IT’S BREXIT!!!
IT’S BREXIT!!!!
Holy shit.
HOLY SHIT!
I’m sure all this schadenfreude can’t be good for me. My social media has been glorious today. The leading Remainiac warcries seem to be:
Old people shouldn’t have the vote because they don’t have to live with the consequences for very long.
Ordinary people shouldn’t have the vote, or at least important issues shouldn’t be decided by a popular referendum.
People who voted Leave didn’t really know what they are doing and regret the decision already. If we had a do-over this afternoon, the vote would be totally different.
All the educated people voted to remain. Stupid Leavers are only now doing Google searches of “What is the EU?”
And, of course, every variation of white people suck and are racists.
I am seriously proud of the British people for this vote. Sticking with the status quo is always the easiest and safest course (sometimes even the wisest). They’ve had had a firehose of scary claims trained on them for weeks. All the cool people begged them to vote Remain. And still they took this step into the unknown.
And, yes, my boss looked like a bulldog licking piss off a nettle this morning.
June 24, 2016 — 7:24 am
Comments: 47
Axed and answered
Feast your eyes, ladies and gentlemen. This is what ‘above average’ looks like.
Above. Average.
Nigel Farage has just come on teevee to say he thinks Remain will win by a few points. That’s been the consensus all week, but to hear Nige say it is depressing.
It solves nothing. The margin is likely to be slim, and all the passion was for Leave. In other words, half of this country is likely to wake up very pissed off at the other half tomorrow. Including a majority of the people who 23andme would call ‘the English’.
This will not end well, and it certainly will not end tomorrow.
Hm. Time to go practice more axe throwing, I think.
June 23, 2016 — 9:27 pm
Comments: 16
I love these
Victorian mugshots from Gloustershire, dug up by Ancestry. Lots of these have gone online in the last few y ears, and I just love them.
This was in the Mail today, so you’ve probably seen it. (There are times I think the Mail is more widely read in the US than the UK. Certainly more frequently linked).
Dude top left looks like Magnifico the Magician, shatterin’ mirrors with his mind.
Have a good weekend, folks! We have another couple days of fêtes to come, so hopefully stories to tell.
ATTENTION-ATTENTION-ATTENTION-ATTENTION-ATTENTION-ATTENTION
The blog is moving hosts over the weekend. If it goes down, do not be alarmed.
June 17, 2016 — 9:11 pm
Comments: 16
Happy Sussex Day!
Don’t worry. Nobody here ever heard of it, either. I’ve had a good time today wishing people a Happy Sussex Day and getting that ‘dog hears hypersonic whistle’ look.
Well, the Sussex Police did post a lovely video, though I have no idea why they chose All Things Bright and Beautiful instead of the unofficial county song, Sussex by the Sea.
Go on, give it a listen. It’s a cheery march and a catchy tune. Brass bands play it at some of the fêtes and festivals (the ones that have brass bands).
I heard it played at a funeral once.
Sussex Day was invented in 2007 to celebrate the awesomness that is Sussex. Among the suggested celebrations, reading aloud the Sussex charter:
For all the people of the ancient kingdom of Sussex!
Let it be known: the 16 June of each and every year shall be known as Sussex Day.
Sussex day shall be celebrated according to the rites and traditions of Sussex.
Let it be known all the people of Sussex shall be responsible for the maintenance of those boundaries that join to those of our neighbours.
Let it be known all the people of Sussex shall be responsible for all the environs within those boundaries.
Let it be known, the people of Sussex shall recognise the inshore waters that lie inside a line drawn from Beachy Head, and extending to Selsey Bill as being, the Bay of Sussex.
Let it be known, the people of Sussex will undertake responsibility for the general well being of our neighbours.
Let it be known the people of Sussex shall be guardians of our wildlife.
Let it be known the people of Sussex will, through custom support all local business.
Finally, let it be known, as guardians of Sussex, we all know Sussex is Sussex … and Sussex won’t be druv!
In God we trust.
God Save the Queen!
We Wunt Be Druv — I love that — is the unoffical motto of Sussex. It doesn’t appear in print until the early 20th C, though it was described as a favorite motto. It probably originates in the Weald of Sussex, where also originated the two major revolts of the Middle Ages: Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, under Wat Tyler, and 1450 under Jack Cade.
The county flower is the round-headed rampion. I have never seen one; it’s a weird-looking thing. I think Dr Seuss had a hand in the design.
The crest and flag of the county feature six martlets, which is the heraldic version of either a swallow or a house martin. Ehhh…technically, it’s an emblem, not a coat of arms, as arms can only be granted to an administrative body (not a whole county) and Sussex hasn’t had a united one since the Domesday Book.
The martlet also appears on the arms of the fourth son of a noble family, as the martlet has no feet (only feathers) and so cannot land, and the fourth son hasn’t any land either. That doesn’t have anything to do with Sussex, I just thought it was a fun heraldic pun.
The 16th of June was chosen because it is the feast of Richard of Chichester (1197–1253), patron saint of Sussex. His shrine was once regarded as a place of miracles, almost as popular as the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, but mad King Henry VIII ordered it plundered.
We’re going to celebrate Sussex Day by playing a boules match against those rotten stinking foreign bastards, The Next Village Over. See you tomorrow.
June 16, 2016 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 12
It begins
Yeah, I made a doge. So sue me. The meme is only three years old, I checked. Hard to believe. That is a shibe (or part-shibe), isn’t it?
Anyway, the local fête season began for us this weekend. We managed to hit two over the weekend, and just dodged getting wet at both of them. We’re a little concerned that the weather will have made one in particular lose money, and that might kill it forever.
