This is the best ass bruise you will see today
Londoner goes to a stag do in Poland, falls through table, is protected from grievous spinal cord injury by the wings of an angel, I guess.
Don’t mean to be running a nudity blog up in here but, you know, Britain is my beat, and so many silly things happen in Britain. Silly, naked things.
That item is from a free London paper called the Metro. Whenever we go to London, I always find a copy of it on the train, but they also have an online presence. Please join me in sampling the delights:
Lonely Serb rejected by 5,000 ladies of Facebook. For sale on eBay: uber creepy doll. Also on eBay: a set of six twigs found in London’s de Beauvoir Square.
Instead of picking it up, Sussex council paints its dogshit hot pink. Conjoined twins are always good. Soylent Beige. You probably shouldn’t click that. Come to that, you probably shouldn’t click this, either.
Just so you think it isn’t all tea parties and cucumber sandwiches over here.
p.s. Though we did go to a tea party this weekend, and there were cucumber sandwiches. So, sometimes it’s tea parties and cucumber sandwiches.
May 13, 2014 — 9:52 pm
Comments: 17
Bounce
The first ever naked ping pong tournament took place this weekend in a private room in the Holborn Club in London. According to this article, ’twas the very spot where table tennis was invented in 1901. (Wikipedia disputes that, but really, who the hell cares?).
There are some artfully posed publicity stills at the link. I’m guessing the actual event was more than a little silly, with all that junk bobbling around.
Yeah, the club is really called Bounce. Didn’t make that up.
According to Pixy Misa’s Twitter feed, Ace had a catastrophic server crash today. In case you were wondering. They expect to get it up and running later today.
May 12, 2014 — 8:55 pm
Comments: 11
*spit*
One last bit of ironmongery. Sorry the focus is none too good, but it’s dark in the kitchen. Note the whirring thingamabob on top: this is a clockwork mechanism to turn the spit, to roast the beast before the fire. The rope leads to a weight which would have to be cranked back to the top periodically. Put some boy out of a job, this newfangled contraption did.
One of our cookery books points out that most of us have never had real roast beef — what we call roast beef is really baked beef. And when you think about the difference between a rotisserie chicken and one from the oven, you’ll realize that’s true.
The posts this week are from Michelham Priory, which we visited on Sunday. As the guide explained to us, a priory was kind of like the social services of the day. Unlike the monasteries, which were shut off from the public, the staff in the priory were priests intended to minister to outsiders. They gave food and shelter to the poor and nursed the sick.
Like all the others, this one was disbanded by Hank the Eighth, but luckily for us lived on as a private residence. Or a piece of it lived on, anyway.
Right. What time is it, kids? It’s Dead Pool time! Well, it will be tomorrow at 6WBT!
May 8, 2014 — 11:05 pm
Comments: 17
More blacksmith
This is also a product of the blacksmith’s art. Despite the fairly elaborate decoration on the latch mechanism, it wasn’t made by a jeweler. It’s the locking mechanism of a 16th C and it’s a surprisingly fiendish object.
The entire box is made of iron. The docent couldn’t tell me how much it weighs, but she reckoned it would take four men to shift it. She let me try the lid on another similar box, and it was honestly all I could do to lift it vertical.
On either side at the top, you can see two stout rings for padlocks. Centered between them in the box proper is the keyhole, and it’s fake. It goes nowhere. The real keyhole is hidden behind a boss in the center of the lid. It slips sideways, and there’s the hole. The sound it makes when you turn the key is epic.
It is further compartmentalized on the inside for papers and jewelry and whatnot. The idea was that great men had to have lots of coin on hand to pay for everything, especially when they traveled. There are four holes in the bottom for bolts, to bolt it to the bed of a cart for just that purpose.
If Robin Hood ever did make off with one like this, I hate to think how many Merry Man it would take to file enough of a slot into it to make room for a wedge to make purchase for a hammer. I don’t know how else you’d get it open.
May 7, 2014 — 9:57 pm
Comments: 8
Steel ivy.
On Sunday, I watched a blacksmith make this on an ancient forge. It’s about the size of the ball of my thumb.
He took a quarter inch mild steel bar and hammered the end into a sort of arrowhead shape.
Folded in half.
Part straightened again (this made the big vein down the middle).
Beat the little veins into the sides of the leaf.
Nipped it from the rod, leaving a nub of the rod behind.
Turned it and hammered at the nub, over and over, until it became a long, thin stem.
Hammered the stem around the nose of the anvil until he’d tied it in a knot.
Not much more than five minutes. It was awesome. We asked to see more examples of his work, and the blacksmith reached his blackened and callused paw into his pocket…and pulled out his iPhone.
Heh.
May 6, 2014 — 9:48 pm
Comments: 13
I can see a lot of this in my future
In case you can’t quite make it out, that’s me poking a glob of KitEKat on a toothpick into the open maw of Jack’s latest victim (he didn’t mean to hurt innybody, he just wants to playyyyyyy). This is a very birdy place and Jack is a bird-loving sociopath, so I might as well learn to do this now.
Birdy alert and feeding well. Making a nuisance of itself hopping all over my study. Very nearly a fledgling (perhaps it was on its first flight) so it shouldn’t be in care long, assuming it survives the encounter with the deadly cat’s mouth bacteria. In fact, I tried to give it back to its parents twice by putting it on branches near the nest, but he couldn’t quite make his way home. When I brought him in the first time, I thought the cold had done for him and it was quite a while before I got him hopping and chirping again.
