Weasel television
So, Wednesdays we have coffee with the neighbors at a local cafe. This morning, first thing when I showed up, more than one of them said, “so, this Boston thing — right wing tax protestors, you think?”
Behold, the insidious evil of the media messaging machine. Bear in mind, my neighbors are mostly farmers and desperately conservative people, but this is the only theory they had heard. And by repeating this speculation each and every time something bad happens, it doesn’t matter that it keeps stubbornly not being true, media accomplishes its mission.
Anyway, that’s not important. This is: one of the ladies in this flock had quintuplets. She’s not in the field, though. She’s in the barn. Resting.
It’s lambing time! Or, rather, lambing time is almost over, and here’s the result. And the weather is getting better. Uncle B snuck up behind me and took this picture today.
Yes. Weather permitting, I play banjo to the newborn lambs.
April 17, 2013 — 10:44 pm
Comments: 34
Don’t worry. They’re not mad at *you*
No, it has not escaped notice here that our juvenile president seems to go way out of his way to insult Britain. Sending nobody from his administration to Maggie’s funeral is just the latest in a series. (The picture is from the rehearsal, by the way).
Here’s the thing, though — that “special relationship” stuff is real and it is an incredibly durable and powerful force. It’s not about our governments cooperating. In fact, politicians of all kinds seem a little embarrassed about it (for reasons I can’t quite wrap my puzzler around). It’s because we are the same people. We share a common history, a common law, a common view of the world. Not just Anglo-American, but wherever free markets and English common law have penetrated — in other words, former British colonies. (Oh, it’s not racial, either. It applies equally to former colonies like Hong Kong). It’s the Anglosphere, and it’s real and persistent.
I get a much wider view of it from here. Despite the locking down of legal immigration (and you better believe they’re clamping down on migration between these two countries — not the right sort of immigration, don’tcha know), people are still finding ways to move between Anglospheric countries. Nearly every one of our neighbors has family in the US, Canada, Australia or New Zealand. This is sheep country, so that’s not surprising, but it’s also true of my doctor and the road engineer who lives on the corner.
I expected to encounter some degree of anti-Americanism, but so far…nada. People’s faces light up when they hear my accent and they can’t wait to tell me about their last trip to Vegas or Disney World.
So, no worries. The petulant man-child in the Oval Office has tweaked a few tails, but nobody’s mad at you. We’re family, after all.
April 16, 2013 — 9:49 pm
Comments: 27
They’re real and they’re…well, presumably spectacular
Deep fried Mars bar. I always wondered if that was for real, but if the Scotsman is highlighting it as their Scottish Fact of the Week, then I guess it’s legit. They turned twenty last year.
Okay, I’m a fraud. I have been following the news. Oh, not American politics, which still makes me want to punch kittens. I’ve been watching, with an increasing sphincter-clench, the Far East hotting up fast. Wasn’t there a time when threatening to bomb the US mainland was an unequivocal act of war? But China has no intention of shutting Pyongyang up.
Meanwhile, they — China — are beefing up their drone arsenal, just as we have been telling everybody we’ll send our drones where we like and shoot whom we please. (Nice precedent, guys. Really, as an aside, we’d better litigate an individual right to shoot at drones before we don’t know whose drone that is over Mr McGregor’s barn).
Oh, skip all that and just read this one, an overview of how tetchy it is between Japan and China at the moment. All it takes is a slip of the finger in the danger zone and I smell history coming at us, fast.
So — fuck it! — candy bars it is. Near as I can figure it, a Mars Bar is what we ‘Muricans would call a Milky Way. Because — again I say, fuck it! — when you’ve got World War Yang coming at you, a 1,200 calorie snack doesn’t seem that big a problem.
March 26, 2013 — 11:12 pm
Comments: 36
Stupid Britain, sweet Britain
It’s not funny, you guys. Somebody got hurt, you guys.
Did you see this? Some kid in Essex got hit in the face with a flapjack, so his school has banned triangular food. I dunno. Sharp edges, I guess. Insert “assault snack” joke here.
Flapjacks are a kind of ancient British granola bar: oats, honey, raisins and butter baked together. They’re nice. And chewy. And LETHAL.
Eh. Palate cleanser. This lady is the widow of one of the actors who recorded “Mind the Gap” for the subway system. His recording was used on her local line. Sometimes, she went to the station just to hear his voice, after he died.
The last round of computer upgrades changed to a different announcer. So she got in touch with Transport for London. They not only gave her a CD of his recordings, but they’re going to put his voice back in her local station, just for her.
D’awwww.
March 25, 2013 — 10:00 pm
Comments: 42
Oh, second Winter, you utter bastard
Oh, I am so tired of this. Ohhhhhh, I am so tired of this. The long range forecast? Wetter and colder.
I have generally liked the weather in Britain. Our little corner of the island is drier and sunnier than the rest. But this year, Summer ended early for us and it’s been this — that there up there in the picture — for months and months.
The chickens are filthy and miserable, the garden is a muckhole, the chicken lady isn’t hatching any interesting chicks until it warms up and I’m wearing wellies everywhere.
Enough. Stahp. Go away.
It’s the weekend, I haven’t anything in particular to say for myself, so…how’s the weather?
