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the boids

The gulls are getting hella aggressive at the seaside Scottish town of Newhaven. Okay, that’s not a very good story, but I liked the picture and the link goes to the Metro — always a fun, trashy read. (Don’t miss “man’s trousers blown off by exploding tyre.” No, Brits can’t spell “tire,” poor things).

In other news, Rolf Harris was convicted of sex offenses today and will undoubtedly do time. In case you’re wondering who the hell Rolf Harris is, he’s the guy who wrote “Tie Me Kangaroo Down.” You still shouldn’t give a shit, but at least you know who he is now. You’re welcome for that song going through your head.

There’s been a lot of that going on in the UK lately: going back and prosecuting men for sex crimes they committed decades ago. In many cases, the things they did were common knowledge at the time, but attitudes were different then. Or, at any rate, there was a whole lot of that kind of thing going on. In a sense, it’s not really fair to roust old men out of their beds and prosecute them for ancient crimes.

But in another sense — screw ’em, these guys were pigs. The fact that they usually got away with it back then is grossly more unfair than the fact that they’re being locked up for it now.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s garbage night. We’re up to four bins now: rubbish, garden waste, glass and other recyclables. If they add another bin, I’ll be officially too stupid to take out the trash.

June 30, 2014 — 10:39 pm
Comments: 18

Round 66: Death in the High Summer

Hutch wins dick with Eli Wallach! While he was a student at the University of Texas, Austin, Wallach acted in a play with fellow students Ann Sheridan and Walter Cronkite. Just think — in future, when weird-ass things like that happen, somebody will have cellphone footage of it.

He was married to actress Anne Jackson for 66 years. That’s the sign of a mensch, if you ask me — especially in Hollywood.

M’okay! Here we go!

0. Rule Zero (AKA Steve’s Rule): your pick has to be living when picked. Also, nobody whose execution date is circled on the calendar. Also, please don’t kill anybody.

1. Pick a celebrity. Any celebrity — though I reserve the right to nix picks I never heard of (I don’t generally follow the Dead Pool threads carefully, so if you’re unsure of your pick, call it to my attention).

2. We start from scratch every time. No matter who you had last time, or who you may have called between rounds, you have to turn up on this very thread and stake your claim.

3. Poaching and other dirty tricks positively encouraged.

4. Your first choice sticks. Don’t just blurt something out, m’kay? Also, make sure you have a correct spelling of your choice somewhere in your comment. These threads get longish and I use search to figure out if we have a winner.

5. It’s up to you to search the thread and make sure your choice is unique. I’m waayyyy too lazy to catch the dupes. Popular picks go fast.

6. The pool stays open until somebody on the list dies. Feel free to jump in any time. Noobs, strangers, drive-bys and one-comment-wonders — all are welcome.

7. If you want your fabulous prize, you have to entrust me with a mailing address. If you’ve won before, send me your address again. I don’t keep good records.

8. The new DeadPool will begin 6pm WBT (Weasel’s Blog Time) the Friday after the last round is concluded.

The winner, if the winner chooses to entrust me with a mailing address, will receive an Official Certificate of Dick Winning and a small original drawing on paper suffused with elephant shit particles. Because I didn’t have any dinosaur shit particles.

June 27, 2014 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 109

Ha! Ha! Ha! Come here, silly swans!

There’s an exhibition of rare Chinese propaganda posters going on in Edinburgh at the moment. It’s 133 posters from 1913-1997 on loan from the Propaganda Poster Art Centre in Shanghai.

I wouldn’t mind seeing that. Not enough for a field trip to Scotland, but enough to look it up online. I lumme some propaganda. (No, I really do. I’ve always thought that should have been my calling). The Telegraph has a better slideshow (I know, I know…slideshows are de debil).

I especially love these ladies, from the model opera Red Women’s Detachment, 1971. No, they don’t look silly at all.

Right. We’ll assemble here under the flagpole tomorrow, 6 sharp.

Dead Pool Round 65!

June 26, 2014 — 10:19 pm
Comments: 13

Purty flars

ZOMG! It’s Delphinium Week at Godinton House!

I know, right? It seems like only yesterday. The picture, of course, is not Godinton House. It is but the head gardener’s place at Godinton House, but I fell in love with it because it had those awesome pointy boo-boos on either side. I didn’t do so great in my architecture course

Godinton House is a grand old pile. Per the masonry dates on the house, building was continuous from the 15th to the 20th Centuries, though it all aged down and works well together. In six hundred years, it has only been in the hands of two families. We didn’t go in, on account of we were there for the delphiniums.

The delphiniums! If you wouldn’t know a delphinium if the Delphinium Fairy rammed a flaming delphinium up your ass, here is a nice picture Uncle B took today. But there were acres of them in the most spectacular colors. The weather was perfect for it today, too.

The delphinium part of the garden is maintained by the Kent and East Sussex chapter of the Delphinium Society. All kidding aside, they seemed a nice bunch of old dears, and the gardens were spectacularly pretty.

p.s. I’m still playing that online card game, Hearthstone. I went to post something on their user forums tonight and got the message that my account has been suspended. No explanation or nothing.

Me. My account. Don’t they know I’m a respectable goddamned middle aged church lady? I just got back from a fucking delphinium show, for chrissakes!

June 25, 2014 — 10:27 pm
Comments: 22

Guzzbries

Behold, the mighty gooseberry crop! I reckon there’s about five pounds there (well, Uncle B weighed them, but I didn’t write it down. Five pounds, close enough). The little dark ones in the back are a sweet purplish dessert variety.

Uncle B says we’ll have to make a gooseberry fool. So I asked “what exactly is a fool?” And he says, “Oh, it’s something like a syllabub.”

Sigh.

