Plus Ca Change

Sunday Music: Sunday Girl

 

Beautiful and whimsical anything-but-new-wave retro-pop confection from 1979 by way of the 1960s, courtesy of Blondie, released as follow-up to their Heart Of Glass #1 single. This one hit #1 in several countries, but didn't chart in the U.S. But should have.

Government Is The Problem. As Usual.

 h/t CW

Reference please the above pic from CW's daily timewaster site.

Yes, we're sure it's an idyllic place, with gorgeous views, and tucked right in amidst Nature on all sides. Which is rather exactly the problem with it. If we were to name such a homestead, on the order of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, we would name this architectural act of insanity contrary to all common sense Kindling. Calling it Kingsford might be a wee bit too on-the-nose.

My absolutely curmudgeonly response:

"In a canyon, with a wood shake roof. And dead leaves all over it. Might as well just stack full gas cans against the outside walls. And violating just about every other survivability measure in a wildfire zone.

And some fall, the tearful owner will be "Shocked! Shocked, I say..." that's it's about to become a monument to human stupidity during a major brushfire.

This is why some areas should be declared unbuildable, all fire protection withdrawn completely, home insurance legally denied in perpetuity with the full backing of the state, and the entire area redlined from ever receiving a penny of federal disaster relief.

If you can absorb the cost to rebuild it every ten or twenty years out of your own pocket when it inevitably burns to the ground, ROWYBS.

Otherwise, once it burns down and the owner can't eat the cost to put it back, rebuilding permits are denied forever, and it reverts to permanent wild habitat by eminent domain, and the owner given $1/acre.

Now show some rich stupid jackhole's house perched over the waves and built beyond the mean high tide line that gets surf-pummeled by storms every generation or so."

And then, inevitably, Anonymous Yahoo (funny how they're almost always Anonymous, i'n'it?) pipes up:

"But also we are totally opposed to government intervention in people's private lives! Do we know that this property is in a location where brushfires are common? Seems like you want to confiscate these people's property based on a picture. But again, small government and "don't tread on me" or something"

 

To which load of halt-witted codswallop we reply:

"1) "Totally opposed"? No. Never said any such thing. You conflate "minimal" with "anarchy" at risk to your own argument, with a heaping helping of reductio ad absurdum. Best wishes with that approach.

2) Those are oak trees, growing in a canyon. Brushfire city. Period.

3) I don't want the property confiscated until Reality makes it obvious it never should have been built upon to begin with.

It was jackassical government greed that let some mid-century idiot build there in the first place, to maximize the county's taxable property value. Which then requires more brush crews to save it, and more roads to maintain to get to it.And then more disaster funds when it repeatedly gets burned up.

Government created this problem.

Smaller government would start by ripping out the paved road that gets there, closing the nearest fire stations, condemning the land, and turning it into permanent natural habitat. But that breaks five or ten government rice bowls, and gets entitled idiots all riled up. 

I've only seen this about 5M times in my lifetime in this state.

If some idiot wants to build his own private road, or make do by getting supplies in and out by pack mule, and carries the liability for such an idiotic house out of his own pocket, that should be the only way that place gets built.

Dollars to donuts the owner also gets all bent up when coyotes eat his pets, and mountain lions start eyeing his kids, and screams to Uncle Government to "do something". Then pisses and moans when the local fire department tells him that with trees and brush 20' from the house, they've already written it off when a fire breaks out. And he's likely the first in line at the trough when they declare a "disaster" (as opposed to "natural causes x human stupidity", which is also the plot recipe for every episode of Rescue 9-1-1, USCG: Cape Disappointment, and 57 other reality-based shows) once his house is a charred chimney surrounded by ashes.

It was big government that started such nonsense, A to Z, in the first place. Like people along the Mississippi found out a few years back, some places shouldn't have houses on them, ever, unless there's an annual stupidity tax on the property equal to 100% of its assessed value.

If government withdraws all services to such parcels save tax assessments, and cancels utility easements, which currently start a goodly number of brushfires up there in competition with lightning (you could look it up) the problem self-corrects within years, if not months, with no further effort nor public expenditure.

That's minimal government.

Your ball.

For a vivid exemplar of this sort of stupidity right now, google "Rancho Palos Verdes landslide zone", and read up about the latest batch of entitled idiots with more money than common sense, currently pissing, moaning, and harrumphing that gravity has annoyingly reasserted itself in their multi-million-dollar cliffside neighborhood, and demanding that government somehow stop it, and/or recompense them from public funds for their idiotic residential choices.

