Weasel weasels for a week — now with more weasels!
Today is a public holiday in Britain. It isn’t actually my birthday, but that blessed day is early in May, so I reckon it’s a good time to TAKE THE WEEK OFF!
Oh, nothing special. I’ve got a stack of books, some really unhealthy food and lots of booze. Also, Far Cry 4 and Shadow of Morder and a bunch of other games I’ve never cracked open (stupid Steam sales!).
I’ll be around, though. If something interesting comes up, I’ll be ready wit de Photoshop. Meanwhile, enjoy five dumb pictures of weasels I’ve queued up just for you.
May 4, 2015 — 12:00 pm
Comments: 15
This is a post about phone boxes
You gotta feel for British Telecom: in this day of cellphones, there’s almost no need for public pay phones. The old boxes are expensive to maintain and operate at a grueling loss. They tried to replace the old red boxes with modern glass ones (emblazoned with a logo unaffectionately known as ‘the poof with the pipe‘) and there were riots.
And by riots, I don’t of course mean Baltimore-style toiletpaper-looting, CVS-burning riots. This is England. I mean dozens and dozens of people wrote very rude letters to the government written in green ink.
The upshot was that the phone boxes were slapped with protection orders. These days, they are quietly being decommissioned, when they can be prized away from the neighbors. Or recommissioned as something else — there’s one near here with a defibrillator in it. Fully renovated, they sell for thousands. There’s an interesting article about it here.
The article links out to — well, it would do, wouldn’t it? — the Trainspotters Gazette of kiosk sites. There’s a Kiosk of the Month, Profiles in Kiosks, the A-Z of Kiosks and kiosk articles rated by popularity.
The two favorites are K6 and K2, both designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (1880-1960) who also designed the Liverpool Cathedral, the Battersea power station (an iconic London landmark, now decommissioned and remade into fru-fru apartments) and Bankside power station (now the Tate Modern).
You’ll recognize the K6. It is THE red phone box. The domed roof is thought to have been modeled on the tomb of Sir John Soane in St Pancras Old Church.
Would I shit you? I would not.
Do have a browse. The site covers all of them — the tardis police box, AA sentry boxes (that’s Automobile Association, not Alcoholics Anonymous) and phone boxes from K1 (beige and cast cement) to the Poof with the Pipe (KX100).
That’ll give you something to think about for a while. Good weekend, y’all!
May 1, 2015 — 3:16 pm
Comments: 13
phox phacts
This adorable little babby fox cub wandered into a beauty salon in Tunbridge Wells this week and hid behind a filing cabinet. Mama couldn’t be found and the ickle one was far too little to make it on his own. But the RSPCA took him and will raise and release him.
D’awww, amirite?
But then there was this story. Did you see the one about the Russian scientist who likes to wander around Chernobyl?
Brave woman, interesting story. Worth a read.
At the very end, there’s a video that shows her hiding in her car in terror of what looks like a perfectly healthy, strangely friendly fox in the woods. That’s worth a watch, too.
She explains in the video that friendliness and fearlessness has been found, in foxes at least, to be an early symptom of rabies. Which makes a horrible sense, when you think about it.
Great. Now I’ll never dare to be St Francis.
April 30, 2015 — 10:05 pm
Comments: 8
Is this happening in the States, too?
I ordered something from Amazon — a knapsack, to be specific. My shoulderbag gets heavier by the day and it’s making me list to port. As usual from Amazon, my order was dispatched within a day.
Then I waited and waited and waited and it didn’t show. So I check the order, got the tracking number and…if you haven’t figured it out, SFC stands for “Send From China.”
Increasingly, our goods from Amazon and eBay are being sent directly from China. Sometimes they tell you up front, sometimes they don’t (I think eBay always says where the goods are located). The economics of this are interesting.
Sometimes my only clue is the product seems unusually inexpensive for what it is. Even the postage is often cheap or free!
I’m conflicted about this. I don’t really like cutting out the middleman when the middleman is my neighbor. On the other hand, I don’t feel like handing him money for being my neighbor. The goods are coming from China anyway…what exactly is the benefit…?
So far, I’ve been happy with everything I’ve gotten directly in this way. Good quality stuff, cheap. No customer service issues. And it takes longer, but rarely more than a week longer than locally warehoused goods.
Does this happen where you are? How do you feel about it? Oh, and — good weekend!
April 24, 2015 — 8:31 pm
Comments: 24
Accidental shepherdess
On the walk home from work today, I stopped to watch a local farmer round up his flock of sheep to move to another field. No dog, no ATV — he just drove forward and back across the grass in his 4×4, honking. Got them all right where he wanted them to go, including stragglers. It was masterful.
When he got them all bunched up and headed out the drive, I gave him a round of applause. He leaned out of the car and yelled, “stop them — they’re headed for the crop!”
Yes, dear readers, today I was an accidental shepherdess. He had three or four guys in the road directing traffic, but the sheep (being sheep) tried to bust out in just the wrong place. Or just the right place, since I was standing there gawping and waving my arms.
