Ladies and gentlemen, the 47th President of the United States
With a wolverine on his head. I explain the wolverine in this 13 year old post.
I have coffee with my elderly English friends Friday mornings (nearly all Guardian readers). They were snickering about the Trump verdict and I said, “they’ve just made him the next president.”
Silence. Then guffaws. I felt like Ann Coulter in that famous clip.
We’ll see, won’t we? Have a good weekend!
May 31, 2024 — 7:14 pm
Comments: 9
Thanks, I guess
This arrived in the mail today. It’s a little rubber robot or astronaut keyring. It’s been through customs. Twice. With it was a card with an envelope. The envelope had the Ebay logo and “Thank you for shopping on Ebay. Support our shop, merchants give small gifts”.
Inside was a printed card that reads (and I have produced the typos, smashed together words and weird punctuation verbatim):
Thank you!
Dear valued customers,
How are you today?
Firstly, thank you’very much for your purchase; wereally’vafue your business.Your item is in another package and usually arriveswithin 1-7 working days, which you may have alreadyreceived.If you haven’t received it yet, don’t worry,it may stillbe in transit andwill arrive in time.
When you receive it, we sincerely hope that you willenjoy it.
We value every customer’s feedback and suggestion.Please feel free to contact uis onfine if you have anyquestions andneeds.
There is no indication anywhere on any of this what the name or location of the shop might be. From the slight Engrish, I’m guessing China. But the shop? I haven’t bought anything from Ebay for weeks, and I don’t think the thing I bought came from China.
This was a globe-hopping waste of a tiny bit of everybody’s resources.
Oh, the last thing I bought was a Manta sleep mask. Mucho recommendo.
May 30, 2024 — 5:58 pm
Comments: 8
Stop me if you’ve heard this one
I feel like I’ve posted about this before, but this is the first time I’ve seen the famous hen up close. This is my friend’s hen who has turned into a rooster. Yes, it’s a thing. Sort of.
As I understand it, chickens come into this world with two gonads: the one on the right is active and the one on the left is a they/them. The active gland determines the sex of the bird.
But if a cyst or an injury or just plain old age damages the active gonad, the enby one wakes up and goodness knows what it makes of things. The hen usually stops laying eggs and becomes sterile, and takes on the secondary sex characteristics of a cockerel.
I’ve never heard of this happening to a rooster, come to think of it.
True enough, her comb is bigger than the others, but she didn’t really develop the male pattern feathers (which can happen). Most tellingly, though, she wakes up in the morning, belts out a COCKA-DOODLE-DOO and then, oddly, lays an egg.
She’s an old hen (which is probably her issue) and an egg eater (the unforgiveable chicken sin). Their veterinarian keeps urging them to wring her neck, but they can’t bear it.
May 29, 2024 — 7:45 pm
Comments: 6
Permission to break the blog?
In a thread below, Deborah HH opined that she missed the “recent comments” blurb in the sidebar. I do too. Without it, you can’t tell if somebody has revisited an old post with a new comment.
So I roused my lazy ass and had a look at the innards and, sure enough, a plugin I was relying on for the function has died. There are other ways to do it, but my blog is so old and eccentric that I can’t use them.
The layout of WordPress blogs relies on Themes, which set everything from column width to header graphics. There are thousands of them. If you have an orthodox website, you can swap themes all day and everything will fall into place. If you’ve done a bunch of weird, ignorant things to your Theme, it won’t.
I went looking for a WordPress Theme that was anything like the current three-column layout I have to use as a starting point for a clean new Theme and discovered something scary: about half the Themes out there won’t work with my outdated version of PHP (a scripting language for the Web). And my version of PHP is old because…you guessed it. My Theme is too eccentric for a newer one.
Meaning, I gotta modernize or, sooner or later, I’ll be forced to update PHP “for security reasons” and everything goes boom.
All of this to say I’ll be breaking the blog at some point. I can do a lot of tinkering without switching entirely, but I have to jump eventually. Things may look weird. Color might sneak in. A sidebar might disappear for a while. But I should be able to replicate everything eventually.
Maybe.
May 28, 2024 — 6:55 pm
Comments: 7
I named a chicken after this man
Any of you guys follow this man? It’s Nick Rekieta of Rekieta Law in his final form. He had a pretty entertaining YouTube channel explaining lawsuits line by line. Wholesomeness was his gimmick. Married his highschool sweetheart, homeschooled their five kids, regular churchgoer.
I listened to hours of his content about five years ago. So much so, it was playing while my chicks were in the incubator and one seemed like it had imprinted on his voice when it hatched. I named it Rackets after him.
Then the lawsuit I was following came to trial, he was wrong about all of it, and I quit watching.
I’d heard he’d had a fall from grace (he actually won the uncoveted Lolcow of the Year from Kiwi Farms,which is a pretty steep fall) but I had no idea how far. That’s him in a recent stream on the right (he may or may not have something sexual going on under the desk at that moment).
This week, his pastor turned him in and the police busted down his door down and found filth, 25 grams of cocaine, his wife and sidepiece, guns (legal ones, but it’s a crime to have them where there are drugs). They won’t see their kids for a while.
If you want more, YouTube is all over it. Oh, and Rackets the rooster keeled over in the long grass one day, before ever his first “cock-a-doodle-doo.”
