Tag: Stupid people

Speed Bump

Grammar Nazism

Actually, a multitude thereof, and all in the same article.

Mulcahy, pictured, was only trialed in 2000 when Duffy confessed he had been his accomplice.

FFS, it’s not enough that “trialed” is now being used as a replacement for “tested”;  now these illiterate assholes are using it instead of “tried” (in the judicial  sense)?

It doesn’t end there:

From there, the police started to look for a man with a A blood type…

You mean “the” A blood type, of course.

To add insult to injury [sic] , there’s this:

“The other thing, and we’ve never made this public, is that a tourniquet was used”

Ahem.  A tourniquet is a stopgap medical device to cut off massive bleeding in a wounded limb;  a garotte is looped around the neck and tightened by turning a stick or piece of metal as a means of strangulation.

And their description of the murder weapon:

They thought that [the piece of wood] been used as an accelerator to burn the body. It wasn’t. It was used act fallen out of the knot that had been used to strangle Maartje.

Right now, I am not allowed to visit Britishland, which is probably A Good Thing.  There would be murders at the Daily Mail offices, perhaps even by garotte (which would be fitting).

Gah.  Where’s the Sipsmith?

Fire This Asshole

Drive Time, Wokism

Last Sunday was the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, whereby car enthusiasts converge on the famed golf course and drool over the various examples of automotive gorgeousity strewn around like a rich man’s carelessly-scattered diamonds on green velvet.

Here are a couple other examples:

Iso Rivolta:

Ferrari Pininfarina:

And all was well in the land, until this little Wokist twerp got in on the act:

Let’s get two things cleared up before we continue. The first is that while the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance is certainly far from the most momentous cultural event of the year, it is the most prestigious car show anywhere in the world. For a few days in late summer, the 18th fairway at the Pebble Beach golf course is the very highest point for any rich person who covets vintage cars, and the highest honor for any person working in the business of restoring classics.
The second is that Mercedes was not just a car company that was busy at work doing normal car stuff during the time in which Nazis were in power in Germany. Mercedes was an early and direct supporter of Adolf Hitler long before he took power, helping him out while he was still an outsider figure in Bavarian politics. When Hitler got out of prison in 1924, he got picked up in a Mercedes-Benz.

Ergo, says this girlyman, we should not have the 540K as the winner because it was driven by Nazis.  Here’s the car in question:

And then this:

This is exactly how this car is seen in this world of the mega-rich: an encapsulation of “the optimistic mood” of Germany in 1934. Let us ask: for whom was this an optimistic time, and who is the kind of person who looks back on that time now, remembering its icons for their … optimism? Rich people, that’s who.

Wow… wealth envy and oh-so laudable “anti-Nazi” sentiment all wrapped up in a neat little bundle.  Read the whole thing to get the RCOB that Longtime Reader Ken S. warned me I’d get, when he sent it to me yesterday.  And I did.

Even better is that the writer suffers from the usual hypocrisy of his ilk, in that he owns a… Volkswagen Beetle, surely the most Hitlerish of all German cars of the 1930s.

So just for the hell of it, feast your eyes on a couple other examples of this eeeevil car:

And to hell with this wokist revisionism.  Let’s just enjoy the automotive excellence.

Pity, though:  I used to enjoy reading Jalopnik.

Speed Bump

Grammar Nazism

Oy.  Once again, the bludde boileth overre.  Guess why?  Never mind, it’s the Daily Mail again.

PICTURED: Moment Kaley Cuoco’s stunt double is RAN OVER by a car

Give me a minute while I get a fresh cup of coffee.

I’ve ranted before about the Brit tendency to misuse tenses, e.g. “he was sat there” instead of “he was sitting there”, and now we have the latest manifestation, using “ran” instead of “run”.

In this case, the problem stems from fucking illiteracy  ignorance of what is being omitted from the sentence:  “…stunt double is (being) run over by a car.”  Clearly, saying “stunt double is being ran over by a car” jars the senses — or maybe it doesn’t, in the post-grammatical world we now find ourselves in.

Just for the record, “ran” in this example is a transitive past-tense verb, i.e. “the car ran over the stunt double” (although it really should have run over both the writer and editor of this article).  Similarly, it can be used without an object (“the boy ran away”) unless it’s used in a different sense (the man ran the company — i.e. managed the company).

Of all the times to run out of fuel for my flamethrower…

Texas, Baby

Righteous Shootings

Let’s hear it for the folks in Fort Worth:

Texas Crowd Stones Gunman to Death After Fatal Shooting

A man allegedly opened fire and killed at least one person at a Fort Wort, Texas, party on Monday morning, prompting the other attendees to reportedly stone the alleged shooter to death at the scene.

I’m just surprised that he wasn’t shot, this being Fort Worth, but I guess that we could call this a Righteous Stoning…

Thanks to several people for sending me the link.

Statistical Bollocks

Drive Time, Numbers & Statistics

Did you know which is the most dangerous interstate highway in the U.S.?  (I’ll let you ponder that for a moment.)

According to this study, it’s Interstate 45 — with five accidents per 100 miles — which runs from Dallas to Galveston via Houston.

Which, as any fule kno, is complete nonsense — what statisticians call “bullshit” — because I-45 is also one of the shortest highways in the U.S.  And yes, it’s busy.  But ask any Texan whether they’d rather drive from Dallas to Austin on I-35, or on I-45 to Houston (about the same distance) and 35 would lose by a landslide.

But I-35, you see, is a long interstate highway (running from Laredo TX all the way north until it dies out of sheer boredom somewhere in Minnesota), so its deadliness is mitigated by long stretches of nowhere in which nothing happens (I’m looking at northern Oklahoma, Kansas and Iowa, for example), so its deaths / mile count drops substantially.  Hell, I’d rather drive on the Long Island Expressway than the distance between Dallas north to Denton on I-35.  (I’ve done both, more times than I can count, and there’s no comparison.)

And for sheer white-knuckle terror, consider I-40 from California to wherever it ends on the East Coast…

Be careful of numbers, folks:  they often lie.  And by the way, the article itself is, quelle surprise, complete bollocks too because they use two totally different measurement metrics — deaths per 100 miles (distance), and deaths per million passenger-miles — which are completely different.  But hey, it’s the Daily Mail.