Then And Now

Just to prove that there’s nothing new under the sun…

Then:

Now:

I should point out that while the girl in the first pic has assumed a rock-steady stance for a gun rest, the same is not true for the girl in the second pic. I blame the public school system, NBC’s Olympic coverage of Women’s Gymnastics, and Democrats in general.

Also, modernity does have its drawbacks. The girl in the first picture is unlikely to experience any untoward effects, other than perhaps some black-powder smoke in her eyes (and she’s wearing a bonnet to help prevent that; very responsible). Unfortunately,and thanks to the rapid-fire ability of the AR-15 and the concomitant warming of its barrel, the girl in the second pic is likely to experience a condition known to us Old Guys as “blistered furburger”.

Just sayin’. (And thanks to Reader Old Texan for the second pic.)

Reality

Allow me to quote an email exchange I had with my Brit friends earlier this week. While everyone in Britain was oohing and aahing over the nuptials of skinnymalink Pippa Middleton to some chinless Brit dude, I was taken by something else: the car which brought the not-so-blushing bride to the church, and I commented as such to Mr. Free Market and The Englishman in an email which basically said “Never mind the bint, it’s the car I love”. And you have to admit, the Jaguar Mk.V is quite a looker:

I was rudely brought back to Earth, firstly by Mr. Free Market:

“All very well on a bright summer’s day — all 3 of those that we get each year — but the first sign of drama & it won’t start.”

…and yet more by The Englishman:

“Agreed — the idea of a ride in one of those is lovely, but actually they are bone rattlers, noisy, expensive to run and at the slightest excuse refuse to start. Demanding attention all the time with mysterious dramas. Of course with the top off they look fantastic, though often they smell a bit of damp leather and dogs. And in the end something a bit more modern with something up top and a decent level of comfort is a better ride.
And the same goes for the car.”

Such cynicism is appalling.

One Dozen

Some people were asked what they thought was the “magic number” of sex partners — more than X being too many, and less than X showing likely sexual inexperience.

The number X: twelve (or to be accurate: not X but XII).

My guess is that most of the respondents weren’t around in the 1970s. “Twelve” would have been an annual average, back then.

Here’s a totally gratuitous pic of a Seventies girl (Christina Lindberg), just to show what we guys had to deal with, temptation-wise, in those days:

Yeah, call me old-fashioned (take a number), but I love the clothes women wore back when I was in my late teens and early twenties.

 

No Chance

When I was at university in South Africa back in the early 1970s, our group of friends developed a game known as “Poor Man’s Monopoly” using a regular Monopoly game, but wherein each contestant started off with no money whatsoever, collected only $20 (not $200) when passing GO, and the winner was the the first player to own any property at all. (Let me tell you, those little brown properties next to GO became much sought after.) And of course, the “Chance” cards which casually allowed a player to collect $5 from each of the others could cause a fistfight. The only “Chance” or “Community Chest” cards we stripped out were the ones requiring income tax payments — because, obviously, no one earned enough to pay taxes and we didn’t want to see our friends committing suicide. The games took forever to spit out a winner — kinda like life itself, really — and were played in an atmosphere of grim desperation — once again, kinda like real life.

Which brings us to this wonderful concept.

According to Black Lives Matter (and their White liberal supporters), this is their life, according to the White Man’s Monopoly rules:

Suggestions for the “Chance” and “Community Chest” cards in Comments, please. As always here on my back porch, political correctness and trigger warnings can be safely ignored as long as it’s funny.


By the way: I didn’t spell “Monopoly” with the little circled R after the y because a.) I don’t know how to create it in WordPress and b.) fuck you, Parker Brothers’ lawyers or whoever.

Camera Work

When getting a new smartphone or camera, the natural instinct is to take photos of people and things almost nonstop. However, care should be exercised, and people should take time to get practiced with features such as “focus” and “zoom” — and especially “zoom”. Take these two scenarios, for instance. In the first, our photographer wanted to capture this romantic picture of a couple kissing on London’s Tube, and share it with her friends.

What she wanted to send:

What actually arrived:

The second situation was a freshman coed who wanted to show her mother a cute picture of herself and her new roomie coming home from a sorority party, somewhat the worse for wear.

What she wanted to send:

What actually arrived:

Like I said: we really need to know how to work the technology…