few years of contract work — chicken and feathers income — before he finally found a full-time job at a company which was later bought out and became a division of Sony.

And I know that I published a stupid article on the topic of illegal alien workers a while back, and I cringe when I think of it.  (And yes, I was crucified in the Comments by y’all, and deservedly so.  I don’t know what I was thinking.)

Anyway, I see that as ICE is starting to do their job and deporting illegals, American workers are benefiting greatly.

So I guess they were prepared to to “those jobs”, despite the lies uttered by the Democrats over the years.

Random Beefcake

Good Stuff, Men & Women

This little thing was sent to me by a longtime lady friend back in Seffrica.  (Just to elucidate, “Visagie’ is a common Afrikaans name.)

It’s for my long-suffering Lady Readers, who are woefully neglected on this back porch when it comes to eye candy:

For my Gentleman [sic]  Readers:  these are the kind of guys (and their families) who are being welcomed as refugees into the U.S. by the Trump Administration.  Once they qualify to vote, I don’t think they’ll be voting for the socialists anytime soon.

Which is why the Commies are screaming so loudly, even though their actual numbers are small.