Snow day!
Fat balls for everyone!
There must be something in the avian metabolism that says, “eat! Eat like the wind!” when the snows come, because I have never seen so many little featherheaded bastards in my life, all jostling, squeaking and flapping around my leftovers. I had to bring them seconds and thirds or there was gonna be murder. Murder in my garden.
I reckon we got about four inches down here. No big, but enough to grind local commerce to a halt. London, they shut down part of the Underground (“part of it isn’t under ground,” Uncle B explained). That’s more than Hitler managed.
The Daily Mail is full of ZOMG and freakout, but that’s their job. Our local forecast looks like it’s all going over to rain tonight.
Pity. It was beautiful while it lasted.
February 2, 2009 — 8:42 pm
Comments: 13
Other brands that will never, ever make it in the States
retarDEX.
The one on the left is a mouthwash and the one on the right is a toothpaste. Clinically proven to eliminate bad breath and make weasels spray milk out their little pink noses.
I am so TOTALLY adopting this as my insult-de-jour. You know, like when I catch Uncle B jigging around the bedroom with his underpants on his head, I’ll be like “dude! DUUUUDE! Did you brush with RETARDEX this morning?!”
As opposed to RETARDex, which is clinically proven to eliminate retards.
Sorry for the fuzziness of this. I have to employ great stealth. Lord Sainsbury doesn’t like weasels taking pictures of his retarDEX.
Happy Friday!
January 30, 2009 — 8:15 pm
Comments: 24
Paper, plastic or pennypinching clothed in sanctimonious green twaddle?
Has this come to the States yet? Stores in Britain don’t automatically give you a bag any more. I don’t mean one or two items at a little store, I mean the supermarket and a whole cartload of groceries.
They sell these “permanent” bags at about a pound a throw. I wouldn’t mind that so much if they didn’t usually sport some vomitous greenie slogan in puke-colored ink.
Some stores will give you freebie plastic bags if you ask. One we frequent won’t even do that unless you spend X amount, although they will give you an empty box for free (boxes that, Uncle B says, would otherwise cost them plenty to get rid of, as they are technically considered “industrial waste” by the local council). When we go to that one, if I haven’t remembered to cram a bag in my pocket, we stack our purchases and walk out with them in our hands in big, tottery pyramids.
That particular store has a sign outside thanking us for helping them keep umpty-ump million plastic bags out of landfills this year. Huh. I would be happier if they had the honesty to thank us for saving them umpty-ump pounds on their bag costs. A couple of pence times umpty-ump million isn’t chump change.
Now, I’m all for re-using stuff, and carrier bags are especially obnoxious — what with their mysterious power to insinuate themselves up trees, stuck to fences, down the gullets of birds or floating majestically out to sea (is it my imagination, or did the greens stick us with plastic bags because paper ones were tree murder?). We re-use carrier bags all the time, mostly for packaging up smelly kitchen waste to sneak into public dumpsters, on account of our trash pickup is only every two weeks (another rant for another day).
But I cannot abide having my leg humped by a bunch of sanctimonious piffle about saving the planet when a) I am, at times, grossly inconvenienced while b) the stores are making a nice bit of scratch out of it, thank you and c) it does fuck-all, really, for The Planet.
On the upside, however, Uncle B and I had a stroll around town this morning. He bought a bag of fat balls for the birds at the first stop and wasn’t given a bag. So the rest of the day, I got to say things like, “I say, did you leave your fat balls on the counter in the bakery?” and “would you like me to carry your fat balls for a while?” and “let’s throw your fat balls in the back and go for a walk on the beach.”
So there’s that.
January 27, 2009 — 6:55 pm
Comments: 41
Suggestions?
Last meeting with the vicar today; the order of service. This is where we pick out hymns and all. It was rather sweet, actually. She sat on the couch and hummed religious tunes to us for an hour.
I have ascertained that there is not a hymn called “O Holy Shit!” Nor one called “Dear Sweet Jesus, How the Hell Did I Get Here?” after which I was completely stumped.