Fool. Syllabub. Cranachan. Eton mess. Pavlova.

Ugh. Just give me a smoothie.

June 24, 2014 — 10:51 pm
Comments: 29

Bees!

I bet I hoovered 150 live bees off the bedroom window Saturday morning. It started with two or three bees the day before. Then six or seven.

We’re continually being hectored about bees, how the hives are dying and we must do everything we can to make our gardens bee friendly. We were opening windows and shoo’ing them out gently at first.

Then we woke up to a bedroom full of the little bastards, and we both got stung, and it was all, fuck that noise.

We found the tiny hole in the bedroom wall they were coming out of. Things improved when we plugged it, but not completely. Four hundred year old house. Not exactly air tight.

The Council couldn’t do anything because it’s indoors (presumably in the chimney), so we got a private bee guy on the line. He got out of his van and just pointed to that ginormous swarm of bees on the chimneystack there.

Huh. We missed that somehow.

After much poking and peeking and trying to reach them with the hose we decided to leave it and see if they swarmed off of their own free will. Which they did later that night.

And that was the great Midsummer’s Day Bee Adventure.

June 23, 2014 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 24

Round 64: the lazy, hazy days of Summer edition

ScotttheBadger takes it with Casey Kasem. Link goes to a Daily Mail article about Kasem’s home, up for sale. It comes with a piece of the Brooklyn Bridge, a golf course and a heart shaped pool. It looks tacky as shit, and it’s a steal for $42 mil.

0. Rule Zero (AKA Steve’s Rule): your pick has to be living when picked. Also, nobody whose execution date is circled on the calendar. Also, please don’t kill anybody.

1. Pick a celebrity. Any celebrity — though I reserve the right to nix picks I never heard of (I don’t generally follow the Dead Pool threads carefully, so if you’re unsure of your pick, call it to my attention).

2. We start from scratch every time. No matter who you had last time, or who you may have called between rounds, you have to turn up on this very thread and stake your claim.

3. Poaching and other dirty tricks positively encouraged.

4. Your first choice sticks. Don’t just blurt something out, m’kay? Also, make sure you have a correct spelling of your choice somewhere in your comment. These threads get longish and I use search to figure out if we have a winner.

5. It’s up to you to search the thread and make sure your choice is unique. I’m waayyyy too lazy to catch the dupes. Popular picks go fast.

6. The pool stays open until somebody on the list dies. Feel free to jump in any time. Noobs, strangers, drive-bys and one-comment-wonders — all are welcome.

7. If you want your fabulous prize, you have to entrust me with a mailing address. If you’ve won before, send me your address again. I don’t keep good records.

8. The new DeadPool will begin 6pm WBT (Weasel’s Blog Time) the Friday after the last round is concluded.

The winner, if the winner chooses to entrust me with a mailing address, will receive an Official Certificate of Dick Winning and a small original drawing on paper suffused with elephant shit particles. Because I didn’t have any dinosaur shit particles.

June 20, 2014 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 90

You should probably have that looked at

How did I miss this? Apologies if everyone knew but me. Apparently, when the 30-foot-tall commemorative statue of Nelson Mandela was unveiled in Pretoria in January, nobody noticed the tiny bronze rabbit in his ear.

The two Afrikaner sculptors had wanted to sign the work on his pantleg, but were told not to. So, covert bunny. It’s an Afrikaans pun. “Haas” means rabbit, but it also means haste, and they were in an almighty rush to finish the thing by the deadline.

When it was discovered, there was kerfuffle. Also brouhaha. Some thought Mandela was a jolly man and would have wanted it to stay. Others thought not.

My favorite quote is from Mogomotsi Mogodiri, spokesman for the Department of Arts and Culture, “We don’t think it’s appropriate because Nelson Mandela never had a rabbit on his ear.” If that isn’t hilariously literal enough, he went on to say, “We’d want people to see that statue as a symbol of hope, not about something like a rabbit.”

Well. You needed a pair of binoculars to spot it, but still it had to go. So it went.

Always hungry for attention on the cheap, PETA tried to “adopt” it, but nobody seems to know where it went. So PETA went away and murdered puppies and kittens until they felt better.

Right! New Dead Pool. Here. Tomorrow. 6 WBT! Be here. Or don’t. I’m not your mother.

June 19, 2014 — 10:35 pm
Comments: 16

Bookmark this

This is a fun ongoing series from the BBC: Victorian Strangeness. The author combs Victorian newspapers for nuggets of weird.

My favorite is the story of the two skeletons found walled up in the attic of a theater, mummified as they died — in the act of murdering each other. There was no clue to the mystery, except that the theater’s carpenter had gone missing fifteen years earlier.

For an even more fun dip, though, try doing a Google Images search of “Illustrated Police News” — the Daily Mail of its day (except the Daily Mail was the Daily Mail of its day. The Mail was aimed at the newly literate lower orders, where the News was all about the pitchers).

I don’t know about you, but I’m rooting for Bloomers Lady and her bicycle.

June 18, 2014 — 11:20 pm
Comments: 7

That is so effing French

There is a pedestrian bridge in Paris over the Seine near the Louvre called the Pont des Arts. Here, lovers come to write their names on padlocks, clamp them to the bridge railings and fling the key into the river, an expression of undying lurv.

The railings are collapsing. Duh.

This is not an ancient tradition, it is a recent thing, a creation of social media. It’s spread from Paris to Moscow and New York and elsewhither. Different cities are dealing with it in different ways, mostly involving cutting them off.

I just love the idea of Parisian infrastructure collapsing under the weight of empty romantic gestures.

I’ve come to dislike the French since I moved here. It’s not exposure to the English what’s done it, it’s exposure to the French.

June 17, 2014 — 9:15 pm
Comments: 24