My favourite drink? Vodka soda on the rocks, no lemon. Unpretentious, dependable, easy to slap together, gets the job done. It’s basically the Ford F-150 of cocktails. And clear as rain, so it won’t stain my wife’s dress if some good-time Charlie slaps me on the back at a party. For years, it has been my odourless, tasteless, ten-ounce refuge of gastro-utilitarian sanity in a world full of foodies gone mad.
But those days are over: the vodka soda has gone the way of wine, Scotch, and gourmet hot sauce. Order one at any velvet-rope bar or restaurant, and the waiter follows up by asking your preferred brand of hooch — under the demonstrably false conceit that the human tongue can distinguish between what are effectively different varieties of windshield-wiper fluid.
Last month, when a waiter launched into an especially long list of unpronounceable Russian and Scandinavian words apparently corresponding to fashionable vodka brands, I felt as if I were in a scene from “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” I really can’t tell the difference. Just give me the cheapest one on the list were the words on my lips.
Of course, I said nothing of the sort, because I didn’t want to come off as a rube. So instead, I declared emphatically, “Oh, Grey Goose, please” — recalling at random the last brand I’d seen advertised in an upscale travel magazine.
Moments later, the waiter returned with my drink, and it tasted fine. Which is to say, it tasted exactly like every other vodka soda I had ever tasted — or, indeed, that had ever been tasted by any other human in the history of fermented spud juice.
This, more than anything else, is what I have come to resent about foodie culture: Not just that it is pretentious and expensive. Not just that it makes me feel guilty about the Cheez Whiz sandwiches I put in my kids’ lunch boxes. But that it turns us all into liars.
Jonathan Kay, “Lies My Waiter Told Me: Foodie culture has invaded my vodka soda. It’s time to fight back”, The Walrus, 2015-08-17.
March 29, 2017
QotD: The humble vodka soda
March 26, 2017
“It’s that old self-love double-standard again”
Julie Burchill on the recent boom in public applause for female masturbation:
There’s a bit in the Cate Blanchett TV commercial for a scent called Si that never fails to make me snigger smuttily. (Admittedly not difficult.) After we see the Radiant One being life-affirming in the rain (‘Si to life!’) and with a Significant Other (‘Si to us!’) she wanders off alone and, looking particularly glowy, stares into the camera: ‘Si to myself!’ It’s tragic, but what was clearly intended as an oath to empowerment always strikes me as a reference to onanism. I spit out my Malibu every time.
Mind you, I could be forgiven for my immature interpretation. In recent years, female masturbation has gone from being the love that dare not speak its name to the one that can’t stop moaning, gasping and screaming it — and then making pop videos about it.
[…]
We’re encouraged to admire these finger-happy females, but what would our reaction be if male crooners started singing about self-abuse and, even better, filming themselves pretending to do it in order to flog their music? I suspect the reaction might not be a million miles from one long collective ‘Ewww!’ But why is a masturbating man the subject of amusement and/or contempt while a masturbating woman is some sort of heroine? Logically, it doesn’t make sense. A woman can always get sex, whereas men often have to chase it, pay for it or go without it, so they’ve got a lot more reason to be interfering with themselves.
But now it’s the ladies, Lord love ’em, who are paying for the pleasure right through the nose, with the unstoppable rise of sex aids. And yes, that was a snooty judgmental tone you thought you heard there. I refuse to use the approved term ‘sex toys’ because it brings a creepy air of infantilism to this most adult of pastimes (an unnerving number of sex aids are made in the style of children’s playthings). I don’t know what I find more pitiable, two people, presumably equipped with the usual supply of hands, mouths and sex organs, setting about each other with bits of garishly coloured cut-price plastic to reach the realms of ecstasy, or a woman with more money than sex paying £12,000 for a vibrator that the Sunday Times described thus: ‘An 18ct-gold-plated gilded pebble… five vibration patterns with customisable levels of intensity… comes in an artisanal wooden box with gold trimmings.’ Be still my beating heart!
