stoatacide
When commenter Scott the Badger threatened me with Sergeant Badger in the thread below, it reminded me I probably haven’t posted about Tufty Fluffytail, the road safety squirrel. He was the mascot of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents from 1953 until he perished in a tragic road safety accident.
Kidding! But…I dunno…couldn’t you have come up with a better road safety mascot than the animal voted Most Likely to be Found Squashed on the Yellow Dotted Line?
Tufty mostly served as the DoBee to Willy Weasel’s Don’tBee. Gallant to his Goofus.
That poor weasel. They ran him over (repeatedly), dunked him in the river, fed him Mama Weasel’s headache pills. He was forever getting hurt. And when Sergeant Badger came along, do you think there was sympathy? There was not! There was Willy up by the the nape and given a good shaking.
For some Christmases, Tufty Squirrel memorabilia was sure to find its way under our tree. (Remind me to play you the album sometime. It’s one of my treasured possessions).
I console myself with the knowledge that a realistic Willy Weasel would have disemboweled and et the lot of them (not counting Sergeant Badger, whom he would have smothered in his sleep).
Ahhhh…that’s better.
October 20, 2015 — 8:38 pm
Comments: 10
These pretty little things
I don’t know how I wasn’t aware of these when I was in the States (they’re originally South American, after all) but I love them. Physalis. AKA uchuva, Cape gooseberry, Inca berry, Aztec berry, golden berry, giant ground cherry, African ground cherry, Peruvian ground cherry, Peruvian cherry, amour en cage (love in a cage, which is rather wonderful). Little sweet and tart orange fruits in a sweet little paper lantern.
Seeing as I was so fond of them (and they are so expensive), Uncle B reckoned he could grow me some. And so he did. Aren’t these awesome? Do check them out in color.
See? There are advantages to being a gardener’s moll.
Good weekend, everyone!
October 16, 2015 — 10:22 pm
Comments: 13
Hit by a Buick
The news today has been full of the untimely arrival of the Buicks, which confused me mightily until I saw it in print. Bewick. As in Bewick’s Swan.
Every year, a few hundred of the feathery bastards flee Siberia to balmy England in Fall. Their arrival is a herald of the start of Winter.
A herald. I haven’t checked the woolly caterpillar forecast yet.
Anyhoo, this year they arrived earlier than ever, which everyone agrees is a sign of Deep Shit. It’s one of several Bad Signs for the coming Winter, not least of which that it is effing cold already.
Meh. Not ready.
I sometimes wonder if this is why global warming was such an easy sell in the UK: wishful thinking.
October 13, 2015 — 9:17 pm
Comments: 18
Never let ’em know you Photoshop
I usually get my revenge: instead of letting them run off the flyer (brochure/ad/letterhead) on a home inkjet I take it to the local printer and run it off proper-like, which isn’t so cheap. It cuts down on casually-repeated business.
Anyhoo, tonight I’m stuck putting together a program (or programme, if you’re gay) for work, thereby drastically reducing my chances of playing a couple of hours of Witcher 3.
Um, I mean composing a really meaningful and interesting blog post.
Yeah, that’s what I meant.
October 12, 2015 — 9:47 pm
Comments: 7
More holidays than a medieval monastery
Well, whaddya know? It’s National Poetry Day. Not as compelling as National Badger Day, but I’m home late tonight.
What do I know from poetry? Oh, it’s that impenetrable stuff I skip past when I’m reading a novel, is what. My personal taste runs to saucy limericks (I remind you I lived in Pawtucket for seven years).
I’ll get us started with my favorite:
There once was a woman from Exeter,
So beautiful, men craned their necks at her.
And then the more brave
Would smile and wave
…the distinguishing marks of their sex at her.
Beeyootiful! See you back here tomorrow, six sharp, for Dead Pool Round 78.
October 8, 2015 — 10:01 pm
Comments: 13
Good heavens! Is it National Badger Day *already*?
Well, lookit that. Tuesday, October 6 is National Badger Day (which I’m pretty sure is a totally made up fundraising holiday invented by the National Badger Trust).
In honor of this most artificial of celebrations, here are ten badger facts I totally lifted verbatim from today’s Express:
1. The earliest recorded use of the word “badger” for the animal was in 1523. Before that, it was called a “brock” or “bauson”.
2. “Badger” was originally (around 1500) a word for an itinerant trader.
3. The animal was probably called a “badger” from the badge-like white mark on its forehead.
4. Another theory it that is comes from the French word “bêcheur” meaning a digger.
5. Badgers feed mainly on earthworms of which they may eat hundreds every night.
6. According to an old belief, when a badger bites, it will not loosen its grip until its teeth meet.
7. A male badger is a boar, a female is a sow, the young are cubs and their system of underground burrows is a sett.
8. Interfering with a badger sett is an offence under the Protection of Badgers Act 1992. So is obstructing access to any entrance of a sett.
9. The honey badger, or ratel, is considered by many to be the world’s most ferocious and fearless animal.
10. The word “badger” does not appear in any Shakespeare play but Twelfth Night mentions “brock” once.
Must find out who does badger PR. Weasels could use a bit of that.
October 6, 2015 — 7:10 pm
Comments: 12
Today’s the day! Callooh callay!
This is the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this is the day supermarkets in Britain which have more than 250 employees are required by law to charge customers 5p for a shopping bag.
