Random
Ettore Boiardi — Chef Boyardee — was a real person. I guess I knew that, though I was too young to have seen him in the commercials (click the picture for a YouTube).
I gather from paddling around the web that he was a famous and splendid chef, and his mass-produced food was actually very good — when he made it.
He sold the whole outfit to a food conglomerate in 1946, though, and that must have been when some accountant cried, “wait! This food needs more suck!”
Canned pasta. Yuck.
He’s the reason I never voluntarily ate pasta (or anything pretending to be Italian) until I was in my twenties and tripped over the real thing.
My chicken has a black eye. And a bloody comb. And a couple of scabby patches on the side of her head.
It looks like she flew full-tilt into the mesh and rode it down on her face. The two don’t fight, beyond a little belly bumping, so that’s surely exactly what happened.
Eh. She’ll be fine. Both well otherwise.
And about this Journolist thing. The attempted spin seems to be “who’s surprised that lefty opinion writers have lefty opinions?” Not so fast, sonny. There are many delightful nuggets in there.
■ The Listers are such utter douchenozzles.
■ They weren’t sharing opinions, they were building consensus on how best to spin — warp the reporting of — news for partisan advantage.
■ If I employed any of those bozos, I’d be pissed. They are paid for original work, not copypasta. Though all their bosses are liberals, so they’re only going to be pissed at the embarrassment.
■ How many more people are going to wreck their careers before it is generally understood there is no such thing as off the record??? I knew it in the days when ideas were written on paper. Didn’t you? Now that words fly around at the speed of electrons, no one should EVER type ANYthing he wouldn’t want to see under a blinking siren on the Drudge Report.
This scoop must be a godsend for Tucker Carlson, working to get a new site off the ground. So I totally understand why he’d dribble it out day by day. But I do so wish this one had gone down like the CRU emails dump — released in one big go for busy webmonkeys to crawl all over.
Breitbart offers a $100,000 reward for the archive and doesn’t get it? And Tucker does? I wonder how much he has and from whence it came.
Hey, I got a fabulous spotted dick for anyone Lister who leaks the archive to me.
July 22, 2010 — 10:50 pm
Comments: 26
Now *that’s* a funky chicken
It’s a breed called Modern Game and it’s endangered.
There’s an article in this month’s Practical Poultry — or as Uncle B calls it, Chickens and Chickening — about Britain’s vanishing chicken breeds. According to the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, twenty species of British domestic animals went extinct between 1900 and 1970.
I never thought about that before. It’s not like plants; you can’t stockpile seeds in some cryogenic warehouse. It’s even more precarious than wild animals, for whom you can only provide the habitat and hope for the best.
For domestic stock, somebody has to be out there actively keeping the line alive and not letting it get fatally outbred or dangerously inbred.
Funny you never hear of endangered livestock breeds — considering all the howling and handwringing about endangered wildlife, where the number of actual modern extinctions approximates zero.
That’s because the eco nuts think domestic animals aren’t “real” animals somehow. Or, worse, they’re some kind of evil species traitors for cooperating with sinful humans.
Stupid hippies.
I just finished Temple Grandin‘s Animals in Translation — which I can definitely recommend if you find animal behavior interesting. She’s the autistic PhD who designs abattoirs.
When asked how someone who loves animals can build slaughterhouses, she points out — no slaughterhouses, no animals.
Or as someone else put it, if you want to get an animal off the endangered list, convince humans it tastes good.
July 7, 2010 — 11:00 pm
Comments: 14
When you’re a chicken, everyone looks like a tree
It’s been hot here lately. The chickens don’t like that much. In the middle of the day, they stay in the shade under the chicken house, on the cool paving slabs, trilling quietly.
In the evenings, though, when the air cools, I let them out and sit in the garden with them for an hour or so, letting them “free range.”
This consists of squawking, flapping short distances, pecking everything that moves, pecking everything that doesn’t move, belly-bumping and pecking each other, running for cover when anything flies overhead, teasing the cat and, increasingly, perching all over my person in the most outrageous and undignified manner.
That last bit is worth every penny they cost.
That, and so far nobody’s shat on me. Bonus!
