Also from my Disqus history (and yes, this actually happened to me):
“I’d never heard of the term “nooner” until I came to the U.S. back in the mid-1980s. I thought it meant a lunchtime cocktail. So when I suggested to a couple of the ladies at the office that we nip out for a quick nooner… HR was not impressed.”
As we all know, the dreadful Kim Kardashian was attacked and robbed while in Paris attending some fashion show or other, several months ago. Needless to say, as this chick (and the entire Kardashian coven) has become rich by being, well, famous and Kardashian, whole swathes of the population experienced some kind of schadenfreude because, the thought went, she’d brought this on herself by her exhibitionism of wealth and endless self-promotion. Of course she was going to become a target for thieves and other lowlifes.
I remember commenting on this when it first appeared at Insty’s site (can’t find the link, it’s too long ago), but thanks to the eidetic memory of Disqus, I was able to retrieve my comment on the topic:
I’m calling “bullshit” on this whole disgusting line of thought. On that basis, nobody should drive a Bentley because it “invites” car thieves and/or carjackers, no pretty woman should wear sexy clothing because it “invites” rape, nobody should seek celebrity because it “invites” stalking, and no one should live in a showpiece home because it “invites” burglary.
The essence of self-control and civilized behavior is that one does NOT give in to temptation, no matter how severe the apparent provocation. Believe me, if I were alone in a room with some foul liberal, there would be considerable temptation to beat the crap out of him, but of course I’d never do that because it is a.) wrong and b.) illegal. (And if you think there’s no difference between the two, the Clinton Foundation has a job for you.)
I yield to no man in my distaste for the entire Kardashian coven, but to suggest that they’ve “invited” wrongdoing upon themselves by their revolting behavior is simply excusing larceny, and it says more (unpleasantness) about the speaker than it does about the Kardashians.
For some reason, this whole thing has stuck in my own memory, and my disgust towards the Perpetually Envious (for there is no other explanation for the phenomenon) has not dissipated over time, but grown.
We see this over and over again in other manifestations, not just of celebrities like the Kardashians, but even leveled at heroes or people with some kind of exceptional ability. Here’s a good example: Tiger Woods. Tiger became famous like few other sportsmen ever have other than maybe Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali. Tiger did this by being a Black (okay, half-Black) kid who invaded a white-shoe Male Patriarchal country-club sport and absolutely crushed it under his Nike golf shoes. Yet, when it came out that he’d been a busy little beaver — or maybe busy with little beavers — and his beautiful White wife threw him out of his own house, most of his sponsors dropped him like a rock because of his immorality or some such bullshit. His career tanked (unfortunately coincidental with a series of devastating injuries to his back), and the Jackals Of The Press had a field day, lording it over the unfortunate superstar with allusions to Icarus and other such smug, condescending crap.
As I said, all this schadenfreude stems from no other emotion than envy — the envy that small-minded people have for others who have done better than they have in their own miserable little lives: “too big for their boots”, or “the higher they fly, the harder they fall” and similar disgusting tripe.
Well, I called bullshit on this back then, and I’m doing the same now, only with feeling. Actually, I feel even more sympathy for Kim Kardashian than I do for Tiger, because at least one can say that Tiger engaged in self-destructive behavior; all Kim ever did was flaunt her body, celebrity and wealth to a fawning media — the very same media that trashed Tiger, lest we forget.
And I’m not blaming just the journalists (especially the loathsome British tabloids and magazines) who published this nonsense; quite frankly, if people didn’t want to read their crap, those articles wouldn’t be published, so clearly there is a large group of people who feel that way.
We need to be better than this. It doesn’t matter whether we approve of how the Kardashians make their wealth — how someone makes their money should be of no concern to anyone (unless it’s illegally done, in which case we have police and such to deal with it). And if we’re going to be talking about distasteful ways of making money, let’s talk about the disgusting record industry… [25,000 words of angry rant deleted] …and yet nobody would say, if some record company executive’s wife was robbed, that she had it coming.
