The Winter Of Our Discontent

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Old man winter has come to Lagos on the Chesapeake. Northern Europeans would often describe the world on the other side as a bleak winter-scape. It makes sense. For them, winter was the scariest time of the year. There was the cold and people huddled indoors, spreading their germs. The food situation in winter was, until recent, a constant concern for northern people.

That said, I generally like winter. When I lived in New Hampshire, the cold quiet nights were strangely pleasant. It’s always very quiet when the temperatures dip down near zero at night. I don’t mind the snow either. Shoveling has become less fun in my dotage, but the exercise is good for me so I don’t mind it. I’m not sure I could live in a place without some chance of an honest winter.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. YouTube has the four longer segments from the show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android phone commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

Google Play Link

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

26 thoughts on “The Winter Of Our Discontent”

  1. Good stuff as always Z. Nice to hear someone else admit they actually like the winter and don’t mind shoveling.

    Guess it helps if you leave an active lifestyle. Gets tiring listening to everyone else bitch about the cold and snow.

    I tell people move to South or like Jerry Steinfeld said,

    ” My parents didn’t want to move to Florida, but they turned 60 and that’s the law “

    • I prefer winter as well, even my libido is only 100% then, that’s when I do my best “shoveling” wing wink nudge nudge, say no more!

      btw. Giovanni had a good definition of feminism, akin to yours:

      “Since the beginning, feminism has been a sort of alliance between women and powerful men against the average Joe. Even in first wave feminism, the leaders were the wives of upper and upper middle class men who supported their political activity. Since the second wave sexual revolution that began in the 60s, this alliance has secured powerful men soft harems while giving the average woman maximum personal freedom to compete for exclusive spots in those harems.”

      He concludes:

      “Now that the social contract has been soured for men at every level of society, the incentive to rise, strive, and back the status quo for all men has been damaged more than we can realize now.”

      No choice but to enjoy the decline, mandate get it on!

  2. Good podcast. The title of your post reminded me of this little ditty. My wife and I have a canopy out back where we store our mirrored ball and sound system. We recently had a hail storm that punched a hole in the canvas, so I repaired the opening with a shiny windshield from a surplus military transport vehicle. So now is the window of our disco tent made glorious hummer.

  3. Lagos on the Chesapeake…That is a wonderful summation of a once great and wonderful city. I last lived there five years ago. A buddy of mine and I would refer to Charm City as “Stalingrad by the sea” in the winter. If there is not a more depressing place to be during the winter months in North America I would be shocked. Even Wheeling, WV feels less bleak.

  4. A good example of “qualitative analysis” is the crazy stuff John Nash did (played by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind).

  5. You’re spot-on about lefties trying to capture the new coolness of nerds. I wrote about this here:

    So why would an obvious non-nerd like Laurie claim to be one? Simple: in the modern world nerds are successful (once they grow up) and nerds are one of the few female groups who genuinely don’t need looks to gain attention, recognition, and progress in their careers. By claiming to be a nerd, Laurie is implying that she is highly intelligent and is respected in a field which requires a lot of hard work and dedication to enter. She says this in order to offset the physical disparity between her and the models, something nerds of both sexes do. Laurie is intelligent, but nobody would call a polemical feminist writer with such a craving for attention a nerd. Except herself, when asked to stand alongside a bunch of models.

  6. What’s missing from your connecting Jews, basketball, and Russia is a mention of Lithuania. It’s not very well known, but Lithuanians are absolutely bonkers about basketball and it’s their national sport. Lithuania always punches well above its weight when it comes to basketball, finishing in the top 5 in most international competitions. During the Soviet era Lithuanians made the backbone of the USSR team, and a lot of Lithuanians play or have played in the NBA.

    I did a little research into this and found two Lithuanians went to the US in the early 20th century and brought the game back home around 1920. Somehow it stuck, and has done until this day. Lithuania had a large Jewish population up until the Nazi occupation, particularly in Vilnius. Okay, Vilnius was part of Poland at the time but it was full of Lithuanians and the city with the largest Lithuanian population. The Jews were almost wiped out by the Nazis, reduced to something like 10k from a population of around 250k. I’ve been to the old Jewish quarter several times and seen the site of the old ghetto in Vilnius. I understand a lot of Lithuanians migrated to the US at various times (you can see it in the names) and probably a lot of them were Jews particularly in the run-up to Molotov-Ribbentrop. Could be a few got into basketball when they arrived.

    I’m not really into basketball so couldn’t be bothered doing the research, but I’m sure if you pulled at a thread linking Jews, basketball, and Russia you’d find quite a few Lithuanians along the way.

    • Part of the reason, I’m sure, is our height (I’m Lithuanian on my father’s side). If I’m not mistaken, Lithuanians fall in the top 5% of the tallest peoples in the world. My brothers are all 6’5″ and excelled at basketball.

    • I think you are saying cryptoracist, Denny? How so? My love for my dog does not detract from my love for humanity, questions about the foolishness of risking one’s life for a rabbit aside.

      • Pay no attention Bunny is just our very own slave Tiny Duck, he work de blog hard fo massa.

    • But let’s forget about the big-picture issues for a moment. Instead, let’s focus on the actual act. It was brave. It was fearless. It was valiant. It was altruistic. It was everything good about humanity. But when witnessing the act and the fawning over the bunny rescue, I can’t help juxtaposing the feelings expressed about this bunny with the feelings generally expressed when black people are in grave danger.

      Bunnies don’t start fires in their homes.

      Black people do when they are made at whitey for some imagined slight.

      But thanks for displaying the kind of logic that black people frequently engage in to justify starting such fires.

    • Ask any waiter, parking attendant, bellhop or really anybody who works for tips about the best and worst tippers. Then go ask any chairty, blood drive, volunteering organization the same thing. Altruism, generosity and frankly willingness to see outside themselves is vastly more common in one group, and almost lacking entirely in another. And you know whom I talking about, that’s the sad part. Everyone does.

  8. Whenever I read or hear that feminist SJW babble, my eyes and ears just glaze over. I can’t be bothered to try drill through the nonsense to guess the point (if one exists).

  9. I love my dog. My dog is not a symbol or an expression of my humanity or an advertisement of altruism. He is his own very solid little creature and loved and served on his own merits and for all his endearing idiosyncrasies. As Coleridge said, “…the best friend a man has in the world may turn against him and become his enemy. His son of daughter…may prove ungrateful. Those who are nearest and dearest to him…may become traitors to their faith…The one absolutely unselfish friend man can have in this selfish world, the one who never deserts him, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is his dog.” That’s my dog.

      • Eugenics. It was practiced upon ancient wolves and their domesticated descendants. According to Wikipedia, however, the modern wolf is not closely related to the wolves which were domesticated. This implies that the direct ancestor of the dog is extinct.

        I think that Darwin wrote about eugenics, more or less, in Ch. 1 of “On the Origin of Species”. That chapter deals with plant breeding and animal husbandry.

  10. Followed that link to feminist site. Oh, God…the level of delusion among those bubble-dwellers is of cosmic proportion.

    • A “queer femme of color” raised in Switzerland… Commenting on…everything. OMG, you just want to choke a bitch…

  11. Ah, I miss the tranquility of the winter…the heart warming news stories of drunken snowmobilers getting decapitated by barbed wire fencing, the ice fishermen falling through the ice never to be found again…

        • …..higher heating bills, black ice, gigantic potholes, and 3 layers of clothes on my wife. Odds of getting laid are much lower in the winter.

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