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A WHAT?

Business

This is kind of an interesting story:

A wealthy divorcee has sold her luxury home to fund a new life on the high seas.  Mimi Bland, 59, is one of hundreds of high-fliers buying cabins on maritime firm Storylines’ luxury residential cruise ship, MV Narrative.  The liner will go around the world once every three years continuously with stops in ports across the globe.

So far, so good, although the ship’s name did cause a momentary twitch of the nose — “narrative” is not what I’d call a romantic name — but the question which arose as I was reading is:  that’s all well and good, but eventually she’s going to need some income to pay for all that luxury, i.e. a job.  Which is when my nose nearly twitched right off my face.

She plans to work as a mindfulness mentor while on board.

Great Kafka’s throbbing phallus:  WTF is a “mindfulness mentor”?

I thought I had seen some bullshit jobs (and titles) in my time — “diversity consultant”, “human resources manager” and “psychologist” come to mind — but this one takes the Golden Turd Award.

For someone hammering hard on the door of 60, our prospective mindfulness mentor is quite a babe;  but aside from being mindful of her boobs, I can’t actually think what she’d bring to any sane man’s party.

 

Unless “mindfulness mentor” is just another modern term for “sex worker”, but I’m completely out of touch in that area as well.  I report, you decide.

Amateur Drunk Day Warning

Morons & Idiots

Tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day, wherein all people with Irish blood more diluted than a ripoff bar’s house gin can get together and get shitfaced.

Also, there are the traditional parades in Irish ghettos like Boston, New York and Chicago to contend with.

I’m not “Irish” in any way, shape or form except on occasion that I have been known to enjoy blowing things up.  I hate corned beef and cabbage, Irish stew (just the mention of which makes me want to gag), their soda bread is inedible and I don’t care much for Guinness either.

Don’t even get me started on unpronounceable names like Aisling, Saoirse, Eoin, Eoghan, Líadain, Aoibheann, Aoife, Meadhbh, Caoimhe, and Tadhg.

Mr. Free Market has been known to opine that if ever there’s a 1,000-ft tsunami heading east from the mid-Atlantic Ocean, at least the doomed English will get to live a half-hour longer than the Irish.

Which says it all, really.

And that goes for their poxy holiday as well.

Parallel Universe

Bad News, Economics

And in yet another flight of fantasy:

Consumer inflation the past 12 months has increased 6.0 percent, down from 6.4 percent a month ago—a 0.8 percent increase from Feb. 2022 just fell off the 12-month chart reading—according to the latest data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as the Federal Reserve continues to eye further rate hikes in order to tame what has been persistent inflation.

Uh huh.  Six percent, hey?

A 2 percent decrease in gasoline and a 13.6 percent decrease in used cars and trucks was offset by a 9.2 percent increase in fuel oil and a 5.8 percent increase in new vehicles. There was a whopping 12.9 percent increase in electricity and a 14.3 percent increase in utility (piped) gas service, indicating continued high demand for energy services. There was a 9.5 percent increase in food, plus an 8.1 percent increase in shelter and a 14.6 percent increase in transportation services, plus a 3.3 percent increase in apparel, a 3.2 percent increase in medical care commodities and a 2.1 percent increase in medical care services.

Let’s not get blinded by these carefully-constructed lies, here.  Gas prices went down for about two weeks, and then shot up again.  Supermarkets have published reports about 30-, 40- and 50 percent increases in commodity items,

True inflation is running well into the double digits (high teens or more), and we consumers are being bent over the government’s desk and shafted without lube.

Enjoy your day.

 

Pavlov’s Nut

The Gun Thing

I love guns.

This, of course, will come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever read more than a page of posts on this website, or has been on this back porch of mine for longer than a couple of months.

There are many like me, of course, but to a lot of men, guns are tools (for hunting or pest control) or hobby implements (such as for competition shooting).

I’m not in that category.  I’m not a very competitive person, and frankly, I lack the dedication to want to put in hours of practice to become really skilled — and by the way, I was precisely the same way when it came to playing guitar:  I got good enough to make a living by playing bass in a band, but was too lazy to practice hard enough to become really good, like Chris Squire or Paul McCartney (never mind the gods like Mark King or Billy Sheehan).

Back to guns.

What brought all this to mind was when I re-watched the Forgotten Guns episode with Ian McCollum talking to Ken Hackathorn about the M1 Carbine.  McCollum is, as we all know, one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet when it comes to guns, and Hackathorn is one of the most accomplished shooters (and cognoscenti ) likewise.

However, when you watch the show, I want you to pay attention to Hackathorn when the two of them start talking about the M1 Carbine.  McCollum is holding the carbine and basically just… holding it.  Then he hands the thing over and you can tell by Hack’s every action that he truly loves the damn thing, and can’t stop playing with it, holding, stroking and patting it like a grandchild or a beloved dog.

I feel the same way about guns, especially guns of a previous generation.  In fact, about halfway through the video, I had to pause it while fetching my own M1 Carbine, and the rest of the time I spent basically mimicking Ken Hackathorn.

I have to tell you that while I agree pretty much with everything that was said on the video, I think Hack missed a key part of the attraction of the M1 Carbine.  He talked about how the men who actually had to use the thing liked it, despite all the gun’s perceived (and actual) shortcomings — but both he and Ian put it down to the carbine’s light weight and other physical characteristics.  They both missed an important point:  people love the little gun, love it beyond reason.

Like I do.

I’ll go as far as to say this:  every man who has any pretensions at all to being a shooter should own one of these wonderful guns.