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Happy Easter, everyone!

This happy bunny is from 2011. I found him in the chicken house pretending to be a chicken. Buns love chicken food.

I know he doesn’t look happy, but trust me – it’s baby bunny season. I wake up every morning to the sound of screaming buns. Jack is absolute murder on buns. This baby got tossed in the field next door and, let us hope, lived a long and rabbity every after. That’s as happy as a bunny gets Chez Weasel.

Photo credit: Uncle B. I’m going to blow this up to a poster some day.

March 30, 2018 — 8:48 pm
Comments: 9

Heh.

People keep tweeting this image at me. I don’t mind; it never fails to crack me up.

Sadly, it’s prescient. The good news is, I have a four day weekend, starting tomorrow (no ‘separation of church and state’ here — Easter is a biggie). The bad news is, I brought home a ton of work with a deadline of Monday.

A deadline? You say. But Weasel, you work in an office! I do, but once they figure out you can do artwork on short notice, you’re doooooomed. We’ve got the opportunity for some good free publicity — but only if I can cobble together a bunch of layouts in a hurry.

Oh well. I could use the money.

At first glance, I thought this artwork might have come from this lady. She’s an illustrator who sometimes lets her four-year-old finish Mom’s drawings. The result it pretty awesome.

I almost said ‘have a good weekend’ — but it isn’t really yet. See yez tomorrow.

March 29, 2018 — 9:46 pm
Comments: 4

Feh.

Well. That’s not how I had planned spending tonight.

I monitor the work account from home and got a message that someone had pinched a photo to use on our company website. A message from the photographer we pinched it from, alas.

These things can get nasty. I mean, I don’t blame photographers for being upset — the internet is still the Wild West, and people steal like the wind. I’m sure it’s frustrating trying to make a penny off your intellectual property and having to chase it all over cyberspace.

I borrow stuff all the time for the blog and I can only recall receiving a takedown once. On the other hand, the mutilations I inflict on other people’s work may well (ironically) count as transformative. In other words, by pissing all over them, I may succeed in making them legally mine.

But anyway, I’m just a weasel and a company is a company. I heard a horror story last year about a historic society similar to ours who paid a few thousand to get rid of an angry photog.

Not me. I just did my best grovel and made it go away. I grovel real good. It’s that Southern bullshit thing.

I like the pic. I did an images search of “weasel cringe” and got this. And yes, it is mine — from 2011. It still feels weird when I turn up my own stuff on a search.

March 28, 2018 — 9:17 pm
Comments: 8

G’night!

Our clocks changed this weekend. I know, I know…they never change on the same date as the US. Used to gum things up between me and Uncle B back in the day.

As I’m sure he’ll be happy to tell you, I will piss and moan about this for weeks on end. And rightly so, because THE GOVERNMENT HAS STOLEN AN HOUR OF MY LIFE. And one of my favorite hours, too: a sleeping hour.

So it finally caught up with me today and I’m’a crawl off early without saying anything at all clever. But please enjoy this charming and very relaxing video of a weasel sleeping.

March 27, 2018 — 9:24 pm
Comments: 10

It’s coming!

Okay, so it’s kind of cold again tonight, but I dasn’t care — I saw a lamb today! A lot of them, in fact!

Not in our village; two villages over. The farmers carefully control lambing (by carefully controlling sexing) and ours aren’t due for another week. But it cheered me no end.

That, and everywhere around is alive with daffodils.

Funny thing, that. Daffodils don’t really propagate on their own. Not much. And the state doesn’t plant them, even though most of these are on the sides of the road on government land. This explosion of yellow that we see every Spring is because some poor bastard — or a lot of poor bastards over a lot of years — went out and bought bulbs, got on his knees and dug them in. Because he (or she) knew how awesome it would be to see them after a long Winter.

That idea cheers me up more than lambs.

March 26, 2018 — 8:56 pm
Comments: 12

A heroin habit would be cheaper

I still buy bits and pieces from my local art store. It’s more expensive than the online, naturally, but I don’t want him going out of business so I prop him up when I can.

I dropped by for some stuff this afternoon, and he’s hosting a watercolor competition. The prizes are selections of Daniel Smith watercolor tubes. You won’t laugh when you see what this stuff costs!

It’s handmade and they use a lot of genuine minerals, like lapis and turquoise. A little 15ml tube of the lapis will set you back, like, £25. The sets aren’t much better. They also sell sheets of paper with little dots of paint on, so you can try them out, and even those aren’t cheap.

