I’m posting this column earlier than usual because stately Simpson manor is a couple of hours into the first bands of a tropical storm coming through, and I expect that at some time overnight we’ll be losing power for at least a little while.
I know what you’re thinking: shouldn’t I be boarding up the windows and battening down the hatches and prioritizing my own survival, because if this nation loses me at this crucial juncture, America may not survive?
To which I can only say that you’re being a little bit of a Dylan Mulvaney-esque drama queen. Because if I do perish in the storm, there is at least a 45-to-55% chance that America survives without me. And I didn’t get to where I am in the CO nation by NOT mocking leftists and providing conservative insights into current events, just because my life may be in danger.
And before you can ask me another question that could prolong this introduction, no, I don’t like to throw around the word “hero” lightly. And I think you can complete the rest of that thought.
Okay, so I’ve got time for two topics: the rise of an Olympic hero, and Que Mala’s choice of VP.
As regular readers know, I’ve not been a fan of this Olympics so far, because the people who run it appear to be idiots. After mocking my Lord and Savior to kick things off, and then allowing a couple of dudes to beat the crap out of female boxers, the Olympics were just about dead to me.
Sure, I might drop in and pay a little attention, I mean, if my wife is watching or something. Or when something hilarious happens, as when the Muslim Jew-hating judoist got his arm dislocated by a Japanese judoist, momentarily acting as God’s agent on earth.
And yes, I’m not sure what participants in judo are called. And I’m pretty sure that it’s not “judoists.” But my level of caring is as low as AOC’s IQ, so I’m not going to spend the time to open Duckduckgo.com (not commie Google, which you should never use) and check.
Or when the US Olympic female basketball team is unable to sell tickets because they left Caitlin Clark back in the states, resulting in the organizers having to practically give away tickets for yesterday’s game because of the anemic crowds. Unexpectedly!
Good! I hope the team is beaten by Gambia, or Burkina Faso, or by a bunch of judoists from Tongo who mistakenly wander out onto the court and decide to try their hand at basketball for the first time ever.
So yeah, I have no positive reasons to watch the Olympics.
But then my amazing wife showed me a short video of the coolest Olympian of this (or possibly any) age: the Turkish pistol-shooting guy.
I watched the first 15 seconds of it and then insisted that she email it to me immediately. She rolled her eyes and said, “You’re going to write about this, aren’t you?” And I said, “How could I NOT?”
Because really, how?
I know what you’re thinking: Normally, when you hear “Turkish guy with a gun,” you don’t immediately jump to “feel-good story” or “my personal hero!” Added to that, his first name is “Yusuf.”
And that makes it even worse. When you hear the set-up, “Let me tell you about an armed Turk named Yusuf,” your only question is, “Let me guess, his last name is al-Ghoul, and he really hates the Juden?”
But no. Not this guy.
By now you’ve heard about him. He’s Yusuf Dicek
First off, I didn’t know there was a pistol competition in the Olympics. I knew they had that weird thing where you ski for a while, and then stop and shoot a rifle, and then ski some more. But I figured that was just something Finland came up with and snuck into the Olympics in the 30s, as a clever way to entice their young men to train for shooting a lot of Russians who would be needing shot in the coming Winter War.
But the Olympics have a pistol competition too, so good for them. (In fact, a little more pistol shooting and a little less Christ-mocking would be my suggestion for all future olympics.)
Anyway, all of the Olympic pistolists (again: life is too short to look up names for obscure-sport details) are “decked and teched,” as they say. (Actually no one says that. I just made it up, but I like the way it sounds.) They’ve got coordinated and branded outfits made of high-tech fabrics, with sponsors’ names and their countries’ Olympic logo on them. They’re using futuristic pistols that look vaguely like what Arnold’s enemies in the future used in the first Terminator.
And they’ve got headgear. Oh have they got headgear! Stuff that you’d expect Schlomo Bond to have. (Yes, I’m trying to make that a running joke.)
Headsets that offer ear protection, noise cancelling, hypnotic sub-sonic tone generators, and probably high-def Sirius radio. They wear glasses that were personally made after biometric scans of the shooters’ retinas were fed into a super-computer which then fashioned each lense in a sterile lab in Switzerland, I’m guessing.
Some of the glasses come with one lense blacked out, to favor the pistolist’s strongest eye. (I call those the “Moshe Dayans,” and they look impressive.) (And yes, FYI, “I’ll take ‘bad-ass Israeli military commanders for 1000,’ Alex.”)
So the best prima donna pistolists on the planet are all sitting around with their entourage of coaches and technical assistants, going over their millions of dollars’ worth of gear and guns, and in walks Yusuf Dicek. And one of the coaches said, “Did anybody order kebob? The delivery guy is here.”