I think the vicar thinks I’m a sweet, shy thing, on account of I don’t say much. But, really, I don’t recognize any part of this. I was raised a Presbyterian which, it turns out, shares almost none of the hymnbook with the CofE.
Like I remember the Presbyterian hymnal.
January 22, 2009 — 9:41 pm
Comments: 39
Yep. I’m goin’ to hell!
We went to church yesterday.
Yeah. Heh. I know. I kind of expected it to disappear up its own belfry like that house at the end of Poltergeist, too, but we sat in the back and it was very uneventful. This was the last of our premarital Tests of Courage.
Poor Uncle B didn’t recognize a single hymn from childhood. All the King James in the service was wiped away and replaced with easyspeak.
I’m not sure which bit was more painful, the part where everyone shook everyone’s hand (and I do mean everyone and everyone; we all milled about the church shaking random hands like sleepwalking Fuller brush salesmen), or the part where we sang the Lord’s Prayer to the tune of Kumbaya.
That really happened. I swear.
I’ve worked out why the CofE is bleeding customers: this was like all the thing British people are least comfortable doing, rolled into one socially awkward hour. I’m surprised they’re hanging in as well as they are.
Take it from an atheist, O ye witch doctors: you vary your schtick at your peril!
Religion is in the business of selling ancient, immutable, bedrock, absolute truths. A big dose of the traditions of our fathers, with a touch of the secret answer to absolutely everything. Any time a religion “modernizes” itself, it admits that parts of its creed are negotiable. The honest-to-God secret answer to absolutely everything isn’t going to be negotiable, is it?
Plus, the CofE lacks a certain snake-handlin’, foot-washin’ something.
January 19, 2009 — 8:47 pm
Comments: 49
Moo. Moo. Moo. Moo.
Weather forecasting is not very good in the UK. We’re spoiled in the US; our weather usually comes West to East across a big stable land-mass. Americans can see stuff coming a long way off. Britain is an island in the Atlantic; its weather is pushed around and bullied by a big, cold sea. Forecasts aren’t reliable even 24 hours out.
So when last night’s BBC forecast called for clear sun and very poor visibility, I thought it was either/or. Hedging their bets. How can those two things be? They can’t.
And then I woke up to the foghorn.
Our foghorn is not the BEEE-OHHHH of Warner Brother’s cartoons. Ours goes “moo” every little while, like an especially monotonous and retarded cow. It is not a romantic sound. It is a frankly very fucking annoying sound.
It was sunny and lovely for a while when I got up, then the fog dropped from above like ninja marshmallow. Just like that. One minute, I was emptying the dishwasher. The next, Uncle B was saying, “ummm…I don’t think we’re going anywhere today.”
Jesus, it can fog around here.
We went out anyway, but we didn’t get anything done that we meant to. So that’s okay.
Moo.
January 14, 2009 — 8:13 pm
Comments: 16
Some fresher crazy, perhaps…?
I’ve spent a delightful evening paddling around Britain’s National Archives looking for records of Badger House*. Brits do their censuseses on the year one, and I have managed to find Badger House in two of them. In 1901, it was listed as Badger Cottage and uninhabited. In 1911, it was listed as Old Badger (the name it has today). For more detail, I’ll have to give the Queen a few bob.
Earlier censuxices are online — back to 1841 — but it’s all still in beta. I haven’t gotten any hits before 1901, which either means the information hasn’t been fed into the database yet, or the house had a different name. Either. Both. Take your pick.
For the very besteses information — the proper parish records — this little weasel is going to have to hop a train for the county seat in Lewes. All in good time, my pretties. All in good time.
Anyhow, the stuff the British government has gotten online so far is impossibly cool. I posted about the proceedings of the Old Bailey database this Spring (couldn’t find any significant criminal records for the Weasel *or* Badger families, which probably just means we got away with it). As a devoted British true-crimophile, this stuff blows my mind. Britons make fabulous criminals.
And for all you UFOlogists: the UFO files. I’m not much into it myself, but I did check to see if anything weird is on record buzzing Badger House.
