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Not my chicken. Not my cat.

The look on that bird’s face.

Little Boo is not bad about chasing chickens. He’s had a go because it’s such fun, but he backed down when I yelled at him.

He’s responsive to that. Which is, on the one hand, gratifying. But on the other hand, a little sad. Cats are supposed to be bastards, but he’s incredibly shy and eager to please.

Jack was such an unrepentant chicken chaser that I literally wondered if he was deaf. The screaming and the throwing things, it did nothing.

Another picture pinched from my chicken-focused social media. Because I’ve had a lovely laid-back Friday afternoon and I’m lazy. Good weekend, all!

March 29, 2019 — 10:37 pm
Comments: 13

No, YouTube. Let us not go.

This popped up at the top of my YouTube tonight, as though they haven’t been interrupting my programs flogging this thing for months and months. That and their ‘premium’ service — which, as far as I can tell, just lets you play videos in the background on your phone.

No, YouTube. Nobody wants this. Go away.

Anyway. Got jammed up with work tonight, ‘Shopping pictures and watching ‘Tubes.

p.s. Uncle B just reminded me — they’ve started shoving ads randomly and badly all over videos now, too. Like, plop in the middle of an album.

March 28, 2019 — 10:32 pm
Comments: 6

Divided by a common language

I had one of those moments today, trying to pry two stuck stackable chairs apart and I said, “we have to put a little English on it” and all the English people went quiet and stared.

Yeah. I’ve wondered where the phrase came from, too. That seemed like a really good time to look it up.

In case it is hopelessly old-fashioned of me, “to put a little English on it” is most often heard in the context of baseball for putting a spin or curve on the ball. Metaphorically, it is giving something a little twist.

Someone in the room guessed it came from cricket. Which is a very good guess, because the pitcher (erm, bowler) often puts a little spin on the ball so it hops up unpredictably after the first (obligatory) bounce.

I gather. Nobody has ever tried to explain cricket to me, and with any luck no-one ever will.

Anyway. No. It comes from France. And billiards. The expression was to put a little ‘angle’ on it, which is a natural pun for Angles and the Anglais. Ironically, the pun doesn’t work in English.

You’ll have to take my word for it, though. I did all this on my phone, on the hoof, and I’m too lazy to look up the exact liink again.

March 27, 2019 — 9:08 pm
Comments: 15

My giant monkey comic book came today!

If you don’t know what this is: Richard Meyer is a guy who loves comic books. A little over a year ago he started a YouTube channel to talk about it. It quickly became all about how social justice was ruining the funny books. This made his channel very, very popular and made the current crop of comic book professionals very, very angry. And they were all like if you’re so smart, why don’t you make your own comic? And then he did. So they picked up the phone and scared his publisher off*. So then he self-published. I was one of the first few hundred backers, me.

It looks pretty good. I don’t know yet. I can’t read comics sober.

*it turns out, intefering in somebody else’s business deal is against the law. They particularly do not cotton to such conduct in Texas, where much of this happened. So not only did I get to see a neat comic book, but also a very amusing lawsuit (ongoing).

March 26, 2019 — 9:14 pm
Comments: 6

Battle royal

I have a little stash of American junk food I order online, because I’m pretty sure if my body is ever completely clear of preservatives, they’ll take away my passport.

So this afternoon, I’m like “hey, B — want a plain M&M?”

And he’s like, “what even is one of those?” (He didn’t say it like that. He talks real stupid like “oh, I say, Weasel, whatever might those be at home?” I do my best to translate).

You could’ve knocked me over with a pixie stick. Imagine! So I give him a little pile of M&Ms and he’s like, “oh! Smarties!”

I’ll spare you the argument we had on account of I suck at writing dialogue, but it came down to me yelling “It’s M&M’s because they were first!”

You guessed, didn’t you? They weren’t. Smarties were introduced in 1937 and M&M’s in 1941. We laughed and laughed and then we ate the whole bag because we are pigs.

If you hanker to learn how much of a piece of shit Forrest Mars was, here you go.

March 25, 2019 — 10:08 pm
Comments: 10

Lambs, you say?

Artist: Ed Harrington.

If you’ve never read Silence of the Lambs, you should. It’s the only book my stepmother ever recommended to me, so I felt obliged to read it (I don’t read much fiction, and I really hate fictional murder stories).

I actually stood up out of my reading chair at one point, when the plotline took an unexpected turn. You know the place.

Hated the movie.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

March 22, 2019 — 9:16 pm
Comments: 6

Well, I LOL’ed

Watch this stupid video. With the sound on.

It popped up on my Twitter and I laughed. Turns out if you search YouTube for it, it’s been done multiple times by multiple people. Still, I laughed. That’s worth sharing, right?

True story: I played trombone in junior high band. We already had one (my big brother played). Also, it meant I got to sit with the boys and poke those snooty clarinet bitches in the butt with my slide when the teacher wasn’t looking. I reckon I could still belt out the scales if I had to.

But don’t put a trombone in a warm bath to clean the gunk out of it. Don’t do it. It’s gross. Spoiler: the gunk comes out of it.

*pic unrelated

March 21, 2019 — 10:01 pm
Comments: 4

Note to self: buy more beer

Well! I’ve just gotten a work email (yes, I get them at home) reminding me that next year is the 400th anniversary of the sailing of the Mayflower. We’re going to party like it’s 1620!

March 20, 2019 — 10:13 pm
Comments: 10

First lambs!

We saw the first lambs of the season on the way to the supermarket today. Well, the first lambs we’ve seen — there’s a farm in the back of beyond that always has the very first lambs, but we have to go out of our way to see them. These were just RIGHT THERE, like nothin’.

Not the ones in the picture up there, though. That picture is stolen from Middle Farm, a local open farm. They sell tickets for lambing. I can’t decide if that’s a very city thing or a very country thing to do. Their lambing starts April 1, like ours.

I bought my second two chickens from Middle Farm, a long time ago. And very excellent chickens they were, too.

But never mind that — LAAAAAMBS!

March 19, 2019 — 8:42 pm
Comments: 6

Liquorice, yay or nay?

My current chai recipe calls for star anise, which I’ve slavishly added because I’m an idiot obviously. I hate this shit. It gives me the willies.

Anise, star anise (totally different plants, I did not realize), fennel and liquorice all derive their flavor largely (I have learned through a cursory trawl through Google and now I r expert) from a compound called anethole.

But they each have lots of other stuff going on. Like, “90% of the world’s star anise crop is used for extraction of shikimic acid, a chemical intermediate used in the synthesis of oseltamivir (Tamiflu)” Wikipedia tells me.

And once most liquorice was used in cigarette manufacture, giving American cigs a distinctive flavor, until the FDA banned it in 2009 for some reason. Which means the cigarettes I knew and loved no longer even exist.

My mother in law loves the stuff. My mother did, too. We could always con her into taking the black jelly beans.

Black candy. Surely, Mother, they are trying to tell you something.

Can you bear this stuff, or is it just me?

March 18, 2019 — 9:29 pm
Comments: 15