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Dead Pool Round 117: Goodbye, Dolly!

I didn’t even know Carol Channing was still alive, and now she’s not.

Congratulations to peacelovewoodstock, who takes the dick! First dick of 2019.

On your mark, get set…last one to reach Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a rotten egg!

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. Plus (Pupster’s Rule) no picking someone who’s only famous for being the oldest person alive.

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’m fresh out of fairy shit particles.

January 18, 2019 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 63

Please enjoy this luminous chicken

I brought work home tonight, so I fished this off my phone camera for you in lieu of a post. The limited dynamic range of a phone camera means I get the occasional delightful mess like this image.

This is Jenny, as fine a chicken as I’ve ever known. Fox got her. Still sore about it.

And tomorrow? Dead Pool Round 117. See you here!

January 17, 2019 — 10:11 pm
Comments: 5

erm…

Leafing through a very old sketchbook today, an envelope full of stamps fell out the back. Mostly Dutch and Danish, and also…umm…these.

I said Uncle B must have bought them for me and he got all huffy, like, “just because they have Hitler on them doesn’t make them my fault.”

Yeah, I’m pretty sure he bought them for me.

No, I don’t collect stamps.

January 16, 2019 — 9:04 pm
Comments: 9

G’bye

Well. Carol Channing has died, age 97. As often happens, I didn’t realize she was still alive, and now she’s not.

Banging around the tubes, I found the above: Carol with Mary Tyler Moore and Julie Andrews. Thoroughly Modern Millie, which I never saw.

One of the signature songs from that film was “Jazz Baby” from 1919, which Wikipedia says they had to buy back from the Washburn-Crosby Company, manufacturers of Wheaties, who had used it with variations for an advertising jingle since 1926.

The link from the Wikipedia article is dead to me (“not released in my country”), but I found this 1926 Wheaties jingle which…honestly doesn’t sound anything like “Jazz Baby” to me, but someone in the comments says it’s the first use of a jingle in a radio ad. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

While you’re there, please enjoy all these other Wheaties ads. Said it before, I’ll say it again — there needs to be a word for that thing you do where you start off with a simple Google search and find yourself an hour later squinting at Bruce Jenner eating Wheaties.

p.s. oh, yah — congratulations to peacelovewoodstock who wins the Dead Pool with Carol Channing. Y’all know what that means!

January 15, 2019 — 8:49 pm
Comments: 18

Swan goes here

There’s been a swan in this spot for the past few nights. I spotted him when I was out looking for the kitten (he’s nine months old now, the Wandering Age). I saw something white in the canal and thought it was an overcoat (yeah, my first thought was a dead body), but it was a sleepy floaty swan.

I can’t get over how swanny this place is. I mean, we had them in ones and twos and threes back in Rhode Island. But here? One foggy morning, some years ago, I stood in the field across the road and counted 35 of them.

(Ah, yes. Here it is. December 31, 2008).

A bunch of them flew over the car this afternoon. I bet it was a dozen. Their wings make the most extraordinary mechanical whuffing sound when they fly. I wonder if my ditch swan has joined them in migration.

An old farmer told me when you see them here on the coast in Winter it means a cold snap inland.

January 14, 2019 — 9:22 pm
Comments: 9

From my clipfile

I don’t have anything in particular to report today, so here’s an illustrator from my clipfile: Willy Pogany (Vilmos András Pogány) (1882 1955) (full illustration here).

Pogany was Hungarian, though he took American citizenship in 1921. He was one of the great names of what is called the Golden Age of Illustration.

No doubt, there was one of those strange historical throwings-up of an unfeasible number talented people during this era, but I’m inclined to blame the Golden Age on technology.

Book illustration went from the sophisticated black and white wood engravings of the late Nineteenth Century (giving rise to geniuses of ink illustration like Charles Dana Gibson) into early, cheap color reproduction (leading to the ascendance of figures like Rockwell).

Illustrators who surfed the timeline just right — like Arthur Rackham, N.C. Wyeth and Willy Pogany — moved successfully from one style to the next.

I admit, though, I like Pogany’s line work most of all.

Have a good weekend, everyone. I have to do my taxes this weekend, or at least get a start. They aren’t complicated on account of I am poor, but they still aren’t a lot of fun.

Revolución!

January 11, 2019 — 9:42 pm
Comments: 10

Oh, look…another one

Remember that time that you and everybody you knew was upset about high taxes and illegal immigration and the people in charge decided that the most important issue in the whole wide world was…gay marriage? Remember that? Or that time you and everybody you knew was upset about high taxes and illegal immigration and the people in charge decided that the most important issue in the whole wide world was…transgender teens?

Yeah. Are you getting the vegan thing at the moment? You can spot a put-up job when suddenly, inexplicably, it’s all anyone is talking about in government and the MSM. Left, right and center. Or left, lefter and leftest.

We’re getting Veganuary in the neck. I tried searching “who is behind Veganuary?” “why Veganuary?” all the way to “fuck off Veganuary” and all the results were tasty vegan recipes and why you should give up meat for the animals.