Boo frickin' hoo."

QED, podex.

Doubtless we'll be seeing further examples from FL and the Gulf Coast in a day or three as well, crying about "How dare Nature impinge upon our desire to build substandard houses in stupid places! Government should pay us for being that dumb!" in 3, 2...

We apologize to CW for buggering up his site with the second entry, or having to. Should he choose to zap all of the above back and forth into oblivion, we wouldn't blame him. His house, his choices. Which is why we moved it here, in case he does exactly that.

The annoyance at idiots who build such houses where they don't belong, purely out of presumption on the public's funds and good wishes, deserves calling out, which is why we have done so.

Ditto the air-headed thoughtlessness of Anonymous Yahoo's asinine riposte. But the lack of critical thinking which underpins such opinions bespeaks that the left end of the IQ bell curve continues to be over-represented both in real life, and on the internet. As always.

As my father pointed out more than once, "You could get rid of all the horses in the world, but you'd still never run out of horses' asses."

UPDATE: And here's the latest edition of The Stupid People's Gravy Train

Cultural Curios: The Ass-Dollar

ass-dollar (n.) 1. Any piece of currency received in change so worn out and raggedy that the recipient rightfully concludes was almost certainly stored up some prior owner's tailpipe at some point in time. e.g. "I got two ass-dollars in change at the drive-thru."

Having received far too many exemplars of the type, we herewith officially coin the term. Use it widely with our sincerest benedictions. They have apparently overrun the circulating bills to the point that the Treasury Department no longer finds it convenient to remove them from circulation.

Just one more indicator of the true state of civilization, and its continued slippage towards mud-hut Turd World status.

Don't even bring up the actual value of same over time.

First Day In Office: Plans We Can Support

"Artillery lends dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl."

Sunday Music: Dust In The Wind

 

Softest ballad from a hard-rocking band, melancholy wrapped in beautiful simplicity, and as sweet as a drop of condensed honey, this one being Kansas' biggest hit ever (#6 in the U.S. on Billboard) from 1977. Also, truth be told, the entire Solomonic Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes condensed down to absolute truth in about 8 lines of lyrics.

More Bad News For Senator Kneepads

Sunday Music: While My Guitar Gently Weeps

I love this version of George Harrison's classic, covered at his 2004 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame by Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, and - shortly after hack rag Rolling Stoned failed to list him as one of the 100 greatest guitar players of all time - Prince. In case you forgot, or never knew, Prince had guitar chops, his unbelievable lead (beginning at 3:28) on this clip is the highest-watched section of the entire video, and he parks it in orbit.

R.I.P James Earl Jones

This movie clip alone so immortal, it's actually in the Hall OF Fame at Cooperstown. From a movie so iconic, it doesn't pay homage to the sport, the sport pays homage to the movie, every single year, when two major league teams are selected to play the annual Field Of Dreams game in Iowa, and no one thinks it strange.

Just one part of an enormous acting legacy of a once-poor, stuttering boy from Jim Crow Mississippi, later a Ranger-tabbed Army veteran, who became one of the most celebrated voices and actors of any generation. He never took himself too seriously, but always gave his best performance, on stage and screen for 65 years, from Broadway to Dr. Strangelove to Star Wars to The Lion King to The Big Bang Theory, and everything in between.

Aged 93 years, of natural causes, at his home in the Hudson Valley north of NYFC. A truly gentle and incomparable man.

Sunday Music: Stranger Eyes

Great cut from the Cars' 1984 album, the last track on the A side, of Heartbeat City. Most of you don't remember (and indeed, some of you weren't even born) a little over a year later, when Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer released the trailer for a little airplane movie they'd made with Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer, long before Kenny Loggins had recorded Danger Zone. They needed appropriate music, so this track was the background music they used six months before the movie was released. Personally, when the flick came out, we were disappointed they hadn't kept the Cars' tune on the soundtrack.

She Makes A Fair Point...

Life Now Is Closer to Naked And Afraid Than My Fair Lady

h/t Irish

Feral Irishman, in the above link, posted a podcaster's commentary about the sartorial shortcomings of modern folk.

Au contraire, mes amis.

Have you noticed how no one's holding a gun to your head? That you are entirely free to be a beacon of sartorial splendor every day of your life, and provide a positive counter-example, instead of being Nagging Nelly and worrying about Other People?

