Tag: Stupid people

And Back We Go Again

Two-Minute Hate

It’s not often that I agree with the doings of the foul European Union bureaucrats, but I see that they’ve just voted to do away with daylight savings time.  And as we’re coming up to the day (next Sunday morning) where we set the clocks back to Standard Time (where they bloody should be), I gaze across the Atlantic with something approaching envy — or rather, I will next year when DST becomes a thing here again.

Of course, this being Euroland, some people are going to be inconvenienced:

If member states give it the go ahead, EU countries will no longer put their clocks back in autumn and forward in spring.  But this would mean a time zone difference between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, with the province still adhering to Greenwich Mean Time and British Summer Time.

As if the Irish need a way to cock their lives up any further… in discussing the matter with Mr. Free Market during our regular Sunday night drunken phone call, his suggestion is to let the Micks have one time zone (either one, no matter), after pouring a boatload of guns and munitions into the hands of the Northern Irish DUP, and let them all fight it out among themselves, while the rest of Britain sits aside in (to coin a phrase) splendid isolation.

If they’re going to fight about a version of Christianity, they may as well fight over an artificial timekeeping system, too.

Snowflake Report

Freaks & Loonies, Pussification Parade, Seen On Campus

Good grief, why bother to go if clapping is going to intimidate you?

Snowflake students at Oxford University are the latest to demand that clapping should be banned because applause noise can trigger anxiety and want ‘jazz hands’ to be used instead.
The idea for a British sign language alternative for clapping involving the waving of hands was put forward at the student union’s first meeting of the year on Tuesday.
Sabbatical Officers Roisin McCallion, Vice President for Welfare and Equal Opportunity and Ebie Edwards Cole, Chair for Oxford SU Disabilities Campaign, successfully passed the motion to mandate the encouragement of silent clapping.

My suggestion is that for “clapping”, substitute “slapping”, but no doubt some fainting fairy is going to have a problem with that too.  And if the noise of clapping triggers that much anxiety in them, I wonder how they’d react to gunshots.

And note the caption for a couple of the pics:

Sabbatical Officers Roisin McCallion (left), Vice President for Welfare and Equal Opportunity and Ebie Edwards Cole (right), Chair for Oxford SU Disabilities Campaign, successfully passed the motion to mandate the encouragement of silent clapping

Yep, that’s what education is all about.  “Sabbatical Officer and VP Welfare and Equal Opportunity”, my aching ass.

And to think that one of my greatest dreams once was to attend Oxford.

The 100

Music

Let’s face it:  Rolling Stone  magazine was always awful.  I think it was them Frank Zappa was talking about when he characterized their writing as “people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, aimed at people who can’t read.”  (I still miss Frank, a lot, as much for his intellect as for his music.)

RS‘s latest attempt at a “greatest” list (of singers) is a typical example:  muddled, ignorant and open to ridicule.

The muddle is easy:  they attempted to combine several genres of singing — rock, r&B, blues etc. — but while there may be some crossover in those particular ones, it falls completely on its face if you try to include people like Sinatra and Mel Torme, especially when it comes to ranking  the singers.  The muddle is also ignorant of actual vocal quality — and even worse if one tries to include “iconic” as part of it.  There are singers of extraordinary quality (such as Paul Rodgers of Free/Bad Company) who don’t have iconic tonality, and “ordinary” singers of limited range (like Ozzy Osbourne) who almost define an entire genre.  You can’t attempt to rank Rodgers and Ozzy against each other because they are two totally different singers, albeit in more or less similar genres of music.  Now rank Rodgers against Aretha Franklin, which the hapless Stoners did.  It is, as they say, to laugh.  (And by the way:  any compendium list of 100 singers which does not include Ian Gillan of Deep Purple or Steve Marriot of Humble Pie — to name just a couple which caught, or rather didn’t catch my eye —  is fatally flawed.)

Each genre of music requires a different kind of voice, and very few singers can cross over without failing.  And a singer’s inclusion in whatever genre is horribly personal, in any event.  (In the “jazz crooners” club, for example, Harry Connick Jr. is an infinitely-better singer than Sinatra, but without Sinatra there would likely be  no jazz crooners club.  YMMV.)

