Tag: Things that totally suck

No More Bill

Bad News, Travels, Writing

I see with great regret that the peerless travel writer Bill Bryson is closing up his inkwell for good.

In an age when cheap airfares and package tours — not to mention online “visits” through media such as Gurgle maps and InstaGram — could have made travel writing about as relevant as toenail clippings, Bryson’s refreshing, no-nonsense style has defied the trend.

I first encountered the man through his Lost Continent: Travels In Small-Town America.   I found in Bryson a kindred soul because at the time, Longtime Buddy Trevor Romain and I were doing very much the same thing, albeit on a smaller scale:  once a year we would take a long weekend off work, pick a part of the U.S. that we’d never visited before, and fly in (he from Austin and I, at that time, from Chicago).  Then we’d rent a car and set off, destination unknown and only the return flight’s departure time as a deadline.  The Golden Rule:  No Interstate Highways.  Even major U.S. roads with only two digits (e.g. U.S. 30 or Route 66) were treated with suspicion, and we’d get off into the back country roads with alacrity.

We were often asked why we did this — and we did it for nearly a decade — and our reply was simple.  We did it to remind ourselves why we had both left our country of birth and settled in this new, this wonderful and this dauntingly-large and diverse land.

To say that we met interesting people would rank among the great understatements of the century:  in New Orleans, Queer Tom and Opera Kate (an out-of-work opera singer working as a barmaid);  the lady in a little town outside Portland who collected frogs of all descriptions (stuffed, porcelain, wooden, whatever) and displayed them all in her restaurant;  the huge guy in New Hampshire who, when we asked him if he’d ever played football lisped:  “Nope.  I got weak kneeth”;  and the slightly-batty breakfast diner owner in Rhode Island who wore the most eccentric earrings we’d ever seen, a different pair every single day;  these, and many, many others were encountered in our travels, and gave us both dinner-party conversation topics and “Remember when?” reminiscences that survive to this day.

And during every single trip, Trevor and I fell in love with America all over again.

So when reading Bill Bryson’s books, it was like reading about one of our own “Blue Highways” trips (the name taken from the title of William Least Heat Moon’s book of the same ilk).  And when Bryson settled in Britishland, it gave rise to works like the astonishing The Road To Little Dribbling  and Notes From A Small Island  — books which, because I’d been to the U.K. often myself, made me nod my head because I too had been to Little Dribbling, only it was called Upton-Under-Wold, Thirsk or Lesser Foldem.

I cannot recommend his work highly enough, because he is an extraordinary writer who sees everything through a pair of clear-sighted lenses and not rose-tinted ones.  Never one to suffer fools or stupid things, he still talks about them with affection covered by incredulity.  If you’re looking for a reading project for the winter, you could do a lot worse than read everything Bill Bryson has ever written.

And Bill:  good for you.  While I am distraught at your retirement, I am forever grateful to you and your wonderful works.

As to why he’s getting out:

“I would quite like to spend the part that is left to me doing all the things I’ve not been able to do. Like enjoying my family, I have masses of grandchildren and I would love to spend more time with them just down on the floor.”

I can think of no better reason.  Give them each a hug from me.

Speed Bump #922

Grammar Nazism

When did the noun “gift” become a verb?  “I gifted her a birthday present” sounds retarded, not to say redundant or even worse, pretentious.

It’s even made even worse by adding the superfluous preposition “with”.  “I gifted her with a birthday present” sounds so stupidly convoluted and verbose, it could be Jesse Jackson speaking.

There’s a perfectly good word to describe the act of giving:  it’s called “giving”.  By definition, when one gives something to someone, it’s a fucking gift.

I know that I am somewhat guilty of turning a noun into a verb is that I call this same foul trend “verbing” — but of course I’m being ironic by turning the concept against itself.

Don’t get me started.  Every time someone spouts that nonsense, I want to gift them with a kick in the groin.

Silver Linings, Gloomy Futures

Business, Men & Women

Not every business has been adversely affected by the Chinkvirus and Gummint lockdowns:

A businesswoman who sells sex dolls has revealed how her company has been thriving throughout the pandemic, and that she’s noticed an increase in sales each time a new lockdown restriction comes into place.
Jade Stanley, 36, from Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, launched her company Sex Doll Official in 2018, and sells and rents plastic sex companions, some of which can cost up to £8,000, to ‘lonely’ customers.
The mother-of-four explained that due to widespread isolation during the coronavirus crisis, she saw surges in sales every time there was a change in lockdown rules, insisting customers want ‘more than just a sex toy’.

However:

She also revealed that she’s noticed a much bigger demand for male and transgender sex dolls, and told there’s a ‘big market’ for couples who want to involve a ‘safe third party’ in the bedroom.

That might just be the thunder of horses’ hooves you’re hearing in the distance.

So just what does this little hotbed town of kinky sex look like?  Something like this:

…and further down the High Street:

However.

Alert Readers may have noticed in the above pic one of Kim’s Favoritest Places In Britishland:  Greggs, purveyors of  fine pies and finer sausage rolls.  Things are not so rosy there:

Since reopening on July 2, the Newcastle-based firm’s like-for-like sales averaged at 71.2 per cent of its levels from 2019 for the 12-week period to September 26.
Greggs was performing well before the crisis its shares hit a record high of 2,550p in January. But they closed yesterday at 1,219p, down 47 per cent in the year to date.

So to all my Brit Readers, I beseech you:  start Kim’s “Every Meal With Greggs©” program with immediate effect, and to hell with your waistlines.

Your sex dolls won’t complain, I promise you.

