For instance, in the case of the machine-gun washers — by the way, in applying for them, you must call them Gun, Machine, Light Vickers, Washers for lock of, two. That is the way we always talk at the Ordnance Office. An Ordnance officer refers to his wife’s mother as Law, Mother-in-, one — you should state when the old washers were lost, and by whom; also why they were lost, and where they are now. Then write a short history of the machine-gun from which they were lost, giving date and place of birth, together with a statement of the exact number of rounds which it has fired — a machine-gun fires about five hundred rounds a minute — adding the name and military record of the pack-animal which usually carries it. When you have filled up this document you forward it to the proper quarter and await results.
The game then proceeds on simple and automatic lines. If your application is referred back to you not more than five times, and if you get your washers within three months of the date of application, you are the winner. If you get something else instead — say an aeroplane, or a hundred wash-hand basins — it is a draw. But the chances are that you lose.
[…]
Olympus will not disgorge your washers until it has your receipt. On the other hand, if you send the receipt, Olympus can always win the game by losing the washers, and saying that you have got them. In the face of your own receipt you cannot very well deny this. So you lose your washers, and the game, and are also made liable for the misappropriation of two washers, for which Olympus holds your receipt.
Truly, the gods play with loaded dice.
On the whole, the simplest (and almost universal) plan is to convey a couple of washers from some one else’s gun.
Ian Hay (Major John Hay Beith), The First Hundred Thousand: Being the Unofficial Chronicle of a Unit of “K(1)”, 1916.
October 24, 2020
QotD: Dealing with the Ordnance Office
October 23, 2020
QotD: Every military organization
Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road, 1963.
October 22, 2020
QotD: The needs of creative people
The question of where to live on such a low income while trying to write becomes crucial: in the middle of nowhere with cheap rent, or in the city where day jobs help pay for housing? Compromise clouds every decision.
And this simply will not do. You see, creative people, that’s people like Ms Delaney, must live in locales befitting their importance, not their budget. You, taxpayer, come hither. And bring your wallet.
The city of Sydney recently tried to address the problem of artists being priced out by introducing six rent-subsidised studio spaces in Darlinghurst. Those chosen get a year-lease and pay reduced rent of $250 a week on a one-bedroom with work studio.
Creative people, being so creative, deserve nothing less than special treatment. I mean, you can’t expect a creative person to write at any old desk in any old room in any old part of town. What’s needed is a lifestyle at some other sucker’s expense. And so that garret has to be in a fashionable suburb or somewhere happening, where the creative vibrations are at their strongest and genius will surely follow. And that pad of choice has to come before the publishing deal and film rights and the swimming pool full of cash. Indeed, it has to materialise before the book itself, or any part thereof. How else can their brilliance flourish, as it most surely will, what with all that creativity. Our betters just need a little cake before they eat those damn vegetables. And possibly ice cream. Here’s some money that other, less glamorous people had to actually earn. You fabulous creature, you.
David Thompson, “The Humble Among Us”, David Thompson, 2014-01-21.
October 19, 2020
QotD: Afflicting the comfortable
The original quote is from Observations by Mr. Dooley, one of several works Dunne produced as the character, in which Dunne specifically satirizes the press’s penchant for trial-by-media. He presented Mr. Dooley through Irish dialect pieces, hence the diction, so the “affliction” quote below has been lightly edited for comprehension:
When anything was wrote about a man ’twas put this way: “We understand on good authority that … is on trial before Judge G. on an accusation of larceny. But we don’t think it’s true.” Nowadays, the larceny is discovered by a newspaper. The lead pipe is dug up your backyard by a reporter who knew it was there because he helped you bury it. A man knocks at your door early one mornin’ an’ you answer in your nighty. “In name of the law, I arrest you,” says the man seizin’ you by the throat. “Who are you?” you cry. “I’m a reporter for The Daily Slooth,” says he. “Photographer, do your duty!” You’re hauled off in the circulation wagon to the newspaper office where a confession is ready for you to sign; you’re tried by a jury of the staff, sentenced by the editor-in-chief, and at ten o’clock Friday the fatal thrap is sprung by the fatal thrapper of the family journal. The newspaper does evrything for us. It runs the police force and the banks, commands the militia, controls the legislature, baptizes the young, marries the foolish, comforts the afflicted, afflicts the comfortable, buries the dead and roasts them aftherward.
That journalists of all stripes have touted a scathing critique of their profession and repurposed it as a mission statement is a textbook definition of irony that belongs on a Roman pedestal behind bulletproof glass in the Smithsonian. What is most vexing about the modern interpretation of Dunne’s quote is that its new meaning is implied to be synonymous with dispassionately seeking truth, which it necessarily is not.
Robert Showah, “Journalism Is Not Activism”, Quillette, 2018-07-05.
October 18, 2020
Miscellaneous Myths: Orion
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 10 Jul 2020Look! Up in the sky! It’s a giant! It’s a hunter! It’s Orion!
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Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
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From the comments:
Overly Sarcastic Productions
6 days ago
whoops, uh – YES, way back in my Endymion video I DID say that Artemis loved Orion, but in my defense, I was a much less diligent researcher back then, and that little nugget of “common knowledge” was EVERYWHERE I LOOKED. I had to do some serious digging this time to find where it came from and how unsupported it really was. I wasn’t kidding — that interpretation was so appealingly tropey that it eclipsed the MUCH larger body of work that completely contradicted it, and even completely unrelated articles and descriptions will mention “btw Artemis and Orion were totally smoochin” like it’s a Thing. Mythology is fun like that! 😅 -R
October 17, 2020
History Hijinks: Greek Wise Guys
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 16 Oct 2020When I first studied Ancient Philosophy in college I thought it was engaging and interesting to discuss and whatever, but only years later did I come to appreciate the true hilarity of these Wise-Guys.