March 22, 2013 — 11:38 pm
Comments: 49
Another week, another interesting corpse
That’s what I love about Britain — scratch the surface, find an interesting corpse. Or, in this case, dig down eight feet and find fifty thousand plague riddled corpses.
Yes! The Crossrail Project has dug up a plague pit! Well, they think so. They’ve only uncovered thirteen bodies so far, but if it’s the one they’re thinking of (really, they have so many 14th C plague pits to keep track of. What’s a capital city to do?) there are as many as 50,000 bodies to go.
Eight feet down. That really doesn’t seem good enough, does it? It’s in a part of the city that has seen relatively little development (no skyscrapers or anything), which is how it’s remained lost for so long.
It was all over the news tonight. Plague doesn’t survive long in the soil, but they think they may be able to isolate some Yersinia pestis specimens in the tooth dentin. Which doesn’t strike me as very bright, even if they do manage to sequence its genome.
This isn’t the first cemetery this rail project has accidentally dug up. They also unearthed three hundred former guests at Bedlam. Oh, and not long after construction dug up Richard III in a parking lot in Leicester, they’ve dug up a knight in a parking lot in Edinburgh.
It’s like some really twisted game show.
Have a good weekend! Sweet dreams, and don’t dig any holes!
March 15, 2013 — 11:32 pm
Comments: 46
Sheep in a wheelchair
Ladies and gentlemen, sheep in a wheelchair. There you go.
Oh, hey, for some reason, the Freedom of the Press Foundation would like to spread these recordings of Bradley Manning reading a prepared statement, smuggled out of his first hearing. Um, okay!
Not sure what they’re hoping to accomplish. He sounds like an unrepentant, self-absorbed whiny little bitch whose motive for breaking his oath and betraying his country was something like, “because war is H – E – Double hockeysticks.” Particularly when you watch it on a monitor from a comfy office Stateside, apparently.
It’s going to be hard going, making a hero out of this little wiggler.
March 13, 2013 — 12:00 am
Comments: 56
Gnarly Mummy Head!
Gnarly mummy head! It isn’t even my title – it’s Discovery’s title: Gnarly Mummy Head Reveals Medieval Science.
Neat story. This is the oldest surviving European anatomical dissection. It’s a proper, prepared anatomical specimen, too — the anatomist ran wax into the arteries for preservation and everything. Carbon dating puts its origins round about 1200 AD.
Yup, during the Middle Ages. When things like autopsies were supposedly verboten.
I’ve read for some time that the Dark Ages were unfairly tagged with that moniker. I mean, that’s been a trend in history books for my whole lifetime: rehabilitating that long stretch between the Romans and the Renaissance.
Until I read the article, though, I didn’t put that together in my head with Protestantism. That newly minted Protestants talked a lot of crap about the state of science before their time, as a sort kind of anti-Church thing. “Oh, boohoo — the Pope didn’t let us cut up dead people!” Which was not, apparently, true.
Worth a read, anyway.
Oh, speaking of dead people! I’m delighted to acknowledge that Hugo Chavez is officially dead. I’m even more delighted to point out that his official date of death is today, Tuesday, March 5. Which means he falls between Dead Pools and I don’t owe dick.
Sorry, Hutch. I suspect you wuz robbed.
March 5, 2013 — 11:30 pm
Comments: 37
When in doubt, go with the willy joke
I bet you thought Canterbury was all cathedrals and Chaucer and dignified shit like that. Well, it turns out all the naughty seaside postcards confiscated by the police in Kent ended up in the University Library. They’re on display in Canterbury at the moment.
I’ve written about the tradition of naughty postcards before. For a brief period in the Fifties, Britain got a huge case of the vapors (or ‘vapours’ I suppose) about it and confiscated the ones they considered over the line. Donald McGill, the most famous maker-of-rude-postcards, even got hauled into court and had to swear on a bzillion Bibles that he didn’t get the joke and certainly didn’t intend any rude double meanings in his illustrations.
Poor old Canterbury (changing the subject). It’s just inside our traveling distance for a day trip, but I find it a sad place to visit.
Hitler bombed it flat, quite on purpose, along with any other historic towns he could reach. They’re called the Baedecker raids, because it’s believed der Führer picked up a Baedecker guidebook to Britain and ordered explosives dropped on every place with a three star rating.
This probably makes me a horrible person, but thinking about that makes me feel sicker than all the WWII carnage and human misery we see endlessly on the History Channel.
Anyway, he somehow missed the honking huge cathedral in the middle of the town. And the Roman wall. The rest of it, pretty much blowed up or burned out. It’s kind of like a big shopping mall now. Every once in a while, you’ll turn a corner and see a 15th Century pub between the greeting card shops and book stores and get a glimpse of what the place must have looked like seventy years ago.
March 4, 2013 — 11:56 pm
Comments: 27
*burp*
Uncle B had to go to London today, so the livestock and I have been on our own, whoopin’ it up big time.
Oh, there were chickens and banjos, two pork sammiches and a candy bar. There was Judge Judy and a movie. There were underpants! It was pandemonium.
It was underpantsdemonium!
Okay, that was lame, but it’s late and I haven’t posted anything and he’s home now.
I got most of the stains out of the carpets and the hall rug covers the rest, so…just…don’t say anything, okay?
February 28, 2013 — 12:31 am
Comments: 38