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Friends and Family

One of the things that always amazed me was that in any random group of more than a dozen people, the odds of at least two people sharing a birthday were so good it didn’t merit making book — it was almost a dead cert.

But on this 7th day of December, it still amazes that I have three people in my immediate circle of family / close friends who share a birthday today:  Longtime Friend Trevor, step-daughter-in-law Kerryn and step-nephew Mark — all South Africans, by the way.

And only one of them turned 21:

…although it was Mark, not Kerryn who reached that milestone.  She, however, gets this one:

…and lastly, Trevor’s:

I said he was one of my oldest friends…

Happy birthday to all of you !!!!

Provenance

Entertainment, The Gun Thing

I understand the concept of “provenance” — I sometimes call it “touching history”, in that when one can establish through an object some kind of lineage which can take one back in time, it’s always interesting.  It’s why people continue to brave all the hassle and potential ills of going to Egypt, just to see and stand next to the Sphinx and the Pyramids.

I get all that.  I’ve spoken how it felt to show the kids a church in Austria which had been built in 937AD, or going to a pub somewhere in southern Germany which had first served beer in 1256AD (and smelled like it — Daughter:  “Eeewwww do you think they’ve cleaned the floors since then?”).

Those are all Good Things, and that kind of provenance is wonderful.

Much less wonderful is this nonsense:

The pistol used by the late Sir Sean Connery in the first ever James Bond movie – the 1962 classic Dr. No – has sold at auction for $256,000 (£190,000).

Now granted, the James Bond movies brought the old Walther PP/PPK back from the dead — it was never that great a pistol, despite being the sidearm of several European police departments — but… a quarter-million for a studio prop?

I don’ theenk so, Scooter.

I’ve never understood “collectibles” when applied to movie rubbish — Judy Garland’s Wizard of Oz  shoes fetched some ungodly amount of money a while back (can’t be bothered to look it up) — and I’ve always considered this kind of thing to be akin to the groupie syndrome.  I mean, who wouldn’t pay a boatload of money for Sonny Corleone’s bullet-riddled and (fake-)blood-drenched shirt from The Godfather, as somebody apparently did back in 2003?

Well, I wouldn’t, for starters, nor for any piece of make-believe “heritage”.  Lord knows I love guns, but emptying out the old bank account for a piece of historical gunnery — even for Frank James’s Remington revolver?  Nuh-uh.

And coming back to the Bond thing:  Ian Fleming was a fine writer, but he didn’t know shit about guns.  I think his original Bond gun was a Beretta .22 pistol, later “upgraded” to the .25 ACP and finally to a Walther  (.32 ACP, not the .380 ACP as in the movie prop), as though this was the very apogee of weaponry a spy should use.  Hell, even back in the late 1950s, those guns were already in disfavor as sidearms.

As the expression / cliche goes:  A fool and his money are soon parted.  And this is just the latest proof of the thing.

Lockdown Partner

Beauty, Disaster, Food & Drink

Forget for a moment that we’re mostly all Old Married Pharttes, and imagine that you’re going to be in lockdown with a hottie — to be more specific, a hottie chef, because regardless of how hot she is, at some point you’re gonna have to eat, and you don’t want to be stuck in that situation with Jennifer Aniston, who can’t boil a lettuce.

So here are the contenders, in no specific order:

Nigella Lawson

Rachel Allen

Rachel Khoo

Giada De Laurentiis

Lisa Faulkner

Marcella Valladolid

Rachel Ray

Ingrid Hoffmann

Cat Cora
Okay, Cat Cora is probably disqualified because sadly, she’s a lesbianist.  In her place, therefore:

Mary Berg

(That’s for my Canucki Readers…)

As an aside, three of the above are named Rachel.  Coincidence?  I think not.

 

And for my long-suffering Lady Readers, who are always being left out of these things:

Curtis Stone(I know, Australian therefore should be disqualified.  Shuddup or I’ll add Guy Fieri.)

James Martin

Jean-Christophe Novelli

Phil Vickery

And in the interests of good taste and such, I haven’t bothered with Gordon Ramsay, because I would refuse to pay your hearing-aid bills after you’ve been in a three-week lockdown with him.

 

Feel free to add your favorite chefs in Comments.

NSFW Day

Men & Women

Everyone including Your Humble Narrator needs a break from the daily grind, especially given recent political events, and we can’t just fill our days with guns, Righteous Shootings and similar stuff.  (Well, we can;  but Man shall not live by guns alone — I read that somewhere, so it must be true.)

Accordingly, today is all about SEX.  If you are at work, or at all prudish, you may want to skip the posts below because they will contain sex themes, raunchy stories and quite possibly nude women.  Actually, there will definitely be nude women. Read more

Misbegotten Youth

Men & Women

A few days back I posted a Righteous Shooting in which a 14-year-old boy was whacked while trying to hijack a car, and it got me thinking:  is 14 the new 21?  Certainly, the law sees it that way on occasion, when the State will try scum like the aforementioned as adults — but it has to be a seriously-violent crime for that to occur.

Of course, it never happens in the case of sex, because while a 14-year-old boy is deemed quite capable of wielding a gun, he is apparently still a weeny likkel child when it comes to his swinging dick — as evidenced in this sad tale:

A mother-of-three accused of having sex with a 14-year-old boy after luring him back to her house has told a court he ‘didn’t tell her he was in Year 9’ and it ‘didn’t occur’ to her that he might be under age.

In her defense, I bet that he didn’t look fourteen:  he probably had 5 o’clock shadow and wasn’t wearing little boys’ clothing either.  (Side note:  one of the problems in the teenage clothing fashion business is that ten-year-olds are encouraged to wear clothes designed for eighteen-year-olds, which doesn’t help.)

Anyway, our lecherous “older woman” (age 32) didn’t just lure this boy back to her place;  she lured two of the little bastards away, but only jumped one of them — showing remarkable restraint for a Woman Of Today.   And I’m sure these “boys” had no idea that Aunty MILFy, rather than giving them tea and biscuits, was really wanting to get stuck into some fresh young meat.  Young boys nowadays can be so naïve, right?  (Especially when hijacking a car or sticking up a 7-11, you bet.)

I’d love to see a picture of this hard-done-by teen boy — not in the kiddie’s sailor suit he’ll be wearing in court, but as he’s normally dressed to hang out with his buddies — but given the law, in which kiddies’ identities may not be revealed in matters of this nature, that’s not going to happen.

No such protection is afforded the accused, of course, and this Mom Of The Year looks pretty much as you might expect:

We older guys always bemoan stories like this, wishing that we had been subjected to such disgusting sexual encounters when we were of that age.  At age 14, I was still pretty immature and naïve when it came to matters of sex — but even I would have pegged this one for a total skank and fled in the opposite direction.

The fact that these two kids didn’t run away screaming should make them at least partially culpable in what followed.

Update:  Looks as though the little shits weren’t the Pore Innocent Lil Boyz they claimed to be, and so SuperMum goes free. But she’s still a skank.