A very British amusement park
Thrill to the electrifying ‘putting your arm up a cow’s bum’ experience.
This opportunity, if you hadn’t guessed, is part of the James Herriot Country Tour. Herriot (real name James Alfred Wight) inspired a whole generation of Brits to go into veterinary medicine.
Sadly, that generation of vets is retiring and, in many cases, selling their practices to veterinary corporations. A quick Google search tells me that this process has been happening for some years, all over the West. It also tells me that there are pros and cons, both for the vet and the customers.
Huh.
We are fairly involved in a number of local cat charities (because of course we are). One was heavily supported by a veterinarian who has now retired and sold his practice. In their newsletter, they talk about how much their vet bills have gone up since. Many of these practices seem to be basing their prices on how much people are willing to spend to keep their pets going. Which, for many people, is a lot.
They didn’t say this, but we know it from experience with one local practice, the vets are usually young, foreign and don’t stick around for long. We still have a good old country vet, but who knows for how long.
Back in the Nineties, my 20-year-old cat Andrew suddenly developed serious breathing problems (turns out it was a pulmonary embolism). It was a Sunday afternoon – because all veterinary emergencies either happen Sunday afternoon or in the middle of the night – so I drove him to an emergency practice. Don’t ever do this. I told them to keep him comfortable until he died. Instead, he spent his final hours enduring every expensive diagnostic they could think of. Then he died. Bastards.
Speaking of croaking, Joyce Randolph of Honeymooners fame has finally copped it at 99. That means p2 has won the dick and New Dead Pool Friday.
January 17, 2024 — 7:51 pm
Comments: 6
It should be easy enough to check…
This is the Midsummer Tree in Worthing. Folklore has maintained for centuries – or at least since the early 19th C – that on Midsummer’s Eve, skeletons rise up and dance around it. It almost got cut down in 2006, but a passing resident saw them hacking on it and got a campaign together.
They’ve been gathering around it ever since, and nary a skeleton.
Short one, but in order to post, I have to get at least one hand out from under the throw blanket. We’re having a cold snap at the moment. The ice on the chickenwater was 2″ deep this morning – I had to go in and boil the kettle to free them up.
We don’t get many of these, but when we do, I don’t recommend holing up in a wattle-and-daub house. Wait’ll Uncle B gets the fire built up and we’ll be alright.
January 16, 2024 — 8:27 pm
Comments: 9
New and improved time wasters
The very first video ever uploaded to YouTube was the 19 second short Me at the Zoo by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim. The comments section says that was 18 years ago yesterday, but the Wikipedia page says it was uploaded in April of 2005.
Whatever. It set the tone for the kind of content they were looking for. I’m going to assume Karim sold his stake in the site, because it’s reported he periodically changes the description of the video to criticize management decisions (such as not displaying dislikes).
I read recently that by next year, people will spend more time watching YouTubes than broadcast television. I can’t be arsed to look it up – what am I, an investigative journalist? – but I wouldn’t be at all surprised. I gather the young’uns spend a lot of time on it.
I’m already watching more YouTube than TV. I’ve graduated from woodturning and tool repair videos to 15 Most Disturbing Things Found in Attics (mostly people) and 9 worst things found in the woods (mostly dead people). I’m finding more and different kinds of useless time wasters every day.
It’s a wonder, though. YouTube’s actual interface is shit.
January 15, 2024 — 7:53 pm
Comments: 10
Well, I laughed
Going through some old books in the work library today and I ran across a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. I guarantee you know this guy, whether you know you know him or not. He was the originator of many a familiar phrase, like “pursuit of the almighty dollar”, “the pen is mightier than the sword”, “dweller on the threshold” and “the great unwashed” (I pinched all those off his Wikipedia page).
He’s also the guy who famously opened a novel with the words “it was a dark and stormy night.” In all fairness to the guy, it wasn’t yet a cliché in 1830.
You may or may not know that he inspired an annual competition – the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest – which challenges contestants “to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written.” This year’s winner was chosen from 6,000 entries. Are you ready?
She was a beautiful woman; more specifically she was the kind of beautiful woman who had an hourlong skincare routine that made her look either ethereal or like a glazed donut, depending on how attracted to her you were.
Some of the others are pretty funny, too. Check ’em out – and have a good weekend!
January 12, 2024 — 7:22 pm
Comments: 10
You are not ready for this story
I had frequent earaches as a child. Miserable things. My father had them, too. He loved to explain what they did for earaches in his day, pre-antibiotics: they’d take a scalpel and puncture the eardrum to release pressure (otherwise they feared the infection would break inward, into the brain). They did that to him multiple times.
It was his favorite “walking five miles uphill barefoot in the snow to school” story.
