Tag: Stupid people

And Here’s Why

Drunken Fools, Gypsies Tramps & Thieves, Travels

Earlier this week I talked about how Yurpeen tourist places were rethinking their welcome wagon policies.

Well, here’s one place that’s doing that and I think, based on the evidence, we can all see their point:

In a desperate attempt to crack down on alcohol-fueled debauchery, enraged [Albufeira] City Hall officials on Friday approved huge new penalties of up to £3,375 for holidaymakers flouting a strict new good behavior code — with fines for everything from urinating in the street to getting naked.

The rules will kick in within weeks, in time for the summer season, aiming to curb anti-social behavior.

And locals hope they will turn the tide, with nakedness, vomiting in the street or having sex in public all now coming at a price.

Here’s what really sucks about this.  I know Albufeira — I’ve been there before, and I thought it might be the prettiest little village on the whole of the Algarve coast — but that was eons ago.  Clearly, things have changed, and not for the better.

And the problem is that regardless of how badly the tourists (mainly Brits, duh) might behave, the pubs and restaurants are obviously making a killing so they’re not going to do anything to stop the Louts & Sluts Brigade from trashing their town.

Sadly, it’s always the local folks who end up with a town where the streets flow with vomit, blood and semen while the publicans shrug and pocket the cash.

And then everyone will be shocked — shocked! — when the locals start posting signs that read “Muerte A Los Turistas”, “Ingleses Regressam A Casa” or “A Bas Les Rozbiffs”  (depending on whether it’s Spain, Portugal or France, for instance).

What’s really needed in Albufeira is for the Porro rozzers to go all Chicago P.D. circa 1968 with these drunken assholes (men and women):

…and let them know that what might be fine in Merseyside, Manchester or Millwall is non grata when visiting Albufeira.

The problem is that the Euros in general have gone to great lengths to pussify their various police forces, so that very logical avenue will denied them — but it is, at the end of the day, the only language that these oafs understand.  Until that time, then, nothing will change, and fines aren’t going to do diddly.

Speed Bump #4,657

Grammar Nazism

Via Reader Sean F., another gem:

Everyone likes to tell us that if we adopt very strict gun control laws, no one who isn’t supposed to have firearms can get them. It’s so naive it’s almost adorable, or it would be if it wasn’t our rights they were idiotically talking about trampling on.

Instead, it’s very troubling because their nativity is likely to get someone killed.

This is known as “killing the message with illiteracy”.

FYI:  the words are “naïve” and “naïveté”.  We English writers don’t often use verbal modifications such as the acute accent (é), and the diacritic / umlaut  (ï) hardly ever.  But the latter should be written when the compound vowels need to be expressed individually, e.g. “nah-eev” instead of “nave”.  As I recall, I learned this back in 1965, in sixth grade from our English teacher, Mr. John Ball (MA, Oxon),.

Wrong Target

Crime, Mocking Furriners

As anyone interested in trends would know, there’s been a surge in a specific type of city-center crime recently, one which involves a scrote whizzing past his victim, snatching their phone from their hand en passant.  This has made London, amongst others, a place where one should not walk the streets while catching up with an old friend on the phone, or even just calling home to make sure that the kids have not set fire to the house while one has been busy at the gym.

I’ve never understood this connectivity obsession anyway, especially as one shouldn’t talk on the phone in the street (for any reason) because believe it or not, passers-by are not really interested in your choice of wine for tonight’s dinner party.

But back to the phone robbers.  Britishland is applying the boot with a heavy hand in response to this epidemic:

E-scooters and e-bikes driven by brazen phone snatchers are to be destroyed by police within hours of being seized amid a crackdown on London’s mobile theft epidemic. 

Previously officers had to warn offenders before taking away and crushing a bike, scooter or any other vehicle driven in an anti-social manner or if it was used to facilitate a theft. 

But now, new powers will mean police won’t have to wait two weeks before throwing them away and will be able to do so in a two-day time frame.

Now far be it for me to rail against the crushing of these electric pestilences, which have been involved in so many pedestrian collisions because their riders are reckless assholes, not to mention the above assholes of the larcenous kind.

But it seems to me that the wrong part of this equation is being punished.  I’m no expert on the topic, but I have to feel that crushing a thief’s e-bike is rather pointless, in that said thieves having been thus dispossessed will simply steal a fresh bike with which to continue their little reindeer games.

Surely, for all sorts of reasons, it should be the thieves getting fed into the crusher’s jaws rather than their conveyances?  Much more likely to slow this modern kind of theft, I think.

