Scots go potty for Krispy Kreme
“The first few days were utterly chaotic, horrendous, and I know that police were called.”
The Krispy Kreme in Edinburgh has applied for special permission to stay open all night. On account of insatiable local demand. For some reason. Really, are there enough R’s in all the world for a drunken Scot to say “Krispy Kreme”?
Life insists on screwing with my cultural stereotypes.
You’ll be relieved to know the picture isn’t from the Edinburgh Krispy Kreme, it’s from a page about their stores in the Middle East. They have eighty.
No reason not to sell donuts in the Middle East, I just…that image of Keffiyeh Man holding up a glazed donut messes with my norms in the worst way (also, if they were going to use t-shirt guy twice, did they think we wouldn’t notice they flipped the picture and the 2 on his shirt is backwards?)
KK is, of course, an artifact of the Deep South (or the South, anyway…I think the first one was in North Carolina). Fond memory of childhood. Teen years, actually. Krispy Kreme was the only place a seriously impaired weasel could get a cup of coffee at three in the morning. As I recall, our local in Nashville was across from the Old Colony Cleaners (some wag always stole the “y”).
The whole back wall was glass, and we could watch as the donuts moved down a conveyor past the various Stations of the Cross. Most fascinating thing that the aforementioned seriously impaired weasel ever saw.
They give a pretty good feel for the experience here. Watch it a few dozen times, seriously impaired.
February 26, 2013 — 11:37 pm
Comments: 46
SQUEEEE!
Hello, we’re new!
There’s one particular flock that is *always* the first to lamb (farmers control these things pretty closely). We swung by today on our way to lunch, and lookit! They’re old enough to have their ear tags and numbers sprayed on (this is 44 and his brother, 44)…but only just, I reckon. We first spotted a little pile of black lambs, which are so cute it hurts (probably the novelty; they don’t raise many around here), but they had dispersed before we got the camera.
And, guess what? It’s snowing tonight! Poor little baa-baas.
Okay, y’all. Back here. Tomorrow. Six WBT. We’re going to do it again.
Dead Pool Round Forty Six!
February 21, 2013 — 10:38 pm
Comments: 19
Nice going, socialists
That’s the front window of a little music shop in Shropshire. The manager, on his way out, paid a sign writer to decorate it thusly.
That’s a great wickedness of the local system of government — the power and incompetence of county councils. It was a Tory government, unfortunately, that decided to cut costs by combining councils into larger and fewer bodies. The upshot is, our local services are controlled by people who live far away, who are apt to see us more as cash cows than a constituency.
At one time — so I’m told — councils were run by local businessmen on a voluntary (or at least modestly remunerated) basis. Now, of course, it’s run by our global professional ruling class (read: smug, self-important lefties) on eye-watering salaries. And those lefties in turn hire scores of other lefties, in the form of Lesbian Outreach Managers and Pet Hair Recycling Wardens.
But, hey, if there’s anything socialist dimbulbs know how to do, it’s make money, right? Cut essential services and raise taxes! Pff! Easy peasy. It’s not like raising prices ever changes buying behavior.
Down here in the sunny South, most towns still have a charming high street (read: Main Street) full of interesting little shops and pubs and cafes. We do as much buying as we can in these places. You pay a bit more, but you get undeniably better goods and help keep the heart of the town beating.
We’ve watched as high streets all over our shopping territory visibly shrink, thanks to…well, read the sign.
— 1:42 pm
Comments: 21
First! (Then second, third and fourth).
There it is, folks. Proof that Spring is just around the corner, if you can hang on a little longer.
Specialist laying breeds will lay all through the Winter (and all chickens will lay through the Winter if you give them a few hours of artificial light). But fancy poncy fru-fru chickens like ours knock off between, oh, mid October and mid February. It’s the amount of daylight what does it.
How precise is a chicken’s internal clock? Wellll…Lucia laid that first egg (the grubby one on the end) on the 15th of February. Last year, she laid her first egg on the 16th of February. Of course, she is the Mary Poppins of chickens — practically perfect in every way.
