Who?
Look, it’s me! Holding a owl!
There’s an owl rescue around here that turns up at some of the village fêtes and for a couple of quid donation they will let you hold an owl. So I did.
This pretty boy was taken from his mother on the day he hatched (she killed the first one to break shell), so he has no bleeding idea he’s an owl. You can stroke him and give him smoochies and he won’t rip the nose off your face and eat it right in front of you.
More than I could say for at least two of my chickens.
We have our end-of-Summer long weekend now, and I think we’ve just done the last of the fêtes.
Actually, the last fêtes are the flower festivals. These are peculiar little spectacles. They’re flower arrangements + tableaux, all around a village church.
So, next to the altar, there’s a flower arrangement, a golf ball, a hockey stick and an old sneaker: A Tribute to Sport. Under the stained glass window, a flower arrangement, some model cars, a set of car keys and an L plate: Passing Your Driving Test. (I am not making these up; I really saw them).
You walk around and gawp at them (there’s a program so you can keep them straight), then everyone has a cup of tea and a slice of cake and goes home.
Every Freaking Day of my life is a Monty Python sketch.
August 29, 2011 — 9:33 pm
Comments: 29
The three chickens of the apocalypse
They mowed the field behind the house today (making hay while the sun shines — Summer is officially over at Badger House). The chickens took great exception to this and decided to drive the intruder away.
I’ve never seen more than one of them at a time do the alarm call. I had THREE of them at it, and one stalking along for the ride. They stand up very straight, goosestep slowly toward the threat, and scream bk-bk-bk-be-GAAK-bk-bk at it. In this case, a giant harvester.
Three of them. I almost busted something laughing. Something important in the internal organ department.
The illustration — just noodling around with a program called Manga Studio. With a name like that, you can guess it’s intended for comic creation, but it’s actually a very good pen-and-ink simulator. I got an email today offering me the high end version at a very deep discount, but the offer doesn’t seem to be on their website. Maybe it’s for registered users only. Anyhow, if any of you arty types badly want a copy, shoot me an email and I’ll forward you the offer (maybe it’ll be honored, maybe it won’t. Worth a shot).
Good weekend, everyone!
August 19, 2011 — 11:22 pm
Comments: 47
Another rock star of British media
Nobody has dared attempt to explain cricket to me — they make novelty tea towels about explaining cricket to Americans and I’m an extra special sports-impervious case — but I gather England has just done really well against India. Um, yay?
As I understand it, cricket is a game that involves this man, Henry Blofeld, nattering on the radio for days on end about…pretty much everything except the sports contest in front of him. As Wikipedia put it:
Blofeld’s cricket commentary is celebrated for his plummy voice and his idiosyncratic mention of superfluous details, including cranes, numbers of pink shirts in the crowd; pigeons, buses, aeroplanes and helicopters that happen to be passing by. He is also known to talk about the food on offer, in particular cakes, for extended periods of time after the tea and lunch breaks with occasional interruptions of the situation on the field. He also uses the phrase “my dear old thing”, or variants thereof, to address fellow commentators and guests.
By the way, Uncle B heard that Blofeld’s brother, a high court judge, pissed off Ian Fleming and thus gave a name to supervillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Wikipedia says it was either Henry’s father, who went to school with Fleming, or another Blofeld altogether, depending on which page you consult.
Whatevs.
Here’s a YouTube that will give you a sense of the accent and the dialogue.
Also, the same exact thing happened to my father, only he ended up behind a potted palm in the lobby.
August 16, 2011 — 8:55 pm
Comments: 10
Look up!
Perseid meteor showers, incoming! The peak was Saturday and the full moon is stepping all over it, but it won’t be over for another week. This one is my favorite because the time of year.
Click here to watch Sir Patrick Moore talk about the Perseids.
Who he? He’s a national in-sti-tution. He’s an amateur astronomer who’s done more to spread astronomy and inspire astronomers than a whole box of Carl Sagans.
He hosts a BBC program called The Sky At Night [link only works in the UK] and has done since 1957. That got him in the Guinness Book as longest-running presenter. It’s a monthly. He only missed it once, July 2004. He ate a contaminated goose egg and nearly died.
I am so not making this up.
He’s a keen musician. A xylophonist. He once performed the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK” on the xylophone for the Royal Family.
Not making this up.
He looks like a Bond villain. Like somebody left an Edwardian gentleman on a hot stove and melted him. I love the Sky at Night — when we remember to tune it in. It’s worth it just to try to work out how that monocle sticks to his face.
August 15, 2011 — 8:40 pm
Comments: 20
I love bacon SO much…!
I love bacon so much, I get lardons! (They used to be called bacon bits before people starting vacationing abroad, apparently).
So! Not much to do but sit around, eat lardons and wait to see if London goes up in flames again tonight. I have to be up early in the morning, so it had better get a move on.
Mono the elderish just wrote to send me some video links of the rioting and ask what I thought was going to happen. I’ll steal tonight’s post from the answer I gave him.
Errr…I don’t know. I’ve been coming to the UK for almost fifteen years, and the whole time I’ve wondered what it would take to get the Brits riled up enough to push back. They have plenty of provocation — a rampant nanny state, swingeing taxes, out of control immigration, Islamist terrorism, now riots in the streets — and I keep thinking now they will boil over, surely.
I keep thinking wrong. I’m too American to read the vibe right.
