A tail of two roos
The rooster on the left was once the #2 boy. The boy on the right was #1 when this picture was taken.
The girl in the middle was eaten by a fox, but that’s another story.
One day, rooster #2 had a beakful of it and beat the snot out of roo #1, becoming hisself #1. I didn’t realize this until I came out later and the white chicken was nowhere to be found. I called and called and he finally slunk out of the bushes all muddy and bloody and sorry for himself (he wasn’t seriously hurt, but comb and wattle injuries bleed horribly).
Since that day, the white chicken (whose name is Sam because he hatched on the 4th of July) has gotten smaller and smaller. He’s about half the size of Mo now. He mopes around the back door, away from the other chickens. I make sure to throw him treats. Honestly, I’d love to fatten him up a bit.
So! Is this hormonal? Emotional? Is he ill? (If so, he’s been ill a long time without being visibly sick). It’s sad, really. Chicken politics is savage.
November 22, 2022 — 7:25 pm
Comments: 4
Relentless
My great aunt was Jeanne Eagels’ understudy in the 1922 Broadway production of Rain.
I just looked it up and Jeanne Eagels had a sad end. She developed a taste for alcohol and ultimately paired it with heroin. By the end, she was also using chloral hydrate to sleep.
Hardcore.
She keeled over one day while talking to her doctor – or, as we call it where I come from – up and died. She was 39.
Too late for my auntie to play the part, though.
Why did I think of this today? Because OH MY GOD IT WILL NOT STOP RAINING FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING HOLY IS IT MONSOON SEASON ON THIS SOGGY LITTLE ISLAND?
I know it’s England, but GEEZ.
My auntie did alright for herself. She dated Fred MacMurray for a while, but eventually moved on to marry an obscenely rich man from one of the old fortunes.
Her daughter is younger than my dad. I’ve met her, but she never asked me over to Martha’s Vineyard. Huh.
November 21, 2022 — 8:02 pm
Comments: 5
Well, that was boring
I had to buy a scanned copy of a 19th C Sussex directory for work and it’s honestly the most boring. I was expecting ads for “Doctor Snodgrass Cocaine Suppositories” and “New! Modern! Electric hernia truss!” but no. This ad was the most interesting, if only for the word “dentifricium.”
We bought it for the directory part, but even that was a bust – it’s scanned but not OCR’ed, so it’s not searchable.
I did learn a new word – vade mecum. Okay, that’s two words. It’s a reference or guide you carry around and refer to constantly. The publisher of this directory also published something called the Letter Writer’s Vade Mecum and advertised it throughout. You can still find copies.
I read a sample. It was dreadful advice.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
November 18, 2022 — 7:08 pm
Comments: 2
The further adventures of Weasel’s fifty quid
On or around May 1, 2019 I bought £50 worth of bitcoin for a lark. I’ve posted about it before. The next day, it dropped £4 and I thought it served me right.
But by the end of the month, it was around £80 and it never dropped below £70 again.
The plan was to buy a little every month, but Coinbase won’t let me play any more without updated ID. I have my passport, but there’s some rule about it matching the country I’m living in. Probably a new rule, since they let me open an account in the first place. I believe they’d let me take the money out, but it’s more fun to watch it move around.
Remember, this is all from the original untouched £50 seed money. There’s the peak: November 14, 2021. £652.05. Whew!
So what is it in the wake of this whole FTX mess? £156.68. Not great, but a hell of a lot more money than it would have made sitting in a savings account for 30 months.
You know, watching past footage of world leaders smooching up to this FTX slob Sam Bankman-Fried in his shorts and t-shirt is really something. They thought them young’uns could really magic money out of thin air, did they? I mean, the gullible ones, not the co-conspirators.
When I went to buy my first computer, the salesman pointed to a boy messing with one of the display models and said, “look at that – kids are just natural at this stuff.” I didn’t know a whole lot about computers, but I could see the kid was just confidently mashing random buttons while the operating system spit back the digital equivalent of “please stop.”
November 17, 2022 — 7:13 pm
Comments: 9
Air fryer pizza!
You may recall that among my many accomplishments, I once made pizza for a living. Specifically, Sicilian deep dish pizza. Now I have mastered the art of homemade za in the air fryer, using this ONE WEIRD TRICK.
Can’t be clickbait, you’re here already.
If you can get it where you are, buy a pound of raw white bread dough (don’t sell it here, so I do the pizza program on the breadmaker). That will make three 9″ pies, or two if you like a lot of crust. It freezes wonderfully.
Dough works better if it’s a little warm; I usually give it twenty seconds in the nuker. Roll it out with a rolling pin and then place it in the bottom of the food basket, with the grill removed, and press it around the sides. Unless you’re some kind of crazy cleanaholic, the basket is probably just oily enough that the dough will come out easily when it’s done.
