sweasel.com

Thus ends The Week of Phoning It In.

Going to be a great weekend, though. Sunny, 70s…I just bought a couple of huge steaks. Weaselheaven.

I am not liking
this ‘Phoning It In’.
McGoo is I am
So I is to begin.

Do you like this
‘Phoning It In’ ?
Some say it so-sucks.
Some say it’s a sin.

Is ‘Phoning It In’
From a stairwell, in haste,
quite dignified for
A Weasel of taste?

A Wabbit would not.
A Pupster would frown.
An Enas would sharpen.
A Paine – words profound.

this ‘Phoning It In’
is lacking in stuff.
Handicap antics?
Trans’ butts in the buff?

This is not Weasel’s
net-diet of choice.
“No surfin’ at work!”
Sayeth management’s voice.

“But, stuff I must read!
Obscure websites I seek!
Strange factoids and fables
my minions to tweek.”

“Get back to your cube
you mustelid – stoat!
No wifi for you,
Antennas verbot!”

So, lacking in Net time,
his minions despair.
Could Paypal assist him?
Suggest it, we dare?

I am not liking
this ‘Phoning It In’.
If bucks be the issue
I’m counting me in.

-SMcG-

I just spent an hour getting a squirrel out of the livingroom. I almost didn’t say anything. I thought, “no way, Stoaty. Nobody’s going to believe Intimate Rodent Encounter Number Four for the week.” But it’s true. So bite me.

I had just finished my first, happy Friday afternoon Glenmorangie, when I heard a rustling. When you live a life as blessed with rodents as mine, you learn to discern the difference between a light breeze stirring your papers and some variety of rat in the room. There’s hardly a place in my whole house where you can see where the walls and the floor meet; it’s everywhere stacked with great tottery piles of books. And, sure enough, there’s a gray, fluffy tail sticking out between two paperbacks.

Squirrels in a house usually go all…well, wild and squirrely. But this guy was trying to flatten himself as much as possible and hide. I didn’t know squirrels were as good at it as mice, but he was excellent. He was oozing around books and under books and occasionally I’d catch a glimpse of a shiny eyeball or a paw. For the most part, he was absolutely still. Odd.

I opened a door nearer to him and wielded the Mighty Broom. But he wasn’t having it. I pulled away books to follow him, but I didn’t want to uncover him completely and have him launch himself at my face in a panic. You know what I really don’t want this weekend? The rabies series. Then the cats got scent of him and the subtlety was lost.

Finally, I managed to quarantine the room and work him, books and all, against the wall, into a box. I slipped a sheet of cardboard down behind the box, took three steps to the window (him fighting the lid all the way) and squirted him out the window into the hedge.

Really, that is Quite Enough. Pass the beuze.

I’ll tell ya – life as a blogger would be way too intense for me. Rats. Squirrels. Brooms. Rabies series. Minions.

BTW: I think the moderator-gremlin ate a post of mine. Pro’ly better off eaten anyway.

That’s two…TWO rodent credits!

*lighting & thunder*

hahahahahaha!

Bravo Master Poet McGoo! Clappy clappy. Weasel, dude you’ve got to get those holes in your house fixed! One of these days they’re gonna gang up on you and toss you out the window.

You know, I think this one might have wandered in by the door. I had the back door open airing the place out.

Geebus Weasel, I was just looking for some light reading material, you didn’t have to go all hard core on me.

Is the efficiency apartment behind the bathtub still available?

Thanks, Enas. I knew I was on a roll when my cat coughed up a hairball. One must pay attention to these subtle signs and indicators when the muse is infesting one.

Weasel, my brother (Dingey McGoo) had squirrels in his house and they caused him no end of grief. The final straw was when they ate his Macadamia nuts right off the kitchen table.

Since he was getting ready to remodel anyway (and because he’s a doofus), he finally resorted to using his .410 pump with birdshot. Indoors. Repeatedly. It was loud & messy, and he had to replace the Physicians Desk Reference I loaned him that was in the line of fire. But it got the job done. Another seemingly insoluable problem that crumbles in the face of McGoo ingenuity.

Wait. A grey, fluffy tail sticking out from between the book piles is a squirrel? That explains why the flashback didn’t end until I put down the D-Con.

On a weekend-related note, I almost ended up driving by your place yesterday. Luckily, I became aware of my surroundings in time to make the turnoff onto I-290, thus avoiding the detour through the Tern Pooter Plantations. Not that there’s anything wrong with the TPP; as a matter of fact, it’s kind of a pleasant stretch of the interstate. It is the longer way around, tho.

