From CW , and especially for Reader Mike Of The Dueling Pistols:
When it comes to steampunk stuff, though, it’s hard to beat this:
Too bad I already got my Christmas present…
Tag: Good News
Interesting Situation
Last weekend, Lewis Hamilton won the Turkish Grand Prix and with it, the F1 Driver’s Championship for the seventh (!!!!) time, tying the venerated-but-comatose Michael Schumacher for the all-time record. Much has been said about the little twerp, especially by me, for the fact that he’s driving a car (factory Mercedes-AMG) which is hugely superior to most if not all of the other cars in Formula 1, and to a certain degree this is true. (Mercedes had actually clinched the F1 Team Championship title the race before.)
However: in Istanbul on Sunday, conditions were terrible. It had rained all night before, and to add to the drivers’ woes, the track had only been resurfaced a couple weeks prior, which meant that even dry it would have been slippery; add metric tons of water to the mix, and you get mayhem. Which is pretty much what happened. Nobody cared to race on slicks, when meant “wet” or “intermediate” tires were the order of the day, and all during the race, cars were sliding around and off the track like they were being driven by five-year-old boys and not by arguably the best drivers in the world. Even worse was that because the tires were wet-weather ones, they degraded very quickly when the track did dry out a bit. Ordinarily under those circumstances, you’re lucky to get ten to fifteen laps before the tread wears to such an extent that you’re in essence racing on slicks, on a soaking-wet track. This was not the case in Istanbul, because it drizzled on and off during the entire race, which meant that the alternate wet- and dry track gave the intermediate tires a few more laps’ life, to maybe twenty laps.
Hamilton changed off the wet tires on lap 8 — and then drove the last fifty laps on the same tires, winning by a huge margin because all the other drivers had to make two and sometimes three pit stops to change theirs. It was a drive of unbelievable virtuosity, and as much as I personally detest the little asshole, it was a drive worthy of a champion, the win and therefore the title richly deserved. And by the way, Valttieri Bottas (the other Mercedes driver), driving the same machinery, finished somewhere like fifteenth. So much for “equipment superiority”.
I told you all that so I could tell you this.
Hamiton’s seventh driver’s title has resulted in calls for him to be given a knighthood by the Queen — she doesn’t make the decision, by the way, some government flunkey or other does, I can’t be bothered to look it up as like most Americans I think the whole title thing is silly. Regardless, other sportsmen have been knighted before for their sporting success (F1’s Jackie Stewart and Stirling Moss, cricketer Ian Botham — more on him in another post), so it’s not an unusual thing for a sportsman to be thus recognized.
However, this is Lewis Hamilton we’re talking about, so of course there’s going to be a turd in the punchbowl. And this is it: many years ago, Lewis left the U.K. and took up residence in Monaco to escape Her Majesty’s onerous taxation (once again, not the old girl’s fault; she doesn’t makes the laws, she just signs the papers).
To the ever-censorious British public, who think that leaving Britain for this reason equates to near-criminal behavior, this is causing some problems, conceptually. On the one hand, he’s brilliant and deserves some social recognition, but on the other, he’s a reprehensible tax-dodger who’s being rewarded by the Crown despite his “disloyalty”.
Needless to say, I think the wealth-envious Brits are total idiots when it comes to this nonsense: taxes are an evil, evil form of theft: one should pay only as much as the law mandates, and not one fucking penny more. Avoiding paying taxes (as opposed to evading, or not paying any) is one’s fiscal responsibility, and tax loopholes (created, of course, by loathsome politicians) should be used to the utmost advantage without actually breaking the law. Tax accountants and -lawyers exist to know about and bring such loopholes (okay, exceptions) to their clients’ attention and save them money. That’s the beginning and the end of what I call the commonsense approach to paying taxes — but that’s not what the vast British (and huge swathes of the U.S.) public believes.
Thus, the quandary the Brits find themselves in is an exquisite one, as I stated above. And I find myself curiously conflicted: on the one hand I think Hamilton’s achievement is incredible, and worthy of recognition; but on the other, while the tax haven thing is irrelevant, the thought of this woke little BLM-supporting twerp becoming “Sir Lewis” sticks in my craw like a chicken bone.
Quote Of The Day
From someone who’s had enough:
“So what are a couple of old white straight folks to do in the face of threats from these nasty children [BLM, Antifa]? We are going to walk away. Goodbye, Minneapolis; goodbye, Minnesota. You go ahead and defund your police and protect the “mostly peaceful” rioters. We are moving out of the state to a town so small that you have probably never heard of it. We are moving to a state where the governor respects the Constitution and the Bill of Rights within it.