Give it five minutes or so, until the dough holds its shape and has a little strength. Then – here’s the important thing I learned! – flip it over and give it about seven minutes upside down, until it’s just starting to brown. If you don’t do this, the pie will be gluey and underdone on the bottom.
Flip it back over and add sauce (I used storebought spaghetti sauce with a little added olive oil and cracked black pepper because I’m lazy like that). That poor little bent spoon is perfect for spreading the sauce around – and hooking under the edge of the dough to lift it out whenever necessary.
The pie I was taught to make has the ingredients under a solid layer of cheese, and that’s my preference. This one is bell pepper, onion, mushroom and pepperoni. I cook that part for a few minutes in its own before adding cheese. The house mixture was 50/50 cheddar and mozzarella.
Cook until desired doneness (I like the cheese a little browned), hook it out with your ickle spoon, and viola!
Since all food looks gross in black and white, here’s the final product in color.
Or you can buy a 9″ supermarket frozen pizza and give it ten minutes. That’s good, too.
November 16, 2022 — 5:01 pm
Comments: 9
Say, what’s your battleship doing in my back yard?
Okay, it’s anchored off Hampshire, the county next door, but it’s near enough. People are gathering on shore to gawp at it. The USS Gerald R. Ford. Wikipedia says it’s the largest warship ever built in terms of displacement, which I guess means there might be a different shaped boat that comes close.
It’s too big to anchor in Portsmouth, so it’s just hanging out there looking…big for a couple of days.
Ooo…Gerald Ford was a hottie back in the day. Who would’ve guessed?
Unrelated: today I learned bears don’t have collarbones and can squeeze themselves through tiny opening. Okay, not entirely true – they have free-floating collarbones, but they can sure squeeze themselves through tiny openings like big rats.
Here is a 500 pound bear squeezing hisself through a 14″ by 14″ crawlspace window.
November 15, 2022 — 7:00 pm
Comments: 10
Weasel fall down, go ouch
I caught my toe in something yesterday and did a faceplant in the chicken run. The filthy, muddy chicken run. I’m not badly hurt – I biked into work this morning – but I’m sore and inclined to feel sorry for myself.
The terribly pixelated image is Willy Weasel, punching bag of the Tufty Safety Club. I’ve written about Tufty before. Willy got an icecream, so they ran over him with a car.
They ran over him at least twice in that series, but I’m sure I remember one where Willy gets hit and spins around three times in the air while the slide whistle goes woo-woo-woo.
It’s enough to give a weasel a persecution complex.
November 14, 2022 — 6:47 pm
Comments: 3
Boom!
Brits love their fireworks, but the locals especially love a maroon. It is a very big boom to mark timed occasions, like a minute of silence.
There was a maroon this morning at 11:00 and 11:02. There were two on the day after the queen died (to mark the Accession, I think).
There will be one at the start of the bonfire night fireworks – which, as I have explained before, is staggered in Sussex so every local bonfire society can march in everyone else’s parade. It goes on for months.
Anyway, I try to observe the proper decorum, but I’m afraid every time one of these bad boys goes off, I think to myself “Wotta maroon!” in Bugs Bunny’s voice. I will always be an American.
Have a good weekend, maroons!
November 11, 2022 — 6:39 pm
Comments: 15
Mystery solved
One area where we have consistently gained ground in the culture wars is guns, which slightly puzzled me. I was playing my latest VR game earlier and the penny dropped – when you play first person shooters, love of guns is baked in. Guys who grew up with this stuff (and that’s most of them now) will never be afraid of guns.
This game, like most, features guns that exist in the real world and the more you know about them the better your game. I’ll bet there are guys who have learned squillions playing games like this. I’ll bet if I went to the range today, my shooting would have improved.
In VR, too, you aren’t entering keyboard commands, you’re using your hands to eject the magazine or release the safety or pump the shotgun. You’d have to want to try it for real. Have to.
Oh, this is a weird little survival-horror game called Into The Radius, and it’s happy to hand me my ass all day long. But not tonight – tonight I’m having to run a Zoom conference : (
November 10, 2022 — 6:42 pm
Comments: 4
Behold!
The worst chicken house ever bodged together by human hands. Yes, the roof doesn’t align, like, at all. Yes, the door is held shut by a twisted bit of wire (it was fully 1/8th of an inch too tall to fit in the frame).
Finally, I called Uncle B out and we hit it with hammers until it submitted. I’m not done ‘finishing’ it, but I have a feeling we’ll be covering the roof in tarpaper. Honestly, it could not possibly have gone together the way the ‘instructions’ said it would.
Moe will be warm and dry and have a proper perch to sleep upon, so I’m calling it a win.
As for the red wave that didn’t, I haven’t much to say – except that it is extremely unusual for the betting shops to get it this wrong. Pollsters, yes. People with money on the line, not so much. I think we’re in uncharted waters and the old rules no longer apply – for whatever reason.
I’m’a dip out of politics for a while, until I can act less butt-hurt.
November 9, 2022 — 3:56 pm
Comments: 13