I can’t remember which one of you foul bastards kindly souls pointed me at this channel, but now that you have, I should point out that ever since you did, the damn thing has been on permanent-play in the background and has yielded countless little earwormies on a daily basis ever since.
I hope you are satisfied.
Yeah I know it’s A.I.-spawned, but it’s jazz so who cares?
Over at Snark & Shotguns comes a timely bit of analysis:
In 2015 a team of researchers walked into German classrooms and asked teachers to rate how good boys and girls are at reading. The average answer was that girls are better. Then they tracked the kids for two years. Boys whose teachers held the strongest stereotype saw their reading self-concept drop measurably, holding actual achievement constant. The teachers weren’t making the boys worse readers. They were making the boys believe they were worse readers, which boys, being human, respond to by reading less.
It gets funnier. A French team in 2016 gave eighty third-graders the same reading task twice. First time it was framed as a reading test. Boys flopped. Second time, same task, framed as a game. Boys beat the girls. And here’s the punchline — the boys most damaged by the “test” framing were the boys who cared most about reading. The ones who’d internalized that reading mattered were the ones whose performance collapsed the moment reading was put in the institutional cage labelled Test.
And then the most telling observation:
Last thought, and this one really matters. Jerrim and Moss, in the biggest international study of its kind, looked at 297,000 fifteen-year-olds across 35 countries and asked which kind of reading develops reading skill.
Answer: fiction.
Only fiction.
Non-fiction, newspapers, magazines, comics… Once you control for fiction, none of those do the work. The gender gap in fiction specifically is larger than the gender gap in any other text type.
Boys are not failing to read. Boys are failing to read the one thing that makes them better readers.
I can attest to this. When we started homeschooling the Son&Heir, fresh out of Catholic middle school, we tested his reading skills and found them to be around sixth-grade level.
So in addition to whatever else we taught him (Saxon Math, mostly), he had to read for no less than four hours a day. Every day. And by “every”, I mean Monday through Sunday. (We made allowances for family outings and so on, but that as the guideline.)
At first, he kicked and screamed, complaining that he kept falling asleep, to which our response was, “Fine. If you fall asleep, don’t worry about it. Just keep reading when you wake up.” We didn’t really much care what he read, only that it couldn’t be a picture book or comics. And because he didn’t know what to read, I gave him a series of books from our library to start with. There were no restrictions about following the list, however; if he got halfway through a book and it failed to keep his interest, he could quit reading it — but he had to explain to me why he’d done so.
It took about a year. And then one day he asked me: “Do we have any more books by Daphne du Maurier?” He’d found a favorite author. In the following months, he read her entire body of work. And then came the real breakthrough: he discovered fantasy, in the shape of R.A. Salvatore (author of about a jillion titles), and over the next few years read all of his body of work.
All of a sudden, we couldn’t stop him reading. He moved on to the Great Books — he still has the set — and never looked back. To this day, he is one of the most well-read men I know. His B.A., by the way, carries a Philosophy major, which is not a discipline for the non-reader. (He reads stuff, e.g. Hegel, that makes his father’s brain hurt.)
I know: the plural of anecdote is not data. But it certainly supports the Jerrim and Moss experiment.
Now go and read the whole article to see how badly public schools have served our boys.
Knifeman who stabbed three people in Switzerland runs towards young schoolchildren ‘while shouting Allahu Akbar’ with weapon raised
...and we’ll probably never know his motivations or motives, of course.
Global warming is getting worse because of the deportations conducted by ICE — The Guardian
...JHC, could they be any more pathetic?
Prisoner struck and killed by a high-speed train after escaping from a custody vehicle that was transporting him from a police station to a court hearing
...out of the flying van, and onto the railway. [cue “heart of stone” music]
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent Confirms Treasury is Prepared to Print $250 Bill with Trump’s Face
...first I checked the calendar, and nope, it’s not April Fool’s Day. Then I imagined Lefty heads exploding, and I laughed and laughed and laughed. (I still don’t believe it, though.)