This act was from that one; a dog rescue outfit in Essex. They’re all about taking scrubby old mutts and making proper working dogs of ’em. There were a dozen dogs at the show, from little terriers to big shepherds. They did very well, too — even the newest dog, who was (paradoxically) fourteen when he came to the shelter and a little confused about how he got there.
The trainer unloaded an interesting stream of dog facts. Like, you know how both your eyebrows go up when someone comes into a room? Well, a dog will only raise one eyebrow, and that eyebrow tells you which is his dominant paw. Yeah, I know, but he swore on a stack of kibbles.
He also said he’s never met a dog with a natural fear of fire. And to prove it, he had the dogs leap through hoops and corridors of fire, past flaming torches. Even the little dudes had no problem with it. That would have made an awesome photo, maybe, but my photographer spotted a giant model biplane doing loops over the end of the field and I lost him.
The exercise in the picture was a little wince-some. The littlest dogs couldn’t clear all those crotches in one leap and landed squarely and repeatedly on that man’s taint. I hope he was properly equipped.
June 13, 2016 — 8:53 pm
Comments: 15
Stoned
My sharpening stones came today, and this was tucked into the box. Actually, hippie jokes aside, I can quite see a Tai Chi of scything being a sensible thing. When you watch the smooth, controlled, thoughtful movements of a good scyther, you can definitely see how applying the principles could help. Especially since the beginner’s instinct is to slash and thrash.
The two stones I got were a very fine Rozsutec and a slightly coarser Bregenzer. The coarser stone is easier for a beginner though, obviously, rougher on the tool. The Bregenzer Quarry is now closed, so no more stones will come out once the supply is exhausted.
You don’t need to know all that, though. I do. I use you guys as a daily diary.
You knew that, yes?
June 2, 2016 — 8:41 pm
Comments: 16
I learned a thing!
We went to the country show on Saturday and it was awesome (the weather cooperated and everything) and I bought a scythe and a sickle! w00t!
Now some of my handier readers may know how this thing is done, but I did not. Using either a scythe or sickle in the field, the blades need to be resharpened every five or ten minutes. An unsharp scythe is a misery. This is done with a lozenge-shaped stone kept on your belt in a holster half full of water.
This looks completely badass. Mine are in the mail.
But after a day’s mowing, or less if you’re mowing something hard, the blades need peening (which is sadly not as rude as it sounds). What you do is hammer a couple of millimeters of metal at the edge until it is super thin. Not only does this mash out knicks and dings, but it makes the blade thin enough to take a good edge from a smooth stone.
This is done with a one-pound hammer on a peening anvil, which is not a bigass anvil like they drop on people’s heads in cartoons, but a little shiny thing. Eh, have a YouTube.
The dude on the left in the painting is using a portable peening anvil they used to take out in the fields and stick in the ground. You can still get those. (Painting by Léon Augustin Lhermitte).
If you’re a casual mower, you can get away with filing the edge to shape. That’s what I’ll do. I don’t honestly see myself peening in the near future and, trust me, I’m going to be the most casual of casual mowers.
You’d think you’d hammer the blade away to nothing in no time, but there are plenty of very old scythes and sickles to be had. Though if I were serious, I’d buy a modern one.
If you wonder why bother, do a YouTube search of “scythe vs strimmer” — spoiler: scythe always wins.
May 30, 2016 — 8:53 pm
Comments: 14
Oooo…grungy!
There was a link to this at Ace’s the other day, and I was impressed enough to look up how it was made. Three plus years ago, a group of six students from De Montfort University, Leicester took old illustrations from the British Library and painstakingly reproduced what 17th Century London would have looked like before the Great Fire (if you hit the link, you have to fast-forward a minute to get to the animation. The beginning is a montage of illustrations).
It won a contest jointly sponsored by the British Library and game developer Crytek. They used the CRYENGINE, the engine that built the Crysis games. Fun games, but they made my GPU fan squeal like a little girl.
You know, if you enter a contest jointly sponsored by the British Library and Crytek, it’s hard to see how you could not come up with this exact idea (this or Stonehenge), but they’ve done a beautiful job, so all hail.
I love this use of 3D technology. Crawling all over 12th Century Jerusalem and Damascus was the only reason to play Assassin’s Creed (though I grew weary of the gameplay by the third installment).
Oh, and Daniel Vávra’s precise historical reproduction of 15th Century Bohemia, Kingdom Come: Redemption is still in the works, though it looks like the deadline has slipped by a year.
And, yes, he’s still taking shit because there aren’t any black people in it.
May 26, 2016 — 9:25 pm
Comments: 3
Baaa, man
So, somebody dumped the remains of a dope-growing operation on the side of the road in a little Welsh village…aaaaaannnnnd the sheep got into it. They’ve been roaming the village, breaking into homes. Presumably to raid the ‘fridge and watch cartoons.
Eh. Sorry about the lameness. I’ve brought a lot of work home this week. Don’t ever let ’em know you can do publication design.
I am in brochure hell…
May 25, 2016 — 10:13 pm
Comments: 9
Quite a month for royal bidets
Happy birthday, Edward the Tooth! Seven hundred and thirty two years young today.
Though Wikipedia says his birthday was yesterday, the date only came across my FaceBook feed today.
(On a side note, I found a way to make FaceBook fun — stop following my boring old friends and follow groups about history, art and chikkens!).
He’s the one who got the red hot poker up the hoo-hoo. Most historians these days don’t think that really happened, because most historians these days are boring old stinky pants.
April 26, 2016 — 8:30 pm
Comments: 10