May 27, 2024 — 5:57 pm
Comments: 6
Also gay
Ever since the first Assassin’s Creed game released in 2007, fans of the franchise have hankered after a version set in Feudal Japan. Well, this year they’ll get it. Good and hard.
It has two playable characters, a Japanese woman ninja and this guy – the one black guy in all of Feudal Japan (yes, he existed. No, he wasn’t a Samurai).
But that apparently didn’t piss off their fanbase enough, so they decided to make one or both LGBTEIEIO.
Part of the ongoing “I have control of this property you love and I’m wiping my bottom with it” trend in modern media. I can understand why activists do it – they’re activists – but I can’t understand why the shareholders put up with it. A failed videogame (or movie or TV series) is a very expensive proposition. BlackRock isn’t sliding them that much DEI money.
Have a good weekend!
May 24, 2024 — 7:48 pm
Comments: 9
I have no sense of scale
I bought one of these. It’s a single serve blender. I had it in my head that that glass on the top was like an eight-ounce tumbler so the machine would be a slim, compact addition to my kitchen gadgets.
It is, in fact, a counter-hogging brute.
Oh, well. It’s a smoothie thing. I think they designed it with gym bros in mind, one of which I emphatically am not. But I am kind of gullible when it comes to supplements.
I’ve taken and subsequently stopped taking scores of things after that one article I read in the Epoch Times (who, by the way, quietly renewed my subscription without me noticing when the three month trial expired).
So far, only two supplements make a measurable, undeniable difference: collagen (which makes my nails and hair stronger) and fish oil (which makes a definite difference to my achy hand joints).
My current smoothie is a spoonful of instant coffee, a cup of fancy Jersey milk, two spoons of collagen + hyaluronic acid + vitamin C, a spoonful of inulin (I don’t remember what this does, but I accidentally bought a big bag of it) and a scoop of protein powder (some sources say old people don’t get enough protein, some say they get more than enough, and some say you should chew your protein not drink it).
I buy my junk from a company that is obviously promoting itself for peak athletic performance. I have often contemplated writing them and saying they should make a separate website and packaging for that other potential customer base: wrinklies desperately clinging on to wellness.
Do you supplement? With what and how?
May 23, 2024 — 7:51 pm
Comments: 13
Wet.
Welp, it looks like we’re getting a general election over here. On the 4th of July, no less!
Not sure what Sunak is thinking. He is emphatically not a popular politician and he will probably be the death of his party. Absolutely nobody voted for him. Not even members of his own party. He got the top job through some kind of dark WEF fiddle. No-one’s knows.
“Wet” by the way is kind of the British word for RINO.
Absolutely everyone running is a piece of shit and I despair. I think I’ll write in Donald Trump.
Other’n that, nothing to report. Wednesday is my day off and I spent it in the comfy chair watching YouTubes with titles like “the 10 creepiest last minutes caught on camera” and “Pet Owners Share The Most Ridiculous Reason They Had To Bring Their Pet To The Vet”.
Folks, I was born for this life.
May 22, 2024 — 7:57 pm
Comments: 4
Pet the doggy
It’s been a while since we checked in with the Prehistory Guys, but we were bored this afternoon and it turns out they have a project at Göbekli Tepe. Link goes to a whole playlist of short films about it.
Super interesting stuff. This is 10,000 years ago, just at the end of the last ice age, and they had cisterns for storing water and pipes capped with limestone moving the water around the complex.
They still think the builders were nomadic hunter-gatherers, even after finding this gigantic stone complex. As of 2021, only 5% of the known site has been excavated.
Did I tell you I bumped into one of the Prehistory Guys in town? Not surprisingly, he was at a historic attraction. I gave him the side-eye for the longest time, before sidling over and blurting out, “hey, you’re that YouTube guy, aren’t you?”
Then it got super awkward. A big fan would’ve known his name. After a few minutes scraping my toe on the pavement and clearing my throat, I slunk off.
Michael Bott is his name.
We kind of went off the channel because they spend way too much time photographing each other staring at the really cool thing. Oi! You! Show me the really cool thing.
I gave up on Cosmos for the same reason. Thirteen hours of Carl Sagan making the “ooo!” face.
May 21, 2024 — 6:58 pm
Comments: 4
Can’t we just let kids play?
Spotted in Sainsbury’s today. This is a character from a Lego playset called Friends. Her name is Autumn. There are three pictures of her on the box so I can confirm she is an amputee. Not, like, a half-built figure in progress.
She’s pictured on the front with a playmate, Leo, who is a brown person with pink shorts and a pink floral shirt.
Eh. The Danes. They could at least have given the poor girl a hook so she could feed the rabbits.
Story related. When I was about six, my parents were about to throw a party. My mother explained to my brother and me beforehand that one of the guests had lost both her legs (car accident, I think) and would be coming in on crutches and we were on no account to stare or make a big deal of it.
Comes the evening, an attractive young woman sweeps in without her prosthetics, a man on either side holding carrying her by the elbows. My mother took one look and shouted “OH MY GOD, WHERE ARE YOUR LEGS?”
Her legs were in the shop. I’m told our faces, staring at Mother, were beyond horrified.
One more. Some years later, my mother’s best friend had a prosthetic leg. She had an old wooden one (her swimming leg; she could float all day) and she kept it propped up against the wall in her bathroom.
Every time I went into her bathroom and spotted the leg, I blurted out, “oh, I’m sorry!” You know, like I’d walked in on her. Every time.
May 20, 2024 — 7:48 pm
Comments: 6