Hello, stoopit
I don’t know why I even look at the Mail. I’m convinced half the things in it are fakes or put-up jobs, and the other half are low rent and tacky. But there’s lots of it, and the internet has been boring lately.
Oh, well. This guy and his wife rescued two battery hens. And then, worried that the chickens would feel the cold, had little woolly pinafores made for them. Looking at the pictures, those birds do not look happy to me. I’m sure they’re like, “can we go back to our nice warm barn now?”
Though it can be hard to judge the mood of a chicken, I’m pretty sure my girls are missing Lucia. She was, after all, the one who told them what to do. Now they just drift around looking listless and unhappy. The weather isn’t helping. They don’t even come out of the hut most of the day.
With the death of Lucia, there’s room on the perch for Coco (who grew up to be a big, beautiful bird) in the main house, and Maggie (the crippled one) can have the nest box for the Winter, so she’s at least with the other girls. At last my whole glum, abbreviated flock is together now.
Dear Abby – I think my chickens are depressed.
November 12, 2013 — 11:34 pm
Comments: 17
Now, that’s just silly
Apparently, he won a goodly number of them fair and square in the Navy during the war. So that’s not silly. But, gosh you’d think uniform regs would allow these guys to wear them in two rows, instead of one long pasteboard like some kind of banana republican.
If you’re curious to know what they are and what he got them for — all 17 of them — here you go.
Good weekend, folks!
November 9, 2013 — 12:00 am
Comments: 19
The Muzeum of Beanz
Jack and I got exiled to the kitchen yesterday for bad behavior, so I organized the canned goods cabinets. Words are inadequate to describe how astonishing it is that I might organize a kitchen cabinet. My housekeeping, it is below average.
Lookit — turns out, in aggregate, we have a whole cabinet’s worth of Heinz beans. Excuse me, “beanz.” They’re likely to last a while, too. I’ve finally plucked up the courage to tell Uncle B that the answer to the question, “would you like a few beans with dinner?” is not merely “no” but “honestly, no.”
Anyways, MacDonald’s is throwing a corporate snit. After forty years of Heinz ketchup, MacDonald’s is dropping them because — get this! — the new CEO of Heinz is the old CEO of Burger King. Word.
Pretty thin gruel of a blog post, I admit, but we were exiled again. If this keeps up, I’m in danger of having a clean kitchen.
October 31, 2013 — 12:04 am
Comments: 41
Never forget
I ain’t even made this picture myself. I nicked it off Imgur.
Yeah, our giant megahellstorm was a bit of a fizzle. It was a pretty good blow — and heavier up toward London, where there were a few fatalities — but for these parts, it wasn’t even the worst storm of 2013.
Poor, poor journalists — they had a cool name picked out and everything. The St Jude’s Day storm! See, today was the feast day of St Jude, who is the patron of lost causes. Awesome, amirite?
The overreaction and consequent razzing are all down the to the Great Storm of 1987, which was the most powerful storm to land here in centuries (which had hurricane force winds but was not technically a hurricane, as those bastards are tropical). The size of the storm caught everyone by surprise and the Met Office has overreacted ever since (same thing happened in Rhode Island after the Blizzard of ’78).
There were casualties and disruption, but the main thing people remember is the trees. Brits like their trees, and millions and millions of them were lost in the storm. Including ancient and wonderful trees, like six of the seven oaks in Sevenoaks.
I hear people bring up that storm all the time. But mostly, I hear them bring up Michael Fish, who gave this forecast before the storm. He’s never lived it down. It’s one of Britain’s favorite memes.
I know, I know. A completely unremarkable moment, even in light of the storm, but you have to understand: the English.
October 28, 2013 — 9:21 pm
Comments: 24
So, there’s a wallaby in Highgate Cemetery
That sounds like one of those Monty Python bad English phrasebook sayings, like “my hovercraft is full of eels.” Or “my nipples explode with delight.” But no, there really is a wallaby loose in Highgate Cemetery in London. None of the local zoos have reported one missing, but expert say the photos look like a Bennett’s wallaby, and there are colonies of those known to live wild in the UK.
Yes, it’s true: there are wild wallaby colonies in Britain. The climate is so congenial — it seldom rises above 85° and never spends long below freezing — that stowaways and escapees find it easy to live off the land. It’s a real problem here.
Like the tiny, terrifying muntjac deer, AKA the vampire deer. False widow spiders. Hungarian laughing frogs.
London is so stuffed full of feral budgies they’re having to shoot the bastards.
Did I say “congenial”? I guess I meant survivable. For a laugh, I used to visit the meerkat cam at the Bristol zoo (camera link didn’t work for me when I tried it just now, but it feels wrong not to link). Bristol. Ah, poor bastards. I’d watch those old meerkats standing disconsolately in the rain, water dripping off their fur. Generations removed from the Kalahari Desert, but the looks on their little faces plainly said, “something is terribly wrong with my life.”
Anyway, back to the wallaby. Let’s hope he shits on Karl Marx’s grave.
Update: Obamacare.gov is still boned.
October 24, 2013 — 10:10 pm
Comments: 21
Lookit the little tiny life preserver in the water
Ha! Ha! I bet you thought this was an Obamacare metaphor.
Nope. Four generations of the Gibson family from the Islands of Scilly were photographers, and 125 years of their shipwreck pictures are going to auction at Sotheby’s.
