Outdoor chocolate
The town was called Bunny, you see. It’s in Nottinghamshire.
So Nestlé snuck in in the middle of the night and renamed it Easter Bunny and built this ten-foot-tall chocolate rabbit. Yes, it’s all chocolate. Upwards of a hundred pounds of the stufff. The basket – also chocolate – has 698 treats in it, one for each person in the village.
The article describes it as a surprise to the village, but surely the mayor or someone was in on it. I feel like you have to have permission.
I mean, this is a nice story and all, but something about outdoor chocolate bothers me. I mean, won’t it…melt or get stuff stuck in it or the seagulls and rats and vandals will eat it and shit all over everything. It seems big unsanitary.
Oh, well. Bunny gets a park bench out of it – not made from chocolate.
March 28, 2023 — 6:35 pm
Comments: 5
A little Greek swag
Pretty little cup to go with my fancy coffees. It’s the tiniest demitasse I ever did see, but I have a carafe for the coffee, so that’s okay.
The latest is me trying (and failing) to make a proper Turkish coffee. I can’t tell you how many YouTubes I’ve watched.
You start with a medium roast arabica, ground to a fine powder. Add one heaping teaspoon per cup plus sugar (if desired) and water into a cezve (I don’t have a one of them, but I do have a small copper-bottomed vessel I used for making chai).
Heat it slowly over medium heat until just before the boiling point. It bubbles up and you skim off the crema into a cup (a larger cup than this, obvs), then slowly pour in the coffee. The grounds either dissolve or sink to the bottom, I’m not sure which is supposed to happen.
Because it doesn’t. I get a giant mouthful of hot grounds. Every time.
Oh, well. Once I pour it through a filter, it makes a really very nice cup of coffee. It’s just not a Turkish coffee.
March 27, 2023 — 6:59 pm
Comments: 7
Oh, c’mon!
This one is a reach. Local news site has accused Upper Dicker and Lower Dicker of being “rudely named Sussex hamlets.” I’ve been to both and they is innocent.
Dicker is a perfectly cromulent word. It’s no Pratt’s Bottom
I know what happened. All these local news sites run on a steady diet of “this pretty Sussex village” and “this quaint Sussex pub” stories. And, while we have a lot of both, they soon blow through all the really good ones. Then they get desperate.
We are situated on a road that runs several miles between a village and a town. Not surprisingly, we’re on this road a lot. It was recently featured in one of these items as one of the prettiest drives in Sussex.
I told Uncle B and he laughed. “The one with the industrial estate?” The very one. Sheep are quaint in lambing time, though.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
March 24, 2023 — 8:08 pm
Comments: 5
They’re not even my cats
Microchipping cats to become compulsory in the UK this year.
I know. I’m reduced to this. That’s just how boring and awful my day was today.
On a brighter note, some poor headline writer got to use “meow or never” – so that probably increased the quota of joy in the universe.
p.s. Yes. All my cats are chipped, always.
March 23, 2023 — 7:47 pm
Comments: 7
Moo!
Weather was atrocious again today – wet and windy. We were going a little stir crazy, so we headed out to a new farm shop. Yes, that’s what we do for kicks. We have to go further and further afield to find new ones, though.
You might think they’re all alike, but wrong again, my imaginary internet friend. There are some things all farm shops seem to have in common – there’s a particular brand of frozen entrée name of Cook that’s in every one of them and some local grocery stores. I think Cook supplies the freezers for free, which explains that.
But they all have their specialities. Some have their own local fruit farm or market gardens. The one nearest us specializes in being terrible, which is a shame. It’s a fake farm shop for tourists.
The one we went to today specializes in meat. They rear their own pigs and sheep and especially cows. We like meat.
On a Summer’s day, you can watch the herd contentedly grazing behind the shop. You probably could’ve watched them discontentedly munching hay in a barn today if you had a mind to get wet.
They clearly have a mixed meat/dairy herd because FRESH MILK DISPENSER, Y’ALL! You buy the bottle (or bring it back washed), press the button and DAIRY MIRACLE. I’m very fond of milk.
I’d like to think on the other side of that wall is a cow hooked up to a milking machine.
March 22, 2023 — 7:15 pm
Comments: 8
Weary and elderly
You and me both, mate.
This sad seal washed up on the beach in Arun. He looked so awful, people kept calling animal control, who sent a vet out.
