Oct 092022
 

My late cat Raedthinn also knew how to open doors. He figured it out when I briefly lived in an apartment with door *handles*; he watched me use them, figured out what was going on and would reach up and pull the handle down to open the door. When we got back to door *knobs* he knew how they worked, but he could rarely get enough leverage on them to open doors. But “rarely” isn’t the same as “never.”

If your cat is opening doors when you don’t want him or her to do so, don’t get mad at the cat. Cat’s doing what a cat’s *supposed* to do. Be mad at yourself for being outsmarted by a critter with a brain the size of a walnut.

 Posted by at 11:43 am
Sep 272022
 

A fitness class out for a jog goes by an outdoor cafe… and the people having their lunch think that the class are running *from * something, panic, and take off running with them. On one hand.. ha ha, very funny. On the other hand, this was in Brazil. I’ve seen the videos. The many, many, MANY videos. It’s not insane to keep your head on a swivel in Brazil, and be ready at the drop of a hat to bolt. That whole country seems like Chicago writ large.

 

 Posted by at 10:03 pm
Sep 202022
 

If a blog post hereabouts makes mention of something, something that seems like it aught to be in the post (a link to a book or movie on Amazon, say, or perhaps photos), but the post has a distinct blank spot… it may be that your adblocker is nuking the links or images. Most adblockers should have a way to unblock certain pages or whole websites. Do that, and chances are the blog posts will make sense.

 Posted by at 1:08 pm
Sep 082022
 

Nearly two decades ago, a lesbian named Norah Vincent decided to go through a substantial level of effort – working out, makeup, voice training, etc. – to be able to pass as a man. She spent 18 months being a “man,” and wrote a book about her experiences, the summary being “men have it hard too.” This was not exactly a shatteringly surprising conclusion for men, but it seemed to surprise a bunch of women who yammer on about “male privilege” and “patriarchy” and other such things that have never seemed to provide me with so much as a dime. Shrug. Well, she’s back in the news:

Woman Who Pretended To Be A Man Dies By Assisted Suicide After Realizing How Difficult It Was To Be One

To be fair, the story here seems to be missing a lot of details. For, example, *why* exactly she self-deleted. The author seems to conclude that her experiences as a man screwed her up… but that was a decade and a half ago. Given the dearth of details, there could have been a whole laundry list of other problems that cropped up in that time that led to her end. A New York Times article about her is similarly lacking in details.

 Posted by at 11:19 am
Aug 272022
 

Sylvester Stallone made a career out of playing “action heroes” who tended to be all muscle and little brain… or at least that’s the stereotype. A lot of his characters and movies *seemed* like that on the surface, but were very different underneath. “Rocky” is often thought of as a boxing movie, but it’s really a love story with some boxing thrown in. “First Blood” is thought of as a simple shoot-em-up, but it’s really a story about how society threw away a whole generation of veterans… that monologue at the end *utterly* makes the movie. And “Demolition Man” seems another simple shoot-em-up with sci-fi trappings, but it’s a reasonably deep commentary on political correctness. And the man, when he had the right material, could *act.*

Stallone himself seems to be a pretty smart guy. This comes across *brilliantly* in this clip from a BBC interview from 1977:

A more complete version of the interview:

 

 Posted by at 1:11 am
Aug 142022
 

There are a *lot* of lessons to be learned from Russias ongoing war. One being: don’t post your location on social media, especially if the enemy *really* wants you dead and has access to long range precision ordnance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9yFz7cuT7o

Hmm. This one doesn’t seem to auto-embed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9yFz7cuT7o

UPDATE: Huh. The video is now private. This seems to be because the video has been updated:

 

Interestingly, one of the video clips that was removed showed a soldier just walking along… a soldier with a *US* flag patch on his shoulder. Whether that means that was actually irrelevant footage of a US solider somewhere else (Afghanistan?) or a mercenary with a US patch… dunno.

 Posted by at 11:08 pm
Aug 102022
 

“Quora” allows any goober to ask any goofball question, and anyone can respond. I have no idea when or why Quora decided to send me emails with some of the latest and greatest posts, but a couple times a day, there they are. Anyway, this one popped up today:

I support banning guns in the US. Can pro-gun people provide some reasons why gun control is bad?

There are a bunch of answers of varying levels of wisdom. But one line that jumped out:

So whenever anyone says “I don’t think you should have guns” or “I don’t trust you with guns”, I must ask in turn, what are you planning to do to me that you think I’d shoot you over?

What are you planning to do to me that you think I’d shoot you over?

 Posted by at 8:59 pm
Aug 012022
 

I don’t care who you are, this right here is *funny.*

If you think it’d be just neato-keen to get a tattoo in some foreign language, go right ahead. But is it really so much of a bother to put some actual thought into it first? I checked out a number of these, both Chinese and Japanese, on Google Translate, and the video seems to be generally correct in the wacky translations of the ones that are shown. Which means that if you want, say, “courage” tatted on your arm in Chinese, you could get 勇氣  (Yǒngqì) and feel *reasonably* confident that you won’t come off as too much of a fool. Heck, at least you could do your translation, print it out and show it to a Chinese speaker and see if they say it means what you think it does. Is it really *that* friggen’ hard?

I bet a lot of Chinese-speaking tattoo artists are tempted to slap “愚蠢的白人自由主義者” on their customers.

 

 Posted by at 9:01 am
Jul 122022
 

I think a decent case can be made that we might see the collapse of civilization within a generation or two… and possibly sooner. The end of the Soviet Union over thirty years ago seemed like the dawning of a glorious new age… but we’ve squandered that opportunity. We’ve ignored the barbarians gathering outside the gates… and gathering *within* the gates. You can see it in many of the videos and news stories I’ve posted. Not just a coarsening of discourse, but a collapse of the family and an increasing feralness among fatherless “children.”

The piece below is depressing, and very likely right. I don’t agree with all of it… but you don’t need 100% agreement to agree that things are in a bad way, that something must be done, and the general direction of what that something is.

How To Recognize Civilization When You See It

 Posted by at 6:53 pm