Bend over — here it comes!
“What’re you in for, son?”
It tells you all you need to know about food taxes here that you’ll make an extra £8 million if you can smuggle your ton of Chinese garlic past the tax man.
Hey — been shopping? I don’t know about the States, but over here…oh, my sweet, fancy Moses! Have the prices gone up since Christmas! They kept everything steady and ran lots of sales before the holidays, but now…let ‘er rip!
Like most people (I assume), we buy the same things over and over, so we notice. Cheap cat food by the six pack: £2.99 a fortnight ago, £3.50 today. Butter, £1 to £2. Liquor…no, I don’t even want to talk about liquor.
I’m taking up smack. It’s cheaper.
And the sneaky bastards are covering it up. First, the sneaky bastards at the supermarket are all touting this “brand match” thing. They’re holding prices fairly even on the big brand name products, where they have a lot of margin to play with, and steadily rising the price of the lesser brands, store brands and generics. So the register receipts say, “you saved £5 today!”…on the price of Heinz beans or Smirnoff vodka, while the basic, minimum cost of eating goes up and up.
Second, the sneaky bastards in government are pegging inflation to things like house prices and new cars. Well, sure…house prices have dropped. And everybody’s terrified to buy the big ticket items like cars, if they don’t absolutely have to, so no. Those aren’t going up, either. Yay, no inflation!
Meanwhile, back in Meatworld, where people must eat, wear clothes, heat the house and gas up the car before they do anything else, costs are galloping away. Food and energy. Through. The. Freaking. Roof.
And if our farmer neighbors are any indication, we ain’t seen nothing yet. Costs of grain and other animal feeds went up sharply this year. So, to avoid having to feed herds and flocks through the Winter, many of them took the loss and sold off as much livestock as they dared in the Fall. So there’s an abundance of meat on the market…until it’s gone.
Oh, what larks!
January 9, 2013 — 10:47 pm
Comments: 30
Are you ready for some ar-che-ology?
These days, the Thames is one of the cleanest urban rivers in the world. Once upon a time, though — and for hundreds and hundreds of years — it was London’s toilet, wastebasket and repository of unwanted dead hookers rolled into one. If you have the stomach to go looking, some of the junk thrown or lost down there is incredibly cool.
“Mudlarks” are people who traditionally combed through the shit on either side of the river looking for stuff worth having. Historically, it was neither nice nor lucrative. These days, mudlarks are armed with metal detectors, and it’s…well, actually, it’s still not nice and not often lucrative, but they find some unbelievable stuff.
To metal detect along the Thames, you need a license from the Port of London Authority. And to get that, you need the approval of the Museum of London. Which is excellent, because the museum does analysis on their finds and buys the very best specimens for display. There are only about fifty people with a license at the moment.
Okay, hang on to your retinas, I’m about to send you to the Mudlarks’ official site, or as I call it: The Worst Site on the Internet. I mean it. Not because it’s ungrammatical, scatological, politically incorrect, half missing and keeps pointing you to the awesome new site that doesn’t seem to exist. No, because MY EEEEEEEEEYESSSSSSSSS!
But it’s totally worth the risk of nausea, shortness of breath, incontinence and temporary color blindness, just to browse through what’s left of the pictures of all the cool things they’ve dug up.
Would I lie?
Update: oh, their new website is MUCH easier on the eyes! Thanks for the tip, Carl!
January 7, 2013 — 11:49 pm
Comments: 31
Apple tree sex
We watched a program about apples last night. And it was interesting. The British are whoop-de-gaga about apples. They eat billions of them every year, in hundreds of varieties.
So. If you eat a Granny Smith for lunch and then you plant the seeds, the resulting trees will bear apples that are not a Granny Smith. In fact, each pip will grow into a unique tree.
Why is this? For the same reason your second child is probably not a lot like your first and neither of them are exactly like you: apples are genetically complicated. They’re the most genetically complicated fruit of all. There’s a mommy tree and a daddy tree and they each contribute genes in near infinite combination. There are more than 7,000 recognized varieties of apple, which doesn’t count all the unrecognized apple varieties that sucked.
Now, I am a complete horticultural illiterate, so y’all probably knew this already, but I didn’t.
So every single Red Delicious or Pink Lady is grown from cuttings off one tree (or, you know, cuttings off of cuttings off of cuttings) grafted onto a different rootstock. Turns out, we figured out how to graft plants back in the days of the Pharaohs.
The program visited the old lady with the original Bramley in her back yard (Bramley is the most popular cooking apple in Britain). Upwards of two hundred years old and still going strong (the tree, not the lady). When she realized the tree was actually growing in the garden next door, she bought the house next door.
The original Granny Smith, by the way, was discovered by Mrs Smith of New South Wales growing at a garbage dump. Word.