No. For once.
*name has been changed to protect the mustelids. I hate to be cute about it, but the real name of this house is enough of a true and legal address to track us down like dogs. Like dogs!
January 13, 2009 — 9:37 pm
Comments: 11
Okay, this is getting ridiculous…
We went wassailing this weekend.
Yup.
Wassailing.
Apple wassailing, to be specific. Or, as it is traditionally known in Sussex, howling. It doesn’t have anything to do with Christmas (or wassail); wassailing is an ancient pagan ritual performed in apple growing parts of the South of England. The locals dress up like elvish hobos, offer bread and cider to the trees and fire off shotguns to scare evil spirits away from the orchard.
You people think I make this shit up, don’t you? Well, I don’t. Every day in Angle-land is like King Richard’s Faire, but with older costumes and fewer chubby virgins.
I was going to tell you all about the ritual and shit, but for once in their miserable lives the locals started a ceremony early. We got there right on time, which was just in time to see the boogie-scaring fireworks and the traditional wassail bowl paraded back into the pub. Then everybody got pissed as newts on cider.
We did get to see the mummers in the pub, though. Yeah, you know what? I’m going to go lie down for a while.
But, hey, I get to keep my debit card.
January 12, 2009 — 9:00 pm
Comments: 25
How to tell you’re in an exotic foreign land…
Whiskas comes in flavors like duck and rabbit, which makes annoying Warner Brothers cartoons play in my head whenever I feed the cat (DUCK season…WABBIT season…DUCK season…WABBIT season…). And the packet is in five languages.
Also, you have tea with the vicar. Tea with the vicar, I am so not kidding. Tonight was the second of our premarital counseling sessions (oooh! ‘Premarital’ makes it sound so naughty). She didn’t show us any more of Margaret Calvert’s industrial design work, but there was this graphic of a cup filling up with anger and resentment and spilling over with sarcasm, or some shit. I don’t know. I drew a picture of an weasel going “grrrr!” on it when she turned her back.
The vicar is a very nice lady, or I wouldn’t put up with a minute of this.
Then we came home, started a roaring coal fire and set the chimney on fire. No, no…we were able to starve it before it burned down Badger House, but that means no more fires until the sweeps come. And the sweeps can’t come until Thursday. And it’s going to be Really Very Cold this weekend.
But never mind. I’ve always said one of the great benefits of living in a multicultural society is that the airport ladies’ room teaches you how to say, “please put your tampon in the receptacle provided” in a variety of pointless, mouth-grinding, ugly languages. So here, courtesy of Whiskas, for your enlightenment and entertainment, is “complete pet food for adult cats” rendered in a bunch of stupid foreign tongues:
Alimento complete para gatos adultos.
Helfoder för vuxna katter.
Fuldfoder til voksne katte.
Täysravintoa aikuisille kissoille.
Ah, Croatian. The language of love.
January 8, 2009 — 8:53 pm
Comments: 36
It was so cold in England today…
…we had blue tits.
On our fat balls.
I’ve been crumbling up bread ends and meat scraps and leaving them out for weeks now, but for all I know I’ve been fattening rats (last Summer, Uncle B took a picture of an especially fine specimen waddling off with a crust; that’s when he quit leaving food out).
Today, though, bits of Britain were colder than bits of the Antarctic and the boids turned up in hoids.
I totally don’t know from birds. I love watching them, but I’m at a “ZOMG, look at that precious fat one with the beak!” level of expertise. So I got out the binoculars and the Field Guide to British Birds and I counted
■ One thrush
■ One robin
■ Two pairs of moorhens (maybe one pair of moorhens and a pair of coots)
■ A lovely pair of chaffinches
■ Half a dozen blackbirds (a different species than ours; the British kind really do have that sweet, meandering song like in the old Beatles tune)
And that’s before the rooks came home from work and scared everyone off.
Oh, and Uncle B swears he saw blue tits on the seed feeder, but he sees tits everywhere. I’m worried about that boy.
January 6, 2009 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 36