You’re welcome, Ma’am
Aw, now isn’t that nice. The Queen just appeared on television to thank everyone — that means me — who helped organize festivities for her Jubilee. Some monarchs have the nicest manners.
Meanwhile, soon as I dry out a little, I’m sure I’ll be back to blogging about…whatever it is I usually blog about. Chickens and banjos, is it?
p.s. McGoo is not claiming dick for the Trololo guy, so Dead Pool Round 32 rolls on…
June 5, 2012 — 9:50 pm
Comments: 27
Can you spot me?
Okay, okay…these are just some random old biddies for the BBC News site, but we had our village street party today and it looked just the same. It went well. Something about drinking alcohol at noon makes me feel delightfully wicked and debauched.
Then we had us a little nap and totally forgot the lighting of the beacons tonight. Yeah, that whole Lord of the Rings ancient-signal-beacons-on-the-hills thing? REAL!
They’re all over this county, to warn us of pirates and Frenchmen (BIRM).
Did y’all watch any of the flotilla on Sunday? It doesn’t get much more British than that. Her Maj and Phil the Greek stood at attention in the prow of the lead boat for four hours in the lashing rain (poor bastard’s in the hospital tonight, but he made it through) with a thousand little historic boats floating behind. Then, at the end, the London Philharmonic (nice and dry inside a barge) played the standards while the poor choir stood on deck in a soaking, sheeting downpour singing Land Of Hope and Glory, Rule Britannia, and God Save the Queen.
Awesome.
June 4, 2012 — 10:33 pm
Comments: 22
Mutual of Freaking Omaha
Seriously, this is in my back yard. Actually, has been for a week. They don’t nest here; they nest up the canal somewhere. They come to this spot — mama, papa and seven cygnets — to catch the afternoon sun.
Thank goodness for the ditch between us. Papa swan lunges and hisses when I get close to take pictures. I’d just as soon not test the old wives’ tale that these things can break a man’s arm.
There’s another happy family unit up the creek aways, by our neighbor’s farm. Six babies plus two unhatched eggs. Sadly, just three babies this morning. Stupid foxes.
I saw our lot again this today and they’re all okay. So, woot.
May 29, 2012 — 10:03 pm
Comments: 30
Things you see in the market
Thursday is market day, and for once we were out early enough to catch it.
I don’t know if we have the equivalent of these open air markets in the States. Maybe we do and I somehow missed it. I spent many happy hours in flea markets, but that’s not the same (the flea market equivalent here is the car boot sale, and we’re never out early enough to catch those).
This is all new stuff. Some of it scruffy and cheap. Some of it not so scruffy and cheap. Some of it not so scruffy and not so cheap. Some of it from local stores at pretty much their regular prices.
There’s food and clothes and jewelry and shoes and tools and pet food and incense and household goods. There’s a Persian parfumier and a fake Indian (feather Indian, not dot Indian) selling dream catchers. There used to be a baker who came over from France. There’s cheese and crabs and rutabegas (which they call swedes). There’s a big book stall and a guy with a wok and statues of the Buddha and flowers. It’s a pretty Dickensian day.
The market seems to fill an important niche in the local economy. Buses full of bluehairs turn up on the day. In a land where everything is very, very expensive, it’s a place to go to get cheap garbage bags and wooden clothes pins.
Anyhoo, as we were leaving, I said to Uncle B, “gosh, that guy looks like Tom Baker.”
And he was, like, “that’s probably because he’s Tom Baker.”
So, there you go, vintage Doctor Who fans. Wot I saw in the market today.
May 17, 2012 — 10:40 pm
Comments: 37
Heyyyy, what’s Rummy doing on my nuts?
It’s a funny thing, being a furriner. The familiar crops up in the damnedest places.
Like — wait, what? What is this famous picture of Donald Rumsfeld gurning at a geisha doing on a packet of wasabi peanuts?
Apparently, Tyrrell’s just liked it. In fact, their headline over this image is “English Eccentrics.” Cheeky.
Whew, that got Time magazine’s panties in a wad.
One [unknown] remains: whether the hawkish neo-con, whom many Britons remember from the misadventure of the Iraq war, truly reflects the light-hearted and slightly eccentric view of life Tyrrell’s wishes to associate with its brand. Whichever way you look at it, it’s nuts.
Well, anyway, they got the story right. It was during President Gerald Ford’s 1974 trip to Japan. Rumsfeld was the WH Chief of Staff. He was passing a chopstick scrunched under his nose to the Geisha next to him. As you do.
This was apparently a competitive event, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger won, thanks to superior physical endowments. His nose, people.
The peanuts are delicious.
May 8, 2012 — 8:55 pm
Comments: 22
You’re new here, aren’t you?
Ladies and gentlemen, your Easter lamb!
Right on schedule, lambs. I promised you lambs, and…lambs.
We had glorious weather today, so I sat in the backyard in a sling-back chair and welcomed a whole bunch of the little woolly boogers to the neighborhood. One of my favorite days of the year (we’ll have a few more days of lambs, but the weather won’t be so nice).
We had quite a cold snap last night. Down to 34° overnight. Think of that. Think of all the lambs born into darkness and cold, then suddenly the big, bright, warm sun breaks over the horizon. Lambgasms all around. One year, I’ll have to get up before dawn and see that for myself.
Happy Easter weekend, folks!
April 6, 2012 — 9:44 pm
Comments: 39
Honey! The ewes are ready!
