Ex-army, ex-pat, living in NZ. 🏴
Joined April 2022
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BeachComber retweeted
The Iran War is the greatest political blunder in the last two decades at least. A catastrophically stupid decision. An unforgivable betrayal of America First principles.
Is the John Lewis Christmas advert celebrating our replacement or warning us against it? It's hard to tell.
BeachComber retweeted
These Ring videos of certain demographics raiding candy bowls on Halloween bring me back to what I like to call the Farm Stand Theory and which I think has been coined elsewhere as the Farm Stand Test.
Most of the neighborhoods I’ve lived in have had a house with an unmanned farm stand. You take fresh produce or eggs and leave the money in a box. It runs entirely on the honor system.
If you are moving and looking for a new community, find one that has a farm stand. The farm stand immediately tells you that the community is safe, neighborly, and high trust. The farm stand reveals more than any other single observable factor ever could. Even if you never use the farm stand, you can rest easy knowing it’s there.
If your neighborhood not only doesn’t have a farm stand but *couldn’t* have one, even in theory, that means you live in a shit hole. It means you can’t even trust the people around you to be minimally civilized and decent.
People who live in the city like to brag about the nice restaurants and stores nearby. But the vast majority of neighborhoods in the vast majority of cities couldn’t sustain a farm stand for even a day. It would be looted and wiped out within about 45 minutes. That makes them shit holes. I don’t care how expensive the houses are or how many restaurants you have nearby. You’re surrounded by dishonorable, deceitful thieves. You live in a dump, I’m sorry to tell you.
But the uncomfortable (for some people, not me) fact about the farm stand is that it also tells you something else: if you have an unmanned farm stand, your community is probably overwhelmingly white. It could also have an Asian population and sustain a farm stand just fine. But that’s about the extent of the “diversity” you’re likely to find if you’re trying to live in a Farm Stand Eligible location, which you should be.
A neighborhood could be wealthy or middle class or lower income and have a farm stand. The farm stand doesn’t tell you much about the average tax bracket of a community. It does tell you something about its demographics. Feel however you want about that fact. But it is a fact.
BeachComber retweeted
Apparently there’s a celebrity threatening to kill themselves if allegations about them are made public. I feel deeply for the celebrity involved - whoever that person is.
Here’s @davidwalliams shredding my mental health in front of my colleagues and friends before my career was destroyed.
And why in 2026 Sense & Sensibility have they changed Willoughby from seducing a 15-year-old girl, impregnating then abandoning her, to him being the 'victim' of a very much older widow who conveniently dies in childbirth? I genuinely cannot understand this fundamental change.
2026 Sense & Sensibility has taken one of the most iconic heroines in novels (Marianne), a girl that passionate, intelligent, artistic girls identified with, and turned her into a morose, angry, dirty modern teenager. Marianne's passionate nature came out in her music, her love
age. We want the Willoughbys. But 2026 Marianne's 'passionate' nature is shown by her constantly eating fruit, juice dripping down her usually dirty face, her ragged, greasy hair in her eyes. No subtlety, no poetry, no music. She deserves the block-of-wood Brandon they gave her.
Mrs Dashwood, Eleanor and Margaret in 2026 movie version v same family in 1995 version. Why are Jane Austen's characters now being presented as drab peasants?
2026 Sense & Sensibility Willoughby and Marianne poetry scene: alone, making out on Dartmoor rocks. 1995 same scene, Marianne surrounded by her family, charming, happy. I think the screenwriters of the 2026 version thought they were making Emily Bronte, not Jane Austen.
Moment Marianne sees Willoughby at the ball in London in 2026 movie, v 1995 Emma Thompson version. In one there's filthy gloves and juice dripping down her face. In the other radiant joy and love (which is where the dramatic contrast with what follows comes).
Ball scene Sense & Sensibility 2026 v ball scene Pride & Prejudice 1995. One more resembles Hieronymus Bosch than it does Jane Austen.
I saw Patrick Stewart as Enobarbus in the RSC's Antony & Cleopatra in 1978. Glenda Jackson played Cleopatra. Alan Rickman was in it too. I still have the programme from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. Another lifetime. RIP Patrick Stewart.
I'm still seething about Sense & Sensibility. We've got 3 makings of this classic, wonderful novel: Emma Thompson's movie; 2008's mini series; 2026 movie. And we can see visual degradation being attempted of England's past in each interpretation.
In the first, the Dashwoods move into a rather lovely cottage in Devon, with room for their servants. In the second, it becomes more rustic, more windblown. But they still have servants. Now, 2026, they come to a literal hovel up on Dartmoor and have no servants.