Since I didn’t tease it yesterday or anything, probably the best thing to do is push it off until next Friday. I’ll queue it up over the weekend so I can’t forget again.
To make it up to you, I’ll post pictures of the choo-choo later,
if any of them came out okay.
July 25, 2014 — 7:51 pm
Comments: 12
Ye olde swirley
Here’s an interesting article from the BBC: local groups searching churches to catalogue Medieval graffiti. (I would also direct you to the Suffolk group and the Norfolk group for many more pictures).
Basically, it’s a bunch of amateurs (with professional guidance) fanning out across England to document and record ancient church graffiti. The project started in Norfolk in 2010.
2010. Seriously. That fascinating stuff has been hanging around for, like, a thousand years and nobody has formally cataloged and examined it. It blows my mind.
I can’t tell you how strange and common that is here — this weird lack of curiosity about local history — but I can kind of tell you why.
For hundreds of years, serious historians concentrated on Roman Britain. Those generations of academics who believed Greek and Roman culture were the high point of civilization — and that was, let’s face it, most of the modern era — were inclined to be embarrassed by what they saw as the primitive customs of the locals before the edifying arrival of Caesar’s boys.
To these people, the Medieval era was just a sinking back into provincial ignorance — do they still call it the Dark Ages? — the long snooze of Western Civ, waiting to be rescued by Italian culture again (i.e. the Renaissance).
Modern academics are much more inclined to revere primitive cultures. But the peoples who love pagan-y things tend to be Lefties. And Lefties believe showing the slightest interest in English things is raaaaacisssssst.
So there you have it. There are all these amazing places and objects and boxes of bones squirrelled away all over the country, unexamined. Every once in a while an academic turns something over with his toe and goes, “huh.”
Makes me crazy.
July 23, 2014 — 10:40 pm
Comments: 12
Moar storm
Everybody has a story about Friday’s storm, but I still haven’t seen any official suggestion it was anything but a typical Summer thunderboomer. You can see the leading edge of it again in the photo above (credit to this guy). Tenterden (where that picture was taken) had anecdotal reports of a funnel cloud, but that’s not official either.
It’s amazing the stuff that can happen without much official notice — before, during or after. Occasionally, the sea sneaks in and steals a village here. They are placid people.
Anyway, this is now officially my favorite weather event EVAR. And I just love weather.
And, yes — with the death of James Garner, the Dead Pool is officially won (step forward, Platypuss!). That means…Dead Pool 67! Friday! 6WBT!
July 21, 2014 — 11:01 pm
Comments: 15
The big blow
Today, everybody was talking about the storm (except any of the news sites, for some reason). There were rumors of a tornado. Certainly, the whole business started off very effing strange indeed.
It had been an unusually hot day for England and thunderstorms were predicted in the afternoon. Everyone who was outside agreed you could stand and watch the storm come. On the one side sun, and behind it roared a great fist of cloud. It hit with a sudden blast. I’ve never felt wind like it. It blew junk from the garden straight through the house. I had to lean my entire bodyweight against the front door to get it to shut and latch.
The extreme wind only lasted ten minutes or so, but there was a pretty good thunderstorm behind it blowing all night long. We lost power early on so we sat in the dark and drank wine. After which I slept through most of it.
I tried to get a picture of the approaching monster — the sun was going down and those first clouds were dyed orange, with an absolutely sharp edge because it was moving so damned fast. It was an amazing thing to see. Alas, that’s when I discovered I busted my camera when I dropped it earlier. By the time I fetched another camera, it just looked like a regular old thunder boomer, see above. And in color.
And that’s why no post yesterday.
July 19, 2014 — 8:43 pm
Comments: 29
Sorry ’bout that
Friday’s post was pre-empted by the most hellacious thunderstorm. The leading edge of it was a blast of wind out of a clear blue sky that was like nothing I’ve felt before (and I played in Hurricane Gloria until the cops fussed at me). It blew garden debris the length of the house. Took my full weight leaning against the door to get it shut and latched.
Anyway, needless to say, we’ve been without power most of the night. All seems well now, but I’ve got to run. When I get back, I’ll see if any of the pictures I took do it justice.