There's a colloquial name for that nowadays. It rhymes with "Karen".

What's that, you say? This is all news to you? Color me shocked.

Wear a suit and tie, or a dress for the women, every day of your life, if that's what turns your crank. Show the poor, ignorant boobs what class looks like without opening your mouth or uttering a single word. [Hint: It's never behaving like a scold and a shrew. In fact, the definition of a gentleman is "someone who never discomforts others in any social setting." Here's a cluebat for you: find us the clip of Cary Grant berating anyone else, onscreen or off, for their appearance. We'll wait over here while you work on that.]

I get where you're coming from, and generally dress well as the mood strikes. Whether I do or not, that's my business. But expecting that from everyone else? As if. You're totally out of touch with the why behind that being such a delusionally unreasonable expectation.

People are showing up at the airport in crocs and pajamas, and it's a wonder. Because they know they're going to have to take off their shoes and belt, as if they were inmates, and one time in five be subjected to exactly an inmate's cavity search. (The way you could tell life had gone completely off the rails was when the response of so-called American "leadership" to 9/11 was to violate everyone's personal rights here, instead of blowing entire terrorist countries off the map by the megaton over there, both just because we could, and because it was the correct response to what they had coming. If we'd wiped Mecca and Medina off the map and turned them to smoldering glass monuments to 6th century stupidity on 9/12/01, we wouldn't have had another problem with an entire hemisphere of the world from that day to this.) More to the point here, we wouldn't be reduced to convicts waiting for the gracious permission of the boxcar guards at the TSA telling us when we could put our shoes on.

Frankly, those shiftless, worthless, brainless m*****f****rs are lucky I don't show up with my flying clothes in a paper sack, wearing naught but tear away diapers, and swilling a jug of Metamucil after downing three Ex-Lax bars, and begging for them to ask me to step into secondary screening. They'd never do that a second time, I assure you. And I'd get dressed right there in public, just to shame them even more afterwards. I'm past the point in life where I give a damn about the decorum they think they can enforce, after humiliating and embarrassing (literally) entire planeloads of innocent passengers by the hour, every day for 23 years. But if I gave a sh*t, they'd be the ones I'd give it to. Hopefully while they had their gloved hand checking my prostate, and missing the memo about the explosive I was about to issue from my nether regions.

So tell me, O Great Sartorial Overlord, what is the proper attire for anal rape under color of authority? Inquiring minds want to know.

And then when I get on the airplane, the attire should be either a flight suit, or sweats.

Anything that would permit comfort on cattlecar flights, where the airlines use everything but livestock chutes and cattle prods to load passengers.

If we're going to play "Remember when...?", let's start with calling a spade a spade: they're not "flight attendants", they're stewards and stewardesses. (Hot tip for the self-important flying cocktail waitresses: cruise lines still employ stewards, who don't feel demeaned by that title, but then they have to have learned customer service from someone other than retired Auschwitz camp guards, unlike the sweaty fat-assed water buffaloes hired to hand out tiny soda cans and handful-of-peanuts bags on modern flights.)

Remember when the men working on flights weren't one step from flaming RuPaul drag queens, and the women were hired for both their demeanor and their appearance, and they didn't look like thrice-divorced future box wine cat ladies working at the DMV or WalMart checkout line? And the seats actually were built for someone besides an anorexic emo teen, and didn't leave you feeling like you'd been folded into a torture device and unable to walk after enduring a single cross-country flight?

So maybe if they hadn't stupidly endowed snotty fat-asses with godlike powers and told them they were "flight crew", and instead reminded them they were there for customer service, not Flying Karen Law Enforcement, maybe they wouldn't find themselves facing down drunken slobs at 30,000 feet every day. When you treat people like inmates, they'll meet your expectations, every single time. Every flight longer than 30 minutes is a modern recreation of the Stanford Experiment. Every. Single. Time. (Word to your mother, Airlines: That experiment wasn't supposed to be a guidebook.) If you're not doing that, and they're still behaving like assholes, most passengers would not only be fine with you descending to 10,000 feet to throw them off the plane, they'd actually help. But more often than not, you had it coming, and they like seeing you f***ers get what you deserve.

