Impenetrable symbols
I’ve had to create graphics in international symbols style; I know boiling ideas down to a few simple shapes is not easy. Still, half the damn things are so utterly impenetrable, I feel sure it would be better just to spell it out in Maori or Sanskrit or whatever and let me look it up in the dictionary. (My favorite sign in the States was the international symbol for library. Pointless. What would someone who can’t read the local lingo need with a library?)
Britain seems more than ordinarily decorated with these things. Seems everywhere we go, some poor bubble-headed bastard is getting electrocuted, sliced in half like firewood and pan-fried. He should sue somebody.
Today, I ran across one so impenetrable, I’m still trying to work it out (see above). So far, this is my best guess:
■Holy shit!
■According to the book
■Rays of light will come shooting out of your face, your bellybutton and the tips of your toes
■If you stand too close to the monolith
Got a better idea? I can’t seem to find an international symbol dictionary, so I’m opening it up to suggestions. And no — I’m not going to tell you where I saw it. That would be cheating.
June 16, 2009 — 5:50 pm
Comments: 29
Kittens! Hot buttered kittens!
Get ’em while they’re cute!
I have a feeling Scubafreak is going to be a six cat man forever. But just in case anyone’s in Colorado and feeling a mite peckish, look how good the little fuzzies are coming along!
— 12:48 pm
Comments: 7
Visible from space
Here at Stoatiweaselco, we believe in going the extra mile. Giving a little more. Being there for you.
Sure, it took the Sun to break the story, and Drudge to disseminate it around the world. But only sweasel.com searched Google maps, tirelessly explored the neighborhood and ultimately discovered the Surrey rooftop on which some schoolboys years ago spelled out “COCK” in bricks. Just to bring you this URL.
Don’t thank us. It’s what we’re here for.
June 15, 2009 — 7:00 pm
Comments: 13
The weekend of schmooze…
w00t! Stolen internet connection! I ain’t forking over £6 an hour to read twenty Indonesian penis enlargement offers and spend quality time on my own damn blog. I love you guys, but I’m not paying to hang around with you.
We’re in Ye Olde Docklands, where Uncle B has to do a touch of professional schmoozing for a few days. I took this picture out the window at a cocktail party.
Yep, that there’s the Dome in the background — the Boil on the Bum of Greenwich. I’ve only been there once, when it was still just a building site. There was a sort of shed with the architect’s rendering of what the thing was going to look like, plus a guestbook to sign. Somebody before us had written, “why don’t you fuck off back to America and take your ugly building with you?”
So, so unfair.
Cocktail party. Heh. Not to worry. Weasel isn’t selling out to adulthood. I drank beer and wore jeans and shared my recipe for pan-fried rattlesnake. It’s handy, being able to use my immigrantness to mask my hopeless inadequacy as a grownup.
June 12, 2009 — 8:10 am
Comments: 25
…stand by…
Uncle B has to go up to London on business for a few days — it’s always “up” to London, by the way. No matter where you are in relation to the city, getting there is up and going home is down. Anyhow, he doesn’t trust me alone in Badger House, so I’m going with.
I wasn’t planning a very large party and I’m almost positive we wouldn’t have trashed the place, but I guess that’s the kind of intolerable interference you can expect when you’re a married weasel.
Anyhoo, I’m pretty sure we’ll have access to broadband and I can post as normal, but if not…I wouldn’t want you thinking my silence meant I’d been hit by a bus.
God knows I won’t be hit by a subway train. The bolshy bastards are striking tomorrow.
June 9, 2009 — 7:35 pm
Comments: 48
Objects in history may be smaller than they appear…
Yes, you guessed it. In the complex and sophisticated iconography of sweasel.com, this diagram illustrates Gordon Brown getting his ass kicked in the European elections.
And an historic kicking of ass it was! We sat up and watched the regional count. Everybody knew Labour would do badly, but this here debacle was a fucking Greek tragedy of an ass-kicking: the worst Labour has done since 1918 (founded: 1900). The worst a party in power has done in a national election EVER.
Labour lost Cornwall for the first time in decades. They came in sixth. Below the Cornish National Party (Uncle B describes as ten nutters in a pub). This after coming in lower than the Monster Raving Loony Party in St Ives last week.