Now I’m engaged in the classic wifi v. linux struggle. The laptop recognizes the wifi device. I just can’t figure out how to create another network interface with it. Luckily, I brought a PCMCIA card and cable with me.

And where else could I go on a Saturday morning to read about rodent libraries, Sesame Street references and poetry? At least without someone questioning my sanity / manliness?

Rest well, gentle Weasel. This crocodilian has feasted on New York pizza and is temporarily indifferent to stoat delicacies.

You mean the I-295 loop around town? Weird stretch of road, that. I was once driving South on it and saw the landscape in the distance vanish into nothingness. I drove into it, and it was a snow squall. But the edge of it was as sharp as if you’d cut it with a knife. It wasn’t snowing here, it was there, feet away. Spooky.

Route 6 from RI to CT is my favorite weird stretch of road, though. Outside one place of business, there’s a sign that says “spells lifted”. And Route 44 is a good one. There’s a house that way with antique gas pumps in the front yard.

Rural RI is a real Twilight Zone.

Y’know, the comments section on this blog has become like an additional daily read. It’s great.

McGoo, Wordsworth’s corpse just jabbed a fork in his nuts. That was awesome. I thought we were all sort of waiting for you to start you own blog, though. I mean, it’s fate. No one with so many googly fugue words in their head can fight that temptation forever, surely?

Missed the sesame street reference, ie: lizard’s comment. This blog is called West Sesame Street on my blogroll. Maybe should change it to ‘Squirrells Gone Wild!”

Yea!

Woohoo!

Wabbit,

I’m fighting the blogging temptation. I feel bad that the only time I let loose a bit (i.e. babble mindlessly) is in other folk’s comment sections – hogging the page, so-to-speak. (Notice the three “I’s” in the above? Disgusting, and a distraction from the Host.)

Besides, everyone else is so adroit and knowledgable. For instance, I had NO CLUE that terns had…um…parts, and that they were indeed cultivated (on plantations, no less!) in the East. I bet they’re used on the Space Shuttle engines.

“Spells lifted”!? Whoa. Definitely not Kansas – or what’s left of it after last night.

The Host? I feel like a communion wafer. You’re welcome to babble mindlessly in my comments any time, McGoo, though I do think you’d be a bang-up blogger.

I’ve often thought one of the missing ingredients in blogging is some way to recognize and encourage good commenters. Some blogs I really enjoy reading somehow have lousy comment sections. Some are consumed by like-minded but stupid writers, some by excessive trolling. Some blogs have comment sections that are as good as the blog; there’s one I read strictly for the comments. Some spontaneously form amiable little social communities that don’t seem to have much at all to do with the blog they hang on. Some change over time. It looks completely random.

I have no idea how you’d deliberately shape a commentariat, though. Any sort of direct acknowledgement of particular commenters would naturally be felt as a slam by the other commenters. And every board I’ve seen that implemented a system where readers rate each other has either been either completely useless or swiftly turned into Charles Darwin Junior High. Survival of the cliquiest.

Those of you from the rightosphere might remember there was an undercurrent of hostility from commenters when Pajamas Media was organized. I think commenters may have felt that the way the idea was presented failed to acknowledge the importance of their contribution to the success of many blogs.

So far, I’m ending up with exactly the comment section I deserve. I suppose it’s possible to take that as a compliment, if you squint and turn your head on one side.

Oh, by the way:

My little friend. This is such bizarre squirrel behavior. He was perfectly still here, even as I moved books all around him. He would slowly ooze from one place of concealment to another, mostly keeping his face hidden. He did perk up considerable once I got him in the box, but he was quietly slinking around my livingroom for an hour. Weird.

I hope he doesn’t have rabies.

You do just fine, Weasel. You deserve more traffic. And thanks for the attention to this babbler, and to all your other guests. I may have questions for you and others about “how to” blog. I figure my opinions are no worse than a lot of what i read on the Net.

It’s posture sent an immediate message to my (heh) brain. I wonder if your furry guest is not in a state of local ecstasy from rubbing its li’l furry body all over your lush clean carpet? It is Spring, and the winter fur might itch. It’s lack of fear could be the proximity good reading material and of…well…you? Being of stoat-kind, I mean. Animals KNOW these things.

Then again, it may be carrying bubonic. I’m fairly confident that this would suck a bit.

Yersinia pestis! My favorite plague. It would be an honor to contract the Black Death. If you ride the underground in London, there are points at which the tracks suddenly veer off at an angle for no obvious reason. I’m told that’s to go around the plague pits; nobody was entirely sure if it was safe to open them up, so they routed the subway around them. Brrr.