Example: given that I have four chickens, you might assume that each of my girls has kindly laid me an egg. Well, you would be wrong. (Seriously, don’t you get tired of being wrong all the time?). The score would be Lucia 3, Vita 1. The other two just…better not…look too delicious until they start laying some damn eggs. Moochers!
I’ve been chatting up my chicken pushers, scoping out the new Spring collection. Hoping to add two more soon. Turns out, Vita’s sister won Best in Show at the Reading and District Bantam Society Annual Show last year. Same breed, same year, same flock, same batch of eggs.
Vita is the beautifullest of chickens, but she’s the very bottom of the pecking order in our little flock. Ain’t life funny like that?
Another Dead Pool?! *sigh*. I had no idea who Jerry Buss was, but Uncle Al was so chuffed to win dick, I couldn’t bear to see a hurt looked on that adorable little mug of his. You do have an adorable little mug, right Al? I mean, I had an Uncle Al who was as ugly as a smacked ass, but that’s neither here nor there. Meet you back here Friday, 6WBT for Dead Pool Round Umpty-ump!
February 18, 2013 — 10:59 pm
Comments: 33
Flickaburger
Say, I haven’t posted about our little food scandal, have I? A month ago, somebody tested some supermarket hamburgers (who does this?) and found they were up to 35% horse meat. It was Tesco’s, one of our more downmarket chains, so everyone pretty much yukked it up.
Then they started testing more stuff. Horse turned up in a LOT more places, anywhere there was beef. Or, rather, “beef” — some products were 100% horse.
And then pork turned up where it shouldn’t oughta, and the Muslims and Jews turned green.
It’s touched Waitrose, our most upmarket chain. It caught Burger King out, and they had to run an apology ad in the paper. Oh, this one has legs (yeah, that’s been the best part — the jokes).
The problem isn’t horsemeat, of course, which is eaten on purpose in many places on the continent. The problem is they didn’t know what the hell was in our food.
Me, I eat a lot of dodgy cafe burgers and value-priced chili, so I’ve undoubtedly consumed my share. Luckily for me, I’m not a bit squeamish about what I eat — unless I see it being made. If you want to know more — and why would you? — Richard North is your man.
p.s. Speaking of DNA and dodgy burgers…yes, I’m calling the Dead Pool for Davem123. I’ll be astonished if that perpburger tests as somebody else. See you here Friday 6 WBT.
February 13, 2013 — 11:49 pm
Comments: 32
Really, *really* valuable puke!
Man finds stinky lump of sperm whale vomit worth £100,000.
Its other name is ambergris. It’s used in perfume. Mmmmm-mmmm! It’s a rare man who thinks to himself, “I found this horrible rancid chunk of crap on the beach…lemme just go look that up on the internet!”
This is a good book on perfume: The Secret of Scent. Looking at the books linked at the bottom of that page, there are a lot of other interesting-looking titles there.
Smell is intriguing. I like smells. But my own sense of smell is very poor, so I’ve always been reluctant to wear scent, in case I make a terrible scent faux pas.
What if I wear too much? And what if I smell like whale vomit?
January 31, 2013 — 11:03 pm
Comments: 51
Whoa. This thing.
We’re watching a really excellent 3-part BBC 4 series on wood carving in Britain (I’d link, but I don’t think the video works outside the UK). At the beginning of the program, as an example of Tudor carving, they spent a few minutes taking loving closeups of this thing. It’s a lot more impressive up close than it looks in my little picture.
It’s the façade of a house built by the wealthy merchant Sir Paul Pindar in London in 1599, back when Bishopsgate was rural. It covered the first and second floor front bay windows (that’s second and third floor to my fellow Americans). After his death, it housed a succession of foreign ambassadors. It survived the Great Fire of London in 1666 (a third of the city didn’t) only to become part of the London workhouse system, housing ‘poor children, vagabonds, beggars, pilferers, lewd, idle, and disorderly persons’. The ground floor was a pub called Sir Paul Pindar’s Head (O, fame!).
