Tag: Good Guys

Messypants

Beauty

Apparently, Nigella Lawson is a “mess magnet”, and her house is filled with stuff because she suffers from “shortage dread”.

As do I.

I draw the line at dozens of empty mustard jars, although New Wife has stashed a few such empty jam jars packed away.  (Curiously, a few actually came in quite handy over Christmas, as we filled them with Reese’s Pieces and M&Ms and gave them to the kids as stocking stuffers.)

I have no problem hoarding things like foodstuffs, but empty toilet roll cylinders and the like need to be turfed out, toot sweet.  I think I’ll offer my ahem  services to Nigella, as long as she has a few bowls of pasta first.  Here’s a before/after comparison:

  Q.E.D.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD

Once again, the QOTD comes from Diplomad:

For the coming year? What do I really want? I want revenge.
I know that’s not very Christmassy and all, but then I am an Old Testament sort of guy who wants to see my enemies smitten by a vengeful God. I wish disaster upon the world’s oldest political party, the Democrat party; at a minimum, I want to see the Dem Party suffer the fate of British Labour for what it has done to America and the West. That clown show long ago ceased to be even mildly amusing.
We got very lucky in 2016: Donald Trump provided us a life boat to get away from the Democratic Titanic. We need to take advantage of that to the full. GOP: And, please, no more Romneys or Ryans! No more me-too GOP.

My thoughts, exactly.

Nope. Too Late.

Politics

The Raj tries to explain why God-Emperor Trump should try to heal the nation and bring its fractured pieces back together again (cf. Humpty Dumpty):

America, right now, despite the aforementioned affluence and peacefulness, is a truly unpleasant place to live. We are not loving our neighbors.
The unfortunate result of this, despite its being inherently unfair, is that Trump alone can and must lead the way in curing this condition. No one else is in a position to do it and he cannot expect his enemies to help him, if past performance is any indication.
In order to really “make America great again,” so we can indeed live with each other, even if Durham indicts half a dozen of his opponents, even if he wins a smashing victory in November, the president must resist two powerful temptations: vengeance and gloating.
He should be “the good father,” which he evidently is to his own children, not the angry or cheated man, which he is to his political opponents, justifiably or not.

Sorry, but that’s just not gonna happen, Rog, despite the noble intent.  For two opposing factions to come together, there has to be some common ground and some comity on both sides.

We conservatives have tried both (bipartisanship, polite grassroots movements like the Tea Party, and moderate Republican presidents like George W. Bush), and the fucking Commies have responded with feral intensity to trash all of it.

Unity can only come under three sets of circumstances:  a common basis for society, a shared enemy, or a desire to be united.  We have no common ground between Left and conservatists;  in fact, we’re diametrically opposed.

Actually, we do have a shared enemy, all right, except we conservatives are becoming united against the Commies (they’ve always  been united against us), and the common enemy we now have is each other.

We’re way past wanting to be united.  The Left has called us every epithet under the sun;  they’ve started treating  us conservatives like we’re totalitarian Nazis not worthy of even being allowed to eat dinner in peace;  and if we dare to express opposition to them, we’re attacked either literally by their Pantifa goons, or in the media by the shouting heads at CNN et al.  It takes two sides to want to be united, and the Left isn’t interested because they’ve begun to believe their own insane propaganda.

So no, I don’t think President Trump should try to bring the two sides together.  In the first place, such an effort will fail because the Left (and their Never-Trumper noch schleppers) absolutely hate his guts and will repulse (not would — there’s no conditional circumstance) and revile any of his approaches.  Secondly, even moderate conservatives are starting to learn what we ultra-conservatives have known all along:  no matter how much we try, the only time the Left will accept us is when we do precisely what they  want, and only then.  “Bipartisan” to the Left, in other words, means “we’ll agree to do something with you only as long as you’ll agree to do exactly what we  want”.

Frankly, I’m sick of it.  There are two socio-political groups in this country, and each one has a diametrically-opposite idea to the other of what this country should look like and how it should be governed.  Our Humpty-Dumpty nation has fallen off the wall and is finished, over, done with.

There are two solutions:  geographic partition, and actual civil war.  (If this sounds similar to 1860, it is.  People always wonder how things could come to such a pass back then;  now it should be quite apparent.  The problem now is that the Left is trying to paint Middle America as the slave owners, when in fact the opposite is the case.)

I would prefer the first solution — even though partition itself would cause violence to break out as the details became known and acted upon.  As for the second solution:  frankly, I’m getting to the point where I think I’d just have to handle whatever a genuine civil war might bring, and let the chips fall where they may.  One thing I do know is that I will be the last to start it, but once engaged I will do my level best to finish it.