And then there’s the dude who found the Next Big Apple growing on the shoulder of the interstate (well, the A4260. They don’t have interstates here). Somebody cruising down the highway eating an apple, tossed the core and — walla — honking great apple tree with especially nice fruit.
Britons: potty about apples.
December 20, 2012 — 11:37 pm
Comments: 37
Pucker up, Vicar
So we got a notice in our box to come help decorate the church for Christmas. It asked us to bring, “holly, ivy and evergreen fronds.”
Uncle B says, “did you notice what’s missing?”
And I’m, like, “no.”
And he says, “mistletoe.”
Mistletoe: not welcome in the Church of England. It was a big Druid thing, so the church is not cool with it.
Except York Minster, where the Dean hangs a sprig of mistletoe above the altar on noon, Christmas Eve.
Because, England.
December 13, 2012 — 11:59 pm
Comments: 27
I miss him already
Oh, now this one I’ll miss. Patrick Moore died yesterday. We weren’t regular watchers of The Sky at Night. It was the sort of thing we’d hit by accident, channel flipping, and then have to watch to the end. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
He is believed to be the only man to have met Orville Wright (the first man to fly) and Yuri Gagarin (first man in space) and Neil Armstrong (first man on the moon).
Also, he loved cats, played the xylophone and always wore a monocle. What’s not to love?
December 10, 2012 — 11:14 pm
Comments: 12
Rainy tonight, with a chance of gray balls
Well, that’s a new one. I’m not sure what gray balls in our weather forecast stand for. It’s cold tonight, so I’m guessing sleet or hail. Dirty sleet or hail.
Snow is a little white snowflake, rain is a little blue raindrop. We had a forecast the other day that had an icon for cloudy-sunny-rainy-snow, which is about as much weather as one icon can hold.
December 6, 2012 — 8:24 pm
Comments: 21
Pretty princess pukes plenty
You’ve probably heard Princess Kate has a royal bun in the oven. We’ve heard little else. Man, I thought news from America was annoying lately. Yesterday, we had reporters giving hourly updates — not kidding — standing outside the hospital where she’s been taken for “extreme morning sickness.”
Which means Her Royal Highness is puking her guts out, I guess. I wonder if the toilet has a coat of arms. I wonder if princesses puke rainbows. I wonder if she has a Lady in charge of Holding the Royal Hair Back.
I’ll probably get deported for this.
December 4, 2012 — 11:26 pm
Comments: 34
Amanda Holden’s World of Ham
The Brits are a contradictory lot. In some ways, privacy obsessed. In others, right up in each others’ bidness.
Take the Planning Notice. If you want to make changes to your property, you have to file an application. That info then goes into the local paper, and on a printed notice, which is stuck up on a light pole or something near the scene of the proposed change. And then your neighbors can complain about it and try to get it blocked, if they like.
It’s more intrusive than building permits in the States. You see Planning Notices for things like replacing a broken gate or changing the sign over a shop. And the process applies to rural areas, too. I’m not entirely agin’ it — a lot of the charm of this charming place we live depends on keeping things just exactly the way they are forever — but it does make my libertarian bone itch.
Anyhow, in an “I wish I’d thought of that” sort of stunt, this guy has been stapling funny fake planning notices all over Brighton. Do check it out. And the rest of his blog; he’s got some funny going on.
December 3, 2012 — 9:18 pm
Comments: 25
uuuuuhhhhhhh
Uncle B brought home a special holiday cold from London last week, and I thought just maaaaaaybe I’d avoided catching it.
Nope.
How bad is it? My skin hurts.
How bad is it? I couldn’t even be arsed to take my own picture of wadded up tissues; I pinched this one off the internet. Not that we’re posh enough to use actual tissues — it’s store brand paper towels for our plebian snouts.
Brits call paper towels “kitchen roll.” They call Nyquil “Night Nurse.” See? Even in agony, I impart unto you secret expatriate knowledge.
Also, we’ve invented a thing we call a snot log. We take the empty paper towel tube, stuff it with all the used bits and throw it on the fire. One roll’s worth per tube — the finished log weighs about two pounds and burns with a merry light.
Oof. Can y’all make your own fart jokes without me for a while? Ta.
November 28, 2012 — 10:54 pm
Comments: 30
Important public service announcement
We’ve just started watching Season Four of Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse’s cleverly titled sketch comedy program Harry and Paul, which is very good. And, ummm…you probably can’t get it. So by way of apology, please accept this YouTube of my all-time favorite Enfield short (from a previous series): Women, Know Your Limits!
I laughed until kittens came out of my nose.
You can watch other videos from that series (Harry Enfield and Chums from the Nineties) on its own YouTube channel (and if you click around from there, you can spend a whole evening sampling the Beeb). Oh, and check out Armstrong and Miller — another good sketch comedy program coming out of the UK.
Anybody doing sketch comedy in the States any more?
November 26, 2012 — 11:29 pm
Comments: 18