March 24, 2017
QotD: Academia resembles a drug gang
… both academia and drug gangs are marked by an endless supply of foot soldiers willing to work in terrible conditions for a small chance at living the good life. In drug gangs, the average street-corner dealer makes $3-something an hour; given that he’s got a high chance of being arrested or shot, why doesn’t he switch to McDonalds instead where the pay’s twice as good and the environment’s a lot safer? The article suggests one reason is because drug gangs offer the chance of eventually becoming a drug kingpin who is drowning in money.
(I’d worry they’re exaggerating the importance of this factor compared to wanting to maintain street cred and McDonalds jobs being much more regimented both in the application process and performance, but they’re the ones who have talked to anthropologists embedded in drug gangs, not me.)
Academia has the same structure. TAs and grad students work in unpleasant conditions for much less than they could make in industry, because there’s always the chance they could become a tenured professor who gets to live the life of the mind and travel to conferences in far-off countries and get summer vacations off.
The article describes this structure as “dualization” – a field that separates neatly into a binary classification of winners and losers.
Scott Alexander, “Non-Dual Awareness”, Slate Star Codex, 2015-07-28.
March 21, 2017
Icelandic standup about Nordic neighbours in general and Finnish language in particular
Published on Dec 1, 2016
H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.
March 19, 2017
March 18, 2017
QotD: MILFs
I’m not sure if my predilection for MILFs came naturally or if it was learned over time. I came of age in the ’70s and ’80s and back then, only pedophiles liked young girls. All our pinups were old. When Raquel Welch appeared on The Muppet Show, I started having feelings I’d never felt before. We all did and we talked about her on the swings at school. She was 38. Pretty much every man of my generation has Olivia Newton-John at the end of Grease burned into his boner. She was 30 in that movie. Bailey was over 30 when WKRP was on. Loni Anderson was in her late 30s. Mary Ann wasn’t quite 30 on Gilligan’s Island, but Ginger was 33. Mr. Kotter’s wife was 31 when the show ended. Chrissy Amphlett was 10 years older than me when the Divinyls released “I Touch Myself,” but I almost had a heart attack looking at her thigh-high socks. Nobody paid attention to young girls when I was a young man. It was considered creepy. If one of them wore a Catholic school uniform on Halloween, we’d barf. There may be some disgusting perverts in the world, but in America, “MILF” tops the list of porn searches. Sure, there’s some extra meat around the waist and a little more junk in the trunk. What tepid eunuch can’t handle that? Real men are into women, not girls. No wonder blacks and Hispanics are trampling our masculinity like we’re a bunch of bitch-ass maricóns. We can barely handle a fat ass. You can keep your perky tits. I want breasts with a bit of hang to them. I’m not talking about National Geographic saggy, but if you can hold five pencils under your left one, I’ll write you a love letter. It’s like my friend Trevor once said: “I dated a chick with droopers when I was 19 and I really wasn’t into it — but I sure wouldn’t mind messing with them right now!” He looms in for the second part with a leering grin on his face. This is something young men will never understand. As Steve Coogan points out in The Trip, the spectrum of what you find attractive widens greatly as you get older.
Gavin McInnes, “In Praise of the Benjamin Button Babes”, Taki’s Magazine, 2015-07-24.
March 17, 2017
Jeremy Clarkson’s view of off road cars – Clarksons Car Years – BBC
Uploaded on 21 Sep 2008
Jeremy has his say about 4x4s and his novel take on the school run.
QotD: No True Irishman
I speak for every true potato-loving mick on the planet when I say that St. Patrick’s Day is a genuine Irish holiday that’s been corrupted into Amateur Drunk Day by us filthy Americans. Nobody in Ireland really cared much about it until dumb American tourists started going over there every March, demanding green beer and tunelessly bellowing “Danny Boy” out of their vomit-encrusted cakeholes. St. Paddy’s Day is fake. It’s Kwanzaa for white people.
