Happy birthday, Ma’am
Caption: Her Maj changes a tire. In 1945, she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service as a mechanic and driver, making her the last living head of state to have worn her country’s uniform in WWII.
‘Tis her 90th today. Her real birthday, not the day the nation usually celebrates, which varies. They’re lighting the beacons this evening — a thing they don’t do often. A thing I’d like to see, but they’re not lighting the ones near us.
Note to self: apply for citizenship while you can still say the oath to this lady.
PRINCE DIES ON QUEEN’S BIRTHDAY. The headlines write themselves. Also, Scott Jacob wins the Dead Pool. I’ll queue up a new Dead Pool for tomorrow — which is kind of a relief because I’ll be away all day at a conference tomorrow. See you here, Friday 6pm WBT. Well, I won’t be here, but the new Deal Pool will.
April 21, 2016 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 18
“Mind the Gap” guy dies, sadly not by falling between train and platform
Phil Sayer, the dude who makes the announcement in train stations all over the UK, has died. Of cancer, sadly, not a freak platform accident.
My brain refuses to process “mind the gap” as a phrase with meaning. Fortunately, it’s also painted on station platforms, where at least the words draw my eyes to the appropriate area. There, I might indeed find a big-ass gap between the station and the train, which I will notice. Or mind, if you will.
Their signage also says “way in” and “way out” instead of “entrance” and “exit”, “give way” instead of “yield” and off-duty buses say “I’m sorry I’m not in service” instead of “not in service.” Which, I can’t help thinking, if they cut some of the extraneous verbiage they could go up a point size.
Train announcements are currently done by a woman who sounds exactly like that Overwatch announcer lady in Half Life two. I expect her to call me “citizen” and send those camera drones out after me.
Have a good weekend, y’all — and mind the gap!
April 15, 2016 — 9:08 pm
Comments: 12
Oh, doctor…?
There is a backstory. Visiting New York, Churchill made the classic Brit/Yank mistake and looked the wrong way as he stepped into the street. He was hit by a car and hospitalized.
He needed the prescription because this was during Prohibition. How often doctors prescribed booze and where you got it if you had a scrip, I do not know. The notation at the top left, cropped in half, reads “keep on hand” — so perhaps he was to carry it to restaurants, who were allowed to dispense. Hard to see how that might work, though.
I do know that 250cc is upward of eight ounces. Minimum.
April 14, 2016 — 10:08 pm
Comments: 7
It’s here!
This thing: hugely controversial mailer the gov’t has sent around to every household in Britain. Controversial not least because it cost umpty-ump million pounds to print (and the printer was German).
Excuse brevity. My keyboard was getting gummy, so I made the hugely boneheaded decision to try and clean it up Sunday afternoon. I have completely lost the period key (I’m using the one on the numpad) and intermittently missing right shift, comma, spacebar and enter. The rest of the keys work just fine if you bang them like a gorilla.
This makes typing ever so much fun. I have a new one on order, but it won’t be here before tomorrow, at the very earliest.
April 11, 2016 — 7:58 pm
Comments: 12
Oh, just Brit stuffs…
Welp, they do one of these articles about once a year. I know, because I always steal it to post: silliest placenames in Britain. Enjoy!
Food question
I refuse to believe there’s any part of a pig a Tennesseean doesn’t eat, so I suspect what we have here is a failure to communicate. On the menu this week at Badger Manor is gammon or boiled bacon. The internet tells me “Gammon is the leg from a side of a pig which has been cured. Ham is the leg which has been removed and cured separately.”
The internet also tells me “Gammon has been cured in the same way as bacon whereas ham has been dry-cured or cooked.” But, since British bacon bears little resemblance to the good American stuff of that name, I don’t think this is likely to be helpful.
So, the question is, what is this cut called in the US, and how do we usually cook it?
Also served with
The Brit version is, indeed, boiled (or pressure cooked, in our case) and is often served with pease pudding.
Not to be confused with mushy peas, often served with fish’n’chips. I like pease pudding and mushy peas just fine. They sit comfortably in the mashed potato slot.
When Uncle B asked me if we had pease pudding in the colonies, I said we have the rhyme, “pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot, nine days old,” but really no fucking idea what pease pudding (or porridge) might be.
Does that tally with your experience?
Thanks for the memories
Last two Christmases, we were treated to a dead rat under the master bedroom floor. Or a dead something, anyway. As the floor is made of gigantic Tudor oak planks spiked into the support beams, there’s no chance of getting them up and extricating the corpse. (Some nights I lie awake and imagine the ancient rat boneyard directly under me).
We didn’t get one for Christmas this year. Looks like we’re getting one for Easter instead. Um, yay? My sense of smell is very poor, so I don’t suffer that much. But Uncle B sleeps in agony for the weeks until the smell goes away completely.
Spare his poor nose a thought this weekend. And have a good one your good selves! We saw the first lambs of Spring this week…
March 4, 2016 — 7:39 pm
Comments: 31
Toy.
