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Back Story & The Brand

Toys

After I talked about my favorite watch of all time — Tissot Heritage — a couple of people wrote to me to ask about the brand.  (I’m astonished that people had never heard of the amazing company, which sells more watches than any other Swiss brand, period.)

Here’s Teddy Baldassarre’s take on the whole thing, and like his other discourses, it’s excellent.  For those with a limited budget but are interested in a super-accurate chronometer, by the way, it’s worth noting that Tissot makes the cheapest such in the whole market, and its performance equals many of the (very) spendy models like Rolex.


(They typically cost between $800 to $2,000 depending on the model — but the chronometer’s action is automatic, and therefore of no interest to me, a self-winder devotee.)

Yer welcome.

Peppery

Food & Drink

Via Insty, I found this fascinating article about how America’s food is becoming more spicy:

Consider spicy-hot food — and consider how recent it is as a mainstream phenomenon in the U.S. In 2002 many of us cheerfully chow down on Szechuan and Thai, habaneros and rellenos, nam pla and sambal ulek. Salsa outsells ketchup. But it wasn’t always that way.

When I first came over in 1982, I found American food to be kinda like what I’d left behind in South Africa:  kinda bland, almost-English in fact, and diner food very much so.  Only when I went south to New Orleans and Florida did the food start to spice up a little — in the Big Easy, quite alarmingly so.

Back in Johannesburg, although I’d grown up with at least one curry meal a week, spicy food was definitely not an everyday fare.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I moved Over Here in The Great Wetback Episode of 1986 I found out that over that short period, food in general had spiced up considerably (what the article refers to as “capsaicinization”), and frankly, I wasn’t prepared for it.  It took me a while to get used to it, but I did.

Now?  I eat nachos with one slice of jalapeño pepper per mouthful.  (Without the jalapeño, nachos are pretty awful — close to what Richard Hammond once described as “sick on a plate”.)

What made me realize how my own taste had become so capsaicinized was when New Wife came over from Seffrica to become part of my life Over Here.  Now granted, she’d never been that fond of spicy food — even curry, so much a staple of SA menu, was conspicuous by its absence on her table — and in fact, that was generally true of many Seffricans back in the day, myself included.  So when she came here, her taste buds were set on fire.  And it’s when I prepare meals for her that I realize how much I’ve become used to that increase in spice content;  I have to watch out even when using mild spices like Lawry’s steak salt or paprika.  What seems quite mild for me sets her mouth on fire.  So I make meals accordingly.

Ditto when we visit friends or family:  I have to remind them constantly to be careful of the spice quantity.  (The nice thing about having the kind of friends that I do is that they take such constraints in their stride, albeit with some gentle teasing.  Ditto Daughter and the Son&Heir when we visit them for dinner.)

I’m not going to try and change her tastes, by the way;  had someone tried to do that to me, back in the late 1980s, I’d have kicked back hard.  I may have gradually become accustomed to the modern American cuisine, but it took me well over a decade to do so.

I doubt that New Wife will do it in anything like the same time period, and that’s okay.  At home, we eat more traditional British food, anyway.  Sausage rolls, steak pies and roast beef, for example, were never spicy foods to begin with, and I for one have no problem tucking into the comfort foods of my youth.

I’ll just get the spice when we got out to eat.

Stupid Money

Drive Time, Marketing / Advertising, The Gun Thing

Via Insty (again), I see that Overfinch has crafted a line of bespoke Range Rovers in Holland & Holland livery:

The 2025 Range Rover Holland & Holland Overfinch’s interior is much more overtly extravagant, though Range Rover’s minimalist form language still dominates. Most surfaces are wrapped in Bridge of Weir leather, and those that are not are instead covered with open-pore French walnut veneer or real metal. The stainless-steel inserts in the doors feature the same engraved scroll work as on the “Royal” shotguns, the engraved diamonds embedded in the veneers in the doors echo those on the guns’ stocks, and the Holland & Holland crest is inlaid on the front and rear center consoles, the latter housing a Champagne cooler and a pair of Champagne flutes.

The leather seats feature a unique quilting pattern that also echoes the Holland & Holland diamond motif and features illustrations of game birds stitched into the backrests. In the duo-tone colorway the front seats are trimmed mainly in Harris Green and the rears mainly in London Tan.

Sounds like something an Arab oil sheikh would want to putter around his Scottish estate in, playing a Laird.  Still, I like that interior.

Of course, from the outside the thing is 2025 Rolls-Royce-level Fugly:

…but not as ugly as its price of $650,000.

To put it into perspective, that’s just over the price of three new H&H Royal and a couple-three of their secondhand Royal shotguns.

Lovely as all get-out, but not even with a lottery winning would I be tempted.  And that’s by any of them:  the H&H Range Rover or the H&H shotguns, which taken as the package above would set you back about a million bucks.

Maybe the parvenu status-seekers of today’s ultra-wealthy set would be tempted by such blatant brand-harvesting… hence the title of this post.

As for myself (given a lottery winning as above), my choices are below the fold. Read more

Not Interested

Guy Stuff, Toys

Never having had the financial wherewithal to buy any upper-end watches, I’ve never let that stop me from looking at the market — just as not ever having had the money to buy a Ferrari hasn’t stopped me from looking at expensive sports cars and that market.

Yet even if I had the funds, I’d never buy a Rolex watch.

I know, Rolexes are (generally speaking) well-made timepieces and may be worth the moolah necessary for their acquisition.  All the cool kids wear them — which is actually a negative for me, of course — but besides that, if you want to get a watch that will essentially last your entire life, the Rolex is a good bet.  And of course, if your hobbies take you underwater, then Rolex reigns supreme.  (If like me you’re unwilling to venture into an unfamiliar medium filled with things with teeth and murderous intent, then obviously this would not be a factor.)

But the reason that I’d never buy a Rolex is that they’re big, chunky and bulky, and while that may be the current fashion (another reason for my unwillingness), I’m more of the dress watch persuasion.

And of course, because I prefer a manual-wind over automatic- and quartz (battery-powered) watches is yet another reason.  (Of digital watches we shall not speak:  in other words, if you want to extol all the virtues of your $25 Casio-type watch, please restrain yourself because that just irritates me.)

Here’s a typical Rolex (I say “typical” because like members of certain ethnic groups, they all look the same to me):

Oh, and did I mention that I can’t wear metal bracelet straps because I have hairy arms, and the stupid things catch on and tug at the hairs until I rip the thing off and throw it across the room?  (I know, the Rolex might survive such an action, but whatever.)  It’s pretty much leather for me, in other words, and Rolex doesn’t like their watches to be thus equipped, so screw ’em.

Finally, like the aforementioned Ferrari, Rolex also plays reindeer games with potential customers, restricting access to certain models, thereby driving up the price and thus making them all the more “exclusive” (i.e. only available to the gullible and status-hungry). I’m not going to play that game, ever, in any market.

And for those who want something of quality like a Rolex but of sane pricing, here are some alternatives across all five popular Rolex models:  Submariner, Datejust, GMT, Explorer and Daytona.  I’m not in the market for any of the alternatives, of course, because they’re all still chunky and use metal bracelets straps.  For the watch geeks on the same topic, there’s always Teddy Baldassarre.

My biggest fear is that my beloved Tissot Heritage model may one day break irretrievably, and I won’t be able to find a replacement.  #Discontinued #OldSpiceFreshRedux


(yeah, that’s my hairy wrist)