No: if hundreds of thousands of people are going to tune into “Life With The Kardashians” or whatever they call their stupid TV show, and buy the merchandise that is quite unexceptional but for the “Kim” brand on it, then it is a perfectly valid way for the Kardashians to make money. Hell, talking about shit products, even I paid good money to watch the Chicago Cubs fail, year after year; I’m not going to call someone stupid for buying some celebrity-endorsed cat-piss perfume. (Yeah, I know the Cubs finally won the Series last year; we can all now look forward to another hundred years of failure while the franchise fleeces the rubes again.)
The whole mindset comes from the “tall flower” syndrome — the notion that the person who stands out of the crowd will have his head cut off (corollary: and deservedly so) — but speaking as one who has often been that tall flower (mostly because of my big mouth), let me tell you, it’s a stupid, disgusting notion and we would do well to be rid of it.
Back in the old days, I used to post pictures of beautiful women on Sundays, mostly of screen sirens of the black-and-white movie era. I’m not going to do that anymore, because I think I mined that particular vein pretty thoroughly, and anyway it’s too constricting a topic. Instead, on Sundays, I’m going to talk about anything that takes my fancy — stuff that’s not part of the normal rants and gun worship during the week. Today, and for many Sundays to come, I’m going to talk about Beautiful Things (of any definition)… and if I run out of those things to talk about, well, we’re all in trouble.
I have often been teased about my love for Italian cars — not just Ferraris, Maseratis and Lambos, but for the… lesser brands like Fiat and Alfa Romeo, if we can call them that. Here’s what I wrote about Alfa Romeos many, many years ago.
You get into your Alfa, and wonder of wonders, it starts first time. You set out on your journey, a journey that will take you over fifty miles on curving, twisting mountain roads. You accelerate, and your Alfa whispers in your ear: “Come, cara mia, I can give you more than that; you may use me, use me hard, and I will reward you beyond your wildest dreams.” So you accelerate, and still that soft Italian voice urges you on: “Is that all you ask from me, cara? I have more to give, if you will just ask me for it.” You drive at what you think is an impossible speed; surely, you think, you will crash soon. But the miles fly past, the curves disappear in your rearview mirror (assuming you have the courage to look into it), and still your Alfa purrs encouragement into your ear. Finally, you reach your destination, shaking as though you have just made love to the world’s most beautiful Italian woman. You sit there for a moment, savoring the experience. Then you get out of the Alfa, and the door handle comes off in your hand.
Alfa Romeos aren’t like that anymore. Oh sure, they can be maddening to drive, their cars are more suited for the track than for everyday use, and they’re still built for runty Italians than fat Americans.
Until now.
Allow me to introduce to you the greatest performance sedan on Earth, the car that costs less than half any other performance saloon car, yet still delivers 512hp (!) and a top speed of nevermind: the Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio.
It derives its immense power from a smallish 2.9-liter V6 engine, rides like a dream, and is an order of magnitude better than any other Alfa sedan ever made. More impressive still is the build quality, which is apparently on a par with any luxury performance sedans extant, in that its door handles aren’t going to fall off, the electrical system works just fine, and the automatic transmission, astonishingly, is better than the manual gearbox. I haven’t yet driven the Giulia, of course, but from all accounts, this is not your father’s Alfa Romeo. And most important of all, it costs around $85,000 versus, say, a Maserati Quattroporte GTS Lusso ($165,000 for a 3.9-liter V8 yielding 455hp) or a Porsche Panamera 4S ($125,000 for a 2.9-liter V6 yielding 440hp), and is only a few grand more expensive than its nearest real rival, a loaded BMW M3 — and the M3 isn’t nearly as exciting to look at and, from all accounts, to drive, with its 425hp I6 engine. Only the Mercedes CL AMG 63 ($88,000 for a 4.0-liter V8 yielding 503hp) comes anywhere close to the Alfa in cost and power — and like the Beemer, the Merc is dead boring to look at.
But for me, comparisons are boring. What’s exciting is that Alfa Romeo USA will at last be selling not a go-kart like the 4C, but a real car for grownups.
