Her Friends Have Shattered Brains

Heh. Aluminum. It’s fun to say. ah-LOO-mih-num. heh-heh.

She’s basically cut and pasting John Lennon now:
It’s been a hard day’s night, and I’ve been working like a dog.
I’m just sitting watching the wheels go round and round.
I read the news today oh boy.
Oh Species!! If you leave me…..

Compare the angst of a thirty-three year old Laurie Penny with a 25 year old Dorothie Feilding MM, swanning about Belgium in 1914:
I don’t mind running risks for our men or the French but I’m blithered if I’m going to have holes put in me by a bally Teuton while I pick up their men.

I’ve killed lots of wasps nests. The secret is Carboryl.
You dust their landing spot, just outside the hole, and they drag it inside for you. The whole nest is poisoned in a day or two. Generally they will drag it down and kill the queen. Sometimes there’ll be a second wave as the new recruits hatch, but they are soon poisoned too.
If it’s a serious nest I’ll blow a decent amount down the hole. That requires knowing the entrance and a night time operation, but is invariably effective.
I even killed a nest recently without knowing the hole. Enough powder dusted around seemed to work.

Heh. Aluminum. It’s fun to say. ah-LOO-mih-num. heh-heh.
Someone fetch the hose.

And let’s not forget this one, which is typically dense with self-flattering implications:

Presumably, Laurie imagines that her own theatrical tantrums and endless, pretentious whining make her interesting, which I suppose they do, though only in ways she doesn’t seem to comprehend and would most likely not appreciate.

I’ve killed lots of wasps nests. The secret is Carboryl.
You dust their landing spot, just outside the hole, and they drag it inside for you.
Another pest control method you may find useful: if you sprinkle it around where they are burrowing, for instance under a slab foundation which can lead to cracking, used cat litter keeps armadillos away.
That is all, carry on.

@Sam, re his company’s ad in NYT: “Let’s work together to make real change happen.”
There’s the problem right there. Yes let’s, but none of us have the faintest idea how we are going to ‘work together’ for any end. Even all-out wars have so many misfires (pun intended) it becomes touch and go whether one can even survive let alone win. Even the word ‘real’ is open to question. And at what point does ‘happen’ actually get recognised as, er, having happened?
The devil, as they say, is in the detail. But at least it’s free to say “Let’s work together to make real change happen” and thus feel good, briefly.

Farns,
This USain learned to drive in a 49 MGTC and owned a MGB.
Your remark triggered me. I am literally shaking. I am much angrier inside.
(Also, I now own a Toyota)

used cat litter keeps armadillos away.
A tip that all Brits will find useful.

A tip that all Brits will find useful.
They crossed the Mighty Mississippi, you think the puny Atlantic will stop their invincible* horde ?
*(Why did the chicken cross the road ? To prove to the armadillo it could be done)

English (Simplified)
Heh.

I owned an 1967 MGB-GT…
I will concede that they look good till the federally mandated bumpers, but everything suffered from that, and when they ran fun to drive because they seemed to be going fast, but that is also the thrill of a Trabi. Well, that and the thrill from the sense of impending doom.
For full disclosure I am a owned by Teutonic crates, and TBF, I believe it is in German law, perhaps the TüV codes or something, that for any number of nuts or bolts greater than one, there will be one, and not more than one, that either cannot be removed, is inaccessible, can only be removed with a manufacturers Special Tool, or any combination of the above, and that there will be one thing, preferably very hard to access, no matter how brilliantly the rest of the thing is engineered, that is so incomprehensibly stupid even the Soviets wouldn’t have done it.

her own theatrical tantrums and endless, pretentious whining make her interesting, which I suppose they do
That’s a funny way to spell “tedious and predictable”.

A neighbor of a test pilot i knew in Surrey owned a MGC-GT. Straight six motor. Pretty exciting to drive. The pilot decamped with family to France many years ago. His son, whom I knew as a gangly teen, married a beautiful French girl and produced a passel of beautiful French daughters.
Where was i going with this?

that is so incomprehensibly stupid even the Soviets wouldn’t have done it.
I believe it was the Soviets who designed the stowage of spare tires on modern (US and Japan AFAIK, but probably universal by now) vehicles to only secure one way such that the valve stem on said tire is on the bottom. Therefore the spare must be entirely removed from its storage location in order to even check the pressure, let alone inflate the damn thing.
Guess what I did this weekend…
I’m not exactly Joe Mechanic, but I’m not terribly inept either. I’ll fix the occasional household product, minor electric work, or futz around with minor stuff in the car. I generally hate to throw out something that can be fixed (probably a product of Depression-era parents). But I absolutely dread doing something new on a car that I haven’t done on that car before or did once so long ago that I have to figure out how to do it all over again. It’s not so much figuring out how to do the thing, it’s the “WTF was the engineer thinking when they designed it this way”. Which usually leads me to suspect that there’s some stupid regulation behind it. Yet then I also suspect that someone wanted to address That Thing That Will Never Happen to show off how smarty smart smart they are. Though these latter people probably go into government work. It’s kind of a symbiotic relationship.

“It was worth it to see the looks on my colleagues faces when I told them I was taking this jar of motor oil to the parking lot to top up my carburettors.”
Hah!!
Which reminds me, I’ve got to reclaim my SU tuning manual from the fellow I lent it to – for an MGB rebuild, as it happens.

WTP, I think Lindy’s knowledge is from books and asking questions, though I must add that I have seen commenters claiming military experience agree with him, or perhaps offer reasoned disagreement.
Of course, spear and sword work, armour etc is not exactly current knowledge and practice.
A few months ago, Bloke on the Range, who does certainly know his stuff, took Lindy to the range to show him which end of a gun goes bang. Bloke’s guest certainly enjoyed himself, and I think it telling that Mike took the trouble. A mark of respect.
The “Lindy” part refers to the Hop.

Where was i going with this?
‘I don’t reckon them times will ever come again. There never was a more bullier old ram than what he was. Grandfather fetched him from Illinois –got him of a man by the name of Yates–Bill Yates–maybe you might have heard of him; his father was a deacon–Baptist–and he was a rustler, too; a man had to get up ruther early to get the start of old Thankful Yates; it was him that put the Greens up to jining teams with my grandfather when he moved west.
Seth Green was prob’ly the pick of the flock; he married a Wilkerson–Sarah Wilkerson–good cretur, she was–

Lindy’s knowledge is from books and asking questions
This. He LARPS and does some HEMA, and he’s notable for actually going out and trying stuff for real rather than taking the historians’ word for it. But he’s kind of like the medieval MythBusters, as likely to go confidently wrong as not.

Thanks Jeff & Dan. His videos that I’ve watched on infantry combat and similar dovetail quite well with what my father told me in much detail in his later years and also significantly with others whom I have known who saw real combat at an infantry level. There’s a degree of understanding that you don’t get from even military guys who never were “shot at in anger” as dear old Dad used to say.
I’ve always wanted to ask that in a job interview. “Have you ever been shot at on a daily basis?” Such people know things. It’s like being a fox and a hedgehog, simultaneously.

Hal, I recently re-read Roughing It.
I was startled by Twain’s recounting of how he and a partner started a large forest fire on the northeast shore of Lake Tahoe. I had just been i the area east of Incline, which must have been about the same place as the fire.
Living in California these days one gets pretty nervous about fires.

Speaking of Lord Lucas, Prince of Darkness, I still have two quarts of oem electrical smoke for a Rover I once owned.

Don’t forget that Thoreau set the woods around Waldon on fire, too.