It was epic.
And meaningless. For now, anyhow. Labour doesn’t have to call an election until May next year, and (from a cravenly political point of view) they’d be nuts to do it any sooner. They’ve got the power, and a year is an eternity in politics. Gordon Brown has dug his heels in and nobody in his camp (so far) has the stomach to give him a push. David Cameron of the Tories is way out front, but he’s still the Lindsay Graham of British politics (now with added Greenie!). The fringe parties are still…fatally fringe-y.
And this was the European election. Voting in this thing is like getting to choose between being smacked upside the head or elbowed in the crotch (hence the pathetic turnout).
Still, Labour got its ass kicked! And it was a hell of a thing to watch.
June 8, 2009 — 8:19 pm
Comments: 16
Goodbye, little buddy
Feh. I shipped my lawnmower 3,500 miles, got two mows out of it, and — BANG! — hit a metal post sunk in the ground and totalled it. Bent the driveshaft. Complete goner.
It was old and nothing special, but it was one of those happy few, once-in-a-lifetime mowers that started on the first pull. Every time. Two months on a container ship across the frozen Atlantic in Winter, came out the box and started on the first pull.
It was mine and I liked it.
So I’ve spent a week disconsolately lookin’ at mowers. Everything we saw was very fancy and glossy and a minimum of £200 for an underpowered, no-big-deal, weasel-driven push mower.
I’ve taken the mowing on myself — it’s the one way I can harness my plant-murdering powers for good. I looked at those fancy sports-car-looking machines with all the complicated shit hanging off them and thought to myself miserably, “oh, how a weasel is going to fuck up that shiny yard candy.”
We hit one last place today — a man who repairs and sells mowers out of his home — and I spotted a rusty old job in the corner and fell in love. “Make me an offer,” he shrugged. Heh. Weasel’s got a new funky old mower.
Hey, dude had six cats. I know I can trust him.
Anyhow, I have to mark where that post is so I don’t hit it ruin another mower. So I came up with this thing. Uncle B says I’ll go to hell for this picture, so…ummm…I hope nobody’s had a recent bereavement or anything.
June 5, 2009 — 7:52 pm
Comments: 24
Look into these ten weepy eyes and…ummm…pick two
I know it’s a real long shot, but if anyone reading is near Colorado Springs and catless, commenter Scubafreak got hisself stuck with these five crusty hobgoblins and sure could stand to unload a few. The Humane Society was going to gas them. Yeah. There’s a title mismatch for you.
I know those goggle eyes and bony, stretched faces; that’s what all-but-starved looks like in a kitteh. Charlotte looked worse when I pulled her out of the squirrel trap: gray with filth, one eye crusted shut, a kink in her tail and no fur at all on her belly. She was the most repulsive little beast I’d ever touched with my bare hands. But she cleaned up real good…eventually.
You will — seriously — not find a more faithful cat than one you pulled from the brink when it was small. Charlotte is seven this year and still trails me everywhere like a shadow.
I make this two all black ones, two all gray ones and a gray-and-white, gender to be determined, age about eight weeks. I promise you, these babies will outgrow the knobbly look and be proper sleek and imperious kittehs in no time.
June 4, 2009 — 2:47 pm
Comments: 35
Can NOTHING be simple…?
This is the little radio Uncle B kindly bought me today. We have a radio (or ‘wireless’ as they insist on calling them) in pretty much every room in the house, but I was missing out on the steady drip-drip-drip of BBC leftist venom as I moved between one room and another. So, now there’s this.
You’ll notice that good old AM and FM have been replaced with waves and maths and kHz’ses. You need a ham operator’s license to drive one of these.
Okay, not really. But I do get tired of every fucking thing being a learning experience.
Notice the little round frequency markers? Y’all know what a test match is? It’s what they call a cricket game.
That’s right. This radio has the cricket stations printed on.
June 3, 2009 — 7:19 pm
Comments: 23
I wonder what they sell in there…
Spotted on a drive up the coast. We didn’t stop.
June 2, 2009 — 7:16 pm
Comments: 25