Your suggestions in Comments.
Latest Posts
And Suddenly… Nothing Happened
Amidst all the Glueball Wormening / Freezing / Wormening MkII / Climate Catastrophe / We’re all gonna dieeee!!! hysteria of the past decade, it’s always nice to have it all wrapped up in a bow for us:
Al Gore’s legacy of lies continued to spill into the second decade of this century. Contrary to his predictions in the famous climate documentary An Inconvenient Truth, polar bear populations increased, the Arctic and Antarctic remained relatively unaffected, and no major coastal economy was threatened by rising sea levels.
Read the rest for more major climate-idiocy refutations.
Language Beef
One of my major beefs with European languages is that stupid custom of giving everything a gender — in Latin, a table is feminine but a house is masculine (sometimes, depending on the sense of the sentence); in French a car is feminine but a horse is masculine; and in German, a train is masculine but a railway is feminine, and so on.
No wonder they’ve had to declare war on each other every decade or so.
Basically, it’s Latin’s fault. That Roman nonsense gave every word a gender (with the wonderful addition of a neuter gender which wasn’t very common). Additionally, Latin has no articles (the, a, an etc.) — which I think is why words had to have a gender, so that the listener could determine to which word an adjective was being applied to. Here’s a little summary:
There is a stark difference between English and Latin’s treatment of gender. Only words in English that indicate a biological sex have a masculine or feminine gender. All others are considered neuter. Latin, however, applies gender to many words even when biological sex is not intimated.
No wonder the bloody thing died off.
But that’s not the end of the story, oh no.
As European languages modernized, they added articles — except that with gendered nouns, the articles had to change to continue the form. Hence la roche (rock), le matin (morning) and so on. German went the same way: der Zug (train), die Eisenbahn (railway), etc.
All that, so that this little meme would make sense to everybody who’s not a language dork like I am:
Of course, as can be seen in the above, the Germans took the thing to its logical conclusion and over-complicated their language almost to the point of impossibility, making the article also reflect the nouns’s declension case as well as its gender. Don’t get me started.
At least the Germans are usually too polite to correct you when you screw up, and will sometimes even switch to English if they can. The French, however, have no such scruples and will correct your grammar, loudly and often with a smirk — which makes my already-fragile temper turn homicidal in a millisecond.
Thank goodness English is gradually taking over as the international language of business, and is the backbone of this here Intarwebz thingy.
I still read Le Parisien once a week, though.
Shuddup, You Little Prick
From perpetual pain-in-the-ass Has-Been Mayor of NYFC Bloomberg:
Yes, [California has] problems, including homelessness, struggling public schools and scarce, costly housing. But California “is something the rest of the country looks up to,” Bloomberg said. “California has been a leader in an awful lot of things.”
The only things looking up to California are the flies circling the turds lying in the streets. All the rest of us (sentient human beings, that is) think California is a Grade-A shithole.
And if I can use Hizzoner’s own words, just modified a little:
“California has been a leader in a lot of awful things.”
…which is more truthful than what he said.
Quote Of The Day
From Walter Williams:
“Knowing who owns what weapons is the first step to confiscation.”
I don’t think I have to caution any of my Readers about this, but anyway: if ever some government apparatchik wants to register guns — any kind of guns — resist, refuse to comply, make a noise about it.
I should point out that back in the police state known as Apartheid South Africa, all guns had to be registered to owners, who were themselves registered as such.
I had five guns that the Gummint knew nothing about. In fact, now that I think back, I had more un-registered guns than registered ones. If it was possible under that government, it should be easy-peasy Over Here.
Do ye the same, O My Readers.
Return Of The Nat– I mean Colt Python
Several people have written to me about Colt’s re-release of the venerable Colt Python. From the horse’s mouth:
What… no Colt Royal Blue? I’ll wait. I don’t want a Python Pimp Model, thankee verramush.
Anyway, I can’t wait for the gun mags to review the new Python. What I’d really like to see is some intrepid reviewer doing a side-by side comparison of an old 1970s-era Python with the new one, to see if Colt will be manufacturing guns to the same degree of quality as they did back then.
I don’t want to be all negative and stuff, but something in my water tells me that’s not gonna happen.
But just to be perfectly clear on this: as a HUGE fan of the Python revolver — I still have my old 6″ Python holster, against the day when I get another one — I will be the happiest man in the world to be proved wrong.
Some of you may be wondering, if I’m such a Python groupie, why I ever sold my old one:
Answer: I didn’t sell it. I shot it till it broke, irretrievably: frame bent, cylinder busted, the full catastrophe. Only the barrel and trigger assembly could be salvaged for parts.
It was the finest handgun I’ve ever fired, by a day’s march — and believe me, I’ve shot a LOT of damn handguns in my life.
I still mourn its passing.