W00t! They moved the ewes into the field behind our house, and they look like they’re ’bout ready to pop. That means in a day or so, we can stand in the back yard sipping coffee and watching lambs being bornded.
Which will put you off breakfast, honestly.
Some flocks started weeks ago, so there are lots of tiny, unsteady laa-bams about. As far as I know, there isn’t any Schmallenberg in our area, but reporting the disease isn’t mandatory, so we don’t really know. Doesn’t matter. Infected or not, the gross-out factor is putting people off eating lamb.
But never mind! We aren’t sheep farmers and we hate lamb, so it’s all win for us. This is my favorite time of year, the white season. Little lambs, big swans and the hawthorn hedges blossoming white.
April 5, 2012 — 10:17 pm
Comments: 34
Phew, home
This’ll be brief; we just got back from a day in London (bidness thing for Uncle B, but we got some shopping in). Caught the bullet train. Ashford to St Pancras in thirty minutes.
Okay, that doesn’t mean anything to most of yez, but trust me…that’s fast (at least two hours by car). Also, it makes a day in London practical, at least occasionally.
That there’s the St Pancras Midland Grand Hotel, in the same style as the original St Pancras Station (the current station is modern and nearby). It’s an awesome building.
When it was built in 1873, it was absolutely state-of-the-art. Elevators. Revolving doors. Oh, it was the future.
Just not quite the future enough: no running water in the rooms. In 1873, not a big deal. Not long after 1873, really big deal. By 1935, it had declined so far it had to shut down. Spent almost eighty years boarded up.
Imagine that. Great huge bulk of a building smack in the middle of London, empty. I bet it was spooky inside.
Anyhoo, the Marriott chain got hold of it, fixed it up and reopened it last year.
Admiring it from street level is about the best this pair of mustelids could afford.
March 28, 2012 — 10:02 pm
Comments: 23
Noticed anything…weird about the Daily Mail lately?
So the U.K. Daily Mail beat out the NY Times to become the world’s the most visited online news site.
And then this happened. It’s a screen grab of today’s Mail. It’s like that all the way down. It’s like that every day. It’s been that way for weeks. It’s been driving me mad.
The UK’s most popular newspaper IS ALL ABOUT THE USA.
It hasn’t always been this way, and I’ll bet the print version isn’t. If I were a proper journalist, I’d buy one and compare. But I’m not. I’m a lazy weasel impersonator on a Friday night and, anyway, I only read that filthy rag when somebody leaves it on the lunch counter.
Yeah. Not a fan. I know it’s a supposed to be right-wing, but it’s really just the Shit-Stirrer’s Gazette. I know, I know – all newspapers are bad, but the Mail is something special.
More than usually mendacious. Less than usually accurate. They specialize in running snapshots of Angelina Jolie with a bit of toilet paper on her shoe under the head “Not so classy now!”
Feh.
But the good capitalist in me is torn. On the one hand, the Mail has apparently identified its actual user base and is providing them the services they want. So, good.
On the other hand, a British newspaper that’s all about America? How weird is that?
Good weekend, all.
Oh. Hey. Mono the Elderish has cobbled together a discussion forum. In case you’re not wasting NEARLY enough time on the internet, there you go.
<litella>Never mind.</litella> As Carl points out in the comments, my default Mail URL points to /ushome/. Why that should be — my IP says I’m in Maidstone or some such — I do not know. The Mail still sucks, though.
March 2, 2012 — 11:55 pm
Comments: 23
Four things I did not know about Edweard Muybridge
Y’all know Edweard Muybridge, right? He settled a very old argument and kind of fathered the moving picture in the process.
Horsey folk had argued for ages whether a running horse ever had all four hooves off the ground at once. Muybridge was a well-known photographer in California when Leland Stanford (former governor, race horse owner and founder of Stanford University) hired him to answer the question. Took him years to work it out, but Muybridge eventually wired a bunch of cameras along a track with tripwires, ran a horse down it and got the answer.
Which was: everybody was wrong. People in the NO camp believed a horse always had at least one hoof on the ground. People in the YES camp thought they were all four off the ground, with the front legs aiming frontwards and the back legs aiming backwards. Like a rocking horse. Whee! Turns out…well, look at the picture.
Muybridge went on to take upwards of 100,000 photos of people and animals in motion. Which is, to this day, a cherished reference for animators and illustrators. Lumme some Muybridge!
So anyhow, I was looking up the date of that first definitive horse series (1877) and I discovered four things about him I did not know before.
He was English. Born in Southwest London in 1830. He moved to the States in his mid-twenties. He was born Edward Muggeridge, but apparently decided his name needed a little weirding up. Which explains why you’ve never heard of an Edweard or a Muybridge before (unless you have, in which case — do tell!). He got some nasty head injuries in stagecoach accident in San Fran, which may have left him a little…cracked.
Also, he killed a guy and got away with it. He discovered his wife had taken a lover — a certain Major Larkyns — tracked him down, said “Good evening, Major, my name is Muybridge and here’s the answer to the letter you sent my wife” — whipped out a gun and BANG. Shot him dead.
His insanity plea (on account of his brain damage) was rejected, but it was ruled a justifiable homicide anyway. On account of, diddling other men’s wives was considered really unacceptable then.
Oh, a fifth and final thing — he then dropped his son off at an orphanage, assuming him to be Larkyn’s boy. Poor bastard grew up to look just like Muybridge.
Good weekend, folks!
February 24, 2012 — 11:14 pm
Comments: 27