SOURCES & Further Reading: Plato’s Dialogues (Apology & Republic), Aristotle’s Ethics, Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen, and when direct sources aren’t available, there’s a bucketload of great write-ups from Stanford: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pr…, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/de…, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ar…, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pl…, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/so…
This video was edited by Sophia Ricciardi AKA “Indigo”. https://www.sophiakricci.com/
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
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October 14, 2020
QotD: The frenetic pace of cancel culture
You want to say: Slow down, young’uns! First you seize power and send all your class enemies to the camps or the grave. Then you turn on your own to purge the ideologically wobbly or those who are insufficiently zealous.
But these idiots are eating their own before they have power. Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling? Off to the gulag for believing in biological sex. The New York Times editorial-page editor earned defenestration for believing in free speech. Day after day on Twitter there’s a frenzy of witch-burning and heretic-stoning; the entire platform is like a self-lubricating guillotine.
Then again, it might be seen as a new, efficient model. After you’ve overthrown the tyrants and set up the People’s Committee, you have a new world to build. Even if you devote the morning to inventing a postcapitalist paradigm and spend the afternoon figuring out how to get fresh water and sanitation to your typhus-infested camp, that means you have to spend the evening drawing up proscription lists. Purging is necessary, but who has the time?
So they’re getting it out of the way now, purging the culture and the Twitter lists of people and things that need to be extirpated for the good of all.
Perhaps this is what happens when people who have been bingeing on TV shows for three months with no place to go decide to have a revolution. Instead of watching the shows once a week and pacing themselves, it’s a whole season in one day.
James Lileks, “Twinkling’s Canceled, Little Star”, National Review, 2020-07-06.
October 10, 2020
Miscellaneous Myths: The Minotaur
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 9 Oct 2020Ah, Theseus. Athens’ favorite trash man. Let’s talk about someone a little more interesting — literally anyone involved in this story will do.
Good news, I found the 1080P button! Bad news, the minute differences in image resolution are now threatening my sanity.
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
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QotD: McMansions
“McMansion Hell from A to Z: Part One (A-H)”, McMansion Hell, 2016-09-25.
October 6, 2020
Rowan Atkinson Live – The devil Toby welcomes you to hell
Rowan Atkinson Live
Published 29 Jul 2010In this sketch, Rowan plays the devil, also known as “Toby”, he welcomes new people to hell.
Selected Highlights from Rowan’s stand up tours during the years 1981 to 1986.
Whether mesmerising us with the sheer visual mastery of Mr. Bean, beguiling us with the acerbic wit of Edmund Blackadder, or simply entertaining us as the suave, but rather hapless British Secret Agent Johnny English, you surely won’t have escaped the comic genius that is Rowan Atkinson.
In Rowan Atkinson Live, co-written with Richard Curtis (4 Weddings & a Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually) and Ben Elton, Atkinson runs the whole gamut of his remarkably versatile 30 year career, with sketches, mimes and monologue’s that are guaranteed to have you shedding tears of laughter. Performing live on stage alongside “straight man” Angus Deayton, the show features a number of original and familiar routines, including sketches that appeared in the original Mr. Bean series.
October 3, 2020
History Summarized: Hawai’i
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 2 Oct 2020To learn more about the Native Hawaiian community and their culture, visit: https://www.hawaiiancouncil.org/about
This year, to celebrate Indigenous People’s Day, we’re taking a look at the history of Hawai’i, from its early history in the Polynesian maritime culture to its forming a Kingdom to its annexation by the United States. Beyond simply a special case in the story of American expansion, Hawai’i has a deep history that deserves to be better known.
SOURCES & Further Reading: Great Courses Lecture “Lifeways of Australia and the Pacific” by Craig Benjamin, Britannica Hawai’i, “The Navigators: Pathfinders of the Pacific” By Low & Estus, Lonely Planet Hawai’i History, and lots of discussion with a native Islander (see discord section below).
This video was edited by Sophia Ricciardi AKA “Indigo”. https://www.sophiakricci.com/
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
DISCORD: https://discord.gg/kguuvvq — Come to the #New-Video-Discussion channel to chat about this video, and ask questions about Hawai’i to my friend Lady Eris#9175, a native Islander!
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September 29, 2020
Modern Classics Summarized: 1984
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 24 Feb 2017It’s the mother of all dystopias! Long before YA dystopia rose to power, before the age of Young Attractive Heroes who Rebel Against The State and Also Find Love, there was just Winston Smith — a middle-aged man in poor health who Rebelled Against The State and Also Found Love. It just ended much less prettily for him.
1984 codified most of the modern dystopia tropes — absolute control of the media, black-bagging people who spoke out, and a lot of popular terms like “doublethink”, “big brother”, and “thought police”. Unfortunately, a lot of those terms got stripped of context and thrown around for the sake of Extra Edge, and as a result they get used a little haphazardly. And there’s nothing Red hates more than misused terminology, so here’s the video outlining the ORIGINAL meaning of 1984!
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September 27, 2020
CHECKMATE, LINCOLNITES! Confederate DESTROYS Yankee with FACTS and LOGIC
Atun-Shei Films
Published 23 May 2019Checkmate, Lincolnites! Debunking the three or four arguments Neo-Confederates always make when they talk about the Civil War.
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September 24, 2020
QotD: Gurkha versus Japanese, mano a mano