Control

Bad News, Technology

Regular Readers all know that I treat the Internet Of Things (IOT) with deep and hostile skepticism.  I hate the idea of driverless cars, “remotely-controlled” appliances and -household systems, and don’t even get me started on “smart” guns with embedded chips.

Here’s a decent takedown of the concept:

After a week of tinkering, he effectively turned the coffee maker into a ransomware machine.  When the user tries to connect it to their home network, it triggers the machine to turn on the burner, spew hot water, endlessly spin the bean grinder, and display a pre-programmed ransom message while beeping incessantly.  The only way to get it to stop?  Unplugging your now seemingly possessed coffee maker entirely.

I know that all this is The Coming Thing, and we should all just bow down and accept its inevitability.  My standard response to this kind of attitude has always been quite simple:

  or the more heated

or even

Stick shifts and car keys, bolt-action or pump action rifles, revolvers, “dumb” coffee machines, house keys, pen and paper… y’all get my drift, right?

Fuck automation, and fuck the Internet Of Things or Skynet or whatever the hell they want to call it.

This post comes to you courtesy of the Internet… goddamn it.

Vanishing Point

Drive Time, Modernism, Traditions

I have spoken often of my distaste for much of modern life, and here’s just one more thing to make me want to pack a picnic lunch and an assault rifle, and go find a tall building somewhere.

Sadly, the end of the manual transmission is near, and the unfortunate truth is few people will miss it. Most young adults don’t know how to drive a vehicle with a manual transmission, and they aren’t interested in learning. Many modern automatics offer better fuel efficiency and quicker acceleration than their manual counterparts. Porsche now delivers 75% of its 718 and 911 sports cars with automatic transmissions. The new C8 Corvette is only available with one. When the stick shift loses Porsche and Corvette buyers, you know it’s quickly heading for the rearview mirror.

But it gets worse.

In the future, cars won’t only be automatics; it appears they’ll increasingly be automated, electric vehicles. The satisfying throbbing of the exhaust and the pleasure of driving will also become victims of progress. Traveling in a personal vehicle will be as exciting as riding in an elevator with windows.

And this guy adds his take, talking about

the dystopian future in which you’ll sit passively in your computer-driven car with government-mandated speed limits and instantly-revocable travel permissions programmed in.

In the next year or so I’ll be needing to get a new car because the old Tiguan has north of 115,000 miles under its belt.  Don’t be surprised if I get something with a stick shift (assuming I can find one, and even if it does limit my choices), if for no other reason than to shake my fist at the Empire.

  

And just let some future asshole government mandate “smart” guns with chips embedded so that they can be “controlled” by some central source — essentially, the same principle as automated cars.

At that point, my prospective trip up to the rooftops won’t just be a joke anymore.

Shorter Degree

Education, Seen On Campus

Via Insty I saw the redoubtable Joanne Jacobs’s take on this topic.  Back when I decided to go back to college, I was astonished to learn that a simple B.A. degree would take me four years to attain.  Four years?  Everywhere else in the world only requires three.

Then I studied the curriculum, and started to understand why the late Joseph Sobran lamented that in a single generation, our society had “progressed” from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English at university — a.k.a. the “core curriculum” which required a full year to be wasted on shit like “how to write a sentence” (English 101), “how the U.S. and state governments work” (Pol Sci 001/002), “Math For Dummies” (Math 001), and so on.  Even a “trimmed” course load for this mandatory study looks dubious, as Jacobs notes:

[Greg] Poliakoff would require all students to take “expository writing, literature, a college-level mathematics course, a natural science course, an economics course, a survey in U.S. history or government, and three semesters of a foreign language.”

What a total waste of time, in my case at any rate.  Fortunately, there are ways to “test out” of various courses — for some reason, the fact that I had published three novels somehow persuaded the English Department that I wouldn’t need English 101, for instance — so I was able to reduce some of the bullshit course load, but still not enough to shorten the four years into three that way.

Next, I ran into the stupid restriction that only allows students to take on four courses per semester which, when I studied the course content, made it plain that I would be prevented from tackling five and even six, even though it was easily doable.  My pleas to the Arts Faculty to do so were rejected Because Rules — clearly, the rules are there to protect the Grease Pit Set and Snowflakes from actual hard work, whereas I could see at a glance that the content for all but the 4-level History courses was not only light but superficial.  (Without exception, my requests for a supplemental reading list for a course were met with a “you’re not from this planet” look from the various professors — one admitted to me that she had never received such a request from a student before.  At Wits University in Johannesburg back in the 1970s, every liberal arts course had a supplemental reading list which, while not officially required, was necessary if you wanted to actually pass the course.)

So I attacked the degree with ferocity, taking all the summer / winter vacation classes I could.  (Strange, isn’t it, that professors can teach a course in three weeks that takes a full semester otherwise?)

Anyway, with all that my B.A. still took me three and a half years*, simply because the course schedules often didn’t jell with my degree plan — the one course I needed for a French sub-major (Business French) wasn’t taught in any “summer-mester”, and clashed with a History class during the regular semester, so I ended up taking instead a useless class of English short stories (during which the professor admitted to me privately that I could have taught, let alone studied) and passing up on a French sub-major.

The cynic in me thinks that the overly-long undergraduate degree is driven simply by financial greed — one less year equals a loss of $30,000 in revenue per student — but I will concede that without the bullshit core curriculum, the failure / dropout rate would probably be much higher than it already is.  (And that, of course, is the fault of the high school education kids get these days, but don’t get me started.)

It’s a racket, pure and simple.

*summa cum laude (for my non-U.S. Readers, that means a 90%+ final grade for every course)