Years later, as a teenager, he was practicing for the statewide cornet championships. He was at that point, he said, the third highest ranking cornet player in Tennessee. He said he was a master of triple tonguing. Anyhoo, you can see where this is going: his poor scarred eardrum exploded during practice (I’d like to think during a particularly enthusiastic triple tonguing session). Thus ended his dream of being…the second or first cornet, I guess.
Many years later, he had a surgical eardrum replacement. A tympanoplasty (technically a myringoplasty, since it was just the eardrum). They took a little piece of one of his veins and scraped it really thin and stuck it in his ear. These days it’s done with microscopes, but this would have been about 1966, so they probably did it with rocks or something.
I remember seeing him in the hospital with an enormous head bandage that made him look like a spaceman.
He got some hearing back, but he was pretty deaf and could never get on with hearing aids. This was unfortunate for my stepmother as he loved to make music and believed himself to be a great talent, but could only hear the loud instruments. Bagpipes. Banjos. French horn.
I’m not going anywhere with this story. I just wanted to talk about my father’s ear. Mine is a little better today, I think.
January 11, 2024 — 7:47 pm
Comments: 5
It’s the oddest sensation
For the second time this year, I woke up a couple of days ago with one ear completely blocked. The first time around, over-the-counter ear drops sorted it out in a couple of days. This time, I’m not having much luck.
In fact, the first round of eardrops made it worse.
Now, two or three days in, the weirdest thing is happening. I have maybe 10% hearing in my left ear, so my brain has decided all sounds are coming from my right. Uncle B turned on the radio in the kitchen and I heard music come out of the livingroom.
It’s freaking me out, y’all.
Now, I know my audience. I’m sure at least one of you coots has lost more hearing in one ear than the other. Is this just how it works?
January 10, 2024 — 7:41 pm
Comments: 15
Ugh.
Apparently, I have stolen this meme from @shitheadsteve
Been in a Zoom work meeting all evening. You haven’t lived until you’ve hosted twelve elderly English people arguing parliamentary procedures.
Uncle B was like, you charge for this, right? And I was like !!!
It honestly never occurred to me.
January 9, 2024 — 8:09 pm
Comments: 3
My very weird, very fat cat
Enjoy this view of my delicious catloaf.
He’s a very eccentric beast, like most formal ferals. He’s fat and it’s totally not my fault. He will only eat dry Iams, and not a whole lot of that. He won’t eat wet food. Not interested in people food. Eventually, he even refused treats (have you ever known a cat that turned his nose up at Dreamies?).
So it has to be the bunnies and mice doing it. The vet isn’t concerned. I suppose it’s self limiting – get fat enough, can’t chase prey.
At least, he was like that until last week, when began to reject his food. Vocally. Even angrily. We went nuts. Tried five different brands of dry catfood.
In despair, we tried pouches in jelly and…bingo. Except, he licks the jelly off and begs for more. He’s already visibly putting on weight.
I know a woman who swears her cat went diabetic eating Friskies jelly. I also went through the same behavior with my old cat Charlotte, the one I brought with me from the States (coincidentally also a tuxedo cat). At the end of her life, she’d lick the jelly off but refuse the food chunks and pointedly ignore it until the meat mummified in the bowl.
I am so not looking forward to this again…
January 8, 2024 — 8:26 pm
Comments: 5
Dead Pool 175: tea break’s over edition
Nana1 takes dick #4 with Glynis Johns. The old girl was a hundred, made her stage debut at three weeks old and I only ever saw her in one movie.
Are we all juiced up and ready for January? I know I’m not!
Let’s play Dead Pool instead:
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.
Note: I am woefully behind on dick deliveries. If I owe you one, you’ll know how long. I ain’t gived up, but I haven’t drawn much since lockdown. Some day, your heirs might hear from my heirs.
January 5, 2024 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 42
Not pictured: another gray blob
Pictured on the way home: the two white blobs are mommy and daddy swans and the four gray blobs (brown IRL) are the baby swans. Kind of teenager swans, actually. Okay, they were far away and I only had my phone. We’ve seen the adults in the adjacent field – probably the same ones – but this is the first we’ve seen of the swanlets.
Are we all excited for the Epstein papers? No? You disappoint.
We are clear that this isn’t the client list we’ve all been waiting for, but a release of the documents relating to Virginia Giuffre’s lawsuit. I spent a merry hour trying to find the original documents – not articles about them. There are dozens of articles about them, showing all the journalists knew where they were. I managed to find an individual document or two, but not the whole cache.
Finally, in a yet-unpublished Community Note on X, I found this link. I CANNOT VOUCH FOR THE SAFETY OF THAT SITE. Or the veracity of the document. I’d’ve hosted it for you, but it’s 28 megs (940-something pages) and I think that might flatline my connection.If you’re interested and you’re bold, I recommend you right click and save the document to your hard drive.
It’s word-searchable (Clinton appears 72 times). But no mention of Hawking or midgets (don’t ask), so maybe this isn’t the real deal.
January 4, 2024 — 8:16 pm
Comments: 5