So let it be written
I’ve decided to declare Carl the winner of DP 199, since there was a very considerable interval between his pick and the death. Also, I kinda vaguely think I’ve heard of Violet Hensley. I should; she’s from my neck of the woods.
With apologies to LavenderGirl, but sports picks have to be super famous for me to have heard of them at all. Plus, I’m snooty about it.
On kinda the same topic, why can’t I tell X not to show me posts about sports in the sidebar? Every time one appears, I mark it individually as “I’m not interested in this” and after a couple of weeks of that, I don’t see many of them any more. But life really should be a lot more customizable and could be made so easily.
And on the topic of dumb computers, @Grok simply could not understand that if we can see the skull through the magnifying glass, the magnifying glass needs to be on top of the skull. After four or five tries, the result was funny and creepy enough that I ran with it anyway.
Oh, yeah – Dead Pool tomorrow!
September 3, 2026 — 5:40 pm
Comments: 3
Weasel tongue!
Please enjoy this video of a lady giving her pet weasel belly rubs.
Welp, the last of the chicken houses went on the pile today. Shame prevents me showing you a picture of Garbage Mountain – I had to take snapshots to get a quote from the removals man. It was a pretty amazing pile when all the outside junk was rounded up. In our defense, we inherited some of it from the previous owners.
Or does that make it worse somehow?
I did, as advised, keep the pole that propped up the whole end of the chicken house on for years. It seemed too heroic an object to send to the dump.
September 2, 2026 — 6:23 pm
Comments: 6
Hillbilly masterpiece
It’s the end of an era, folks. Here be the remains of my first chicken house (circa 2012) and it’s a wrench to see it go. The gardener began tearing it down today (with a little more glee than was entirely seemly, if you axe me).
It was kept in service well past its sell-by date because I had more roosters than I knew what to do with and no place for them to go. I didn’t want to repair it properly or it could never be removed but I had to make it water tight and serviceable until my flock shrank by attrition. So I composed this redneck masterpiece.
Incorporated into its roof were two seatless lawnchairs, a tarpaulin and bricks. The whole back fell off of it one day (I worked this out when I found the resident rooster strutting around the yard), to be replaced by another seatless lawnchair, some bubble wrap and a bungee cord.
Finally, the nesting box side threatened to fall off entirely and was braced into place with a broomstick jammed into the ground.
It was a work of art. I done Tennessee proud, y’all.
September 1, 2026 — 6:18 pm
Comments: 5
Tell me what I’m looking at
The thing above is a transformer, I guess. Above that (not pictured) are three insulators with wires. But I’m interested in the thing in the middle – the X shape with the ring in the center. It’s made of metal. If it’s ornamental, it isn’t very and if it’s functional, I can’t think what the function is. Structural? Like, bracing?
As I was typing this, a squirrel climbed down our cobnut tree and began pinching cobnuts. We do not – and I can’t emphasize this enough – have squirrels in this part of Sussex. I’ve seen them in other, more wooded parts (mostly squashed in the road), but we’re an area of rolling sheep fields and a few scraggly thorn trees. We do NOT have squirrels.
Cheeky bastard. Now we know where our nuts went this year.
August 31, 2026 — 6:41 pm
Comments: 8
Memento mori Friday
Okay, I made that up. Memento mori Friday isn’t a thing. Google Pictures showed me this snapshot as a seven years ago today… thing and I thought it was cool enough to post. It’s the stone for Lawrence Day and Joane his Wife who died in 1676. I have no idea where it was.
In the prior thread, Rich Rostrom has a burning question about the Dead Pool. Please spend the weekend arguing about it.
Have a good one!
August 28, 2026 — 6:18 pm
Comments: 8
The dumbest place on the internet
Man, I used to think Youtube comments were the dumbest posts on the internet, but Nextdoor takes the biscuit. I get notification of new posts and I know clicking them will be an utter waste of time, but I do it anyway.
It’s all I lost my cat, yay, my cat came home again and Evri has delivered my package to somebody else. That last is particularly aggrieving because I’m waiting for a shipment from Evri and for a week my tracking number has come back “We’re expecting your parcel to arrive with us soon.”
Plus, not a lot goes on around here, so it’s constantly showing me news items from “my village” that are, in fact, from a town 50 miles away. Do you have Nextdoor in the States or is it a limey thing?
Anyway, we’re going to the moving pictures tonight, so I have to go take a bath.
August 27, 2026 — 2:53 pm
Comments: 11
Well, do you feel safer?
This appeared simultaneously with my most recent WordPress upgrade. Search tells me it isn’t a WordPress plugin, though, it’s something my host platforms on its server. I’m not sure how it applies – users can’t upload things and I’m not likely to upload malware myself. @Grok says it’s a good thing and not to sweat it. shrug.jpg
If you’d asked me, I’d have said Dolly Parton was a lot older than 80 and Tim Curry was a lot younger, but there we are. Things are moving.
August 26, 2026 — 6:15 pm
Comments: 4
Waifs and strays
Keep chickens, they said. It’ll be relaxing, they said.
The girls (but not Sam) somehow found a way into the sheep field next door and couldn’t remember the way back. They were calling to each other on either side of the hedge. I went to retrieve them and found things have grown up a whole, whole lot since the last time I went chicken fishing.
Bad things happen on the wrong side of the fence. We call it Llama Field because I wanted to buy it and put a pair of llamas on it, but it was not to be. There be foxes.
As you might have foreseen, after I got gloves and some clippers and got myself snarled up in the bramble, they suddenly found their way back through the fence. But it’s clear that when the cold weather comes (and it’s on the way), I’m going to have to give some attention to the growth along the boundary.
August 25, 2026 — 6:34 pm
Comments: 2
We used to shop there!
It’s the Kroger on Gallatin Pike, 1964, but that’s not me. Damn, lady, that’s a lot of groceries.
I left Facebook years ago because I got so frustrated with it. I was treating it like a proper social media platform for communicating with people, but it’s awful for that. It nests replies layers deep and won’t show them to you unless you click see more a gazillion times. It shuffles comments and articles and runs them out of sequence. God help you if you try to go back and find something you were reading two seconds ago.
But I recently worked out how to enjoy it: watch it like television. Just let things wash over me and not expect continuity. It shows me some interesting things I asked to see and lots of interesting things I didn’t ask to see and how it works out what to show me, I neither know nor care. I’m a Teletubby and interesting things pop into my world.
Mostly pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. Old pictures of where I am now and old pictures of where I used to be. Lately, for reasons known only to the algorithmic gods, it’s been pictures of a Nashville suburb I haven’t visited since 1970 at about the time we moved there in 1964.
But I do get carried away trying to pitch in for someone rehoming a chicken, only to discover they’re in Idaho.
August 24, 2026 — 6:42 pm
Comments: 5
Catz
The British Newspaper Archive tells me they have recently digitised a newspaper called Our Cats: “‘The only newspaper in the world solely devoted to cats,’ the first edition of Our Cats appeared on 1 November 1899 in response to the growing cat fancy community. Filled with reports on cat shows and ‘cat personalities of interest,’ readers could write to Our Cats for advice on caring for their feline friends.”
As I think it vanishingly unlikely that any of you have a subscription to the British Newspaper Archive, I will forbear to give a link. I must say, though, that new things are going online now at an amazing pace. More and more, I can sit in my garden plugging away on my laptop and do all sorts of neat original research.
That’s what I do with myself now: research local history. It’s rich pickin’s.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
August 21, 2026 — 6:31 pm
Comments: 5