Happy Boxing Day!
Gosh, I’m stuffed.
Back here tomorrow. 6 WBT. Dead Pool Round 57!
December 26, 2013 — 11:36 pm
Comments: 6
Christmas Eve Eve
Holy shit, it’s like the apocalypse out there. Yes, we’re on the southern coast, in the 85mph band. It’s rubbish night, but I don’t dare put anything out. I’m amazed we have power. It might not last.
By the way, our little corner of England always gets lumped in with London. As you can imagine, the doings of London always bigfoot all over our local news.
Yes, somebody had Kalashnikov. Sam Paris had him. So there will be a holiday Dead Pool on Friday, if y’all are over your festivities by then.
Expect posting to be light and lame for the holidays, until I sober up. I make that February or so.
December 23, 2013 — 8:25 pm
Comments: 21
I hereby declare de holidays be on
How much is a bottle of Jack where you are? I picked up one for £15 today — about $22.50 — which is pretty good for here. That’s 70cl. A fifth is about 75 cl. Do they still sell liquor by the fifth in the US or have they given in to international peer pressure?
I grew up about an hour from where they distill Jack and it’s always a taste of home. My favorite was green label, which was almost impossible to find outside Tennessee. When the distillery guys tasted a year’s batch, the stuff that wasn’t up to snuff got sold off in a bottle identical to Jack Black, but in dark green. It was harsh as shit, but cheap and plentiful and I loved it. The folks back home tell me they don’t sell it any more.
Boo. I wonder where it goes now.
Anyway, I think this is the first time I’ve bought a bottle of Jack in the UK. There are so many fantastic whiskies on offer, as you might imagine, it didn’t seem terribly pointful. But, here goes — let the Crimbo festivities begin!
December 17, 2013 — 12:18 am
Comments: 51
Weekend public domain book thread…?
So, here’s a British classic that was new to me: Jock of the Bushveld. Dog adventure story, like Call of the Wild or White Fang. But in Africa. And nonfiction.
Wow. Very entertain. Much enjoy.
The links above go to Project Gutenberg. I don’t know when they started this, but they now offer Kindle editions, cleanly formatted, often with illustrations. Man, that opens up a whole lotta excellent free content for the ol’ reading device. And the holidays coming up (or as I think of Christmas, the Time of Reading).
So, anything in the out-of-copyright bin you’d recommend?
Here, I’ll go. In the fine old tradition of ghost stories for Christmas, how about some M.R. James? Or Algernon Blackwood?
The neighbor who recommended Jock of the Bushveld also loaned me a couple of nice old illustrated hardbacks by Ernest Thompson Seton, another adventurer and naturalist and sometime illustrator of the era (and early patron of the Boy Scouts). He — my neighbor — eagerly told me, “I have two thousand books in my library.”
Ah. Good. Ummmm…good weekend, all!
December 14, 2013 — 12:44 am
Comments: 54
Incestuous
Remember the lady in the funeral selfie from yesterday, Helle Thorning-Schmidt? Prime Minister of Denmark? Well, it turns out, before she had that gig, she was a member of the European Parliament.
Presumably that’s where she met and married Stephen Kinnock, who worked in and around Brussels before taking a gig with the World Economic Forum — one of those institutions that gives conspiracy nuts hives.
His qualifications include being the son of Glenys Kinnock, former Member of the European Parliament, former Minister for Europe and former Minister of State for Africa and the United Nations.
Her qualifications include being the wife of Neil Kinnock, leader of the UK Labour party from 1999 to 2004 1994 to 2007. Actually, that’s pretty much it. That’s all of her qualifications right there.
Oh wait, ‘scuse me, beg pardon, I misspoke. That should be Baron and Baroness Kinnock.
In the bad old days, they called this guy, the guy in the picture with the shiny boots, the Uncle of Europe. Because every throne in the West was sat on or next to by a child of his mama. That didn’t work out so hot.
But don’t you worry, the modern European ruling class is totally different — Neil Kinnock’s dad was a coal miner, for cri-yi. I’m sure it’ll turn out much better this time.
p.s. You may remember Neil Kinnock as the man from whom Slow Joe Biden borrowed a few colorful phrases — and bits of personal biography — in his 1988 presidential run.
December 12, 2013 — 12:21 am
Comments: 13
England stuffs
This style of roof is known as a “cat slide”. Okay, I think technically a cat slide is lower on one side and ours is symmetrical, but boy howdy — that cat sure slides purty on it. Go on, you know you want him big and in color.
On Saturday morning, we woke up to the hunt. Well, I didn’t. I slept right through it. But the hunt swept through the neighborhood.
I’m a little disappointed that nobody told us in advance. It’s a trust issue. Fox hunting is still hugely controversial here.
The people agin’ it say it’s impossibly, unnecessarily cruel to the foxes. And destructive of property. And illegal.
The people for it say foxes are vermin, country people have been dealing with them this way for hundreds of years and — Jesus Christ, mind your own business.
