From sunny Seffrica comes this lovely story.
Executive summary: three choirboys run into a church waving guns and try to appropriate the entire congregation’s cash. Only problem: the church in question is located in a deeply conservative part of the country, and one of the congregants is an ex-cop. Result: two choirboys dead, one possibly wounded.
You may now applaud.
And from the comments to the article comes this priceless observation:
Note the upvote : downvote ratio.
Before you read Teh Headlines below, here’s a little pick-me-up.
…looks like that “assimilation” thing is working well for the Krauts.
…somebody explain to me why punishment for a crime like this shouldn’t include flaying before execution.
…this is me, wearing Sarah Hoyt’s shocked face.
…man, I didn’t know that Trump has 60 million campaign workers.
…and I’ll believe that poll, as long as “Do you think Blacks are racist?” was one of the questions.
…joins Mandela, far too late, in that great Murdering Bastards Club In The Sky.
…who? Oh yeah, the guy who’s going to lose an election by a larger margin than George McGovern.
…let’s start more modestly by canceling stupid.
…wrong as always, Rather, you lying Commie cocksucker.
…the only thing newsworthy about this one is that it wasn’t Nicholas Cage.
…I know, I know: this item no good without pitchurs:
Not quite zero, but close.
Here’s an example of “studies” that just set my hair on fire:
The LEAST reliable used cars revealed
Warrantywise has published data from its Reliability Index for older cars
A minimum of 100 examples of each car is needed to provide a reliability score
…but here’s where the turd hits the punchbowl:
It measures reliability based on the volume and cost of repairs to vehicles
Including cost of repairs means that.. wait for it… cars like Bentley and Audi are going to fall to the bottom of the list, regardless.
Here’s the scenario:
But in terms of actual (instead of cost-weighted) reliability, your Dacia was in the shop ten times, compared to the Audi’s twice.
I’m not saying that’s what happened in the study (I don’t have access to the raw data), but that’s the problem when you add irrelevant factors to an equation.
The real problem lies with the title. If Warrantywise had called their study “Total Cost Of Post-Warranty Ownership”, it would have given the output a better foundation.
Or if they were going to stick with reliability, they should have ignored cost and instead stressed weighting factors of “frequency of breakdown” and “magnitude of failure” (brake lights fail, no big deal; transmission dies, much more serious). That, at least, would have given prospective buyers a clue.
All that said, I’d still get one of these (with only 12,000 miles usage)
…over a poxy Mitsubishi anything.
(See what I did there? About the same thing as Warrantywise did. It’s called “bias”.)
Anyway: if you can afford to buy it, you should be able to afford to maintain it.
And can ignore silly studies.
As the Left ramps up its little reindeer games, expect more of this kind of thing:
“As we’re walking down passing Fourth Street, a blue car just come swerving out into the middle of the street almost runs over a bunch of protesters and everybody around starts like smacking the car trying to get him to slow down,” the witness said. “He pulls down his window and he fires three shots into the guy. From point-blank. No words no nothing. And then rolls up his window and zooms off.”
I’m not saying this is a good thing — despite my Yosemite Sam online persona, I dread having to shoot someone again — but at some point, the “kill everybody” switch is going to be thrown by ordinary people, especially when these rioting thugs start blocking roads, stopping cars and trying to assault the drivers and passengers.
Used to be that peaceful protests were confined (by the police) to sidewalks, with lots of chanting, signs and so on. Peaceful stuff. But that police action seems to have gone by the board — whether by negligence or design I can’t say — and inevitably, as police presence diminishes, the thugs will become bolder and more violent as they get the impression that “We own the streets!”
So I blame city management for this — muzzling police has long been a hallmark of Leftist government — and if the winds have been sown, both rioters and their government backers can expect whirlwinds; which will invite rioters to start carrying guns to these “peaceful protests”, and off we go on the hurricane of violence.
Which, by the way, is exactly what the Leftist nomenklatura wants to happen.
Well, the weekend fun is over.
Now the cleanup begins, with a little humor to alleviate the drudgery.
And remember, if you see a helpless young lady stuck with a broken down car:
…her boyfriend is probably hiding behind the bushes with a gun.
When you hear the name “Fleetwood Mac” many people are unaware that there have been essentially two, maybe three versions of the band, all containing the brilliant rhythm unit of Mick Fleetwood on drums and John McVie on bass guitar. That engine room remained unchanged for decades, and powered the band through all its various incarnations.
But the music that surrounded that rhythm unit was changeable.
Most people equate the Fleetwood Mac name with the drippy 1980s version which pumped out bouncy neo-ABBA megahits like “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” and “You Can Go Your Own Way”, and people who think this was the best version of Fleetwood Mac make the mistake of equating commercial success with musical value — “They sold a lot of records, so they must be good” (cf. Elton John, Britney Spears, Taylor Swift etc.). (That’s actually the opinion of the recording industry, only those reptiles put it more honestly: “Those longhaired assholes made us more money than the Small Faces or Steely Dan”.)
But the better band, by a country mile, was the first version — originally called “Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac”, which differentiates them from the later popcorn Mac.
And all this came from the notice yesterday that Mac’s founder Peter Green had just died, at age 73.
Now Green was an absolutely brilliant blues guitarist — at the time, technically quite the equal of people like Jeff Beck, Paul Kossoff and other British blues players of the era — but like most lead guitarists, he was a hopeless head case so his music never achieved the level of Beck et al. That doesn’t mean they were bad — anything but — but his blues-drenched music, lyrics and psychodelia were not, to put it mildly, commercially attractive.
Take a listen to Man Of The World, and pay especial attention to the lyrics — and that was about as commercial as they got. Even old standards like I Need Your Love So Bad were given the Peter Green treatment.
And let’s not forget Black Magic Woman — the original Green version, as it turns out, not the salsa Santana copy.
And when this Fleetwood Mac weren’t doing old-fashioned slit-your-wrist blues, they were causing record industry executives to tear their hair out with instrumental songs like Albatross and incomprehensible free-form ditties like Oh Well (which came in two parts, thus ensuring it would never get airplay on the radio stations of the time). Needless to say, it’s one of my favorite Mac songs.
Of course, it didn’t last. Peter Green lost his mind, lived on the streets, and Fleetwood Mac went into their 1b) version, which I also rather liked because shortly before he quit, the band had got guitarists Danny Kirwan (who wrote their only truly commercial hit Green Manalishi) and Bob Welch, as well as the incomparable blues singer Christine Perfect (who’d sung Chicken Shack’s I’d Rather Go Blind, and later married bassist McVie).
Then it all went to shit. The band broke up, all the guitarists and singers were fired, Fleetwood and the two McVies moved to the United States, and out of the shit eventually came the version containing the warbly Stevie Nicks and commercial songwriter Lindsay Buckingham, and the rest, as they say, is history (as chronicled here). And I’m not interested in it.
When you have Bill Clinton using one of your songs as a campaign anthem… well, that says it all, really.
But any guitarist of any worth knows all about Peter Green, his virtuosity and his contribution to music.
R.I.P.