You may notice that this Friday column is actually appearing on Thursday. (And if you did, you are provably more coherent than Dr. Jill’s husband, who is constantly mixing up Thursday and Friday. Along with his wife and his sister, and also the Vatican and a bathroom.)
My writing schedule is going to be erratic for the next week or so, because I am taking my third annual May trip with two of my cousins.
Regular readers may remember that one of the cousins bought a 1976 Cadillac El Dorado three years ago, and the three of us drove it the length of Route 66, from Chicago to LA. (If you’re interested, you can see my daily diary from that trip on Martinsimpsonwriting.com; scroll down to see “Road Trip.”)
Last year the three of us took the “Lap Around the Lake,” driving around Lake Michigan, from Chicago up through Wisconsin, into Michigan, and back down through Indiana.
I’ll get up to Illinois tonight, and after supper with yet another cousin, we’ll hit the road on Friday. Depending on the weather, we’ll either be heading for West Virginia and Virginia — seeing Harper’s Ferry, the Shenandoah Valley, etc. – or else heading south, with a stop to see Lincoln’s birthplace in Indiana, followed by taking a tour around Kentucky to see where my dad’s side of the family comes from.
Will we be listening to some John Prine and Tyler Childers as we’re driving around the old Simpson stomping grounds in Kentucky? Damn straight. There may even be some moonshine involved, in honor of our humble roots.
Whichever route we take, we’ll be doing some hiking, either in Tennessee on the Appalachian Trail, or in the Virginias. I plan to write about some of what we’ll be seeing and doing, but I’m not sure when or how often I’ll be posting.
Having said all that, today I’ve just got a few disconnected thoughts for you, based on stories that caught my attention in the last week or so.
In the “good news” column I’ve got the tale of a 14-year-old Michigan boy whose 8-year-old sister was looking for mushrooms when a 17-year-old boy “came out of the woods and grabbed her.” As you might expect, the brother defended his sister.
As you might not expect, he did so by deploying his… slingshot! And if you’re now asking yourself what century this is, me too!
The story starts out like a Grimm’s Fairy Tale, with a young girl gathering mushrooms (!) and an ogre jumping out of the Black Forest to snatch her. Then the kid brother goes all Tony Montana on that guy – “Say hello to my leetle slingshot friend!” – before ending up in ancient Israel, where he’s facing off against Goliath.
If the idea of a kid in 2023 carrying a slingshot isn’t disorienting enough, consider what a badass sling-shotter (sling-shottist?) he is! If a bad guy was wrestling with your little sister, how confident would you have to be that you could miss her and hit him — with a slingshot!?
Well this kid was apparently a graduate of the Mel Gibson School of Slingshottery, because he both aimed small and missed small.
State troopers found the 17-year-old at a gas station a short time later, suffering from “severe [slingshot] injuries” to his head and chest. Which has to make for the coolest police report ever written in the history of Michigan. (“Hey Captain, what caliber would you say that kid’s slingshot is?”)
The only downside of this story: expect the Dems to start screaming about how we need to ban slingshots with large capacity pouches, especially if they’re scary looking “assault” sling shots.
In another feel-good story, leftist dullards in LA just got groin-kicked by reality again, as yet another of their money-grabs failed spectacularly.
Last November, the LA Dems voted for a new “luxury tax” of 4% to 5.5% on houses that sell for more than $5 million. It passed with a vote of 60%, and the numbskulls who sponsored it crowed about all of the social justice they’d be able to achieve with the $900 million they expected it to raise in the first year.
Well, the tax went into effect on April 1st, and I’ll bet you can guess what happened. Because you’re not a leftist who doesn’t understand concepts like incentives, disincentives, and unintended consequences.
The “journalists” at the far-left LA Times must have felt like they’d been caught on the wrong end of a sling shot when they had to report the results. It turns out that rich homeowners rushed to sell their places before the tax took effect, and if they weren’t able to sell them, they took them off the market. (Duh!)
How bad was it? In March, before the tax, 126 of the targeted properties were sold. In April, once the tax took effect, that number declined slightly. To 2!
As AOC could tell you, that’s a drop of at least 50%, if not more.
But buck up, little Marxists, because your goal of $900 million might still be achievable. There are still 11 months left in the year, and you’ve only got $899.5 million more to raise.
Finally, I don’t know how to classify this last story, so I’m just going to report the facts.
An Ohio man named Darren Glines has decided that he’s now a woman, so he started calling himself “Rachel.” Which isn’t as problematic as the fact that he started going into YMCA female changing rooms and getting naked.
After he did so when three juveniles – actual females, it turns out – were present, he was charged with indecent exposure. And because the world has gone crazy, he was acquitted a few weeks ago by an idiot judge.
Glines’ defense – with which the aforementioned idiotic judge agreed – was that his obesity prevented any indecent exposure.
That’s right. The combination of his huge gut and tiny genitals meant that the girls couldn’t have seen the latter. So case dismissed.
Leave aside the philosophical question of what is more offensive: a male exposing his genitals in a women’s locker room, or a naked zeppelin of a human who identifies as a poorly endowed male, in a women’s locker room.
Both of those options involve indecent – not to mention traumatic and nausea-inducing – exposure! And that judge should be forced to shower with Dirigible Darren, while that Michigan kids unloads on both of them with his slingshot.
One final quiz question: Who do you think has humiliated himself more?
A. Jeffrey “the one-armed bandit” Toobin, after getting caught pleasuring himself on a Zoom call?
B. Darren Glines with his “huge belly/tiny phallus” defense?
C. Alejandro Mayorkas, after the last several months of embarrassing himself with his transparently dishonest gas-lighting press statements. (Somewhere in Iraq today, even Baghdad Bob is saying, “Dude, have you no self-respect?”)
Biden delenda est!
“Dr.” Jill Biden/Alejandro “The Border Czar’s New Clothes” Mayorkas, 2024!
Martin Simpson 
Who has humiliated himself most – none of them is feeling the least bit humiliated, because none of them is capable of embarrassment. Not the jerk in the woods, nor the slug in the girl’s locker room, nor the other slug wearing the black bathrobe and sitting behind the bench.
LikeLike
Wow, you get better and better!!! Thank you so much ,Martin! Enjoy your trip.
Blessings, Lesley
LikeLike