I have neighbors on both sides of the argument (though mostly pro-hunt, I suspect). I’m deeply ambivalent about it, but I have decided I don’t have to have an opinion on every little issue. I think this is proper foreigner attitude.
They keep the hunt secret as best they can to avoid protesters (though apparently there were a few), but I would have appreciated a heads up. I’m told when their blood is up, a pack of dogs has been known to sheer off from the main group and kill cats. And chickens. (Yeah, ouch, there’s that ambivalent thing again).
They scared up seven foxes this time, so I heard. They didn’t get them all, though. I sat outside with Jack last night (I have to run him around every few hours to work the satan out of him), and there was one screaming loud ol’ fox in the field next door.
It sounded like somebody was skinning a live swan.
December 3, 2013 — 10:25 pm
Comments: 26
Here we go!
I bet I’m getting fifty commercial emails a day, from everybody I’ve ever bought so much as a paperclip from. Mostly from the States, so they are — how you say? — out of luck sneaking a hand in my pocket this Christmas.
I dread this season. I’m a lousy gift shopper, Uncle B is incredibly hard to buy for and his birthday is too close to Xmas. If something’s big, I can’t afford it. If it’s small, he’s already bought it. If it’s weird, he’s probably not going to like it.
What I usually do is open up Amazon, close my eyes, think of him and poke stream-of-consciousness into the search box. For, like, a week, until I reach my money limit.
The thing above is one of my stranger successes. It’s a temperature-controlled butter dish. See, Brits use butter instead of mayo as a sandwich lubricant. And, on untoasted bread, the butter is either tear-it-up hard or sloppy soft, depending on the season and how long it’s been left out. This thing has a thermostat, a dial and a computer fan in the bottom, so the butter is always the perfect spreading temperature.
No, really, it was a hit.
What are some of your stranger Christmas successes? Seriously, I’m asking. Begging, even. I am allllll out of ideas this year.
December 2, 2013 — 11:32 pm
Comments: 31
This is fun we’re having, right?
We most certainly do celebrate Thanksgiving in this household (a gluttony holiday wasn’t exactly a hard sell). Turkey Day is my favorite and, not entirely by chance, the anniversary of the day I arrived in England for good. Well, the date shifts a little, obviously, but I count it from Thanksgiving to Thanksgiving. Five years now, if you can believe it.
Our neighbors — among them the incorrigible old coots who got us drunk last night — have been good and welcoming. The problem is, they’re all ten or twenty years older than we are. We just have time to get attached, and they go falling off the branch already. One died suddenly last year, another has had a completely incapacitating stroke.
Here’s a nasty shock: the NHS doesn’t pay for nursing home care. When our friend with the stroke has a medical issue — breaks a bone or gets pneumonia — he goes in the hospital and socialized medicine pays for the lot. When he’s stable enough to go back to the care home, his wife pays, to the tune of about $1,200 a week. Until they’ve bled her savings white, and then the state picks up the tab.
Part of me thinks “fair enough” — round the clock care is terribly expensive and it has to paid for somehow. But geez, this guy worked all his life to build up his little stash, and there it goes — whoosh, down the crapper. He doesn’t even get anything nicer than the man who pissed it all away at the pub. Not that he’d know the difference now, poor bastiche.
Anyway, I promise to be cheerier tomorrow. Because — turkey!
November 27, 2013 — 11:54 pm
Comments: 17
Another view
I’ve probably given you the impression that it’s all Miss Marple and stone circles and villages fêtes, haven’t I? Like most things, it’s a lot more complicated than that.
Take this view. The white strip at the bottom is Camber Beach, the only white sand beach in this part of the country. It’s a beautiful thing; its been used dozens of times as a movie backdrop (most recently, George Clooney and Matt Damon filmed there this Spring).
And that thing in the upper right corner that looks like fly eggs? That’s holiday caravans. Read: trailer park. Low rent, but at least it’s seasonal trash. The houses around it are poorer, and year ’round.
It’s a rough little town, Camber. About the poorest in the county. And I can think of half a dozen up and down the coast nearby that are like it — grubby places next to lovely places.
There’s a particularly seedy, sea-sidey kind of poverty here. White. Drunk. Violent. Loud. Cheap. Young men with fighting dogs on short leads, lots and lots of tarty girls. The seaside attracts them, of course, but we also have it on good authority that the social workers dump problem families in the same neighborhoods, over and over.
Which explains all the junkies in Hastings.
November 23, 2013 — 12:37 am
Comments: 18
Something something henge
We drive past this stone circle occasionally. It’s in a roadside field sandwiched between an old church and a fake farm shop (farm shops are all the rage at the moment, so the area is filling up with “farm shops”).
This ancient monument was built approximately two to four years ago. I suddenly noticed it when we drove past a couple of years back, but it’s only recently appeared on Google maps. Google’s satellite updates have about a five year latency, I’ve noticed.
This guy’s Flickr shows it much better.
Not sure what we’re looking at, but I’d bet hippies are responsible.
November 21, 2013 — 11:53 pm
Comments: 22