Jim Treacher, “No True Irishman Loves St. Patrick’s Day”, The Daily Caller, 2016-03-17.
March 16, 2017
QotD: Sex and the twentysomethings
To be clear: The ideal female mate is young. You’re going to want three kids, and to do that you really need to get going by 25. My wife had our first in her early 30s and at the hospital she was wheeled through a door that said “Geriatric Mothers.” I thank my lucky stars we were able to defy biology and churn out three so late in life. I know you twentysomethings are convinced you don’t want kids, and I was the same way at your age, but you’re wrong. Talk to social workers who deal with the elderly. The deathbed moans from those with no kids are all about their total lack of legacy. Defying the biological imperative isn’t empowering. It’s a curse. So if you settle down with a woman over 35, you are making a huge mistake.
That being said, I’m not into women under 35. I remember having sex with young women when I was a young man and it sucked. Teenagers were the worst. It was like we were both trying to go through a doorway at the same time as we grunted, “Not there,” and apologized. My single friends often text me pictures of the twentysomethings they’re paired up with and I almost feel sorry for them. Sex lasts, what, 10 minutes? Now you have 23 hours and 50 minutes to talk to someone who says “like” every third word. The sex is terrible, too. They pump away like they’re working at a pump factory and there’s no intellect or imagination involved. It’s like playing tennis with a toddler. I want a woman who has been around the block and knows what she’s doing. I’ll spare you the details, but there are techniques you learn with time that only a wife can know.
Gavin McInnes, “In Praise of the Benjamin Button Babes”, Taki’s Magazine, 2015-07-24.
March 12, 2017
Is this the definitive exegesis of “woke”?
At Ace of Spades H.Q., OregonMuse fishes in the comment stream and finds a question that needed to be answered. Extensively.
13 I’m not up on the current “hip kid lingo”, so what exactly does “woke” mean?
It sounds stupid, so I am guessing it is not something achieved by hard work and discipline.
Posted by: moki at March 09, 2017 02:22 PM
1. “Woke” is pretty much the same as what the old-time Marxists called “class consciousness”, i.e knowing that the human race is divided by economic class and that the “proletariat” class needs to overthrow the “bourgeois” class in order to establish the epitome of human perfection, the world-wide communist state.
2. The Marxists also had a term they called “false consciousness.” I think it means something like this: you know what “class consciousness” is but you reject it, because you know it’s bullcrap.
3. I once heard erg use this term to describe ace.
4. Don’t know if there is any comparable term like “false woke”. Maybe sleepwalking?
5. Anyway, the point is, “woke” is a concept that was basically lifted from rat bastard commies.
6. Eventually, as blue vs. blue conflict increases, we’re going to start seeing “woke fights.”
7. They won’t be called that, but that’s what they are.
8. At some point, the various factions of woke will start making distinctions between “woke” and “woke woke.”
9. And these woke groups will be all “woker than thou” to each other
10. To a “woke” person, the only thing worse than not being “woke” is being “woke”, but insufficiently “woke.”
11. These blue-on-blue slap fights will be hilarious to watch.
12. Even better with popcorn
March 11, 2017
“Writing a good populism story in Canada is thus all about reaching the Canada Is Just Better conclusion”
J.J. McCullough provides a valuable public service by compiling a checklist for Canadian media types when writing about populism:
Greetings Canadian journalists!
As you know, there’s currently a thing called “populism” happening all around the world. This is a fad in which poor people elect little Hitlers to power. I mean, it’s so far only actually happened in the context of Donald Trump (boo!) getting elected in the U.S., but there’s also that Brexit vote thing in the U.K., and that counts too for some reason. I know the iron rule of journalism is that you need three examples before you can claim a trend, so in a pinch just refer vaguely to “recent events in Europe” and that should cover it.