So Rolling Stone should have broken up the list into genres, just for starters, with the first being the aforementioned “iconic”voices — those which defined the genre — and then some attempt at vocal quality if they’re to be ranked at all.

I’m not going to do that, at least, not today.  But here’s an example of ten of my favorite Rock vocalists in no special order, just as I think of them:

Robert Plant (Zep)
Joe Cocker
Paul Rodgers (Free, Bad Company)
Cilla Black
Graham Bonnet (Marbles, Rainbow)
Stephen Stills
David Bowie
Freddie Mercury
Ann Wilson (Heart)
Ian Gillan (Deep Purple)

And just for the hell of it, ten from R&B/soul, likewise unranked:  

Otis Redding
Wilson Pickett
Aretha Franklin
Joe Tex
Tina Turner (who could equally have been classified under Rock)
Al Green
Ella Fitzgerald
Sam Moore
Lionel Ritchie
Etta James

And both lists could change tomorrow.

Buh-Bye

Culture

City Journal puts men’s magazines under the microscope, and doesn’t like what it sees:

In a tough media environment, men’s magazines are suffering more than most. Some—notably, Playboy and Esquire—appear to have decided that appealing primarily to men is no longer the best way forward.

Yeah, good luck with that, assholes, and watch your readership (and business) disappear.  Good-bye and good riddance.

Come to think of it, this humble website  offers more to men than any of the glossy so-called “men’s” magazines.  On these electronic pages can be found pictorials of topics wanted by men:  guns, cars, women, food, booze and articles including straightforward political discussion, cultural content — such as the occasional review of movies, music and fine art — and even historical analysis, all on a daily (not monthly or quarterly) basis.  Oh, and no ads.

And it’s free, except for voluntary contributions (thankee).

Unreality

Freaks & Loonies, Modernism

Amidst this whole LGBTOSTFU nonsense, I would have thought that certain biological manifestations were pretty much set in stone, so to speak — such as women’s menstrual periods.  Apparently not:

Transgender lobby forces sanitary towel-maker Always to ditch Venus logo from its products

Why?

…the decision [was made]  by makers Procter & Gamble (P&G) to kowtow to trans activists who were born female and still use sanitary products.

So let’s get this straight (ahem): someone born a woman who “transitions” into a man will get offended by the Venus logo?  Because gawd forbid a dude should get his eyes crossed by having to use a sanitary towel with a drawing  on its label?

After I stopped laughing, I decided on the following policy.

As far as I’m concerned, if you still have a penis, you’re a man, no matter what the rest of your body looks like.  (That means you, Caitlin Bruce Jenner, even if you were voted Woman of the Year by some morons.)  And if you call yourself Macho Man, feel like a man (whatever that means) but still have a functioning vagina needing tampons etc., you’re still a woman.

End of story, end of statement, end of this fucking insanity.

Thought For The Week

Deep Thoughts, Ethics, Modernism

From the much-reviled Puritans (very relevant at this time of the year):

Puritans believed it was also “to knit the heart of a husband to wife,” a charming thought. One of the supposedly oppressive rules of the Puritans was that men should not get away with taking advantage of women. They were strict. They did not believe that a man and woman who were not husband and wife should be alone together, because they thought the temptation was likely to be too much for one or both of them. We threw that rule out, and guess what? It turns out it has a good deal of truth to it. Just because adultery does not occur in 100% of such situations, or even 30% does not mean it doesn’t happen more than is good for both individuals and society as a whole… [Puritans] did not foreswear the flesh, they merely believed it should be held under short rein.

So many of the “old social rules” which have been weakened and eventually discarded have, over time, been seen to be not only sensible, but whose absence has been very harmful to society.

But with the modern world’s insistence that we never ever ever go back to the old ways because that would be [pick any or all as appropriate]  reactionary, racist, hateful, intolerant, intolerant, silly, White hegemony, patriarchal and in general doubleplusungood, I’m gloomy about the chances of our ever reinstating any of those old customs, rules and mores.

Even if going back would be beneficial to, oh, just about everybody.

I think I’ll go to the range this afternoon.  That usually dispels my gloom.