I Hate This

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.

Perverts And Child Molesters

I have often ranted about how ordinary English words have been appropriated and stripped of their original meaning by people and movements whose actions I deplore:  “gay” for “homosexual”, “grass” for “marijuana”, and so on.

There is a category on this website entitled “Grooming”, and I bitterly resent that a word which has all to do with manners, clothing, fashion and such has likewise been hijacked by Perverts International.  Who they?  you ask.  Why, this bunch of assholes in Britishland, for example:

School children are told prostitution is a ‘rewarding job’ by sex education providers who promote ‘kinks’ to pupils including flogging, beating and locking people up in a cage.

I know exactly whom I’d like to flog, beat and lock in a cage (e.g. an iron maiden), thereafter followed by impalement, and it’s these “sex education providers” who are corrupting children.

I’d refer to them as “motherfuckers”, but that would be a misnomer, wouldn’t it?  They have their sights set much lower.

Diversion

Many of us greeted with dismay the action of President Braindead to release oil from our strategic reserve, supposedly in order to reduce the price thereof.

Well yes, and now this:

Americans received a nasty surprise when they learned today that much of the oil released from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been exported rather than refined domestically in the U.S. to lower the cost of gasoline at the pump.

President Joe Biden’s ongoing million barrel a day release of oil from nation’s oil reserve has depleted it to levels not seen since 1968.  All at a time when the Biden administration has engaged in wholesale war against domestic energy producers under the guise of forcing energy transformation on America.

You might ask who is getting our oil that is being drained from what effectively is our military’s national security oil savings bank

Reuters reports that China is one of the June recipients of the formerly strategic oil.

How nice.

Short Answer: No

…and:

The simple  answer is the title of this post.

Longer  answer:  Do not expect help from those whom you hate and actively seek to destroy.

Fuck ’em;  their medieval belief system, their backwards society, their honor killings and their hijabs:  fuck ’em all.

They’re savages and should be treated as such.

Needless to say, our Congress is no doubt authorizing a few billion dollars in aid, which just makes me all the more eager for November 2022.

Mumbles In The Darkness

Here’s an article which resonated with me:

Why are today’s TV shows and movies so GRAY?

I’ve now got to the point where the movie has been consistently dark during the first five or ten minutes, off I go to somewhere else.  Ditto the Brit movies in which the dialogue is either mumbled, spoken in an unintelligible accent or both.  Also, the ones where impenetrable slang is in more than half the dialogue — I know, it’s realism, but still — I don’t expect characters to speak Received English via the Royal Shakespeare Company either.

And for gawd’s sake, S-L-O-W D-O-W-N when you speak your lines.

Pardon me if I just want to know what the hell is going on in your precious Work Of Art.  Cinema is becoming like modern art, where the expression is so personal that it needs explanation by the auteur.  And don’t give me that “mood” jive, either.  You wanna see a mood, just watch my expression as I hit the “outta here” button on the remote.

I do make an exception for the Scandi-noir movies and TV shows, because the Scandis only ever get about two hours of sunlight a day, so an average production would take years to shoot if they waited for sunny days.

But even that’s a problem:  in every police station I’ve ever been in (and there have been quite a few hem hem), the rooms are brightly lit to almost daylight levels.  In the movies, I’m constantly yelling at the screen for someone to hit a light switch.

No wonder they miss so many clues:  they can’t fucking see them.

And no wonder so many people are ditching Netflix, Prime et al., when so many movies are being made according to the Intangible / Unintelligible Sludge formula.

Paul Revere, Part Deux: The Calis Are Coming!

Now here’s a cause for alarm:

Musk’s electric car company wasn’t the only Silicon Valley giant to make the move and is unlikely to be the last. Bloomberg reports that Hewlett Packard made the shift after citing the difference in real estate expenses between the Golden and Lone Star states, with Oracle Corp also making the move. If other major companies also make the decision to leave Silicon Valley, it could spell disaster for the area — especially given how income and employee numbers are split. If just Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Cisco left Silicon Valley would lose 20% of its employees and billions of dollars in GDP. High taxes and living costs may soon drive companies and workers away from Silicon Valley, and towards cheaper states with Texas a regular target.

Frankly… no.

I have no desire to have those woke asshole corporations come to my beloved Texas, and change our way of life — already in some danger thanks to their predecessors — into something that more resembles California’s.  And change it they will, make no mistake, because they will come with shitloads of money:  money that will buy them politicians and local government officials, and their wokist, Green attitudes will gain a foothold — or, I should say, a stronger foothold — when in fact few Texans outside Austin want that crap to change their lives.

Here’s a little warning to liberal Californians:  EVERYBODY HATES YOU.  I mean really, really hates you.  Your insufferable liberal smugness and superiority, your ability to drive up affordable local real estate values fueled by the proceeds of your bloated California property prices,  your liberal mindset and your insistence that everywhere you move must change into what you just left behind — all that and more does not endear you to the locals.  So do not act surprised when your appearance is not only not welcomed, but treated with dismay or even outright hostility.

I remember chatting to a guy in small-town Idaho who had moved there to escape all the expat Californians in Colorado (seriously), and was horrified to learn that said insects were now starting to infest his new home town.  When I asked him why they would move there when there was absolutely no real industry to attract them, he just snorted and said, “Retirees.”

I wish you could have seen the expression of loathing on his face and heard the utter hatred in his voice.

It may come as some surprise to Californians, but most people don’t actually care if in their little towns there are no vegan restaurants, cute little gourmet bistros that sell kiddie portions at adult prices, yoga studios, Lululemon outlets and all the unnecessary shit that Californians seem to regard as critical to their precious “lifestyle”.  And by the way:  there aren’t going to be a lot of charging outlets for your precious Priuses and Teslas, so don’t complain about that when it can all be solved by leaving that shit behind and buying a Ford F-150.  In fact, that’s a perfect analogy for the changes that you have to make if you want to be accepted:  ditch the attitude and go native, because nobody cares how you did things in California, even if you feel that it’s so much better and can’t stop telling people that.

And by the way:  if you do move out of California and relocate to America, one of your first actions should be to buy a fucking gun (preferably several) and a truckload of ammo.  And if that course of action causes you to recoil or feel uncomfortable, then you may want to just keep on driving through Arizona, Texas and Tennessee until you get to Massachusetts or New York, where they feel the same way about those icky guns as you do.

Bloody hell, just the thought of Google moving to Plano makes me want to start looking at real estate in east Tennessee or rural Idaho.

I think I’ll go to the range.