So anyway, having established that the world is in the midst of a populist tidal wave, the important question to ask is why it hasn’t hit Canada. The obvious answer, of course, is that Canada is just better than everywhere else, but you’re not allowed to say that openly if you’re a serious journalist. That’s for columnists like Doug Saunders or John Ibbitson or John Ivision (those are two different guys, right?).
Writing a good populism story in Canada is thus all about reaching the Canada Is Just Better conclusion without making it overtly obvious that’s where you’re heading. Or at least not obvious in the first paragraph. The way you do this is by noting that while Canada has some populist-like things happening, they are all really stupid and dumb and unpopular and meaningless and should be ignored. Because Canada Is Just Better.
H/T to Kate at Small Dead Animals for the link.
QotD: US Army awards contract, losing bidder launches appeal (of course)
The Services should just acknowledge the reality of contracting anything in the seven-figure realm, and change initial award announcements to read: “The Initial Conditional Award of Contract XYZ is to Defense Conglomerate 1369. Work will commence after all Congressional Outraged Publicity-Seeking Posturing is exhausted and Butthurt Losing Contractor Challenges are adjudicated. We hope to run both those actions concurrently, and anticipate work will commence a minimum of 3-5 years behind schedule and costs grow at an exponential rate during this period, hence the budget supplemental is already in draft form for Newsies, Think Tanks, and Outraged Congresspersons to grind axes with.” Added caveat for this particular contract: “Additionally, a website has been established to collect all the comments from .40/.45 cal and steel-frame fanboyz to rant about How Stupid This Choice Is.”
John Donovan, posting to Facebook, 2017-02-28.
March 10, 2017
BAHFest Sydney 2016: Dr. James O’Hanlon “Why do males have nipples?”
Published on Feb 26, 2017
Watch Dr. James O’Hanlon discuss how nipples are actually rudimentary balance organs that detect the bodies orientation in space assisting terrestrial mammals stay upright.
The first BAHFest Sydney took place at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences on Friday, August 19th 2016.
For more info about BAHFest and upcoming shows in your part of the world, visit http://www.bahfest.com
March 8, 2017
Soonish, coming later this year from Kelly & Zach Weinersmith
I’ve been reading (and occasionally linking to) Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic for years. It combines a Far Side sense of the zany with actual science (well, sometimes). Zach and Kelly have combined their talents (she’s a scientist who “studies parasites that manipulate the behavior of their hosts”) to produce a book that will be published in October that I’m eager to read as soon as it’s available:
You can click the image to go to the Amazon.ca pre-order page. More information on the book here.
March 5, 2017
QotD: “Call it Fifty Shades of Orange“
The sequel to that stupid mommy porn bondage movie is now in theaters, giving naughty thrills to bored housewives whose liberal husbands can’t cut it manwise, but the real festival of S&M was in the White House as President Trump unleashed his iron discipline on the media. Call it Fifty Shades of Orange.
It wasn’t a press conference – it was a kinky dungeon session where masochistic journalists eagerly sought out the delicious pain Master T was dealing. Hack after hack stepped up, tried to play “gotcha.” and ended up whimpering in the fetal position. The best part was CNN’s Jim Acosta, fresh from whining about how conservative outlets now get to ask questions too, basically handing Trump the cat-o-nine tails. Dude, next time keep from talking yourself into more public humiliation by biting down on the ball gag.
The media’s safe word is “Objectivity,” but none of them uttered it.
The wonderful thing about Trump – and the thing that sets the Fredocons and wusspublicans fussing – is that he gives exactly zero damns about the media’s inflated and ridiculous self-image. He doesn’t pay lip service to their lie that they are anything but what Instapundit calls “Democratic Party operatives with bylines.” Trump called them the “the enemy of the American People,” to which normals responded with “Yeah, sounds about right.”
Kurt Schlicter, “President Trump Has Been Far Too Nice To The Mainstream Media”, Townhall.com, 2017-02-20.
