Quotulatiousness

December 14, 2018

Assembling “The Cosmodemonic Sauder Adept Storage Credenza, from the dark Satanic mills of Sauder”

Filed under: Humour, Woodworking — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Having recently had a similar experience attempting to assemble a large IKEA wardrobe, I felt very sympathetic reading of Gerard Vanderleun‘s struggles with his cosmodemonic credenza from Sauder:

Item Weight 125 pounds
Product Dimensions 58.2 x 17.2 x 36.3 inches
Item model number 418344
Assembled Height 36.26 inches
Assembled Width 17.165 inches
Assembled Length 58.189 inches
Weight 133 Pounds

Some assembly required.

Some? Some?! This little item took me the better part of 5 hours and left me shaken, exhausted, splinter struck, and drenched in a sweat that fell from the veritable fountains of profanity I launched at this !!!@@**%!*@!! item of our damned age. If it had not been a gift and if I had not just come by a pathological fear of fire, this THING would have been piled in the parking lot in front of my little apartment and set alight while I gibbered and danced about its flames in loincloth, pitchfork and torches.

Most of the first hour of trying to assemble this overweight and overbuilt POS was spent counting the nine (9!) different sacks of nails and connectors and sorting the various wooden slabs (one weighs in at around 50 pounds) and reading the always delightfully ambiguous instructions illustrated by a set of mechanical drawings in the ever-popular “oblique” style.

The next two hours would have found me assembling the various units to the mantra, “Slowly…. and ….. patiently.. and slowly… and…”

The final two hours would have found me in the 9th circle of Dante’s Inferno looking for the way out with only one beer to my name.

I’m not a petite man and I’m not a weak man. But this one brought this man to a new awareness of his age and his mortality; a mortality that I prayed would not kick in until I had hunted down the sadists behind Sauder and stood them all against the wall.

In the end I did get the !!!@@**%!*@!! item built. It stands on the back wall of my living dining area ready to receive the needful things for which it was made. As for me, I had to take to my couch for half a day just to get over the intense fatigue resulting from tossing 125 pounds of pressed wood around my house and trying to cuss it into place.

Following this experience I lay on my couch swearing to never, ever, “assemble” any item of furniture. But guess what? Unless you are ready to lay out serious cash, there are no items like that any more. Everything is Ikea-infected and made of sawdust.

“Bohemian Rhapsody”

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh on the media phenomenon of “Bohemian Rhapsody” … which, in his opinion, isn’t all that good as a song:

… Queen wasn’t really a four-piece; it was a pansexual mutant alien athlete-hero plus three ugly, highly talented Englishmen. And “Bohemian Rhapsody” almost isn’t a song so much as a captured moment. Considered as a song, there isn’t much to it except as a showcase for virtuosity: it’s not among Queen’s 20 best. And ordinary people can’t take a crack at “Bohemian Rhapsody” expecting to do it nicely and competently, in the way they might do “Blackbird” or “Wonderwall.” To be used for performance by the general public, “Bohemian Rhapsody” basically requires a roomful of drunks united in the ironic, non-judgmental spirit of karaoke.

Perhaps there is not much more to be said of “Bohemian Rhapsody” by way of explanation. Queen enjoyed trying on American hats from time to time (ah, if only Elvis had stayed around to receive the gift of “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”). But an American group could never have made anything that was weird in this particular way — wallowing in the pathos of a French gangster movie, then diving into a cryptic Dantean nightmare, piling up gestures and word-sounds into a unabashedly hokey panorama. There is no content at all to the thing, per se, except what the band members put into it as performers. In no way, I promise, will knowledge of Scaramouche’s place in the commedia dell’arte or the life of Galileo Galilei unlock some hidden layer of understanding.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” is an exquisitely made thing whose intricacy and beauty everybody can appreciate on more or less the same level. That is the special formula for mass popularity in all of the arts. They will tell you the Mona Lisa has a zillion layers of biographical or political meaning, but the painting really is what it is for everybody, and in roughly the same way. Every ordinary grownup can participate in the intimacy and the mystery of it, and it is not really a superior experience, as many great paintings might be, for somebody with a bundle of university degrees. As often happens I am reminded of Andy Warhol’s praise for Coca-Cola. “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.”

Dreadnought: The Battleship that Changed Everything

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Historigraph
Published on 24 Nov 2018

So it’s probably worth noting here that when Dreadnought made all other battleships irrelevant, it didn’t do so equally. For example, Japan had constructed two ‘semi-dreadnoughts’ a couple of years earlier, with more 10-inch guns than was standard at the time. The Americans too were moving towards building an ‘all-big-gun’ battleship, but they were much slower at getting them built than the British.

If you enjoyed this video and want to see more made, consider supporting my efforts on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/historigraph

Sources:
Robert K. Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War
Ben Wilson, Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy

QotD: Burgundy

Filed under: France, Humour, Quotations, Wine — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If it’s red, French, costs too much, and tastes like the water that’s left in the vase after the flowers have died and rotted, it’s probably Burgundy.

Jay McInerney, Bacchus & Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar, 2002.

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