They can do what they like with the money they collect, provided it goes to a ‘worthy cause.’ One worthy cause might be a charity for providing free shopping bags to Britons pissed off by radical green legislation that keeps making it through Parliament somehow, even though they never win an election anywhere, ever (except Brighton, ’nuff said). Bets are, the Prime Minister’s bobble-headed soft-left wife is behind this one.
The papers have decided on a sarky approach to the general public disgruntlement. And the disgruntled general public is inclined to be sarky right back about the difference it’s gonna make to ‘the environment.’
See, when they did this in Wales, supermarket bag use was reduced by 71%. Which looks like a minor something useful until you reflect that those supermarket bags have been replaced by ‘bags for life’ — which, naturally, aren’t for life. Duh. They use roughly ten times the plastic, cost about ten times as much and last about ten times as long as regular bags. That’s what we call a wash. Except, if you reuse them enough, they pick up all sorts of nifty bugs from your raw food.
Today we went shopping, put our stuff in ‘bags for life’ — and bought a roll of small garbage bags for the kitchen messy bin, where recycled carrier bags used to do. Take that, gaia! Virtue signalling is my new favorite term of abuse.
Truth is, this is just one more pointless, pushy lefty inconvenience in a life made increasingly pinched and gray by neopuritan gesture politics.
October 5, 2015 — 10:03 pm
Comments: 15
If it’s Monday, this must be Camelot
For reasons I ain’t quite sure, I have been to five ancient piles in the last week, and I’m up early tomorrow for another. (For those following along at home, they are: the Clergy House, the Priest House, Michelham Priory, Smallhythe Place, Penshurst Place and…erm…I have no idea where I’m going tomorrow. It’s work).
The picture above is Penshurst Place. It’s not my picture. They wouldn’t let us take pictures. We almost snuck and took pictures anyway and I kind of wish we had; the ones online don’t do justice to…well, any of it, but particularly this room. This is the baron’s hall and photos don’t give any sense of the scale and amazingness of it.
Probably the most gobsmacking room I’ve ever been in, ever. It made me whisper bad words in wonder and appreciation.
They filmed chunks of Wolf Hall here. If you haven’t seen it, make an effort.
As for last night’s No Kidding Apocalyptic Death Moon of Plague and Blood and Other Bad Things…meh. It was a clear, cold night here — perfect for viewing. We went out at 1:30 and the moon was impressively big, with a bite out of it. I woke up at 3:00 and discovered it hovering outside the bedroom window, still big, with an even bigger bite out of it. I woke up again at 4:00 (what bad night I had) — supposedly the peak of the phenomenon — and it was pitch black.
Maybe it had moved away from the window. Maybe it was only red for a little while as the shadow passes. I don’t know. Not impressed.
Dear Celestial Doodah: must try harder.
September 28, 2015 — 7:26 pm
Comments: 10
Old bones
This is what we went to see in Alfriston: the Clergy House. We’ve been several times before; it’s one of my favorites.
The house is a perfect transition from Medieval to Tudor. It was built in the 13th C. The original floor (hard-packed and white, made of sour milk and chalk) had a firepit in the center. It was one big open room, with the master’s table at one end and the servants at the other, just like a Medieval hall (or Viking longhouse). The smoke rose up to the high pitched roof and escaped out the…well, thatch or stone. They’re not sure of the original.
One big smokey, sweaty communal living area, just like Wayland intended.
Then the Tudors got hold of it and installed all sorts of wacky newfangled conveniences, like a fireplace and an upstairs with stairs and rooms.
The picture shows what it looked like in the late 19th, when it had damn near crumbled back into the earth. It was so far gone, it was more easily returned to its original Medieval condition, with the outline of the later innovations still showing.
It’s not one of those so-rebuilt-it’s-practically-Disney sorts of places, though (I’m looking at you, Great Dixter). It’s all original, down to the funky floors and wattle-and-daub construction.
I could spend a lot of time staring at those walls, if the steward hadn’t been such a loquacious and excitable young man.
Remember, now: Dead Pool Round 77. Tomorrow. 6WBT. Be here, or be somewhere else! Or go somewhere else and then come back here!
September 24, 2015 — 9:03 pm
Comments: 6
Like the first morning…
After much rain, last weekend was supposed to be beautiful (spoiler: it was). We took ourselves to Alfriston, one of our favorite Sussex villages, inspiration for the hymn Morning is Broken.
I’ve posted about Alfriston before — a little town, but beautiful and much to see (if you want a better look a that mine, mash here; hard to believe it would have taken out the whole bidness).
There are an improbable number of ancient pubs for such a tiny place (perhaps because it was a market town). We settled on The Star. Legend has it the original name was the Bethlehem Star, when it was built in the 13th Century as a pilgrims’ hostel for the use of travelers between Chichester and Canterbury.
Others sniff that it’s only Fifteenth Century (do follow that link; lots of piccies of the carving out front).
If I were psychic, my lunch might have been oppressed by the weight of all the thousands of bodies who had sat just exactly where I was sitting to eat a meal. I am not psychic; I enjoyed my beer and pea soup very much.
Beer and pea soup. Better than it sounds.
More pictures later, but first: Xul has won dick (again) with Yogi Berra. Poor old bastard; I didn’t know he was still alive. You know what that means, of course: Dead Pool Round 77.
Be here Friday or forever hold your peace.
September 23, 2015 — 9:23 pm
Comments: 4