I mentioned earlier this week I was hoping to go to a work-related seminar today, and so I did. It was about conservation of historical documents and it was, for the most part, very interesting.
The best nugget was learning that the British Museum’s whole object catalogue is online. You can browse the database of nearly four million objects (and growing), with good descriptions and high quality photos. (Try the advanced search. Nobody uses the advanced search and that makes the head of cataloguing very sad).
The lowlight was a presentation about trying to bring diversity to historical research. The speaker carefully never defined diversity, but told us the measures they’d taken (they who? The Arts Council, I think) to increase ‘diverse’ trainees in history. Like, eliminating the degree requirement for entrance and ultimately limiting the program to London. And even then, they had a three in ten dropout rate. This was after a day of being told the pool of jobs was shrinking.
It boils down to: taking scarce jobs away from qualified English people who want them to foist them upon unqualified, unspecified ‘diverse’ people who don’t.
And with that depressing thought, I bid you a good weekend!
February 19, 2016 — 10:24 pm
Comments: 7
This important news from Great Britain
Beginning tomorrow, supermarket giant Tesco will cease to sell curved croissants in favor of straight ones, on account of Britons are too retarded to put butter on non-rectilinear objects. Or something.
I think Trading Standards should make Tesco sell them as “straights”, since the crescent shape is integral. Legend has it, they were invented in 1683 to celebrate the defeat of the Turks in the Siege of Vienna, the crescent shape in imitation of the Turkish flag.
Hm. Perhaps this is a sop to our Muslim friends. Or maybe — just maybe — it’s more efficient to make straight pasteries than curved ones, on an industrial scale.
Why we butter them at all is a mystery. Have you ever seen croissants being made commercially? There’s more butter than flour!
February 18, 2016 — 8:59 pm
Comments: 17
Watch out for falling…ones of these
Somebody stole a giant model triceratops out of a park on the Isle of Wight and left it in the middle of the road. As the Telegraph drily observed, drink was probably involved. If not before, it surely would have been afterwards, if I had run across this in the street.
I woke up this morning with an awful headcold and called in sick. I don’t usually skive off work for a mere cold, but my current gig is a little different: I’m the youngest person in the group, by a lot. I’d feel pretty shit if one of my cow orkers got carried off by my rhinovirus.
I’ll be fine; the British version of Nyquil is called Nite Nurse.
Also, whisky and ginger wine.
February 16, 2016 — 10:58 pm
Comments: 9
This guy
This is beautiful Llanwenarth House, which inspired the hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful. It’s a 16th C building with a largely 18th C interior.
Or was. It was bought by a property developer who gutted it and redid it, inside and out, to modern (and bad) taste. Not surprisingly, he did all this without planning permission, because he totally would never have gotten planning permission to vandalize an historically important building like that.
All this happened last Summer and it would have been a story but not a very big one, but for one thing: when they dug up the new patio and turned over the stones, they found writing on the back. He’d used headstones from a local disused children’s cemetery, leaving a host of Victorian unfortunates in unmarked graves. None of the sources were very specific about how he got them or induced the workmen to chop them up. I suppose one good villain was all the story required.
As it happens, making unauthorized alterations to a listed building is a criminal, not a civil, offense. We know this because we live in a listed building. Every time I wad up a newspaper and stick it in a drafty crack, I think to myself, “self — you could go to jail for that.” Or gaol, as they call it here. They can’t spell for shyte.
Welp, today the news comes that the legal process has done its evil work and dude has gone bankrupt defending himself. I’m not usually a fan of lawfare, but in this case, I’ll make an exception.
Phun phact: Cecil Alexander, who wrote All Things Bright and Beautiful, was a woman.
February 11, 2016 — 10:32 pm
Comments: 16
Yes, thanks
Shrove Tuesday — wot today is — is known as Pancake Day here in Jollye Olde. They make pancakes, traditionally, to use up flour and eggs before Lent.
Which makes no damn sense, if you ask me. Flour keeps forever (if it’s dry) and eggs is laid by chickens, who will presumably continue to do so despite anyone’s position in the liturgical calendar.
Anyway, you don’t see them eating pancakes here so much as running races where everyone dashes down the high street flipping one in a pan. And they aren’t pancakes, they’re crêpes.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with a nice crêpe, except if a certain hypothetical weasel went into a Little Chef and ordered pancakes expecting to get the IHOP Big Breakfast. That was a sad, sad hypothetical weasel.
The English also traditionally had enormous football matches on Pancake Day, ruleless affairs in which the flower of each little town’s manhood turn up to kick the shit out of each other while a football looks on helplessly. A few towns maintain the tradition.
If you’re interested, Brit papers are full of pancake articles today, most of them illustrated by photos of American-style flapjacks oozing maple syrup. Which made Uncle B cross. Teehee.
NB: Zsa Zsa is spending her 99th birthday in the hospital. Is another longstanding Dead Pool favorite about to fall? Don’t count on it; that is one tough old broad.
February 9, 2016 — 9:07 pm
Comments: 16