June 29, 2010 — 10:41 pm
Comments: 32
Important chicken update
Umm…they’re fine.
Click the picture to be whisked away to YouTube for a short video verifying the complete fineness of my chickens.
June 9, 2010 — 7:57 pm
Comments: 35
Poo!
At right we see examples of many of the wonderful, mystical shapes and colors of perfectly healthy chicken shit, as submitted by readers of the Poultry Pages forum.
I thought Mapp had a bit of a problem, but some tonic in her drinking water, a monotonous diet and close examination of her chickeny byproducts and I think we’re okay.
I must admit, I had no idea enlightened poultry keeping had quite so much to do with scrutinizing and maintaining chicken butts, one way and another.
Chooks are getting bigger and sassier by the day. I can’t tell you how much of a kick I’m getting out of them.
Don’t forget to tune in tomorrow at 6pm sharp, London time, for the next Dead Pool. I’m going to set it up now to auto-post.
If you hover over the ENTER key, you might be the lucky minion to nick Gary Coleman! (Thanks for the tipoff, JuliaM).
May 27, 2010 — 10:41 pm
Comments: 10
Lookit the birdies!
I was just sitting here with my feet up — I picked a shitload of blackberries and made a shitload of delicious bramble jam (which is what you call it when you make blackberry jam from wild berries) — when it dawned on me…I posted that rude M’chelle picture last night. I have to come up with a post for today.
So, please accept this picture of a mummy gull and a baby gull what I took at the beach a few days ago. Okay, that might be a daddy gull, but the speckledy one is definitely a juvenile. They stay spotty like that for a couple of years and hang around their parents. Ummm…if I remember my birdiculture correctly.
Note that the adult bird is banded. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is all over our area.
Thanks to everyone who threw me a link today. Nothing like a ‘lanche to cheer the dessicated lump of pure evil I call a heart.
September 22, 2009 — 8:20 pm
Comments: 13
Partners in crime
They work as a team. Dude on the left pinches scones; dude on the right clotted cream. I don’t think the lady who owns them spends a whole lot on chicken feed or Friskies.
Heh. Yeah. That’s right. I managed to screw two posts out of this one time a few weeks ago when we stopped for tea. That’s what a lazy sack of shit I am this week.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
July 3, 2009 — 6:57 pm
Comments: 26
Mixed metaphor
When the Beatles sang “blackbird singing in the dead of night…” as a metaphor for the civil rights struggle, I’m guessing they had no idea how confusing that would be to Americans. Our blackbirds go graaaaaaak.
But, sonofabitch, it turns out the British blackbird is a whole ‘nother species — Turdus merula (stop laughing, you in the back!) — and it has a great song. A burbling, silly, happy, random thing. It sounds just like — if you’ll permit me a metaphor without any poetry in it at all — a bird version of the mechanical stylings of R2D2.
We have one in the garden. I don’t know if he really follows me around, or if his sound is so distinctive I’m just highly aware of him whenever he’s out there.
That’s him, at the peak of the roof. (Note the bottle cemented into the masonry; we still haven’t worked out what that means). I waited ages for him to fly away so I could get a picture of him taking off, but he out-waited me. There’s only so long I can stand with a camera pressed to my face.
How do I know it’s just the one? Our blackbird is a bit leucistic — his head is mostly white.
I’m sure that’s a metaphor for something, too.
June 18, 2009 — 7:07 pm
Comments: 13
Snow day!
Fat balls for everyone!
There must be something in the avian metabolism that says, “eat! Eat like the wind!” when the snows come, because I have never seen so many little featherheaded bastards in my life, all jostling, squeaking and flapping around my leftovers. I had to bring them seconds and thirds or there was gonna be murder. Murder in my garden.
I reckon we got about four inches down here. No big, but enough to grind local commerce to a halt. London, they shut down part of the Underground (“part of it isn’t under ground,” Uncle B explained). That’s more than Hitler managed.
The Daily Mail is full of ZOMG and freakout, but that’s their job. Our local forecast looks like it’s all going over to rain tonight.
Pity. It was beautiful while it lasted.
February 2, 2009 — 8:42 pm
Comments: 13