So! Here we go:

1. Pick a celebrity. Any celebrity at all, though I reserve the right to nix picks I never heard of.

2. We start from scratch every time. No matter who you had last time, you have to turn up and pick again. Poachers are not shunned.

3. Your first choice sticks. Choose wisely!

4. It’s up to you to search the thread and make sure nobody’s got your pick already. What am I, your mother?

5. The pool is open until somebody on the list has the decency to croak. Feel free to jump in any time. Newbies, strangers and drive-bys welcome.

6. If you want the fabulous prize, you have to trust me with a mailing address. If you don’t want the fabulous prize, it may be the most sensible decision of your whole miserable life. Packages go by slow boat, typically take eight to ten weeks and arrive looking crusty and hungover.

7. The new DeadPool will begin the Friday after the prize is awarded.

Once again, you’re playing for a two-pack of Aunty’s weaselicious microwavable spotted dick. A two pack, I said! And by the time it gets there, an out of date two pack, most likely. Eat at your own risk.

Let the macabre speculation begin!

My home state continually finds new ways to make me proud. But it’s not often I’m reading one heart-warming tale from the land of my birth when somebody emails me a link to another.

The first is a Memphis lady who disappeared from her hotel room, only to turn up under the box springs six weeks later. My, what a fragrant accomodation that must be, if nobody noticed for a month and a half. Via HotAir.

The second concerns a young Gallatin men who robbed a bank dressed as a leprechaun. The ending isn’t happy: he and his getaway driver were shot down a short time later. Two promising young Tennessee boys cut down in their prime. Via Uncle B.

Okay, remember y’all — Dead Pool tomorrow. Six sharp. At the moment, that’s six hours ahead of the right coast, nine hours ahead of the left coast. Be there, or no dick for you!

Thing is, there are many swift, direct routes to Brighton from London, including an excellent fast train service. So Londoners assume (as we once did) that it would be even easier to get to Brighton if you lived on the Southeast coast.

It’s not. It’s narrow, twisty backroads and lots of them.

And then we got lost in Brighton and couldn’t find parking (and when we did, it was nearly £10 for three hours). And then the Polish cab driver dropped us off in the wrong place and swore it was the right place.

To our surprise, there was not a meal on offer, so we were forced — forced — to burn through the snack table like buzz-saws, stuffing our faces with Pringles and Doritos and reduced-fat chive-flavored Philadelphia cream cheese. It was oddly homely.

And the way back was everything the way there had been, plus fog. I mean, a real Sherlock Holmes / Jack the Ripper, cotton-wool thing off the sea. We kept an eye out for the Phantom Hitch-hiker.

Anyhoo, it’s 12:30 and we’re just in. If I’m going to maintain the sacred tradition of getting puking drunk for St Paddy, I’d better hurry up.

There’s not an Irish bone in my body, but I believe in observing the sacraments.

Hey, remember back in 1995, those Minnesota schoolkids who found half the frogs in their local pond had extra limbs, leading to the obvious conclusion that ZOMG WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!? Yeah, it turned out to be perfectly natural and not caused by evil Gaia-raping modern chemical corporations.

Scientists discovered all the frogs with deformed limbs were in ponds with a certain snail, which plays intermediate host to a certain fluke. The fluke gets into the developing frog embryo and fucks with its limb-producing buds. Instant mutants, just add water.

Of course, hippies still talk about “high incidences of amphibian deformity in response to environmental degradation” but at least they’re doing it with some cool pictures. New York artist Brandon Ballengée has collected gefukt frog specimens from all over the world, which he dyes in cheerful contrasting colors and scans on his flatbed scanner.

Which is EXACTLY what I do with my eight-legged frogs.

His show opens in London today. Uncle B and I have to go up to London soon, but I think we’ll be giving this one a miss.

Yep. This year’s crop. I’m pretty sure that one ewe didn’t squeeze out all nine of those lambs, but she was the designated babysitter.

None of the ladies was happy to see us. Two old dears got so agitated, they started head-butting each other really hard. I didn’t know lady sheeps did that.

Anyhow, congratulations nachogranny! Peter Graves folded, in the shortest Dead Pool so far (following the longest Dead Pool so far. Isn’t death funny?). If you would like your delicious spotted dicks, sir or madam, be sure to give me a mailing address. If not…I totally understand.

We start over next Friday, 6pm Weaseltime (note: we haven’t gone to daylight savings yet, so that’s 1pm East Coast and 9am West Coast). All prior guesses are tossed out and we start from scratch, m’kay? So y’all get busy poaching the best choices.

Have the votes to pass this comprehensive pile of shit, I mean. I’m guessing…not right this minute. But by next week, who knows?

You know what amazes me? That they let themselves get bogged down in the details at all. They only have to get the vaguest framework passed now, and then they have YEARS to fiddle with the knobs and dials.

