Tag: Me Myself I

Personal stuff

Back To Business

Health

Man, that was a stinker of a head cold.  New Wife got it first, no doubt from one of the little petri dishes at the school, and it took her a week to get over it.  On her last day of recovery, I came down with it and it kicked my ass all over the place.

Only yesterday did I feel anything like in decent shape to go out in the car and run errands, and today I feel ready to take on the world, albeit in somewhat-enfeebled fashion.

Thanks for putting up with the reduced and, if I may say, mediocre content of the past week, and my bad / indifferent mood.

Normal programming should resume as of today.  And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m heading off to the range.

Lists

General

Longtime Reader Newt F sends me the following question:

Yesterday I was online and followed a link to “Top Gun Blogs,” and I was surprised that you weren’t even in the Top 50.  Given that a lot of your readers (including me) would think that you should be, why is that?

Thankee for the compliment, but I don’t think that I can call myself a “gun blogger” anymore, and probably lost the appellation when I switched over from the Nation of Riflemen to The Other Side Of Kim;  and certainly, this latest manifestation of mine, Splendid Isolation, is even further away.

Although if you click on “The Gun Thing” category on the right hand side of this page, you will find over 90 pages of gun-related posts (about five posts per page, good grief), it’s worth noting that jokes and such (“Funny Stuff”), cars (“Drive Time”) and booze/food (“Food & Drink”) have 80, 30 and 23 pages respectively.  Clearly, there’s a lot more than just guns over here, nowadays.

More to the point:  volume doesn’t count as much as quality, and I’m not sure that my recent fevered scribblings about guns are even close to the quality of some of my earlier gunny posts.

None of this matters, of course.  I have no interest in popularity, nor recognition of my writings.  I write for myself, on topics which interest me, and any following I may accrue in so doing is simply a happy concidence.

And you’re all welcome on this back porch of mine.  Just mind yer manners, handle yer guns with respect, don’t spit baccy juice on the floor, and all will be well.

Cheers, y’all…

ZA Factoids

Africa

ZA, of course, being the international acronym for South Africa.

Cape Town is one of the world’s most beautiful cities:

The people somewhat less so, but that’s true of just about any city.

Durban looks like Miami Lite:

The Drakensberg range is quite spectacular:


They were named thus by Boer settlers who thought the mountains looked like dragons’ teeth.

The Wonderboom (Wonder Tree), a fig tree that is over a million years old:

…which is why you need to prune your fruit trees.  (It’s that thing in the center that looks like a bush.)

South Africa has its own version of the Grand Canyon, called the Blyde River Canyon:

Not as deep, but then again it’s a couple hundred million years younger.

Now for some other size comparisons:

Relative to the U.S. Lower 48:

Relative to Texas:

And here are the Big Five:

Anyway, those were some of the slides I made for New Wife’s “Where I Came From” presentation to the kids at her school.

So Much For That

Health

New Wife just came out from an Omigodicron episode.  As she described it:  “Three days of a bad flu”, and I knew she was better on Day 4 when she did the washing and ironing, and made me clean the kitchen floor and take out the trash.

Of course, she had the Covid vaccine in December (as did I), so there we go.

And despite us living together, sleeping together and all that stuff, I haven’t got sick (so far).

BFD.

Update:  Just had a chat with Doc Russia.  Apparently he’s recently diagnosed scores of patients with Covid at his ER, but hasn’t had to admit a single one.

Gloom

Bad News

It’s getting on top of me.  The world’s going to hell at breakneck speed, and for the first time I feel powerless to prevent it happening.  Read the headlines of today’s Instapundit — just the headlines, not the stories — and tell me why I should feel any other way.

This feeling has been growing for some time now, which is why these pages have featured so many scantily-clad women, news snippets with snarky commentary, cars and other such trivia.

The weekend’s two posts about the future of the car business sum the whole thing up, really:  change, really bad change, is coming down the pike and there’s not a single thing that I or anyone else can do to stop it.  Standing athwart the tide of history shouting “Stop!” is a completely pointless exercise when yours is the only voice against a cacophony of voices cheering the tide along as history plunges inexorably along towards the abyss of pointless chaos and Dark Ages II.

The barbarians aren’t just at the gates, they’ve chopped the gates up and are using them for firewood to burn up not only our rights, but all those things which give us some small measure of joy.  Modern movies are total shit, modern cars are shapeless and emasculated, modern handguns are like the cars, indistinguishable from each other and underpowered by being chambered mostly for the rat-shit 9mm Paralympic.

The once-Stout Bulldog Brits are being told to cancel Christmas dinners and parties because of a virus that’s more akin to a bad cold — and they’re going to comply meekly, the gutless bastards.  And speaking of gutless bastards, the Australians, once renowned as the most ferocious warriors in the world, are being arrested in parks and confined to house arrest, all for the heinous sin of not wearing a piece of useless paper over their faces — and they’re doing fuck all to resist it.

The only good news of the day is that liberal asshole Chris Wallace has left Fox News;  except that Fox News has become more like NBC since the halcyon days of Roger Ailes, so even the good news is sprinkled with shit sugar.

I need a day off, maybe two.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the range, because that seems to be one of the few joys left.  I’m going to shoot my Mauser’s 8mm ammo till my shoulder aches — I don’t care where the bullets land, I just want to shoot until I can’t anymore.  Then I’m going next door to the pistol range, and I’m going to shoot my 1911 to pieces, or my wrist, whichever breaks first.

My only regret is that I can’t get to the range in a truck with a loud, gas-guzzling V8 engine.