See, the Brits make a positive virtue of putting up with shit. I don’t know if it has its roots in WWII or if the Blitz just tamped the attitude down into their DNA, but “Keep Calm and Carry On” is not mere ironic kitsch. It’s deep in their self-image. We are the unflappable people. Let lesser people flap.
It’s not cowardice — far from it! — we’re talking people who faced down nightly bombing raids with a shrug and a cup of tea. It may be that not ‘overreacting’ to the riots is the way they will choose to distinguish themselves from the rioters. See: tea served on a riot shield.
On the other hand…well. Sooner or later, all this world-going-to-hell stuff will surely be too much even for the Unflappable People.
August 9, 2011 — 10:02 pm
Comments: 23
Watching London burn
I’ve got nothing to add that you couldn’t find out for yourself by following the BBC online or the Telegraph’s live coverage. Except we’re probably getting more ‘chatter’ (as they say in the intelligence biz).
A lot of this is about straight up looting. The picture above is a game store. HDTV, phones, clothes…some lady said they were forming orderly queues to loot an electronics store (that is so Britain).
But the clashes in the street (and perhaps the arson), pictures show an awful lot of young white faces. Either the papers are choosing photos carefully on that basis, or these are typical anarchist rent-a-mobs from outside. The neighborhoods catching fire are not white neighborhoods.
Nowhere near our old haunts yet, happy to say.
Police say they’ll publish the all photos they can get (like this personable young man cheerfully displaying his loot on Facebook) and prosecute anyone they can identify. I would have doubted once, but some kids from the last riot got jail time.
Beyond that…we’ll see. This isn’t the first time people in London have burned down their own neighborhoods. The reaction before was to hose them with money and ‘understanding’.
This time maybe — just maybe — the law-abiding population is too rattled by a general sense of everything’s-going-to-shit to take it.
August 8, 2011 — 9:34 pm
Comments: 66
G’night, folks
Tonight we went to supper with the neighbors and drank a great deal of wine. A great deal of wine was drunk. Also, wine.
In lieu of post, please enjoy this photograph of the cat, what Uncle B took yesterday morning. She’s sleeping in a drawer. Because, cat. And, drawer.
August 3, 2011 — 9:43 pm
Comments: 17
And today’s field trip was…
Great Dixter. It’s a house.
A hundred years ago, a rich man bought a falling-down 15th Century house in Northiam. Then he bought a falling-down 16th Century house in nearby Kent, had it dismantled brick-by-beam and moved back to the first house. Then he got the great Victorian architect Edwin Lutyens to stitch the two together into a faux Tudor manor house, with big dollops of 1910 sauce.
If that sounds a bit snarky, it’s because I haven’t made up my mind about this sort of thing. Two decaying Tudor buildings were saved, so there’s that. And the resulting house really is lovely, so there’s that. The modern bits don’t stick out at all.
But there’s something a bit too Disney’s Magic Kingdom about the whole business. And something too much like vandalism.
Lutyens bought ancient carved blanket chests and had the backs and bottoms removed to put over the 20th Century radiators. Just, ew. There’s still no shortage of ancient chests in England, but…ew.
Years ago, we visited Hever Castle, which was Anne Boleyn’s childhood home. One of the Astors got hold of it in 1903, gutted it and rebuilt it to the 1903 notion of what Anne Boleyn’s childhood home should look like.
Ew.
I don’t know. I think these stately old homes cease to be homes and die. And then elderly people come and buy overpriced cups of tea and artisanal chutneys and tea towels with the birds of England in the gift shop.
Sometimes I feel like I’m something unpleasant swarming over the mummified corpse of something that was once great.
p.s. There was a garden.
August 2, 2011 — 9:44 pm
Comments: 13
She has a point
There’s a display of royal wedding memorabilia gone up at Buckingham Palace this week, including the Duchess of Cornwall’s Cambridge’s [thanks for the correction, Mrs C!] wedding dress. You know, Kate Middleton.
Kate and Her Maj got a sneak preview, and Herself apparently called the effect “horrid” and “creepy.”
She has a point (video here). The room is dark, the dress is lit up with twelve spotlights and the tiara hovers over a mannequin with a stump neck. It looks like a nazgul.
The Royals are a little sensitive about headless queens.
July 26, 2011 — 9:53 pm
Comments: 18
Happy Flying Ant Day!
Ahhhhhhhhh….the driveway is full of flying ants!!!!
Also, the front garden, the back garden, the bit on the side by, and pretty much the whole of Britain. Today, one day only!
This is the day allllll the Lasius Niger on this big ol’ island get laid. Then the males lose their wings, wander about aimlessly, waste away and die. While the females lose their wings, wander around looking for a place to hole up lay eggs for the rest of their lives, mostly fail and die.
G’night, kids!
It’s not the same day every year (not like those showoffy swallows in Capistrano), but it tends to be on a warm, muggy day toward the end of July. Which this is.
I don’t usually freak out about insects, but the last time I saw a cloud of flying ants, it was the advance guard of termites that ate the back half of Mother’s house. Happily, these dudes don’t do anything worse than get in your hair and die all over everything.
Yeah, yeah…it’s a nature blog now. I can’t bear to post about Anders Breivik today. The BBC are rolling around in this one like a hog in shit, in the most sick-making display of political opportunism. Cannot. Deal.
July 25, 2011 — 5:26 pm
Comments: 23