(I can’t afford a Giulia, of course; a Fiat 124 Spider Lusso ($28,000 for a 1.4-liter turbo yielding 160hp) is much more to my wallet’s capacity, and I’ll be writing about that one later.)
But Alfa is back… and it’s just as exciting a prospect as its last beautiful sport saloon car worthy of the Alfa name, the Alfetta GTV6 (2.5-liter V6 yielding 160hp):
I have driven this beauty, from memory, back in about 1983 — and my earlier description of driving an Alfa Romeo is based on this model, driven through South Africa’s mountainous Van Reenen’s Pass at frightening speed. (I should point out that the GTV6 also won the European Touring Car Championship for an unprecedented four years in succession, from 1982 to 1985.)
Today, the 2017 Giulia Quadrifoglio would eat its lunch.
I was wandering along some tributary of Teh Intarwebz looking for something or other, when I came across a series of paintings of extraordinary beauty done by Russian-Israeli artist Leonid Afremov, and completely forgot what I’d been looking for. Here’s one that caught my eye first, called Heavy Rain:
Now, the thing about traditional Impressionism is that it was created at a time when light in cities was soft, made by gaslight and candlelight — and needless to say, the en plein air trend of 19th-century Impressionism meant that most paintings were daytime scenes. Night, in the countryside, means darkness (unless you’re Van Gogh, of course, and see the stars as miniature suns). Cityscapes were mostly lit by the sun, and to those painters, the city sun was harsh (which is why there are so many Impressionist paintings of dusk, dawn or rainy scenes, where the light is softer). Here’s one by Edouard Cortès, to illustrate [sic] the point:
But Afremov is a modern Impressionist painter — he was born in 1955, which makes him a year younger than I — and the light he sees is harsher, brighter, more artificial: neon, light bulbs and florescent tubes, and he uses a palette knife rather than a brush to make the contrast even more pronounced. That doesn’t take away from his wonderful skill and expressiveness, of course; just look at his exquisite Promenade, and tell me it’s not evocative:
If you go to DeviantArt, you can see more.
I just love his work. If I could, I’d buy prints of almost everything he’s ever done and hang them on my walls.
As with my old blogs, I won’t be posting much over weekends because
a.) people need to be with their families / doing something productive / sleeping off hangovers, rather than reading my stuff on the Internet; and
b.) I need time for my Pore Ole Brain to recover — it’s been a busy week; and finally,
c.) I have a boatload of work to do in clearing out the assorted garbage of the last fourteen years so that the house does not make prospective buyers run screaming down the street.
Nevertheless, one fresh post each day awaits you over the weekend. See y’all on Monday, when the normal menu of invective, anger, threats to politicians and gun worship will continue.
Via Insty, I discovered this little beast lurking in the bushes. The piece is entitled, “The race for autonomous cars is over. Silicon Valley lost” and is about how Silicon Valley won’t be able to challenge Detroit / Wolfsburg / Stuttgart / Tokyo in the manufacture of autonomous cars. Don’t care about any of that. No, the turd in the punchbowl actually comes towards the end of the article:
There is another area where Silicon Valley could play a dominant role and it’s all about accessing car-based data.
One billion people get in and out of a car every single day. They go to work, they go home, they shop, they play, they do a billion different things. Knowing where they’re going and what they’re doing can be very valuable. That data can be aggregated, sorted, and packaged. And then it can be sold to anyone.
Unlike automotive manufacturing, Big Data analytics driven by Artificial Intelligence does not require large capital investments in factories and equipment. That translates into meaty profit margins, reportedly as high as 90%.
There are basically two sets of data. One set is generated by the car, such as how all the parts and components are performing and how well the car is running. That allows automakers to mine the data for a variety of uses, such as trend analysis to quickly identify warranty issues or learn how to set more effective engineering specifications.