Your suggestions in Comments.
Some time back, Reader Mike S. sent me this pic, with the comment: “Marketing trumps Good Taste every time.”
My initial reaction is to agree with him. Clearly, this rifle is not aimed at Grumpy Ole Pharrttes like him (or me, for that matter), but at some new genre of gun owner — my guess, a Gen Z person who wants to look cool and doesn’t want to look like his grandpappy (again, like Mike or me) with our old WinMar wooden-stocked “cowboy” rifles.
And yes, while I think that the tacti-cool thing in the snow pic looks like dog’s balls on a Noritake dinner plate, there’s no denying that it would work just as well as its predecessor — I mean, a lever gun is a lever gun is a lever gun, regardless of its cladding.
Also, in places that Must Not Be Named — places that ban “assault rifles” — there is no question but that Snow Gun would escape the baleful scrutiny of said gun-haters because it is, after all, just a lever rifle.
Finally, the marketing executive in me says that we Grumpy Ole Pharrttes are entering the Twilight Years — i.e. we’re not long for the gun world, or any world — so we are, to put it crudely, a shrinking market. In that spirit, therefore, manufacturers should extend their product line to accommodate the tastes of a New Generation…
…as long as they continue to make traditional lever rifles, and not make it an “either/or” situation, because that would make me fucking enraged very sad.
But hey, considering that I had to change my sixty-year deodorant choice because the manufacturer decided to do the above, what the hell. Let’s just join the in-crowd and get some ghastly new thing instead of a rifle that has served its users perfectly well for over a hundred and fifty years.
Update: Panzer Arms has decided to get in on the faerie “white gun” trend, with its semi-auto 12ga:
I’m kinda interested how that thing is going to look after a thousand rounds has been put through it. My guess is that it’s going to look as worn out as a Kardashian’s pleasure pit. But I could be wrong.
Street cost is around $500.
There’s a massive danger to Earth, uncovered by !Scientists!:
Men are bad for the planet, a controversial new study has claimed.
Researchers from 13 countries have joined forces on a new paper, titled ‘Men, masculinities, and the planet at the end of (M)Anthropocene.’ According to the experts, men tend to have a greater carbon footprint than women, largely through travel, transportation, and tourism. Blokes are also less concerned with climate change – and less willing to change their everyday practices to fix it.
No shit. We’re too busy building stuff, moving stuff, drilling for stuff and in general making the planet habitable for everyone. But wait, we’re doing even MOAR Evil Things!
In addition, typically ‘manly’ activities negatively impact both the environment and the climate. This includes things like fishing and hunting, as well as meat consumption. ‘Men tend to be more involved in owning, managing, controlling heavy, chemical, carbon–based, industrialized agriculture, high environmental impact and extractive industries, and of course militarism, with its own devastating environmental effects.’
However did they miss “car racing”? And only in the fevered mind of academia would hunting and fishing be a danger to the environment, when any fule kno that practitioners of the above are the most ardent supporters of environmental protection.
Of course, it’s all dressed up in the usual pseudo-scientific gobbledegook:
Professor Jeff Hearn, professor of sociology in Huddersfield’s Department of Social and Psychological Sciences, said: ‘There is now plenty of research that shows clear negative impacts of some men’s behavior on the environment and climate. What is astonishing is how this aspect does not figure in most debate and policy in a more sustainable world.’
That’s because “most debate and policy” concerns itself with more important issues, such as whether Sidney Sweeney’s ever going to do OnlyFans.
On that topic: they also missed “wanking”. I’m not sure how that lovely activity is linked to Global Warming Climate Cooling Change©, but I am sure that as we speak there is a group of some asshole “scientists” busy working on a (taxpayer-funded) study on the topic.
People are being paid — in thirteen countries, no less — to produce bullshit like this.
Fach.