Prove me wrong. Please
Yes, we also are getting the four-part documentary about the life of Hillary Clinton. Why? Where’s the audience? What possible interest could anyone have in a documentary about this washed-up dessicated old hag?
Because she’s going to be the 2020 nominee. Count on it. Calling it now. Either Biden’s vice presidential pick, or Biden is going to be too incapacitated to do the job, sometime before or after the election.
For what other conceivable reason did all the other candidates collapse and leave the Dems with nothing but an old man showing very distressingly obvious signs of senility?
Crazy idea? God, I hope so.
Try to have a good weekend with that thought running around in your head!
p.s. At least I have lots of Hillary! artwork to recycle. I’m not having much luck caricaturing Biden, for some reason.
June 12, 2020 — 7:14 pm
Comments: 15
It’s a lockdown miracle!
Uncle B got a dentist appointment today! Nothing too awful; he’s lost a crown and will need it replacing. This is the first we’ve heard of practicing dentists. There’ve been horror stories about dentists giving out strong drugs rather than treatment and telling people to pull their own teeth if it got too bad.
What, the hat? I thought he might enjoy seeing an old friend. It belonged to a Victorian street dentist or tooth puller who wore it to advertise his expertise to passers-by.
It’s from the collection of a wonderful little museum in London, the Cuming. It was closed for a long time after a fire, but it looks like it’s open again. Well worth having a poke around their collection online.
They’ve even got 3D versions of many of their objects that you can twirl around. Behold, the hat!
June 11, 2020 — 7:38 pm
Comments: 3
The tweet below is not a parody
This is the putative leader of the group that has taken over six city blocks of Seattle. Since many of you have confessed that you (wisely) have dropped out of social media, I thought you might enjoy this.
I sure did.
June 10, 2020 — 7:56 pm
Comments: 23
And that’s when I hit the X in the upper right corner
Calls for Penny Lane to be renamed. Seems it was named after slave trader James Penny. Mind you, the calls weren’t new today, but new today is the fact it may be done on the fly, without public consultation.
They’re tearing things down and rubbing out names all over Britain today. Don’t go to Twitter right now; it will break your heart.
June 9, 2020 — 8:49 pm
Comments: 10
Something wicked going on in this house…
Stepped into a random empty shed in Assassin’s Creed: Origins and found this tableaux. I’ll bet the environment designers have fun making these little surprises.
Yes, I went back to finish this game to the very end. Because if I’m going to spend hours running around a landscape, I would rather it be ancient Egypt than Eighties Afghanistan.
Congrats to DurnedYankee, who hath retired. And to ArmyBrat who retireth soon.
We regard ourselves as semi-retired. Retired, but there’s not enough in the pension to float our lavish rock’n’roll lifestyle so we have to pick up work when we can to avoid touching capital. At the moment, it isn’t clear when my job will be back, or if it will ever be able to afford for me to do nice-to-have but not-essential projects like before.
On the other hand, sleeping in! Every day!
June 8, 2020 — 7:25 pm
Comments: 7
Moon!
If you haven’t been to social media today, don’t. It’s just crazy people screaming at each other. I know, I know…but more than usual even.
Then this came across my feed. It is one complete orbit of the moon in high resolution, and it’s stunning. Set it to loop. I must have watched it go ’round and ’round for five minutes, a soothing meditation plopped in the middle of all the crazy.
It was cut together with slices of data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter so that it appears fully lit all the way around. It almost looks slightly 3D, which is probably a side effect of how they magicked it together.
More about how they did it here.
Cheer up, folks. The weekend is here! Some vague and fading corner of memory tells me that’s a happy time.
June 5, 2020 — 8:11 pm
Comments: 19
The evolution of cop shows…
You’d think a two-month lockdown would be time for TV companies to shine, show a bunch of escapist stuff to distract us. But no, programming has been shit. We’ve taken to binge watching some very old TV.
Like The Sweeney. British 1974 police procedural. Uncle B informs me it was Britain’s first gritty cop series and controversial for it. Entertaining stuff.
This frame cracked me up. It’s a PTA meeting. See the painting in the background? RAF airplane rains bombs onto stick figures. A kid would be sent to therapy for that painting today.
Anyhoo. I was trying to remember when our cop shows went from squeaky clean Dragnet to dirty Dirty Harry. Kojak maybe?
June 4, 2020 — 7:45 pm
Comments: 13
Nope. Nope, nope, nope.
I’m going to have to give social media a rest for a while. Shit’s making me crazy angry today.
I will say this: if ever I am made to kneel, I’m not standing up again until somebody slaps me with a sword and says, “Arise, Stoaty Weasel, rightful queen of all England!”
June 3, 2020 — 8:05 pm
Comments: 14
Any beekeepers about?
Y’all know we have a honey bee problem. We suspect the main hive is in the attic, but a swarm forms on the outside of the chimney on sunny days every Summer. We have yet to spend the money necessary to get this resolved because it hasn’t been a serious problem.
Today as I sat peacefully in a deckchair, a single bee came after me aggressively. Flying repeatedly into my face, my shirtpocket (!) getting tangled in my hair and, eventually, stinging me on the jaw.
I am absolutely not someone that panics at the sight of a stinging insect. I prefer to sit quietly until they get bored with me. I’ve never been stung doing that.
Thing is, it happened later with two more bees, though not the point of being stung. First time, I got up and went in the house to escape. Second time, I was armed with a can of fly spray.
I was playing the banjo, but I’ve been doing that in the garden for ten weeks, or however long we’ve been locked down. I wasn’t wearing anything different (literally, I wear the same shabby garden clothes every day). I hadn’t eaten anything strange. I wasn’t wearing a scent. I’m a goodly way away from the house, with my back to the swarm.
Swarmed. One bee at a time. What’s pissing them off?
June 2, 2020 — 7:31 pm
Comments: 19
Maybe.
This came across my Facebook feed labelled “Earliest photograph of a cat 1880”. I know, cute…but that date sounded a bit late to me. On a Google Image Search of “first photograph of a cat”, this image appears first (Reddit) and eighth.
But there were also lots of pre-1880 photos of people holding cats which, I suppose, is technically different from a photo of a cat.
On reflection, I’m going with this photo from Harvard University’s Houghton Library as the oldest. It’s 1840-60, and the cat is blurry and almost indecipherable. That’s cats (and daguerrotypes) for you.
Things here start to open up a little on Monday, though I’ve just heard the sad news the Sussex bonfires have been cancelled. They do most of their fundraising in the Spring and Fall, you see, and who knows what our emergency services will be like in September/October/November.
Still, another almost unbelievably beautiful weekend coming up here. I hope the weather is at least bearable where you are. We keep telling each other what a different experience lockdown would have been in a miserable, wet Spring.
May 29, 2020 — 8:21 pm
Comments: 11