I find it bizarre that the slideshow at the top of the Veganuary site is a series of adorable farm animals. Because, you know, the only reason those beasts exist is because we eat them. Most bear little resemblance to their natural counterparts.

Cows, chickens and pigs, after so many generations of breeding for characteristics people convenient, can no longer make it in the wild. Maybe if we cut them all loose all and let the predators at them for a hundred years or so, a few hardy specimens would survive to create brand new breeds of wild animal, but I don’t think that’s what the vegans have in mind.

Just how many petting zoos do they think the market will support?

January 10, 2019 — 10:53 pm
Comments: 12

Dammit, EU…!

Every day, multiple times a day, the typical resident of the EU bumps into an EU reg, and it is never — IT IS NEVER — a good thing.

The General Data Protection Regulation came into force almost a year ago. This is the one where the mediocrities in Brussels thought to themselves, “wouldn’t it be nifty if we protected the privacy of our citizens?”

The result was a shit-ton of pointless new regulations. Every organization in the EU (including little ones like the historic society I work for) had to elect an Information Officer (that’s me!), pay a registration fee to the government (tax had to come into this somehow, yes?) and develop dozens of make-work policies and procedures to deal with the fact our members voluntarily gave us their mailing addresses when they signed on.

Naturally, this does nothing to curb serious information breaches by the usual suspects — banks, government agencies, social media and the like — but eats up the scarce resources of little orgs with pointless hamster-wheel exercises.

You can bet Brexiteers are people who have to deal with this shit, and Remainers have people who do it for them.

Oh, and then there’s this ^^^. About once a day, surfing the web, I run across a website from outside the EU that thought to itself, “fuck it — I can’t be bothered to comply with some overseas regulation I don’t understand. I’ll just block the whole continent!” Probably forever.

Thanks, faceless bureaucrats!

January 9, 2019 — 9:41 pm
Comments: 6

Word of the day: blatticulturist

For the Love of Cockroaches: Husbandry, Biology, and History of Pet and Feeder Blattodea

Hardcover – 18 Sep 2017
by Orin McMonigle (Author), Jonathan Lai (Foreword), Louis M. Roth (Contributor)
£44.95

The amazing diversity of color and form in cockroaches around the world has rarely been displayed to the average animal enthusiast. Several well known species have been bred for decades as feeder insects for reptiles and other exotic pets, but there has only been a handful of dedicated blatticulturists keeping and breeding a wider range of species for sheer enjoyment. As exotic cockroaches receive more attention, more and more people are trying their hand at them, but with very little attention given to these creatures in the popular literature. That changes now, as Orin McMonigle shares his enthusiasm and wealth of knowledge in this new book, For the Love of Cockroaches. Orin provides experienced instruction for proper housing, feeding, and breeding cockroach species, followed by details on the many species available to enthusiasts (illustrated in full color). At 350 pages, this is the definitive cockroach manual for anyone branching out into these fascinating insects.


Most helpful customer reviews on Amazon.com
Amazon.com: 5.0 out of 5 stars 1 reviews

Beautiful book and everything you need to know to keep cockroaches successfully
14 August 2016 – Published on Amazon.com
In my opinion, this is Orin McMonigles best book yet! It is enjoyable to read and look through and covers the basics of cockroach biology and their history with humankind. Most important, this book contains extensive information on keeping cockroaches as pets or as feeders for other pets — although if you start off keeping them only as feeders, I’ll bet these wonderful creatures will win you over into keeping them for their own sake as well. 😉 I have found the extensive species-specific information very interesting and helpful and am grateful that the author took the time to include photos of each species, as well as the many other beautiful photos throughout the book.

Highly recommended!
11 people found this helpful.


I was only looking for an automatic chicken feeder.

January 8, 2019 — 7:41 pm
Comments: 18

History’s slowest invasion force

In the last six weeks, hundreds of people — mostly men, mostly describing themselves as Iranian or Iraqi — have crossed the Channel in dinghies to land on their own or be picked up by our Coastguard. Which, of course, they do. And bring them here. Which, of course, is why they keep doing it.

Mostly next door in Kent, (that’s where Dover is), though a few washed up closer to home. We carefully lock doors these days.

Where are they getting the dinghies from? Why now? Why Iranians/Iraqis? Nobody knows. But at least they’re allowing us a lively discussion (see above).

Around 60 migrants are believed to have come ashore between December 23 and December 30 but reports from charities and refugees in Calais suggest the figures could be higher.

The Mail on Sunday reports that 66 migrants made it to Britain on Christmas Day alone.

Last month Home Secretary Sajid Javid declared a “major incident” over the number of migrants trying to cross the Channel to reach the UK.

Of the 504 migrants seeking to cross the English Channel in 2018, 276 managed to get to British waters and coasts, and 228 were intercepted by the French authorities.

If you haven’t seen anything on your news, not to worry — we haven’t much either. Except local sources.

They have to explain where all those abandoned dinghies on the beach are from after all.

January 7, 2019 — 8:24 pm
Comments: 9