Category: Lifestyle

I Hate This

Food & Drink, Lifestyle, Two-Minute Hate

From City Journal:

Restaurants supply physical nourishment, but their ultimate contribution to life is spiritual. From the bonds forged with dining partners to the camaraderie shared with fellow patrons to the banter exchanged with staff, dining out is a social, aesthetic experience. But QR codes are ruining it. More than a superficial nuisance, they are a sign of cultural decline.

Whenever I go to a restaurant and am confronted with this nonsense, I ignore it and demand to get a paper menu.  Usually, I get strange looks from the staff and eventually get a plain photocopied list, with no pictures of the dishes.

Suits me fine;  I know what a burger looks like, ditto schnitzel, ditto spaghetti bolognaise, ditto pretty much everything I care to eat.

Although it hasn’t happened yet, if I’m ever told that I can only order a meal through my phone, I’ll get up and walk out.  I hate using my fucking phone at the best of times, and to sit there squinting at a list of dishes in tiny type with microscopic pictures is guaranteed to put me  in a terrible mood — not the ideal customer a restaurant wants, because then I’m going to find fault with almost everything that happens thereafter.

I’ve already griped about concrete walls/floors and loud music, so I’m not going to repeat it all here.

I know all about the cost of labor and the difficulty in finding decent waiters and waitresses nowadays, and I don’t care.  I want the personal touch when I go out to eat, and you can forget that drive-through shit, too — hell, if I ever go to a fast-food restaurant (a highly infrequent event), I park the car and walk inside to place my order.

I was never a fan of “casual dining” to begin with, other than as a family/friends event, or being out of town where I have no option.  But as this move towards impersonal- and remote service seems to be growing, the less likely I’m going to be found eating out.

A pox on all of them, and on this so-called modern life.

Fact-Based

Lifestyle, Plagues and Poxes

I may have said it first, but Steve Sailer says it with data and stuff:

Fortunately, in the current global outbreak only three people outside Africa have died so far, none in the U.S. Hopefully, there’s something different between African monkeypox and Western gay monkeypox.

Of course, monkeypox in America and Europe is overwhelmingly being spread by gay men to gay men.

For example, in New York City, none of its 336 victims so far have been women, in comparison to seven who are listed as “TGNCNB,” an acronym new to me that stands for “Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Non-Binary.” Similarly, in Washington, D.C., which has the highest per-capita infection rate in the country, not one of the 122 patients is a woman.

Of course, one cannot mention the unthinkable:

“It’s unclear if this version of monkeypox spreads sexually or through more general skin-on-skin contact, or, most likely, both. It might also transmit through the air, but, at the moment, it appears to usually take a gay bacchanal to strew it far and wide.”

…lest one is accused of homophooohhhbia, but let’s be honest and at least acknowledge that in this case at least, there’s an ironclad correlation between buttsex and homopox.

A Rose By Any Other Name

Lifestyle

Mrs. TrueBrit sends me this snippet with the question:  “What does this even say?  Is it a shagfest, or what?”

Everyone’s talking about: The summer of sex parties

You mean orgies?

No. This isn’t Ancient Greece. In 2022 it’s a sex party and it’s all about choice.

Why am I suddenly reading so much about sex parties?

Because they’re having a huge post-pandemic renaissance. A recent headline in the New York Post screamed: ‘NYC ready for threesomes, sex parties after disappointing hot vax summer.’ The intellectual reading of the situation is that we’ve had months of lockdowns in which to reach a deeper understanding and acceptance of our sexuality. The less lofty (but possibly more accurate) viewpoint is that sex has been in short supply and now it’s back on the menu we’re really going for it.

Well, this is what comes from reading crapfests like You Magazine, which contains articles such as “The ultimate guide to crystals (and the celebrities that love them)”, “Piers Morgan has been voted the nation’s number one celebrity crush” (Jesus wept) and “Where to travel in 2022, according to your star sign”.

By the way, NYC is more like Ancient Rome, not Greece — and by that, I mean Rome in the months during the barbarian invasion, where the legions weren’t defending the city because there was no longer any public money to pay their salaries.

If that doesn’t sound familiar, you must be a Socialist.

And for Mrs. Truebrit:  a “sex party” is indeed an orgy, no matter how much they try to redefine it.

Post-Lottery

Lifestyle, Travels

If I ever have the great good luck to win some kind of lottery, I’d be faced with a serious choice.

Option 1: 

  • become a jet-setter and travel the globe, visiting unfamiliar places like Helsinki, Prague etc.:

 

  • go shooting in Britishland with Mr. Free Market,

  • sip long glasses of G&T on the balcony of my hotel room in Monte Carlo or in a beach house in the Seychelles:

…and generally spend the rest of my life in strange, exciting places.

Option 2:

Buy a large farm somewhere and live (and end) the rest of my life like Uncle Hub and Uncle Garth, snarling at the world and shooting at strangers from my porch:

And don’t tell me to embrace the healing power of “and”, because the two lifestyles are completely opposite and contrary, and my faltering old brain probably couldn’t handle the sudden shift back and forth.

People who know me well, like my Longtime Loyal Readers, will appreciate the attraction of both options to me.

Options

Lifestyle

Sheesh, my post about a more relaxing life got me all sorts of input, from literally hundreds of suggestions to several invitations to come visit.  A couple of issues need to be addressed, however.

Because I’ve lost well over half a million dollars (failed businesses, cancer treatments, etc.) over the past dozen-odd years, wherever I end up would be as a renter.  Suggestions, therefore, of cheap real estate or great deals are of little value.

That said, I have found many wonderful places where rental property is not only inexpensive, but in fairly decent areas — i.e. not on the scuzzy side of town where my gun would often be called on, but not for recreation.

Here’s one such example:  a little town outside Morehead KY, which features scenery such as this:

And little single-storey 2BR 2BA apartments like this:

…which on the whole cost less than half of what we currently pay for our Plano apartment of similar size.

I should also point out that all this is way in the future, if we decide to do it at all.  Dallas is where (most) of my kids live, and New Wife’s kids — well, Australia and South Africa are just not gonna happen.

Thankee for all the suggestions and advice.  I should add, however, that if we ever move, it will be away from the Texas heat, so all the suggestions concerning the Hill Country etc. are for nought.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to look at maps and such.