A Bit of This and a Bit of That

     It's been an uneventful week here at Bloody Nib Manor.
     Of course, the hot weather has been bothersome. The Lovely Lady Nib, being at the same time both sturdy and delicate, has found the heat to be wilting and spends the daylight hours reclined on her rattan chaise while drinking G & Ts with more T than G. Your friend is afraid that it may remind her of her youth in the North West territories before the Partition. One can not but feel pity for her since she still insists on wearing wool next to the skin even in the hottest weather. It is not a matter of fashion versus practicality, but more a matter of habit.
     And, of course, yours truly has been affected by the rays of Ol' Sol in no good way. The Harris tweed jacket, gray flannels, Wellington boots and tweed cheese-cutter cap have been put into the wardrobe and replaced by a linen jacket, white flannel trousers, Greek sandals and a Panama hat. One feels ridiculous and silly walking about the grounds in such gear, but life is often ridiculous. Our Good Lord has a sense of humor and seems to enjoy laughing at our attempts to be comfortable. He always has the last laugh and one day we'll get the joke. But at the moment not feeling comfortable loading one's Dunhill or Peterson with a bowlful of Rattray's No. 3 Old Noggin because of the heat and having to make due with Three Nuns in a Falcon pipe is no joke.
     The heat always brings out the best and the worst in people. The best is that they get lethargic and the worst is that they become angry. Actually, the worst situation is that during the heat of the day they are lethargic and during the cooling of the evening they use their restored energy to commit mischief. Fortunately for the lovely Lady Nib and your correspondent the harvest is in and the granaries are full. But the heat has made the harvesters from the shire angry and resentful. But the good thing that the heat has resulted in is that, for at least this year, the workers, instead of gathering the dried straw to make torches and protest whatever ills they feel they have suffered have, instead used the straw to make straw hats for themselves and have taken to tapping their supplies of ale and cider to get some sort of relief from the heat. At least this year they are not blaming the denizens of Bloody Nib Manor for their misfortunes. Instead they yell at the Sun.
     But to get on to other things:
     The Swedish child, Greta Thunberg, is on a Global Warming campaign. Her talent, as it is, is to drive people, especially young people, into a panic about what she and her handlers claim is man-made global warming. Yours truly is agnostic on the issue of man-made global warming, but to be truthful, he is more a skeptic of the concept than a champion of it. Miss Thunberg wants the world, or at least the developed world to panic about man-made global warming. She has said so publicly several times. She, as young people often do, wants something done now. She claims to be autistic (or at least her parents claim so), so, in a sense one can ignore whatever she says simply because the modern definition includes several indicators; mental retardation (have you, dear reader, ever noticed that their are no mentally retarded people any more?), emotional retardation (it's now called Asperger's Syndrome), clinical narcissism or obsessive compulsive syndrome. Who knows what this poor child who at her age should be following pop groups and waiting for boys to approach her moon face is suffering from? But her parents and the lick-spittle press have made her, despite her robotic manner and repetitions, a modern day Joan of Arc sailing on a three million dollar yacht who has risked nothing. She, or her handlers, are attempting to lead a Children's Crusade against the evil man-made global warming. But, like the original Children's Crusade of the 13th century. Miss Thunberg, like the leaders of the Children's, expect that because they are innocent children they are in the right and because they see themselves in the right the world will bow before them. But once it comes down to getting the rubber on the road they are lost about what to do. She, and they, had a slogan or two, but nothing else. A slogan and a dollar will not get one a beer on a hot day.
     And Miss Thunberg and her cohorts have no answers about what the average person is supposed to do to "cool" the Earth. Electric cars use as more energy in manufacture and operation than do gasoline or diesel cars. Solar panels for the powering of one house's needs are not reliable, especially in places in the Northern Hemisphere such as Sweden. Windmills break and interrupt the migration of protected birds, not to say kill more eagles and hawks than hunters do. And does she really expect Bloody Nib Manor to trade in it's Rolls Royce and Land Rover in favor of a Smart Car or a horse wagon? Does she expect China. India and Japan to go back to rickshaws, howdahs and overloaded bicycles. Does she expect, once her dream comes true, that she'll have to cross the street while stepping on horse apples and fouling her super nice and too expensive Nike shoes.
     The girl is 16. She's not smart and she's not wise. She's a silly puppet who repeats what she is told. And anybody who follows the advice of a 16 year old girl or boy is really not very smart. But there are a lot of not very smart people in the world, and the talkeratti class seems to contain most of them.
     While we here at Bloody Nib Manor don't spend much time paying attention to popular culture i.e. there's no novel written within the last one hundred years that is really worth reading except mysteries, popular culture, like a termite or a rat occasionally burrows itself into the baseboards of the Manor. And whenever your friend, the Lovely Lady Nib or one of the staff finds the head of the thing poking out of the wood we find ourselves rather polluted by it's appearance.
     Such a pollution came to the Manor a week or so ago when it came to light that the awful Miley Cyrus was served by her husband, Liam Hemsworth with papers for a divorce. Mr. Hemsworth seems to be a rather nice young fellow with a sense of right and wrong, while Ms. Cyrus has, for many years, has shown herself as mad as an outhouse rat. Who knows what drove Mr. Hemsworth to marry such a crazy tart? Let's face it, the woman cannot even be referred to as a lively jeune fille when he married her. But tastes and hormones differ; some men like women with faint mustaches, and others like women who have been prostitutes or wantons. There is no accounting for taste.
     A few weeks ago Mr. Hemsworth, after less that one year of marriage, told Miss Cyrus that he was finished with the marriage. Not coincidentally the singer formerly known as Hannah Montana told a popular magazine that she really was not a heterosexual but instead was a sort of bi-sexual (perhaps even a tri-sexual) and that she had no interest in bearing children because the world is so screwed up and on its last legs that she didn't want to add to the pain of Mother Gaia by bearing brats. Fortunately for us, she'll keep her promise and we, as a civilization, will not have to bear the burden of a third generation of bad singers singing bad songs.
    And then there were several photographs published on the popular Internet of Miss Cyrus behaving with another woman in a way that no person with any common sense at all would liked to have been photographed doing. But, of course, common sense is in short supply these days, and a sense of public propriety is even more rare . But, apparently unknown to Miss Cyrus did in allowing these photographs to be taken (in fact, she posed for them) is that she told the world that her husband was not really her husband physically and that "tipping the velvet" was just as satisfying for her as marital relations with her husband. And Mr. Hemsworth finally woke up and pretty much said, "I can get better action a lot cheaper from some fishnet stockinged  whore without all the craziness. At least that chick will pretend."
     And despite the fact that it was Mr. Hemsworth who threw over Miley/Hannah the feminist press has reported that it was she who found her lesbian liberation by telling him to grab his hat and get out.
      The Western world has gone mad because of guilt for which there is no evidence for. But we here at the Manor hold the walls up as best we can.