— 8:09 am
Comments: 5
We just missed it…
Lookie here. Somebody’s done made a crop circle near the Long Man of Wilmington. Here’s an aerial view of the Long Man on Google Earth. Squinting at the map, I don’t think it’s the field directly at his feet, I think it’s the field above and to the left of that.
Do poke around Google Earth. It’s always cool to explore England like so. I’m sorry to say, they no longer think the Long Man is Stone Age. More like 17th or 18th Century.
What’s non-obvious from the overhead shot is that he’s on the side of a very steep hill. We climbed up to him once — there’s a footpath both above and below him — and it was one of our most memorable outings ever. Just as dusk fell, a great thick cloud poured over the top of the hill, swallowing up the giant. And us, eventually.
I’m not surprised the farmer in the article is pissed. Between the crop circle and the people going to look at the crop circle, he’s probably out a few hundred pounds in wheat. They’re bringing the crops in now.
We were there just a couple of weeks ago — he’s a couple miles outside Alfriston, where we had lunch.
We didn’t do it, though. I swears.
July 16, 2014 — 10:30 pm
Comments: 16
Sophisticated
I’m going to recommend another egregious lefty entertainment product to you: A History of the World in 100 Objects. It’s one hundred handy fun-sized fifteen-minute BBC podcasts based around objects in the British Museum and it’s very cool.
The series ran daily for twenty weeks starting way back in January of 2010, but the whole thing is still available (at the link) for downloading. Also, have a look around the website — it’s cool, too, and includes much more than a hundred objects, in part because they solicited listener submissions. I’ve talked about this series before, but I’m currently re-listening to it from the beginning.
The objects are awesome, but the bias is unmistakable from the beginning. The narration was written and read by the curator of the BM, a lefty cunt-whistle named Neil MacGregor.
Take the above object. It’s a little sandal tag carved out of hippopotamus ivory for Den, one of the earliest Pharoahs of Egypt. Wikipedia says: “Den is said to have brought prosperity to his realm and numerous innovations are attributed to his reign.” Which is the sort of observation we used to make about kings.
MacGregor says this object shows that powerful men have used war and the propaganda of war to control their own people from the beginning of civilization. He called it sadly familiar. To support this contention, he brought in an editorial cartoonist (bound to be from the Guardian, though I was too lazy to check) who said yes, indeedy, he also sometimes drew important people larger than ordinary people. So there you have it.
I’m not reading too much into this, I promise. 2010 was Peak Butthurt over the Iraq War, and he was very clearly calling out Bush’n’Blair.
The BBC is all but unavoidable in this country. We often bitch about it, Uncle B and I. The steady drip-drip-drip of cynical lefty worldview gets into your head no matter how hard you push back. I think it was Melanie Phillips who first described the modern Left as an auto-immune disease: us bad, not-us good. Over and over, all day long. It works its way into the dispirited bones of the unwary.
To this day, they can find a George Bush joke in the gardening program.
Just saying. Listen to the podcasts anyway. Despite everything, there are some wonderful objects and fascinating facts in there. And fifteen minutes is the perfect chunk size for doing doing chores.
July 14, 2014 — 11:23 pm
Comments: 9
Things that are hot
So there’s this burger joint in Brighton called Burger Off (see, there’s your first hint this isn’t going to be the feelgood story of the day). One of the condiments they offer is an imported hot sauce. A very fucking hot imported hot sauce.
Like, on the Scoville scale of food hotness, Tabasco peppers are between 30,000 to 50,000 heat units, ghost chilis between 855,000 to 1,463,700 heat units, police pepper spray between 500,000 and 5 million heat units and this shit somewhere between seven and nine million units.
Bit of a fake, the Scoville scale. It relies on humans’ subjective ability to taste hotness, and we all know the more you sample, the less you taste the stuff. Also, in their final forms, all these things are diluted to different strengths. Nonetheless, we can safely say Mr Gambardella of Burger Off is serving a very fucking hot sauce.
Incidentally, I don’t know what kind of ‘burgers’ those are up there, but it’s the picture that went along with the Daily Mail article. Looks like a spleen burger or something. I think I’d need a shot of the hot stuff to take a bite of that.
