adorbs
That there is a rescue badger being raised by a retired farmer. She’s raising three on milk and custard creams. Custard creams are a kind of vanilla cookie — when you get ‘tea and biscuits’ here, the biscuit is likely to be a custard cream (or a digestive).
I knew an old man in the mountains many years ago. He was very nearly pure Cherokee Indian, and he surely looked it. He found a baby groundhog once and raised it as a pet.
He fed it nothing but Little Debbie’s Oatmeal Creme Pies. Nothing. But. Because the groundhog loved them so. After two years, it had a seizure and died.
Like, no shit. I think about this whenever confronted with the numinous red man, the archetypal Indian with his spiritual connection to nature and the land. Even a Neanderthal like me knows a groundhog needs to eat a fucking vegetable now and then.
There were more interesting stories in the news, but it’s April 1, so I didn’t trust any of them to be true.
April 1, 2015 — 8:47 pm
Comments: 18
Well, there’s always 2025
A bunch of us, strangers, gathered on a scenic overlook facing East at 9:35 and saw a deep and impenetrable nothingburger. We weren’t even able to figure out exactly where the sun was. After a while, someone muttered, “looks like your typical gray English morning.”
Other parts of the country were luckier.
In addition to the eclipse, y’all know it’s the Equinox, yes? So it was also the day blue hairs descend on Stonehenge for the world’s most elderly cosplay competition.
Good weekend, all!
March 20, 2015 — 10:49 pm
Comments: 18
Oh, that’s right – YOU DON’T GET THIS ONE
We’re getting a total eclipse on Friday — first one since 1999.
I’m not sure why that is. It seems like y’all in the States get one every year or two, but there you go. Not quite total where we are; about 80% on the South coast.
It should peak in the middle of my Friday commute, but I’m not getting too excited. The weather is due to be very overcast, and probably will be (I say that because weather forecasting here is atrocious, but this is a big predictable band of dark cloud). Although I suppose overcast will just make it eerily darker.
I like eclipses. I haven’t seen many.
Anyhoo, check out this neat tool. It’s a 3D global eclipse tracker (yes, yes…it works for you, too). Go play with the buttons and knobs!
March 18, 2015 — 10:27 pm
Comments: 16
That cruel thing I did to Debbie Wasserman-Schlutz’s eyeballs
I ran across this Mashable series of photos of inmates from a Victorian mental hospital in Yorkshire. It’s a sad browse, but interesting. I was particularly struck by this woman.
The caption says she suffers from “general paralysis of the insane” but it’s more usually called general paresis. It’s a sudden onset bugfuck crazy that used to be blamed on bad character but was ultimately recognized as the third and final stage of syphilis, when the bugs finally eat the brain.
It was tricky to work out because the madness strikes abruptly as much as thirty years after the initial infection, so the bad character explanation made as much sense as anything (a Victorian with syphilis being the very definition). But somebody got a Nobel in the thirties curing paresis by infecting patients with malaria (the syphilis bacterium can’t take the heat, so one good fever can kill it off).
My mother describes seeing a tertiary syphilis sufferer on Bourbon Street, stumbling along the road suddenly freezing with one foot in the air, having forgotten how to walk. The diagnosis comes courtesy of my grandmother being a nurse and jazzmen being no better than they should be, *sniff*.
Anyway, I mention it because this condition informs one of my most cherished phobias: Lyme disease. On account of it’s a very similar disease with a very similar progression: spirochete causes a small rash, disappears, roars back with a leather mask and a chainsaw thirty years later. Except Lyme is a lot harder to kill.
Summer is coming. Tick check, people!
March 17, 2015 — 9:05 pm
Comments: 9
PICTURED: Rudely shaped carrot grown in allotment in Lower Belvedere
Actual headline. For the blind, this helpful description is provided:
It bears a resemblance to two human legs, with a growth between them that leaves little to the imagination.
It leaves everything to the imagination. It’s a flipping carrot.
Also discussed, a strawberry shaped like a penis and a carrot shaped like a foot that “caused a social media sensation.”
This isn’t the Sheep Testicle Gazette out here in the ass-end of nowhere. That’s a London paper that somehow found room for this snuggled between the muggings and burglaries.
A hard people to understand, at times.
Anyway, I broke my good camera this Summer, so Uncle B loaned me his one and I’ve now broken that too. Down-twinkles. I’m cameraless. That leaves me at the mercy of any old rude vegetable I can dig up until I buy a new one.
March 16, 2015 — 10:24 pm
Comments: 23
I’ll see your woodpecker-riding weasel…
Nope. Not my work. Oh, also there is this (which is apparently real).