“No, I’m not flaunting this. There is no challenge in my words. But where we are going, nobody wears masks. And everybody has guns.”
Welcome to the United States, Jerry.
Quote Of The Day
My Readers have been on fire recently. From MarkD:
“If the American Right were half as nasty as we’re portrayed, there wouldn’t BE an American Left.”
No shit. We’d have local chapters of Air Pinochet in all 40 states in the U.S.A. (That’s not a typo, btw. CA, NY, CT, NJ, MA, IL and some others have long since lost the right to call themselves part of our republic.)
Wild Child
What chance does a girl named Richenda Antoinette de Winterstein Gillespie have in the modern world?
Well, shorten her name to “Dana Gillespie”, hook her up with a whole bunch of rock stars and actors, and just let her natural talent as a singer do the rest. (Also her killer boobs, but we’ll get to that later). First, the music, which started off with a song that Donovan wrote for her:
And how she looked back then:
Andy Warhol (the cover of David Bowie’s song)
…and some old-time rock ‘n roll:
And now, the aforementioned boobs:
(album cover)
even “Cuddly Dudley” was smitten:
Killer quote:
“All three of us jumped into bed together, which may sound pretty outrageous but that’s how it was back then. There was nothing serious about it; it just felt like a good way to break the ice.”
I miss the good old days…
Unnecessary Deadlines
I have never understood why people give themselves deadlines on activities which require no deadlines: “I have to get my hair cut this week” or “I need to do the laundry today” and “I must finish my book before Saturday” and so on. Other than an attempt to impose some kind of self-discipline over chronic procrastination, all this does is add a layer of stress into one’s life — all the more so because it’s both needless and self-imposed. An ex-boss of mine put it in perspective, speaking purely of business matters and not of obvious crisis situations: “There is no decision can’t be improved by waiting till the next day.”
Over at Insty’s place, Mark Tapscott posted a long letter from a friend who is grappling with the fact that his kids — and the kids of many of his upper-middle-class neighbors — will not be attending public school anytime soon, thanks to the teachers unions’ unnecessary obsession with the health risks of their members being exposed to the germ-laden petri dish that is the average school. (It’s definitely worth going over there and reading it.) Leaving aside the obvious retort that other workers (in supermarkets etc.) seem to have had few problems in this regard, I want to focus instead on one aspect of this hapless parent’s dilemma. Here’s the part that got me thinking:
“And, for the families who either cannot leave a job or are not interested in what has been proposed by the public school systems, they are either spending tens of thousands of dollars per year on private education or are now for the first time acquainting themselves with homeschooling options. I will also add that in many cases, private schools are full and homeschooling curriculum options are sold out leaving families with no idea what they will do in a few weeks.”
Somebody needs to sit this harried man down and explain one of the most beneficial aspects of homeschooling: there are no deadlines. The “few weeks” he’s talking about is an artificial construct: schools say that the new semester must begin on September 7, therefore that’s when education should begin. Of course, that’s utter nonsense if you’re not chained to the public (or any) school system: your kid can take up classes on September 7, or October 15 (or tomorrow, for that matter) — because given the glacial speed of public education, the kid will catch up with, and overtake, his former classmates in a matter of weeks. (Remember that the entire middle- and high school mathematics curriculum — all five years of classroom instruction — can be learned by an average student in just over six months, when delivered at their own pace at home.)
I remember the mother of my son fretting about his slowness in getting toilet-trained, and telling her: “I promise you that by the time he’s fifteen he’ll be using the toilet just like everybody else.” And from an educational perspective, whether a kid starts learning in August or September is irrelevant to their future progress.
Everyone seems to want to set deadlines on education: must complete high school by age 18, then go straight to college and finish the undergrad degree in four years, or else “they’ll be left behind” — as though that matters, when of course it doesn’t.
Unsaid in all this, of course, is that if education is truly unshackled from the education establishment, there’s nothing to stop a kid from finishing their undergrad degree by age 18, either, if the kid is smart enough and motivated enough — because just as homeschooled kids of high-school age typically finish twelfth grade earlier than their classroom-educated contemporaries, the appearance of online university-level classes (delivered either by streaming or by DVD) means that the homeschooled college student could finish their degree in two years and not the more common four.
The only thing that holds parents back from homeschooling is their own sense of inferiority — that somehow, even college-trained adults can’t teach their kids mathematics (the discipline which frightens parents the most). Let me assure you all right now: with the proper course materials, anyone can teach their kids anything.
And best of all, there’s no need to feel pressure to do it by any specified date — hell, you can even learn the stuff with your kids as you go along, and how bad can that be?