Anyhoo, Mr Gambardella got sick of customers who sampled his sauce and said, “pff! That’s not so hot.” So he now offers a deadly XXX burger to those over eighteen willing to sign a (really illiterate — wonder if it would hold up in court) disclaimer. This burger routinely sends people to the hospital:
One guy came in and he was just a little bit cocky and when he left he was admitted to hospital because prior to eating the burger he had a stomach ulcer and we believe it perforated his bowel. He wasn’t in a good way but he pulled through.
And these two reporters from the Brighton Argus:
Mr Barratt took a bite and minutes later suffered severe stomach pains which increased. He lost the feeling in his hands, his legs were shaking and his eyes rolled back in his head.
And within two hours Mr Hendy was suffering similar problems, following his colleague to hospital.
Mr Barratt said: “It was hard to walk. I needed to drink milk to neutralise the burning, which was hard because I was hyperventilating so much my hands had seized up.”
Mr Hendy said: “I was in so much pain I was telling people I felt like I was dying.”
Why do people do this? I like a drop of Sriracha on my sammich, but I stop short of foods that come with frightening health warnings in pidgin legalese.
My mother once challenged a neighbor to a hot pepper eating contest. All’s I remember is the two of them sitting around the kitchen table after all the peppers were gone, taking swigs of the pepper water out of the jar with tears streaming down their faces. It’s a sickness, I tell you.
But my mama was from Texas.
July 9, 2014 — 9:09 pm
Comments: 23
I…have no idea
Well, now. I wasn’t expecting our…ummm…mystery gourd-like vegetable to grow to quite THAT size. Things are ‘UGE. I have told you this, yes? We had three — count ’em, THREE — vines grow up in our raised beds that we most assuredly didn’t plant and locals tell me the things hanging off of them are marrows. Never et one in my life, so how they got in our compost is a puzzler.
Uncle B informs me the village produce contests, they grow ’em to the size of small children and wheel them in in wheelbarrows. These aren’t quite that big, but they would be if I left them.
Marrow, Wikipedia informs me, is the British word for members of the Cucurbita family. Gourds, pumpkins and squash. These look more like morbidly obese zucchinis, but I’m told zucchinis are called courgettes.
Fuck, it’s hard being a ferriner.
Everyone agrees on the recipe, though. Cut them in half, scoop out the middles and fill them with good stuff.
From our garden: herbs, garlic, onions, this year’s new crop of tomatoes. First the skillet, then scoop into the marrow. Bake for twenty minutes, then: American-style bacon, hamburger. Bread crumbs, cheese. Ten more minutes.
Was it nice? Pff! How bad could anything be stuffed with bacon, hamburger and cheese?
July 8, 2014 — 10:22 pm
Comments: 22
Rule by ignorant busybodies
For many purposes, cadmium is banned in the EU. An exception has been made, repeatedly, for artists’ pigments because quantities are tiny (it’s hella expensive!) and the kind of cadmium used for colors doesn’t get into the human body that easily. The cadmiums are an important and pretty irreplaceable of light-fast series opaque reds, oranges and yellows (I use them only in the tiniest concentrations, but I’m not sure what I’d substitute).
Once again, they are considering applying the ban to colors, as well.
Not a big deal on its own, but of a piece with the EU Experience. I cannot tell you how nagged and nannied we have become. Just in the time I’ve been here — oh, the weed killers and pesticides and cleaning products that have been whisked off the shelves. Not on the advice of the experts, but by diktat of “ZOMG It’s A Chemical!” green ignoramuses in Belgium.
Beg pardon. I say Belgium. Richard North of EU Referendum makes a very good case that many of the most obnoxious impositions that we blame on the EU actually are imposed on the EU by the UN. North is a bit of a Mikey-Hates-Everything, but he does his homework.
Global governance via the UN. I know, I know. I see you over there reaching for your Reynold’s Wrap chapeau.
But if you don’t believe in a de facto, shadowy world government, lemme ask you a question: how y’all liking those twisty light bulbs?
July 7, 2014 — 10:20 pm
Comments: 20