Ew.
I don’t know why these things started appearing in my Facebook feed – to my knowledge, I’ve never liked or followed any of them – but there are a bunch of guys who dive on wrecked cars for fun. They travel around the States visiting lakes and rivers looking for submerged cars.
Some of them have really neat toys like drones and sonar. Specially adapted fish finders, I guess. They found, like, twenty in one spot.
The underwater footage of cars covered in barnacles and ick is especially creepy. Well, not as creepy as winching muddy cars out of the drink. Last scene in Psycho creepy. Mostly, they’re just stolen cars, but sometimes there’s a body inside (they blur anything awful). Sometimes the police seem grateful for the help, sometimes…not so much.
I can’t quite stop watching these things. When I was small, we had a houseboat on the Tennessee River that we spent a lot of time on. It was big enough to stay overnight and cook and everything. When I was nine, it sank and I never got over the idea of a place so comfortable and familiar under 30 feet of murky water. Brrrrr.
The channels are Wrecked and Recovered, Exploring with Nug (I think these two channels are related) and Adventures with Purpose.
July 15, 2026 — 6:25 pm
Comments: 1
Just hanging with my posse
The weather’s been fantastic lately. I’m out here first I’m up and I stay until it gets chilly, hanging with my chooks. We saw another fox today.
That’s not the story I wanted to post, though. I want to post this story:
A pensioner has been arrested after a report of indecent exposure in a street. A man, described as wearing a T-shirt and red mankini, was reported as acting indecently outside an address in Aberdale Road, Polegate, on June 19 at around 2.20pm. A 73-year-old man was subsequently arrested on suspicion of exposure and has been bailed while an investigation is ongoing.
So I asked ChatGPT to illustrate it, and it got all through making the illustration and then said, “I’m sorry, I can’t do that, Hal.” or rather:
We’re so sorry, but the image we created may violate our guardrails around nudity, sexuality, or erotic content. If you think we got it wrong, please retry or edit your prompt.
It’s so funny to me that it goes to all the trouble to create the image and then, just before the reveal, steps back and goes, “oh, no – we can’t show THAT.” I’d love to see the gallery of rejected images.
July 14, 2026 — 7:06 pm
Comments: 4
Hey, everyone!
Let’s admire Bob Mulroy’s cock!
Okay, he had an even nicer picture of seven handsome black Orpington roosters, but then I couldn’t make that joke. The unfortunate results of hatching 24 eggs.
I considered putting a few of Winneretta’s eggs in the incubator (trust me – I know they’re fertilized), but thought it was too late in the season for chicks. They need time to feather up before the weather turns.
She’s consistently laid an egg a day since she’s started. She’s laid nearly a dozen now (more thank I think Mapp laid in her whole miserable life). That’s just unnatural for a pekin.
July 13, 2026 — 5:49 pm
Comments: 4
But what does it meeeeean?
Street art spotted today. It’s two blind (injured? crippled?) rats pointing to what used to be the night collection box of a bank that closed years ago. I have no idea what that means.
To change the subject, I was reading earlier about an unofficial plugin for Claude called Caveman, which makes the AI respond in the tersest possible terms. I asked Claude to explain it to me and it said “Why Use Many Word When Few Word Do Trick?”
It compared the result to the sort of language we used to write telegrams – “ARRIVE TUES STOP” – or classified ads. This is about reducing the number of tokens people who buy their AI in chunks have to buy.
In practice, the natural language mode of AI uses a tiny fraction of the tokens used in writing code or working through problems. Claude estimated a maximum 4% savings. And the language part is what makes it fun to talk to.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
July 10, 2026 — 3:36 pm
Comments: 4
Oh no! I haven’t posted anything!
I just realized it’s long past the usual time and I haven’t posted anything! I don’t do that very often. So let me tell you what I was doing instead of posting.
Sitting in a lovely sunny garden surrounded by chickens watching videos from an account called Mad City Modern. He’s a gay man named Barry who lives in Madison Wisconsin and refinishes 20th C furniture he buys at yard sales. He keeps a running stream of consciousness commentary as he strips and refinishes furniture.