Because of course they did.
Turns out he’s just old and tired. And moulting.
I did not know seals spend one month a year shedding their hair and the whole layer of skin underneath it. During the month, they stop eating, sleep a lot, roll around on the sand and look like absolute shit.
That’s it, y’all. I’m moulting.
March 21, 2023 — 7:57 pm
Comments: 9
It’s the Equinox, y’all!
Hoo boy, that illustration does not work in black and white at all. I stole it from this article. From the article:
The equinox happens at the same moment worldwide, although our clock times reflect a different time zone…Interestingly, due to time zone differences, there isn’t a March 21 equinox in mainland U.S. during the entire 21st century! We won’t see a March 21 equinox again until 2101.
I’m going to post that paragraph just as if I understood it.
It well and truly felt like Spring over the weekend, but we’re back to damp and miserable today and for the foreseeable.
Changing the subject, I enjoyed this video: man demonstrates the ten types of magic. This guy is a brilliant stop-motion animator, so that’s probably a clue. If you want to know how he did #10, it’s not the obvious. I watched it a bajillion times to work it out.
If you don’t feel like watching it a bajillion times, I’ll spoil it in the comments.
March 20, 2023 — 7:25 pm
Comments: 10
Happy St Patrick’s Day!
I didn’t think I had any Irish forebears at all, but during my free two weeks of Ancestry.com I did discover some of my people left from Irish ports. Who knows?
Also, I didn’t find any evidence my mother’s mother was French, as per legend, except for the French-sounding last name. I traced her line all the way back to a Texas home for imbeciles and decided that was enough genealogy for me.
Have a good weekend!
March 17, 2023 — 6:55 pm
Comments: 5
Paging Dr Pepper
Huh. I didn’t know New Scientist came up with the term. They certainly didn’t come up with the concept. I read a whole book about it, years before 1994. The author phoned people up whose names lined up with their professions.
Some people were like, “how dare you, sir! I chose my profession for the most serious of grownup reasons!” And some were like, “why yes, being born Lester Buttpeep did influence my decision to become a proctologist.”
My favorite personal example was the kitten I rescued on 6/6/06. Naturally, I named him Damian. The vet was like “lady, are you sure you want to do that?”
I’m confident Damian would have grown up to be a hellcat even if I named him Princess Pinkie Fluffybunny, but he was every inch a Damian.
Today, I ran across a real corker of an example in, of all places, New Scientist:
A few months ago, Dr Organ – Dr Jason Organ – was named the new editor-in-chief of the journal Anatomical Sciences Education. This added flesh to the nominative determinism tradition that is occasionally evident in body-parts-centric medical journals, starting (as far as Feedback is aware) with the publication Brain. Henry Head and Russell Brain were each its editor, at different times, Head from 1905 to 1923, Brain from 1954 to 1967.
Those heads of Brain achieved a sort of medico-literary ecstasy in the December 1961 issue of Brain. Readers could savour an article there titled “Henry Head: The man and his ideas”, authored by Russell Brain. It was Brain head Brain on Brain head Head, in Brain.
I almost had to draw a sentence diagram.
March 16, 2023 — 6:50 pm
Comments: 12
Trap streets, easter eggs and Mountweazels
Speaking of maps without copyright, when I were a young corporate art drudge, it was beaten into me that I must never, ever steal art. Not for any moral principle, you understand, but because I worked for a big company with a lot of money and my boss would nail my ass to the wall if I got sued for copyright infringement.
To this day, I experience whole-body cringe when someone hands me a book and says, “here, you can use this picture.” Which has happened to me, I swear, hundreds of times.
Maps were always a particular problem, because we always needed good maps and who the hell can develop a map from scratch? Oh, the lengths I went to to steal maps without stealing maps.
I was schooled in the fear of trap streets. They’re fake roads put on maps so the copyright holder can spot when someone has traced their map. Here’s an article about trap streets in London. I pinched the picture at the top from that article, because I thought that would be meta.
Sometimes, the solution would be to put trap streets and easter eggs into a bit of traced topography. Or remove bits. Or stretch or shrink it along an axis. The point being, when one bit of art is overlaid on another, they shouldn’t match.
I have written about trap streets before. See also Mountweazel.
March 15, 2023 — 8:03 pm
Comments: 1