You see, I’m not interested in living the rest of my life in a California- or New York-type of society.  That’s not what I signed on for when I immigrated, back in the mid-1980s.  I suspect that there are lots more immigrants like me, and still more people among the native-born population who have seen their civil rights eroded and their society turning more into Southern California.

I’m not the only conservative who feels this way, if the events in Virginia are any kind of portent.

The Virginia situation might yet be averted at the next election, by the way, which should see the Commies kicked out of statewide office.  And we as a nation might still get another five years of grace when Trump is reelected later in 2020.  After that, however, all bets are off.  I don’t think conservative people are going to go adopt the “reconciliation” that Roger Simon is advocating — there is no longer a future for gentleman-Republicans like George W. Bush in our polity.  I also know that the Left always  needs an enemy, and if there isn’t one, they’ll create one.  Which, right now, is us:  Middle America, Flyover Country, the White Patriarchy, Western European culture, Christians, the Deplorables, or any and all of the above.

So here we are.  Good luck to us all.

Quote Of The Day

Literature, QOTD

From Clive James:

“I still haven’t forgiven CS Lewis for going on all those long walks with JRR Tolkien and failing to strangle him, thus to save us from hundreds of pages dripping with the wizardly wisdom of Gandalf and from the kind of movie in which Orlando Bloom defiantly flexes his delicate jaw at thousands of computer-generated orcs. In fact it would have been ever better if CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien could have strangled each other, so that we could also have been saved from the Chronicles of Narnia.”

Amen to all that.

Whole Lotta Ifs

Elections, Good Stuff, The Gun Thing

Stay with me on this one.

If I were many years younger, and if I were not married, and if I lived in Colorado;  and if this woman wasn’t already married, and if I happened to meet her, and if she wasn’t utterly repulsed by me to the point of shooting my fat ass — if all that, then I’d give her a big kiss on the cheek.

Which woman?  This one.

And I bet I’m not the only man who thinks this.

Fallen Giant 1

Business

I have had a relationship with British clothing store Marks & Spencer for twenty years.  Every time I go to London, I visit M&S and buy underwear, socks, shirts and trousers — enough to last me until my next visit.  While I’ve occasionally bought a shirt or two from U.S. outlets like Target or Kohl’s and casual trousers from Sam’s Club, fully 80% of my wardrobe carries the M&S brand — and because in terms of its fit and endurance no other brand has come close to M&S, over the past twenty years, I’ve never worn underwear or socks from anywhere else,.

Nor have many Brits:

One in three British women buys their bras from M&S — 45 bras are sold every minute in-store — while two pairs of knickers fly through the tills each second, which equates to more than 60 million pairs a year.

And from memory, about 50% of British men in the 1990s bought their socks at M&S, simply because they were the very best you could buy, at any price.  With that kind of market share, how could they fail?

M&S also screwed up royally before 2000, by the way, by not accepting any credit cards other than their own charge card.  It was that, or cash.  I discovered this blithering idiocy the very first time I went to their flagship Oxford Street store, went to the cashier with about six hundred pounds’ worth of merchandise, only to have to leave most of it behind because they wouldn’t accept my Visa card and I only had a hundred-odd pounds in cash.  I remember ranting at the floor manager at their arrogance — “throwing good business away” was the phrase I used — and meeting with complete indifference.  Later (much too late, I think) they changed their policy to accept other cards.

At some point in the early 2000s, things began to change, and not for the better.  Instead of selling the M&S brand exclusively, M&S started to sell branded clothing — “tied” brands (exclusive to M&S), but the boutique stuff was more expensive than the house brand, a lot more, but with no discernible difference in quality.  Actually (and this is just a personal observation) I think the M&S allowed their brand’s quality to slip so that they could use the lower prices to compete with the cheaper High Street- and online competition.  Underwear that I’d bought in the mid-1990s lasted for at least five years, while the M&S underwear I bought in 2017 has already started to fall apart.

When online sales came along, M&S was always going to be the first one clobbered, and they were.  Probably the only thing that saved them was the expansion of their business into takeout convenience foods (which, in all fairness, are excellent albeit rather pricey).

Now the company has been kicked off the FTSE 100 (the Brit equivalent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average — DJIA) because their corporate value has declined to the point of disqualification.   (And note BBC TV personality Jeremy Paxman’s complaint, because it’s very much the way I feel about their loss of quality).

The nearest American example of a corporation’s similar fall from grace is Sears — which once had a market share and customer esteem similar to that of M&S in the U.K., but is now in its death throes, for pretty much the same reasons.

I don’t think that M&S is going to fold any time soon — gawd, I hope they don’t, because where am I going to buy undies when the ones I have start falling apart in five years’ time? — but they have a hell of a job ahead of them.