I can roughly make out where the nest is, but I can’t possibly get there because it’s very high and the fruit cage is in the way. Parents followed me all around the garden all day calling me the worst names they could think of.
Anyhoo, he’s a baby Common Blackbird (Turdus merula). This is a completely different bird than the New World blackbirds of home. In case you ever wondered why the Beatles wrote a pretty lilting song about a bird that goes SKWA, Eurasian blackbirds don’t go SKWA. They have one of the nicest calls going. Check out their Wikipedia page for a couple of examples.
Have a good weekend, folks, and send nice thoughts to the little birdie.
May 2, 2014 — 10:22 pm
Comments: 18
Throw your paws in the air like you just don’t care
I don’t usually talk about my personal life — ‘tcha, no wait, successful bloggers don’t talk about their personal lives; I talk about mine all the time! Anyway, we’ve been waking up achey and we think our mattress is shot.
Either that or we’re just old. (Attentive readers will recall that May is my birthday month — not merely the month my birthday appears in, but a month-long celebration of the awesomeness of me).
Mattresses are expensive and science is cool, so we bought a cheap air mattress and just popped it on top of the old one. Not a permanent answer, but to test the age-versus-crap-mattress hypothesis. So far so good, but the top of the bed is, like, four feet from the floor now.
Illustrated: what happens when you hop up onto an air mattress where a cat is sleeping.
Bonus: I found this while image searching “bouncy castle” — bouncy Stonehenge!
May 1, 2014 — 10:50 pm
Comments: 26
A place of dignity and refinement
This iconic image shows Michael O’Brien, an Aussie, the first brave innovator to run naked across the field of a major sporting event. It was a rugby game in 1974 between England and France. The bobby’s helmet (the one covering his junk) is on display at Twickenham, where this event took place.
I always thought of streaking as an American phenomenon, but it ain’t. The first recorded running-naked-on-a-bet was on July 5, 1799 when a London man was bet ten guineas he wouldn’t run naked from Cornhill to Cheapside. The flesh was willing, but the police were uncooperative.
The first recorded incident of streaking by a college student in the United States occurred in 1804 at Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) when senior George William Crump was arrested for running naked through Lexington, Virginia, where the university is located. Robert E. Lee later sanctioned streaking as a rite of passage for young Washington and Lee gentlemen. Crump was suspended for the academic session, but later went on to become a U.S. Congressman.
I lifted that from the Wikipedia article whole, because I couldn’t say it better myself.
Oh. Right. Let’s not forget Lady Godiva, the wife of Leofric, Earl of Mercia, who rode naked through the streets of Coventry in the 11th C to protest her husband’s taxation policy. Everyone kindly looked away from the spectacle except one probably apocryphal swine named Tom, whose name comes down to us through legend.
In her honor, Coventry will be hosting the country’s first national streaking contest next month. Genitals optional, looks like. It’s sponsored by a food manufacturer to celebrate a microwavable hamburger called the Streaker, so named because it is topped with streaky bacon. Or, as we call it in the States, bacon.
Just in case you were thinking it was all Masterpiece Freaking Theatre over here.
April 23, 2014 — 9:43 pm
Comments: 14
Happy Good Friday
The term “looker” for shepherd originated on Romney Marsh, next door in Kent. Romney Marsh is a fascinating place. It’s the sticky-outy bit of Kent that waggles suggestively at France.
The little building there is called a looker’s hut and they once dotted the marsh all over. They were mostly used during lambing time, when very close tabs are kept on the ewes and newborns. The typical example is one room, brick, with a chimney and maybe a window. Little cosy places appeal to me mightily. A looker’s hut would be just the thing.
When lookers keep an eye on the flocks these days, they pull up a trailer. Or drive the fields all day. The old huts are falling down, being vandalized or deliberately demolished (when no-one is looking; they’re all protected by order). I can think of a couple that have disappeared just in the years we’ve lived nearby. Very sad.
Here’s a Wikipedia collection of photos, and another from Google Images.
Have a good weekend, all. It’s a four-day holiday here (no separation of church ‘n’ state for the Motherland), but I promise to turn up on Monday and share the leftovers.
April 18, 2014 — 10:09 pm
Comments: 27
Mutton honey
They found a ewe drowned in the canal in our back garden yesterday. How they noticed one missing and went to find her is beyond me. It’s a big flock. The looker pulled her out with a rope.
In our area, a shepherd is called a looker. You might think a looker looks, but he doesn’t. He lookers. Generally, he goes out lookering in the morning and lookering again in the afternoon.
Anyway, the looker told us a ewe will suicide if she’s ill (although another looker told me a ewe wakes up every morning and thinks, “how shall I kill myself today?”).
The looker (the first looker, I mean) also told us a ewe will reject a lamb if she senses it’s wrong. He had an apparently healthy lamb this season, rejected by its mama, was feeding well on the bottle and looking robust. Found him stone dead next morning in his pen.
On the other hand, most bottle-reared lambs thrive. You can tell who in the flock was raised by humans: they run up to you happy instead of away from you scared. I think I’d feel pretty awful sending off a sheep that thought I was great.
When they fish a sheep out of the ditch, it’s called drowned mutton. Used to sell it cheaper at the butchers, so it was prized by the poor (I can’t imagine it’s legal to sell these days). I half overheard one of my neighbors tell a story about an old lady who preferred drowned mutton, so they pitched one in the pond for her every year.
Lookers, eh?
April 17, 2014 — 9:11 pm
Comments: 15