They do this several times a season in our area, move a big flock from one field to another for better grazing. Just the unwed ewes — I don’t think they’d dare try it with excitable lambs — rushing right down one of the busiest roads in the county. Step out, stop the traffic, chase hundreds of sheep down the highway.
If we’re out when they do it, we know they’ve done it. They close the gates at the end of our drive. That’s how Uncle B heard the commotion and came running with a camera. That’s me in the circle back there, having done my bit.
Good weekend, y’all!
April 17, 2015 — 7:35 pm
Comments: 14
The view out my back door
This year’s crop is coming along. Last week, they were tiny babies. Today, they looked positively adolescent, popping around the field. The picture is Uncle B’s and is a few days old.
Everything is weirdly accelerated this year. The mayflowers are out, the wild flowers are moving through their yearly succession at a brisker than usual pace.
We’ve had an unseasonably warm week. We took sammiches to one of our favorite picnic spots yesterday and couldn’t work out why we were so hot. Then we realized — there was no shade, because the leaves aren’t on the trees yet. Very mixed signals.
This probably means May will be shit ‘n’ chips.
April 16, 2015 — 10:25 pm
Comments: 9
Just a little off the top
Welp, we had our drive pollarded today, six years almost to the day since the last time. Partly done — he’ll come back to do the one on the right and collect the wood too small to be useful.
Pollarding is where you lop the branches off a tree and make really tall stumps. Coppicing is where you lop the branches off and make really short stumps.
We had a tree guy tell us that, in the ordinary course of things, most trees will live a few hundred years at most and then die. But a regularly pollarded tree is, for all intents, immortal. Something about trimming back all its branches makes the tree a sort of perpetual adolescent, biologically. Also, no big heavy branches to weigh it down or split it open.
Usually, the cuts are closer to the trunk, but our professional tree guy was a no-show. This dude is a local handyman sort and he was up there with a hand-saw. I think he was having trouble trimming them any shorter with the equipment he had. Holy shit but he worked hard, though! And now our drive is full of willow fronds.
It’s Spring here. It really feels it now. Has it reached you yet?
April 9, 2015 — 10:11 pm
Comments: 16
Animal adventures
First thing this morning:
ME: Why is the cabinet by the sink open? And why is the mousetrap way across the room over there on the floor?
HIM: Oh, I forgot to tell you. I caught a mouse in the trap last night.
ME: There’s no mouse in that trap.
BOTH: Ewwwwwww.
To be fair, there was a little bit of mouse in the trap. Yeah, Jack pinched Uncle B’s mouse. The least he could’ve done was catch the damn thing hisself. And Uncle B was saving it for breakfast and everything.
Then I was walking to work and something ran up the path at me. Rat? Thinks I. No, stoat! My very first live stoat in the wild! It turned and rippled across the road, and I saw the long, sinuous body and the chocolate tip on his tail!
And then later, pheasant. In our back yard. Those things don’t half make an ugly noise! Majestic beasties, but dull as a sack of wet mice.
So I found you this sculptcha to go with my story. A steal at $6,490! (Yeah, I’d pay it. I like it. Why am I not rich?).
April 7, 2015 — 9:35 pm
Comments: 9
it’s incredibly worrying when the bedbird tucks you in
Very funny. Two monks invent a bestiary. Well, I laughed.
Technically still holiday here. I slept past noon all four days of the long weekend. And you know what? I totally threw my back out doing it. Lying around in bed and sitting around in front of the computer too much.
How in the heck am I going to get up early and hoof it to work tomorrow?
April 6, 2015 — 8:05 pm
Comments: 3
Well, the SS would take me
And there it is. It’s a color-coded pie chart showing the different components of my ancestry. The charts come in three flavors: conservative (90% confidence, but boringly generic), standard (75% confidence and a little more detail) and speculative (51% confidence but breaks it out by country as best it can).
This bit is wobbly science at the moment. They have to decide at the outset the time period they’re trying to tweeze out of the data. 23andme concentrates on what of your DNA dates from the last 500 years. Other services (and, yes, you can submit your raw data to many other services, some free) looks at ancient DNA, or specifically European DNA, or…well, lots of things. These filters are evolving (and, one hopes, improving constantly).
Anyway, I am (more or less) 99.7% European, of which 46.5% British. A little less Brit than I thought, but I did have a German great grandfather and a French one. Also, apparently, their specific model for British/Irish and French/German is not very good (hence the way all four are lumped together).
What’s that? The other 3%? Those little strips of different color at noon? Um, one each of Ashkenazi, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. That’s, um, not necessarily what it looks like. It may mean 3% of the DNA was too old to slot into a European framework and so pointed to older DNA from nearer the human diaspora. Or it could mean my great-great-great grandmother slept with a mixed race field hand.
You choose!
April 2, 2015 — 9:46 pm
Comments: 11