The other set of data is generated by the people in the car; a massive amount of information flowing in and out about where they’re going and what they’re doing. Last year in the U.S. market alone Chevrolet collected 4,220 terabytes of data from customer’s cars. McKinsey forecasts that this could grow into a $450 to 750 billion market by 2030. Retailers, advertisers, marketers, product planners, financial analysts, government agencies, and so many others will eagerly pay to get access to that information. And it’s a gift that keeps on giving. You can sell the same data again, again and again to a variety of different customers.
I have no absolutely problem with the first data set; if it’s to do with improving the car and its manufacturer’s business, I’m all for it.
I have an enormous problem with the second data set. Here’s why.
As Longtime Readers already know, I used to work in the supermarket loyalty program business; you know, those annoying little cards you have to use to get discounts when you check out of the big supermarkets. (Basically, the supermarket is paying you for your shopping data, which they mostly use to improve things like stock re-ordering, shelf management and pricing strategy. That’s the equivalent of Data Set #1, above.) Let me be perfectly frank about this: I don’t know a great deal about a lot of things, but I know absolutely everything about customer data collection and -marketing. Over a period of five years, I set up data collection methodology and designed databases, reporting systems and marketing programs for a number of supermarket chains all over the United States. Trust me, I know whereof I speak on this topic.
Which is why I look on this Data Set #2 from the automotive industry with alarm and absolute hostility. One of the rules I set up right at the beginning of any loyalty program was that the data didn’t belong to the supermarket chain; it belonged to the customer. Once aggregated, of course, the data became ours — but individual transaction data was absolutely untouchable. We could not release any individual’s data to anyone without that customer’s explicit and specific approval — several times, I refused “requests” (demands) from divorce attorneys and once, yes, from a government agency, to have access to individuals’ shopping data.
Now compare and contrast that policy, if you will, with this breezy attitude towards data sharing:
Retailers, advertisers, marketers, product planners, financial analysts, government agencies, and so many others will eagerly pay to get access to that information. And it’s a gift that keeps on giving. You can sell the same data again, again and again to a variety of different customers.
I have often cautioned people about this trend towards autonomous cars. Yes, it means that you don’t have to worry your pretty / pointy little head about that messy driving business while you grapple with WOW Level 13 — but what you’re doing, in essence, is giving up control of the car to someone else. (And you can dress it up with all the IT gobbledygook about “algorithms”, “AI” and “predictive planning” you want; I’ll still tell you to blow it out your ass, because at the end of the day, someone not you is going to control your actions.)
Now this. Note that in the excerpt above, the lovely little term “government agencies” is inserted right next to “and so many others” like it’s not just another fucking tool whereby the goddamn government can observe and yes, later control your actions.
One of my heroes is a man named John Cowperthwaite, who was the governor-general of Hong Kong during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and who was responsible for the greatest improvement of a country’s living conditions in history. Here was Cowperthwaite’s take on government data collection (which he expressly forbade, by the way), as told to Milton Friedman:
“I remember asking [Cowperthwaite] about the paucity of statistics. He answered,’If I let them compute those statistics, they’ll want to use them for planning.'”
If it were just planning, I might be okay with it. But what Cowperthwaite suspected, and what I know for a fact, is that governmental “planning” inevitably leads to government control. Information is everything, and we now live in the Information Age. Sometimes I wish we didn’t, because the vast mass of people just don’t care or are completely ignorant of this danger.
Here’s my last thought (for now) on this topic. The automobile was for decades a symbol of an individual’s independence. In his car, a man could drive wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted, for whatever reason he wanted, and for as long as he wanted — all without anyone but himself being any the wiser. Now, under the guise of “autonomy”, this freedom is going to be taken away from us. (At this point, George Orwell is laughing his ass off. “Freedom is Slavery”, remember?)
I once said that if I could choose the way I die, it would either be in my wife’s arms or on the barricades. Well, that first option has been taken from me, which means that if I die, it will be in a pitched gun battle with government agents who are trying to take away my old car and forcing me to use Government Autonomous Vehicle Mk. VII — and if you think I’m joking, I’m not. Fuck this bullshit.