But no doubt someone’s going to have a problem with this, as would my followup suggestion that said crushing of scrotes be made a PPV TV event.

Fooling The Gullible

Marketing / Advertising

As a longtime marketing guy, I’m still fascinated by how easy it is to hoodwink people by making them think that a higher price equates to better quality.

The genius move, however, is to build on another perception of quality, e.g. “German engineering” or “French luxury” as a support for that higher price.

The “German engineering” ethos has been leveraged countless times, most notably with Mercedes cars — although in this case, it was a reputation very well earned, back in the 1960s and -70s. (In the recent past:  not so much, as anyone who’s driven a Merc of said vintage will tell you.)  As gunnies, we all know of the Heckler & Koch example, which has enabled this bunch of WWII-era retreads to make oodles of cash out of their not-especially noteworthy handguns and cheekbone-crushing G3/PTR-91 automatic rifles.

It’s why I always roll my eyes at the extreme HK fanbois, because I’m positive that most of their fanaticism stems from a need to justify their paying a premium price for what is really a pretty ordinary product.

As for “French luxury”, here’s one example of the trope:  Grey Goose vodka, which is a case history for the ages.  (Watch it;  it’s 10 minutes of your time well spent.)

I happen to know quite a bit about vodka manufacturing, as it happens, having worked with the South African retail arm of Gilbey’s.  As I’ve recounted on these pages before, part of my education occurred when the Gilbey’s guys took me on a tour of their production facility, where an engineer taught me how to make cheap liquor:  take a clear distilled spirit (from any source:  potatoes, sugar cane, barley, wheat, apples, all mixed together, whatever) and pass it through a series of charcoal filters to make vodka, or add a few drops of diesel fuel(!) to make gin, and so on.

The genius of marketing, in the Grey Goose example, was not the manufacture of the vodka or the quality of its raw material, therefore — French wheat is no different from any other wheat — but utilizing the aura of French luxury brands (Louis Vuitton, Chanel etc.) to imply that GG was an exceptional product, made all the more so by creating an artificial bottleneck on supply, and most telling of all, selling the product at a premium price to the International Status-Hungry Parvenu Set.  Good grief:  $30 per bottle for vodka?  When it first came out, I tried it at a hotel bar somewhere — I think it was at Claridges in London, while on a business trip — and while I’m no expert on vodka, I have drunk a woeful amount of the foul stuff.  I could discern little difference between Grey Goose, Stolichnaya and Smirnoff.  (The bartender obliged me by setting up a blind taste test of the three brands — the mark of a good bartender, by the way.)  I identified Smirnoff immediately (see above for reasons), but GG and Stoli?  No chance.  And Stolichnaya, by the way, is a product that trades on the Russian ethos for vodka quality, go figure.

But what all the above illustrates is how easy it can be to dupe people into buying expensive products as part of an aspirational desire to be part of a specific set — most notably, what used to be described as the “jet set” (now, the private jet set), which contains elements of society such as professional footballers, pop stars, supermodels, Russian oligarchs, Hollywood actors, software billionaires and other such scum.

And never has the old adage been so verified that a fool and his money are soon parted.

How To Breathe

Education, Seen On Campus

I can only regard with incredulity this new adventure in education:

A renowned Canadian university has launched a bizarre ‘Adulting 101’ crash course for pampered students who can’t perform the most basic life tasks like changing a tire, buying groceries or doing laundry.

In an era dominated by digital innovation, Generation Z – or those born between 1997 and 2012 – are in desperate need of practical knowledge that older generations might otherwise consider ‘common sense’.

Adulting 101 is designed to teach basic life skills that Gen Z often struggles with, including cooking, budgeting, basic nutrition, laundry and even navigating a grocery store.  The course covers everything from maintaining healthy relationships, practicing fire safety in the kitchen and changing a tire.

For many, the course has been a saving grace – not only helping them personally, but also boosting their daily confidence in navigating the ins and outs of adulthood.

Well, I guess that once a university stoops to deliver courses in Remedial English because such basics somehow escaped the grade-, middle- and high school curriculum, why not the equivalent of 8th-grade Home Economics?

The difference is that “life skills” belong not in secondary school education, but squarely in the “parenting” remit, as the article suggests:

Jean Twenge, a researcher and psychology professor at San Diego State University, suggests that prolonged adolescence and ‘helicopter’ parenting have delayed development among Gen Z.

You don’t say.