Why didn’t Nancy take the public option people and the pro-abortion people aside and say, “look…we have to get our nose in the tent, okay? For god’s sake, don’t queer the deal over something we can change later.”

And I’m guessing that’s exactly what she’s doing. By now, though, this thing is so toxic, even if it passes there’s a good chance it’ll fail in the courts or the states or be starved to death by a Republican majority.

Anyhow, I don’t want to step on my previous post, which is attracting some nice attention (thankee kindly, linkers). Have a good weekend, everyone!

Oh, now this is rich. German greenies calculate that a blog which gets 15,000 hits or more a month (yay! we qualify!) pumps out 8 pounds of carbon dioxide a year.

So what you’re supposed to do is, you write a blog post about this, you put a link to them in the sidebar using their “my blog is carbon neutral” graphic, they plant a tree in your name, it soaks up 11 pounds of CO2, and — violoncello! — your blog IS carbon neutral.

So let’s point out the utterly fucking obvious, shall we? There is no relationship between blogs and trees. Nobody is waiting around for a pingback before they go stick a spruce in the ground. This is an ongoing reforestation program (by the Arbor Day Foundation in the Plumas National Forest. In California) and these German greenie-weenies have just latched onto to display, once again, their weak (or dishonest) grasp of cause-and-effect.

The trees will be planted regardless.

Do you know, China is set to pass the US this year as the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide? I say, let’s get on board that campaign! For every blog displaying a colorful “my blog belches carbon” icon (small sidebar version here, pointlessly large version here), China will build another inefficient coal-fired electricity plant or smoke-belching industrial smokestack. Why, your humble blog could be responsible for spewing thousands of extra tons of carbon dioxide (along with unknown quantities of other, real pollutants) into the atmosphere every year!

Okay, not really, but it makes as much sense as that Green bullshit.

UPDATE: whoa! Small Dead Animals ‘lanche! That’s one of Weasel’s favoritest blogs. Y’all be sure to come back Friday for the Dead Pool. Everyone’s welcome — and you might be the lucky winner of Aunty’s Spotted Dick!

Yep. Top three Nancy Pelosi image searches are “breasts” “young” and “hot.” I just lost the will to live.

Anyhoo, I discovered something interesting today, which you will find probably find totally boring. Humor me. After looking at bank transfers and bureaux d’exchange and other methods of moving my moneys from my US checking account to my UK checking account, I have discovered the fastest and easiest and cheapest method: put my American debit card in an ATM machine, pull out £200, walk in and deposit it in my UK bank. My US bank charges me $1 to do this, and I got within $.01 of today’s posted exchange rate.

Yep. That’s it. What were you expecting, Grammy Pelosi’s hot young breasts?!

The long, slow process of replacing my professional artard gear continues — my new scanner arrived this afternoon. First task is digitizing bits of my worthless coin collection.

No, seriously — I collect what real collectors call “lunch money” — heavily circulated world coins that are worth, at most, the value written on the front. Bought them in ten pound lots on eBay (my dealer doesn’t seem to be in business any more). Ten pounds, let me tell you, is a buttload of small change. Took weeks and weeks to go through them all, and every one of them guaranteed to be worth jack shit.

There would always be lots of fascinating and beautiful stuff, though. Mid-19th to the mid-20th Centuries and every continent on the globe.

You could tell a lot about a place from its money. Like, money with pictures of food on it comes from places where people are starving. Money with food and industrial equipment comes from Communist places where people are starving. In the immediate post-war era, the smallest coins in Europe were sometimes made of horrible cheap and nasty aluminum. Oh, and I’ll never forget the first time I turned over a coin and spotted a swastika on it. Brrrrrr — Nazi lunch money!

I thought some coins would make interesting merchandise. You would think that coins, being as public and emblematic as national flags, governments wouldn’t be all anal-retentive about copyrighting their images. You’d be wrong. This’ll be fun to figure out.

Oh, and the coin in the picture was, I thought, the one time I put one over on the bulk coin people. Without the holes (which were used to make it into a button or charm), a George III sovereign like that would be worth upwards of £1,000. But I’ve been digging around, and that there is almost certainly Victorian brass play money, worth nuffink.

So it’s consistent with the general high quality and value of the rest of my collection.

God, this whole healthcare thing makes me feel like I hopped aboard the Crazy Train for Crazy Town. There is no Obama bill, am I right? There’s the bill the House already passed, and there’s the bill the Senate already passed. Any changes to either and it’s a brand new bill that has to go back through the whole process again from scratch, which is right out. So all this crap about incorporating Republican ideas from the dog-and-pony show is just bullshit, am I right?

So why are they reporting the bullshit with a straight face?

No, no…please not to be answering the rhetorical question. I know why. It’s just, every time the fourth estate looks me in the eye and tells me utter flat-out lies, it feels like the first time.