Dicek stood out in that crowd. First off, he’s 51 years old. Because as everyone knows, your eyesight really peaks in your early 50s! (I’d had very good vision my whole life, but when I reached my early 40s and was taking an eye test to get my pilot’s license, I started guessing at letters on the chart, and the doc wrote some notes on my file that amounted to, “It is illegal for you to ever fly an aircraft without wearing glasses.”)
So there’s Dikec, wearing tennis shoes, a pair of what looked like Dockers, and a t-shirt with “Turkiye” on it that looked like he’d picked it up from a street vendor right outside for 2 euros. (I later found out that that’s Turkey’s official t-shirt. Which tells us that Turkey apparently doesn’t have a big “olympic apparel” budget.)
Instead of fancy ear protection, he had a couple of yellow foam things that I get from Lowes when I’m going to be using power tools a lot. He also wore glasses that looked like a pair of cheaters from Wal-Mart. (“Are you just using those for reading? If so, a 1.5 magnification should be fine. What’s that? You’ll be in a shooting competition in the Olympics in a half-hour? Better take the 2.0s”)
As the other pistolists were assuming unnatural stances that combine the posture of a yoga nut, a ballerina in the Bolshoi, and a Prussian officer in 1878 standing at attention, Dicek stepped up to the line, put one hand in his pants pocket (!) and aimed with his other hand.
If you look up “nonchalant” in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of this guy getting ready to shoot. He looked as calm as some ne’er-do-well who just finished a sleeve of pot brownies knocking over a 7-11 in Bakersfield. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had turned the gun sideways before he started shooting, like the dumbest gang-banger in Chicago’s mostly peaceful weekend shootouts.
So there he was, looking like a guy getting ready to try to win his wife a stuffed animal at a crooked carnival’s rigged shooting gallery. And he started to shoot WITH BOTH EYES OPEN!
Now almost the only shooting I’ve ever done was at pop bottles and cans with a b.b. gun, and at imaginary Nazis with a cap gun. But even I know that when you’re zeroing in for that head shot on Hitler, you’re supposed to close your weak eye and squint like hell through your strong one.
And as I went back to watch Dikec’s competition, I saw that sure enough, they all shoot with one eye closed. Even the ones without the space-age Moshe Dayan glasses.
Not Dicek. He was there to smoke hookah and shoot bullseyes. And he was all out of hookah.
Unfortunately, Dicek only won silver. And the guy who won gold, standing next to him, had a ridiculous Willy Wonka-looking piece of headgear on. So Dicek definitely won on style points.
What’s that? The Olympics don’t award style points?
Okay, I’m out again.
Topic 2: Que mala’s possible VP choices. As of the middle of last week, contenders mentioned include Shapiro from PA, Bashear from KY, Mark Kelly from AZ, and Mayor Pete.
The governors of MI and NC had reportedly been in contention earlier, but they apparently didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree, because they were smart enough to back slowly out of the room when asked about being tied to Que Mala’s political fortunes.
In the last several days, though, the field seems to have been winnowed down to Kelly and Shapiro, with the latter now being the favorite. But I was really hoping for Mayor Pete.
Because now that he’s back from paternity leave – and who amongst us can gainsay the kind of physical toll taken on his body by not carrying a baby in his non-existent womb for nine months, and then going through many hours of pretend labor pains, following by the miracle of passing that baby through his non-existent birth canal, and don’t get him started on how he’s coping with the non-existent episiotomy stitches and unsightly non-existent stretch marks – he’s rested and ready to hit the ground running.
While wearing his pristine first-ever pair of work boots and his hard hat that looks every bit as authentic on his pointy little head as that tanker headgear looked on Mike Dukakis.
So why would I be rooting for him to make the ticket? Simple: for years the Dems have been caterwauling about how toxic masculinity has been ruining American society, so I’d love for them to show the world what a presidential ticket with literally zero masculinity – toxic or otherwise – looks like.
However, as of now it looks like Pete is destined to be always the bridesmaid and never the non-child-bearing bride.
Conventional political thinking would say the Cackler should go with PA’s popular governor Shapiro, because he could conceivably nudge the crucial battleground state into the blue column in November.
But wait. Shapiro is Jewish. And there are a number of Dem voters – most importantly in Michigan, but also throughout the country and in congress – who are jihadi sympathizers and really hate Jews. So smart insiders say that if Shapiro doesn’t get the nod, the most likely reason is the religious bigotry of many Democrats. (I’m paraphrasing just a tad, for greater clarity.)
I’ve always thought that the main theological school of thought motivating the national Democrats was their religious commitment to atheist, destructive socialism. But now it appears that the anti-Semitic tail may be wagging the Marxist dog.
Well done, Democrats!
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 