THE COMPLETE EXTANT PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE OF SHIPWRECK AND RELATED IMAGES BY FOUR GENERATIONS OF THE GIBSON FAMILY OF PHOTOGRAPHERS, 1872 TO 1997, COMPRISING:
585 glass plate negatives (214: 12 x 10in. and 382: 8 x 6in.) housed in 16 original wooden boxes and one cardboard box, a few plates with cracks, or loss to glass or image, some boxes worn; 407 glass plate copy negatives (6½ by 4¾in.) in 4 cardboard boxes; 179 glass plate negatives (4¼ x 3¼in.); 198 film negatives (5 x 4in.) in three boxes; 335 cut film negatives (various sizes); and 39 (35mm.) film negatives 97 original photographs of shipwrecks (silver prints, 12 x 10in.) manuscript ledger by Alexander and Herbert Gibson on the shipwrecks of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly (folio, 330 x 205mm.; approximately 149pp. of notes on wrecks and 32pp. of records of telegraph messages sent from the Isles of Scilly, 1876-77) a collection of books by John Fowles, John Arlott, John Le Carré, and Rex Cowan on the Gibsons of Scilly (see detailed list below), together with newspaper and magazine articles
WANT. Well worth clicking the first link and browsing the photographs. Or this slide show in the Telegraph with larger pictures and longer descriptions.
Oh, but hey…it makes a pretty good Obamacare metaphor, too.
October 23, 2013 — 8:03 pm
Comments: 11
Weird-ass sheep
So these things were turning up all over Britain last year: sheep with spooky-ass smiles stenciled on their sides. Turns out — eventually, after letting folks stew for a while — that it was a PR stunt for a new amusement park’s roller coaster.
Yeah, it’s a year old. I ran across it while I was doing a Google images search of sheep. Never you mind why.
Remember, now: tomorrow. Here. Six sharp. Dead Pool Round 54!
October 17, 2013 — 10:04 pm
Comments: 11
Shiny
A hundred and one years ago, workmen demolishing Wakefield House in Cheapside, London swung a pickaxe into the cellar floor and heard it thump against a wooden box. Inside, they found almost 500 rings, broaches, gems, watches and other awesome examples of the jeweler’s art. They stuffed their hats, pockets and hankies and ran to everyone’s favorite local fence, Stoney Jack.
Fortunately for history, Stoney Jack wasn’t a thug, but a respectable antique dealer named G.F. Lawrence — also head of acquisitions for the brand new London Museum. Which, you’ll be astonished to learn, ended up with 99% of the collection.
Among the jewels was a broach engraved for the first Viscount Stafford, which neatly dates the collection after 1640 when he took the title but before the Great Fire of London in 1666. Why the hoard was buried and never retrieved, no one knows but, as a jeweler’s working stock, it proved priceless to historians. If you’re at all interested, do hit the links (especially the first one; that’s the best article I read).
The hoard is (finally!) going on display in the Museum of London this Friday. Why they didn’t have it ready for the 100th anniversary, I do not know.
That thing in the picture, by the way, is a tiny watch…inside a single enormous hollowed-out emerald. A Google image search is highly recommended.
October 8, 2013 — 10:13 pm
Comments: 7
Maybe own a bit of history, kind of
That up there is the Wesley Tree in beautiful Winchelsea, the ash tree under which John Wesley preached his last ever outdoor sermon, 223 years ago today (spooky — I didn’t realize it when I started writing this post, but the date was October 7, 1790).
Actually, it’s not really. Tourists (or the devout, if you prefer) picked bits off of the original tree until a strong wind came along in 1927 and blew down what was left. This substantial tree was grown from a sapling taken from a cutting. So it’s kind of the historic tree.
Anyway, sadly, we’re having a serious ash die back over here, caused by a fungus, Chalara fraxinea. It turned up in Poland in 1992, ripped across Europe (Denmark lost 60-90% of their ash trees) and arrived in the UK in 2012, in a shipment of young trees from the Netherlands. There’s a lot of ash here, so this isn’t good.
So when the Wesley Tree looked unwell, everyone feared the worst. Well, it turns out the bugger has an altogether different fungus, the Hairy Bracket fungus. Which may or may not go along with an even eviller fungus, White Rot.
Damn, this tree hugging is complicated.
So what they’re doing up there is lopping off the affected limbs and hoping for the best. They’re also appealing for locals to take cuttings and seeds and grow backup trees, in the event of a bad outcome.
I was going to say, if any of my readers are Methodist arborculturists, you should totally ask for a cutting. And then I realized that might import ash dieback to the US.
So, bad idea. Forget I said anything.
October 7, 2013 — 10:55 pm
Comments: 26
Mmmmm…
Roast beef, roast potatoes, carrots and peas…in a bowl made of yorkshire pudding. I know…food always looks gross in black and white, but I can assure you, this was a bit of alright.
I lumme some yorkshire pudding.
Honestly, folks, I don’t know what to say about politics at the moment. It’s not that I’m not following. I am. But damned if I can figure out where it’s going. Everything has an ominous, oppressive feeling, like the heavy air before a thunderstorm.
Though I should probably let you guys know, my gut feelings are *always* wrong.
October 3, 2013 — 10:39 pm
Comments: 28