Quotulatiousness

May 11, 2013

Britain’s latest wave of snobbery

Filed under: Britain, Business, Food — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

Brendan O’Neill examines the worldview of the supermarket-hater:

A malady is spreading through the leafier bits of Britain. It’s causing fevered thinking among its sufferers, who can’t even walk down a high street without experiencing distressing symptoms: cold sweats, anger, an urge to shout rude things at dumb shoppers.

Their ailment? Tescophobia, an irrational loathing of Britain’s biggest supermarket.

A certain tranche of the middle classes hates nothing more than the sight of a Tesco store. Except perhaps the sight of Tesco patrons, whom anti-Tesco author Andrew Simms snobbishly describes as always looking “listless and depressed… slumping from place to place”.

It is nothing more than thinly veiled class disdain for the plebs:

But there’s a reason Tesco and other supermarkets have been a roaring hit: it’s because they’ve made people’s lives, especially women’s lives, so much easier.

Remember when we had to traipse from shop to shop almost every day of the week just to have enough grub and stuff to live on? I have vivid memories of going shopping with my mum, accompanied by my five brothers, back when supermarkets weren’t as common as they are now.

We’d go to the butchers, the bakers, the greengrocers, the corner shop, packing our wares into tatty bags and dragging them home, before having to do the same thing again in a couple of days’ time because the foodstuffs sold by small shops didn’t tend to last long. The arrival of the supermarket revolutionised all that.

Suddenly, everything you might need or want was under one roof. A family larder could be stocked in the space of an hour, where once it was a never-ending task. How much of mankind’s, or rather womankind’s, time has been freed up for other pursuits by the spread of Tesco?

Early betting line implies Vikings have gotten worse since 2012 playoffs

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

This is the sort of thing that gets pinned up on the locker room wall. Last season, the Vikings were a playoff team with a 10-6 record, including a win over the Green Bay Packers in week 17 that clinched the playoff berth. Early betting lines from Las Vegas have them favoured to win only five of the first 15 games of the season:

Week 1: Vikings are 2-1/2-point underdogs at Lions.

Week 2: Vikings are 2-1/2-point underdogs at Bears.

Week 3: Vikings are 6-1/2-point favorites vs. Browns.

Week 4: Vikings are 1-1/2-point underdogs vs. Steelers (in London).

Week 5: Vikings bye week.

Week 6: Vikings are 2-1/2-point favorites vs. Panthers.

Week 7: Vikings are 3-point underdogs at Giants.

Week 8: Vikings are 1-point underdogs vs. Packers.

Week 9: Vikings are 1-1/2-point underdogs at Cowboys.

Week 10: Vikings are 1-1/2-point favorites vs. Redskins.

Week 11: Vikings are 6-point underdogs at Seahawks.

Week 12: Vikings are 4-1/2-point underdogs at Packers.

Week 13: Vikings are 1-1/2-point favorites vs. Bears.

Week 14: Vikings are 3-1/2-point underdogs at Ravens.

Week 15: Vikings are 3-1/2-point favorites vs. Eagles.

Week 16: Vikings are 2-1/2-point underdogs at Bengals.

The Cantor folks did not issue early lines on Week 17, mostly because they have NO idea which players will be sitting out that week in anticipation of the playoffs. So your guess is as good as theirs who will be favored when the Vikings play host to the Lions on Dec. 29.

I’m not saying that going into the final week of the 2013 season at 5-10 is impossible, but if it gets that bad, Rick Spielman, Leslie Frazier and company will all be polishing their resumés because they won’t be back for the 2014 season. A result like that would pretty much require all of the following conditions to be met: Adrian Peterson has a career-worst year, Christian Ponder has a similarly bad year, none of the three 2013 first round picks turns out to be NFL-quality at their draft position, and Greg Jennings turns out to be too old and frail to play football any more.

The “Liberator” isn’t really a gun … it’s a political theatre prop

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In The Register, Lewis Page points out that the 3D printed “Liberator” isn’t actually much of a gun at all:

People are missing one important point about the “Liberator” 3D-printed “plastic gun”: it isn’t any more a gun than any other very short piece of plastic pipe is a “gun”.

You can take my Liberator ... and shove it

You can take my Liberator … and shove it

Seriously. That’s all a Liberator is: a particularly crappy pipe, because it is made of lots of laminated layers in a 3D printer. Attached to the back of the pipe is a needlessly bulky and complicated mechanism allowing you to bang a lump of plastic with a nail in it against the end of the pipe.

An actual gun barrel is a strong, high quality pipe — almost always made of steel or something equally good — capable of containing high pressure gas. It has rifling down the inside, making it narrow enough that the hard, tough lands actually cut into the soft bullet jacket (too small for the bullet to actually move along, unless it is rammed with massive force). At the back end there is a smooth-walled section, slightly larger, into which a cartridge can be easily slipped.

It’s not much of a gun at all. But as with the old saying about the dancing bear, it’s not how well it dances but that it dances at all. After some 100,000 downloads, the company was requested to take the files offline on Thursday:

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