We’re starting to see the new lambs appearing in the fields, which cheers me up no end. We haven’t had a bad Winter at all (sorry ‘Merkins), but I’m still ready to see it go.
March 12, 2015 — 10:19 pm
Comments: 12
Don’t touch our ‘Butthole’, say residents
Yeah. Actual headline. I only posted it for that. I suppose I could do a post on funny English road names, but that’s been done to death.
So, instead, I’m going to post about corvids. Couple of weeks ago, the BBC ran a story about a little girl in Seattle who leaves food for the crows. They pay her back in bits of junk and shiny trinkets.
At the end of the story, they asked readers for any similar experiences and got back some amazing stories. All of them were crows, I think. Worth a read.
We had a couple of pet crows when I was little. My mother was good with animals, so we had lots of them. The crows really impressed me as personalities — smart and alert and a little wicked. They loved to tease the cats.
It’s very birdy where we live now, including a lively colony of rooks. I like the rooks. A few years ago, I was walking home along a busy road and I spotted a rook on the sidewalk. Or maybe a crow. Not sure. Anyway, it was limping badly; it had probably been grazed by a car.
I thought, “awwww…I will throw my coat over him and take him home and nurse him back to health and we’ll be bestest of friends.” I took one step in its direction and it squawked and flew straight into the path of a gravel truck and disappeared in a cloud of feathers and red mist.
I still feel shit.
March 10, 2015 — 11:05 pm
Comments: 9
Yay! Plague pit!
Crossrail is an astonishing engineering project; they’re boring a big-ass new subway tunnel straight across London. Like, 26 miles worth of new track, going through infrastructure, under foundations and within inches of existing tunnels and roads. It’s Europe’s largest construction projects — one of the biggest construction projects EVAH.
If you love big machines and amazing feats of construction, if you sometimes wonder whether we’ve totally lost that audacity the Victorians had so darned much of, you really should follow the link and spend some time exploring. Try their YouTube channel (at least check out the eight ginormous tunneling machines).
Digging a huge trench across London, as you might imagine, is turning up all sorts of ancient junk. They’ve just run across the Bedlam plague pit — 3,000 skellingtons worth — and they’ve got sixty archaeologists on site beavering away at it so construction can continue soonest.
Earlier Underground lines took a stomach-crunching jog to avoid digging up plague pits and taking the chance of unleashing something. But, as it turns out, it’s pretty difficult to extract y. pestis out of old bones. They’re going to do their best.
March 9, 2015 — 9:43 pm
Comments: 12
I suppose I oughta
If you haven’t seen this picture today, welcome. Is this your first visit to the internet?
This shot was taken in a park in East London and, of course, contrary to appearances, this isn’t a happy Disney funride species mashup. It’s a stoat trying to kill a woodpecker for its supper. They both survived. Poor, poor hungry stoaty. I looked for a link to the original, straight news article but it was too late…
…the internet had exploded into tweets and memes.
(Thanks to everyone who sent me links. It gives me a warm, happy glow that a sizable chunk of the internet hears ‘weasel’ and immediately thinks of me).
True story. I read in one of my many volumes of weasel lore that a gamekeeper(?) once found a recently dead eagle that had an ancient, mummified weasel hanging off its chest. He figured the eagle had stooped to the weasel and broken its back, after which the weasel was able to extricate itself, pull its broken body up the body of the flying eagle, sink its fangs over the heart of the bird, die and go into spasm, there to stay forever.
The eagle lived out its life with a dessicated stoat hanging off of him. Let that be a lesson. I’m not sure what lesson that should be, but please let it be one.
March 3, 2015 — 9:26 pm
Comments: 22
It’s Spam appreciation week!
Spam Appreciation Week, I say! I’m sure Hormel sponsors this with the purest of motives.
If nothing else, you must listen to the Spam jingle from 1963. Scrub to 2:37 to hear the theme, words and all. Dude with a cut-glass accent teases it 4EVA.
My mama told me Spam was just made from the bits they had to trim off to fit Danish ham in those cans. It’s not true, but it’s nothing nasty. It’s just pork that’s been cooked in the can, like soup and dogfood. They’re cooked in the can, I mean. Not pork. We don’t feed cats and dogs pork and we don’t make pork soup, though I’m damned if I know why.
Anyhoo! Sliced thin, fried until crispy, covered in melted cheese on a toasted bagel half with mayo. How do you take your spam?
WARNING – WARNING – WARNING…geez, that Spam song is an earworm. Uncle B and I are rolling around on the floor clutching our heads like something out of a Star Trek episode and it Will Not Go Away.
March 2, 2015 — 8:36 pm
Comments: 34