But if you airborne SS troopers with delusions of grandeur are going to treat passengers like a load of Jews getting off at Treblinka, you're goddamned lucky we don't rise up and kill all of you, every time, on every flight, and leave your dead carcasses jamming up the toilets for the next flight. Don't think that happy accident is going to continue forever with 50:1 odds against you, every single day. You're lucky passengers don't get on in tyvek jumpsuits and fling their shit at you by the hour, just for the way both you and your airlines treat them.

And the DMV? Insolence at your own taxpayer expense, and a work ethic that makes lazy people look like efficiency examples fit to build the pyramids or the Transcontinental Railroad. Let's be fair, most of the midwit 80-IQ employees working at the DMV have already maxxed out in vivid real-life the Peter Principle, and administering eye tests and snapping bad photographs is what it looks like when the fetal alcohol syndrome children of life have finally been promoted beyond their level of competence.

Anyone who doesn't bring a machete and a gun to the DMV, and/or a pillow and sleeping bag, is the soul of compassion and foolish optimism in a real-life version of Dante's Inferno: "Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here".

Just spit-balling, but I'm pretty sure the dress code for that experience should be that of Michael Myers in any edition of the Halloween film franchise. Ideally, with a similar bodycount of DMV employees. The rest of us would cheer. And if 200 people walked into any DMV dressed that way on a day other than Halloween, the increase in productivity would be palpable. Hear me, God.

And you're bitching about sunglasses at night? Srsly? I've got three things to answer that:

The Blues Brothers.

Joel in Risky Business.

The Secret Service. (Back before they were incompetent boobs.)

If you still can't figure it out, as Charlie Sheen told Jennifer Grey in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, your problem is you.

 And you want me to dress for work??? It is to laugh.

Work stopped being serious business in all but a few professions when Shaneequa, who couldn't pass a basic typing exam because she couldn't find half the letters, let alone spell a word, got promoted two levels above everyone actually competent, and displays the managerial acumen of any member of a headhunter tribe from New Guinea.

When the corporate (or is it coprophiliac? I get the two so easily confused because of their similarity) overlords start treating work seriously, and hiring serious people, and paying serious salaries, that will be the time for getting dressed up for it.

When you hire DIE assclowns, put them in charge, and pay peanuts, expect your employees to act - and dress - like monkeys. Any day anyone in Cubicleville doesn't show up wearing just a shirt and no pants, like any chimpanzee in TV or film ever, it's a victory for holding the line.

Go price a suit, then look at what those employees are paid, and you're goddamned lucky they don't show up looking like The Beverly Hillbillies, nor start acting like the gorillas in Planet Of The Apes.

If you're going to have expectations about other people's kids, you'd better start treating them like human beings instead of circus acts.

Until then? Count your blessings they haven't reverted to throwing their feces instead of eating a daily shit sandwich at the unending indignities of modern life.

Don't even start with me about retail. A cast of millennial 20-nothings glued to their IdiotPhones like lab rats to the crack feeder, who know less about their shop's wares than retards, or the child labor in the Turd World who made them, whether it's fast food or high-end electronics. Stupid shiftless employees are the reason BezosMart has made Jeffie a billionaire, gobbling up retail market share like a wolf turned loose in a rabbit hutch. The correct attire for patronizing a retail establishment is as the Employee Motivation Supervisor on a slave galley. Including the cat o' nine tails, generously applied.

The proper attire for most businesses now should be clown outfits, with floppy shoes and greasepaint. Or a galley slave's loincloth. Both with behavior and body odor to match. People at both ends of the social transaction have simply reverted to the level of interaction provided. And where they haven't, yet, it's mostly a pity, upheld solely by social inertia, and the grace of a merciful deity.

You want to dress up anyways? Goodie for you. Go ahead on. No one's holding you back. I can even link for you half a dozen excellent YouTube channels and blogs to help you get it right.

You want everyone else to do that too? Well, fire the TSA, end body cavity searches as routine, put back normal-dimensioned human-sized seats on airlines, revoke flying Karen cocktail waitresses' godlilke vindictive powers and teach them to treat passengers like guests instead of livestock, and start treating businesses like business, instead of the clown show it is currently, and then you can issue dress codes again. 

But frankly, most of the people nominally running things and splendidly turned out are damned lucky they aren't being turned over roasting spits by their so-called underlings.

Tell the class how that worked out for TPTB around 1789 in Paris.

Sunday Music - Aku Aku

Three minutes of instrumental ear candy from Styx, the closing B-side track off their triple-platinum 1978 Pieces Of Eight album. Bumper music before there was bumper music.