For all the mud slung by “educators” at homeschoolers, I defy anyone to come up with examples of such helplessness among the homeschooled.  We started giving our kids an allowance as soon as they reached an age we deemed appropriate, said budget to cover their clothing, toiletries and entertainment.  We took them shopping all the time, whether for toiletries, groceries or clothing, but let them make their own decisions, staying well back as they navigated their way through the stores — although we did show them basic stuff like comparative pricing and value judgements.  Hell, I think the Son&Heir learned how to shop for produce from the age of five, because he always accompanied me on the weekly supermarket trip;  and when he bought his first car (at age 19, cash, from his own savings), I showed both him and Daughter the basics of car maintenance — checking the oil, the radiator, how to use a gas pump, and so on.  Their allowance, by the way, ended at age 17 and they all went out to work, at restaurants, movie houses, drugstores and so on, and they were solely responsible for managing their savings and expenditure.

I’m not holding us up as ideal parents, but FFS, any parent who doesn’t do this kind of thing is setting their kids up for failure.

But thank goodness for the universities, who will make up for parental neglect with a course that probably costs $2,500 per quarter.  That cost, by the way, should not be covered by public subsidy or student loans, but by the fucking parents.

Fat chance.

Hot Stuff

Food & Drink, Morons & Idiots

No, not some totty flashing her whatsits. Apparently, Dave’s has come to London:

Famously, Dave’s offers a notoriously spicy ‘Reaper’ burger, covered in red-hot batter, said to reduce even the most hardened of chilli lovers to tears.  Although the batter recipe is a closely-guarded secret, the key ingredient is powdered Carolina Reaper, the second-hottest chilli pepper in the world. Carolina Reaper registers a whopping 1.6 million on the Scoville scale, the internationally-accepted system used to measure the heat of chillis. 

So it’s little surprise that customers can only order the Reaper if they are 18 or over and sign a legal waiver. According to the waiver, Reaper can cause ‘sweating, indigestion, shortness of breath, allergic reactions, vomiting and diarrhoea’, but in extreme cases, it can even lead to ‘chest pain, heart palpitations, heart attack and stroke’.

…with dolorous outcomes, because that’s what intrepid reporters do — stupid stuff:

For the first seven seconds after taking a big bite, it feels like the hype around the Reaper has been exaggerated – but the intense burn suddenly takes off like a bullet.  As Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring of Fire’ starts playing on the loudspeakers, the heat-sensitive pain receptors in my mouth are triggered – and I soon turn into a total, sticky mess. Sweat flows from every pore of my face and snot dribbles from my nose, and I can’t wipe the tears from my eyes because I don’t want to touch them with my messy gloved hands.  Struggling somewhat with my coordination, I slosh milkshake over my trousers and the floor. Reaper is ludicrously, idiotically hot.

The only idiot is you, dummy.

Let it be known that I’m not afraid of stuff like Madras curry, for example.  I remember going to a restaurant in Bangalore, and ordering a Madras chicken dish.

The waiter looked at me a little dubiously.  “You know the Madras is very spicy”, he murmured to me.  (“Spicy” being how Indians describe something that’s going to set fire to your mouth.)

“Nah, I’m from South Africa,” I said to him.  “I grew up eating hot curry ” (Which is true.)

And yes it was quite hot, but also very savory.  I could have eaten two dishes of it.  (Madras is actually classed as a “medium” hot curry.)  I have no problem with Vindaloo — the next level up, and you have to hold me back when it comes to Lamb Vindaloo — but I draw the line very firmly at that point, because after Vindaloo, bad things start happening to you.

And for the record:  Vindaloo curry measures about 15,000 to 20,000 Scoville units.

So 1.6 million Scovilles?  You must be kidding.

And I’m calling bullshit on this whole “hot pepper” nonsense.  It’s not manly or macho or any of that crap when it comes to handling peppery heat.  25,000 Scovilles is like rubbing Deep Heating cream on your skin;  1.6 million is pouring gasoline on yourself and setting it on fire.  And I’m not really exaggerating, either.

Guys who brag about how much heat they can handle are vainglorious idiots, and quite frankly, they deserve every perforation they get in their stomachs or intestines.

As our  flipping idiot  brave reporter Jonathan Chadwick describes it:

Reaper is a 24-hour experiment on your body. As it travels, it inflicts different types of pain – burning numbness in the mouth, aching stomach, and, perhaps worst of all, the morning-after sensation of a red hot poker in the worst place imaginable.

A doctor buddy of mine back in Johannesburg told me once of a patient who actually had small lesions and blisters on their anus following a drunken night out feasting on super-hot food.  The patient was female.

But hey:  be my guest, but please don’t come to me for help because I’m just going to laugh at you.