In 1890, they pulled the house down to enlarge the station at Liverpool Street, but somebody had the good sense to preserve this bit and give it to the Victoria and Albert museum. Here are all the articles relating to the facade from the V&A’s website, which includes some great stuff about the restoration and conservation. I love reading about conservation.
Three hundred years out of doors, this thing. In London. That’s oak for you
Oh, and here’s the BBC page on the woodcarving program — episode 2, The Glorious Grinling Gibbons. Again, probably won’t play for you outside the UK, but he’s totally worth a Google Images search.
There’s a vulgar joke about wood in here somewhere, I feel sure
January 29, 2013 — 11:47 pm
Comments: 20
Roundabouts, bogroll and sexy, sexy toads
Three from the local paper.
The Roundabout Appreciation Society is coming to Sussex. To appreciate our roundabouts. Duh.
The society started in 2002 with a calendar. That’s what they do, roundabout calendars. Wikipedia dryly notes “At the moment the association is trying to attract more women members.”
That thing in the picture isn’t in Sussex, though. It’s in Wiltshire. It’s known as the Magic Roundabout. It is a roundabout made up of five roundabouts. It gives the Roundabout Appreciation Society wood. I am softly crying right now.
Toilet paper! This museum in Chichester owns these disc things that it has been confidently displaying as ancient gaming pieces. Now they think maybe Romans wiped their asses on them. Whaddya know.
Also, toads. They’re going to put some tunnels in place to allow horny toads to cross the road in safety. Not horny toads, but toads that are horny (or is it “which are horny”? I never got that rule straight). Formerly, volunteers scooped them up into buckets by hand and carried them across the road.
Woo-woo! All aboard the Crazy Train to Crazy Town…!
January 23, 2013 — 11:23 pm
Comments: 42
Free the East Sussex Four
The chickens have not left the henhouse for a week, except the occasional short foray into the run for a peck. I wouldn’t put it past them to starve themselves into anemia.
It’s not the snow. It started two days before the snow, when we had a heavy, white frost. The chickens took one look and announced, “the grass is white. Grass is not supposed to be white. Ergo, we will not leave this small wooden enclosure until the grass ceases to be white.” And they meant it.
Changing the subject, Uncle B was up uncharacteristically early this morning. When I slouched out of bed several hours later, I asked him what was up. Said he was woken up by a Very Bad Smell. Which he decided was me, since I’d eaten a bowl of exceptionally garlicky soup for lunch.
Just now, I told him I was going to tell this story, he was all, like, “be fair — I did say I thought it might be the cat’s box.”
That’s supposed to be mitigation, you understand: he couldn’t decide which smelled worse, his sleeping wife or a dirty litterbox.
Huh. Anyway. Not guilty.
January 22, 2013 — 10:20 pm
Comments: 29
They can’t figure out how to get a trigger lock on it
Meet my neighbor, Beachy Head. It’s Britain’s #1 suicide spot. In fact, it’s the third most popular suicide spot in the world, after the Golden Gate Bridge and Aokigahara Woods.
It’s got a body count of about twenty a year, which doesn’t seem all that lethal, so I guess it just seems like somebody is jumping off the thing every ten minutes. Some lady jumped off it last night. This Summer, an old dude even drove off it in a Lark.
I don’t know what it takes to fling yourself off the end of that sucker, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t got any of it. It doesn’t matter right now, but I always like to have an exit strategy. Nome sane?
That’s one of the reasons I really, really hated leaving my guns behind when I moved: lost my exit strategy.
We’ve been talking about guns this week and I just want to say, it sticks in my craw that suicides are lumped in with other gun deaths when we talk about gun control. Seems to me, a successful suicide by firearm means that gun performed exactly the way its owner wished. I have a hard time classifying a correctly functioning tool — ethically applied, whatever the church and the law might say — as a problem.
And on that cheery note, have a good weekend!
January 18, 2013 — 10:52 pm
Comments: 29