Which shouldn’t appeal to me but does. I find his voice and his philosophy soothing. I hate his taste in furniture but I love his taste in wood and finishes (I’m a shellac girl from way back). I like his dog.
The channel is four years old and he’s humble about his skills. I gather from his later videos that he’s developed a following. He does a live social thing on Wednesdays and people regularly give him stuff from his Amazon wishlist. He gets enough sponsorships that he doesn’t have to resell everything he refinishes. He ends up keeping most of his furniture, as far as I can see, because he makes a connection with it while he handles it so much.
This honestly makes me so happy for him.
July 9, 2026 — 7:46 pm
Comments: 2
Turds in Spaaaaaaace
Japan’s Hayabusa2 probe sent home this picture of a near-earth asteroid. They weren’t expecting to get images anything like this good. Lead scientist Yuya Mimasu said he was “absolutely over the moon” – which I think is a hilarious way for an astrophysicist to put it.
He thinks it looks like a snowman. I’d say two Ferror Rochet chocolates stuck together. Or, you know, a turd.
Joking aside, this stuff blows me away. Like all the amazing footage of the surface of Mars. Like, holy shit – that’s Mars!
Somebody pointed out the Mars is a planet in our solar system populated entirely by robots.
July 8, 2026 — 5:47 pm
Comments: 4
Well, it wasn’t a one off
It’s definitely the pekin, though it’s awfully hard for me to believe. She’s tiny. She’s laid an egg nearly every day since the first one.
As much as I love pekin eggs (they’re nearly all yolk!) this is not a good thing. Laying eggs is stressful on a hen and she’s not likely to have a long life, poor thing.
My first two chickens, one would go broody every summer and stop laying. I went through ructions with her every year. I bet she didn’t lay a dozen eggs in her life. She lived to be eight. The other one laid eggs regularly and dropped dead at three.
Let that be a lesson: don’t lay eggs!
July 7, 2026 — 5:59 pm
Comments: 1
Yes, yes…it’s a stupid Facebook meme
It’s the “what medieval owl are you today” meme from Facebook. It came across my feed earlier and I couldn’t find it when I went back to look. To my surprise, when I did an Images search, there are at least three variants. Plenty of weird Medieval owls to go around, I guess.
I’m fobbing you off with a meme because I’ve been in an all day conference about Sussex geology and I ain’t got nothing to say about it. Hope you had a wonderful Fourth! My neighbor on the corner made pie for the occasion, so I had that.
July 6, 2026 — 6:05 pm
Comments: 3
Happy birthdays all around!
Tomorrow is Sam’s 8th birthday (4th of July is why he’s called Sam). Everyone asked me today what I’m doing and the answer is…nothing. The Fourth was never a favorite of mine – it was hot wherever I lived and the last thing I wanted to do was stand over a grill.
Then there was the year I climbed up on the roof to watch the fireworks and the neighbors fired bottle rockets at me.
Have a good weekend. Doing anything special this 4th?
July 3, 2026 — 4:25 pm
Comments: 11
I did it first!
In London in 1997, life-sized plaster noses appeared all over London affixed to walls. They arrived without explanation or credit and, human beings being human beings, legends began to spring up around them.
They were all wrong. It wasn’t until 2011 that an artist named Rick Buckley took credit. They were all casts of his substantial hooter and they were placed directly beneath CCTV cameras. To protest CCTV cameras. You’d think someone would have noticed.
As it happens, way back in 1978, when I were in art school, I discovered an annoying fact. I wanted to learn real art skills – painting and sculpting and so on – and my teachers were all into thinky performance art. The only common ground I could find was surreal art: they’d let me do representational things if they were absurd.
I did a series of cartoons featuring a life-sized plasticine version of my own substantial nose. I really don’t remember anything about it except that I finished the project and had these…noses left over.
So I stuck them on things. As you do. And I don’t remember anything more about that except my fellow students were surprisingly tolerant of them and it was some time before the last one was stolen or destroyed.
I understand some of Buckley’s noses are still out there.
July 2, 2026 — 5:57 pm
Comments: 6