Ask away, though others probably know more about blogging software than I do. I was kind of a latecomer to blogs, so I only have experience with WordPress. I used to design websites for a bit of extra money, so I was snooty about blogs for the longest time. Then I realized I was doing a hell of a long of handwork to achieve the same thing blog software did at the push of a button. In a contest between professionalism and laziness, laziness wins every time.

I’ve found that laziness becomes me. Or I become it. Or We become One.

I like Y. Pestis, too. That didn’t come out right.

I’ve read a bit about the Black Plague(s) in the 1300’s. Um – isn’t it a weasel-like relative (kin to the sable?) up in N Siberia that still carries one of the two versions (fleas-which-carry, that is) of yersinia and is believed to be half the root source for the 1348-50 outbreak? I know the black (Norwegian?) rat is a flea-carrier, too. I can look it up, but – well – see the first sentence.

Europe got hit really hard. Spain lost a princess and future king or sumpin. many things changed as a result of the plague – not least of which was the population. It went down.

I hope you’re really good about birthdays and such with your relatives. I wouldn’t want them pissed off.

Not the kolinsky! Say it ain’t so! That’s the mustelid sable watercolor brushes are made out of — long hairs from the very tip of its tail only. That’s why they’re so bloody expensive.

There are pockets of plague endemic in wild rodents in China, thanks to the Japanese. They developed ‘plague bombs’ full of infected fleas. The trick, apparently, was to burst them high enough to distribute the fleas, but not kill them. It never developed into a full plague, but it wasn’t for want of trying.

Nice people.

You are correct about china – not N Siberia as I stated.
(I got out my Cantor book on the plague and reviewed a bit.)

(Norman F. Cantor. He’s one of those people who looks like what he is. That pleases me.)

I was thinking it was a maroset – but that’s a monkey. It was a strange rodent name but not one totally unfamiliar to me. I have another book on Y.P. so I’ll look there later.

Yep – I read about the J’s efforts to harness the power of Y. Pestis. Glad they failed.

Weasel – ya ever think about the word “posthumous”?

It basically means “after the dirt”.

That’s kinda blunt when you think about it. Crude, even.

“The heroic soldier received the Congressional Medal of Honor, after the dirt, for saving the squad from rabid carpet-squirming squirrels.”

Not too subtle. I hope that from now on you think of “after the dirt” whenever you hear or read the word Posthumous. I do.

So Weasel says:

So far, I’m ending up with exactly the comment section I deserve. I suppose it’s possible to take that as a compliment, if you squint and turn your head on one side.

I suppose. But hey! You got minions! And they seem to be just as wacky as me!

/So, just how DID you get that picture of me squinting and turning my head to one side? (And it only might be true that while I was the Coast Guard Senior Petty Officer of Central and South America that my minions addressed me as “Squirrel.”)

/But we did have the kickass intraAmerican volleyball team!

EW1(SG), do “kick ass” and “volleyball” really belong in the same sentence? I didn’t get the sports gene, I’m just asking.

“After the dirt” somehow reminds me of “between the sheets.” Do you guys know this one? It’s a traditional young person’s church service passtime: you read the names of the hymns in the hymn book and tack “between the sheets” on the end. The deal is, if you page through enough hymns doing this, there’s a 100% chance you will eventually light on a combination sufficiently unexpected and hilarious to make you bark a moronlaugh right into the sacred quietude of the sermon. When you’re seven, anyhow.

O River of Blood Between the Sheets. Love Lifted Me Between the Sheets. Let Us Talents and Tongues Employ Between the Sheets. I Come with Joy Between the Sheets. You get the idea.

My mom taught me that. Just toss it onto that huge pile of grudges over there, would you?

I’m just here to learn about wifi and PCMCIA and stuff.

Oh.. and the page three pics.

And to be prepared for When Squirrels Attack. 🙂

Weasel astes:

EW1(SG), do “kick ass” and “volleyball” really belong in the same sentence? I didn’t get the sports gene, I’m just asking.

To the Coast Guardsmen I played with, they considered it a “blod sport.” If you weren’t bleeding at the end of a game, then it didn’t count.

“Blod” huh? That would be the red stuff that leaks out when you’re injured, that most people would term blood.

EW(etc),

Krovvy!

Stoaty: I was taught to tack on “Between The Sheets” to the end of every fortune cookie fortune. Quite entertaining, that. *Impish grin*