I said to the guy, it’s come to something when Winsor and Newton is the cheapest brand you stock. And it’s true — other than the student grade sets, everybody seems to be going in for fancy hand-made fru-fru colors. Me, I’ve always been a Winsor and Newton kindofa gal, but hey. Free paint.

Anyhoo, the deal is they give you a card with, like, a dozen paint dots and you paint something using that. I didn’t hear about it until today and I have to get it done by Thursday and I picked a subject with a lot of fiddly background (foreground: chicken). So, if you’ll excuse me…

Have a good weekend watching planes and boats and stuff!

March 23, 2018 — 10:55 pm
Comments: 16

Toys

We may be out in the boonies, but we’re along the flight path to the Continent (just ask that nice Mr Hitler). Traffic is high and lately I feel sure we’ve heard an uptick.

Enter Uncle B, who’s a bit of a plane geek. He turned me on to a site called Flight Radar 24. It tracks every plane in the sky. Click one, and it tells you the registration, the destination, all sorts of neat flight information.

If you hear one go over and it ain’t on the map, that’s military. We get a lot of that, too.

When you hit that link, if the map isn’t showing your part of the world, drag the screen until it is. Next time, it will remember.

I love the flight arc of planes flying the Atlantic. They always go up and over, like somebody throwing darts.

March 22, 2018 — 10:15 pm
Comments: 29

Things that surprise no-one

Well, hell. I said to Uncle B that the Austin bomber was probably going to be a young white guy. It just fit the crime, you know? And so it turned out to be. I would have thought he would have more of an obviously ‘troubled past’, but it’s early days yet.

It’s a young white guy kind of crime. It saddens me, but it’s true.

Also in the ‘Things That Should Surprise No-one’ file, does anybody expect anybody to reject Trump because he slept with a porn star and a Playboy bunny? The dudebros who love him will think the whole thing is alpha as fuck.

And conservatives have known all along he’s not one of them. He’s a crass and vulgar man, duh. But what was anyone supposed to do? At least he’s not a pervert (guys who bed legendarily attractive women may be hounds, but they aren’t bent) and he’s less weak and weird than 95% of the people scrabbling for high office in my lifetime.

If “grab them by the pussy” didn’t do it, this is the weakest gotcha ever.

The picture is what turned up on a Google Images search for “surprise stoat.” It leads to an article about surveillance footage of a weasel on a trampoline. Follow it. You won’t be sorry.

March 21, 2018 — 10:26 pm
Comments: 20

I didn’t know we had one of those…

Isaac Newton’s death mask. And by “we” I mean the Royal Society.

Several were made at the time of his death. You have to be careful about that, as sculptors regularly touched them up.

Like the famous l’Inconnue de la Seine, which has been (I suspect) heavily recarved. Nobody simpers in death.

I have been fascinated with death masks ever since I had a life mask made of myself in plaster of Paris when I was about twelve. By my mother’s entire special education class.

This went about as badly as you imagine, but it’s a story that needs telling with a lot of hand gestures and mime. And sound effects.

Anyway, I escaped with my life. Not sure what happened to the mask, though.

Today is the anniversary of Newton’s death, March 20, 1726 (or 1727 in the newfangled Gregorian calendar that was coming into use in his lifetime). If you look closely, you can just make out the dent in his head left by that apple.

That’s Uncle B’s joke.

March 20, 2018 — 9:50 pm
Comments: 12

You sure got to work it to offend these days…

Yep. Flaming chickens.

On Monday, the museum tried to explain that the chickens had not been harmed in the making of the work, stating that the video was made using special effects. (The work was housed in a separate exhibition room with a content warning.)

The museum said the work was produced in Morocco with a team of creative technicians and that the chickens were subject to a “flame effect only for three seconds and under the strict control of the technicians and the artist to avoid any suffering.”

A three second flame effect, huh? I doubt the chickens were impressed. Also, I dunno, “In 2008, the San Francisco Art Institute canceled his solo show that featured a video, “Don’t Trust Me,” which showed six animals being slaughtered with a sledgehammer.”

It is Monday, we are back inside a cold snap (known as “Beast from the East 2”) and I’m in a vile mood. I got problems only gin can solve.

March 19, 2018 — 9:50 pm
Comments: 14