It is bitter, and yet…
Where do you go for the latest in cutting edge medical information? Yes, me too: the trans-Atlantic in-flight magazine. There, snuggled between the barf bag and the instructions for using your seat cushion as a flotation device (I wonder, has anyone ever survived using a seat cushion as a flotation device? I think not), I found an article on Angostura bitters.
They were invented in the 1820s by a German doctor serving in Simón Bolivar’s army. He intended them as a general health tonic, but they quickly passed into folklore in Venezuela and the Carribean as a sort of cure-all. I mean, raising people from the dead is pretty good going for a cocktail. No-one outside the firm knows what’s in them, apart from sugar, alcohol and gentian.
The author of the article I read swears that a few drops in a small amount of soda water will settle an upset stomach and crank up appetite (and I’m sure we’re all searching for an easy way to increase appetite!)
The British Royal Navy latched onto them as a seasickness cure, which is why pink gin is the official drink of the Navy. A shiny new sixpence to the lad or lass who manages to think up the “pink gin/homosexuality in the Royal Navy” crack that eludes me here. Feel free to work Hornblower in somehow. Anyhow, you make a pink gin by swirling Angostura bitters around the glass and then filling it with gin. Mmmmm! Pink!
I really like bitter, ouchie beverages, so I made a mental note to order some of this stuff. Then I saw it in the booze section of the grocery store here. I’ve been a-drinkin’ pink vodkas ever since: vodka, tonic and a splash of bitters.
It’s…nice. It’s not reallly bitter, though. It tastes like this professional dentifrice my dentoid used when I was a teenager. Why I should find that appealing, I…point you to the observation above about my love of things bitter and ouchie.
I give it …
three and a half drunken weasels.
December 11, 2008 — 7:43 pm
Comments: 38
Legends of Olde Englande
Oh, aye. When a man in a Santa-hatted gorilla suit playing a drum kit salutes you with a banana stump, sure an’ it’s goin’ to be a long Winter and hard.
Yeah. These people are weird.
I’m having trouble finding my rhythm; stand by for adjustments. I was always a morning poster ’til now, but I need every ounce of daylight to do house-y things. After which there’s Tea Time then Nap Time then Booze Time. My cup runneth over.
Tomorrow morning, the neighbors behind are cutting down a line of trees in their garden to get rid of the rooks — who are, I admit, very noisey. But it’s a shit thing to do. In December. Corvids are extremely fucking clever animals, and rooks are social and attached to their trees. I’m going to miss the bastards; I hope they take up residence in nearby trees, owned by somebody less keen.
On a happier note, the same neighbors told us there’s a stoat living under their back porch. A stoat, in case you haven’t Googled, is what the Brits call a proper, full-sized weasel.
w00t!
December 9, 2008 — 9:00 pm
Comments: 25
Putting the ‘suss’ in Sussex
Well, you didn’t think we’d put the ‘sex’ in Sussex, did you? Too much hard work.
I have to be cute about the exact town, since that plus the name of the house (not really Badger House) is sufficient unto a mailing address. Houses with names are common here, but our whole neighborhood is houses that are named but not numbered. That’s just how special we are. I think I can safely say Sussex.
Heh heh. Weasel make funny. The county of Sussex is so wide that, for administrative purposes, it has been divided into West and East Sussex since the Twelve Century. Had to be, since you couldn’t ride a horse from one end to the other in a day.
The motto of Sussex is “We wun’t be druv” — which means I shall end my life as it began: in the company of stubborn, illiterate rednecks
Badger House is walking distance from the nearest good sized town and a few miles from the English Channel. On a clear day, we can stand on the shore and see France, but not well enough to get a missile lock. We are surrounded on all sides by acres and acres of sheep. This is serious farming country, for reals.
Our usual roaming territory is wider, stretching from Canterbury in the East, where the Cathedral is, to Salisbury Plain in the West, where Stonehenge is, to London in the North, where there are no British people left at all.
That covers many impossibly cool places and things, about which it will be my pleasure to blog — as I am all politicked out for a while and sick to death of the stupid economy.
December 8, 2008 — 7:20 pm
Comments: 26
A lit-tle too clever for my own good…
When they get wind I’ve left the country, my credit card companies will cut me off. I had to have cards to get here — there were a thousand little, and not so little, moving expenses that wouldn’t take cash — so I didn’t let on. I’ve paid my bills online for years, I figured. I’ll call up from the UK, get my final balance and cancel the account from the warm safety of the Fortress of Solitude, I figured.
Ha! Guess what? 1-800 numbers don’t work from outside the US! Well, they sort of do. They work part way. They string you along. They tease.
You know what it’s like to punch in a boring twelve-digit account number and wend your boring way through all the boring choices in a modern boring automated phone system? Well, imagine you had to poke in twenty digits to get in, and a dial tone cut you off at some random point in the process.
You think this post is boring?
Ummm…you’re right, actually.
December 3, 2008 — 8:07 pm
Comments: 25
Exotica of the Day
Prawn crackers.
No, no…not pr0n, crackers. Calm down there, you crackers at the back. Prawn crackers are a staple of East Asia. Ninety percent air, 10 percent rice, and I think their collective grandmother might have seen a prawn at the circus once.
A bag of them is usually included with an order of Chinese takeaway (aka takeout) in the UK. At least, that’s my experience. Uncle B says it isn’t always; depends the size of the order. Well. There are no small Chinese takeaway orders in the Badger household, so that’s my experience.
December 1, 2008 — 7:14 pm
Comments: 32
S. Weasel proudly presents…
Weasel’s playing hou-owse, Weasel’s playing hou-owse!) remindened me of something I hardly needed remindening of: it would be a HELL of a lot easier to approach Britain if it were just a little more frankly foreign. When you’re stuck up the Zambezi or the Po, you damn well know you’re not in Kansas any more (I assume) and you adjust accordingly. Britain is like…Kanzace. It’s so almost-but-not-quite right, it makes my nerves hum on a low, uneasy frequency.
Some of the differences are deliberate, for god knows what marketing reason. You can buy britches at TK Maxx. You can rub Oil of Ulay onto your face. Same companies, a tiny bit utterly fucking wrong.
Some of the differences are because we are not as same as we think we are. Brits and Yanks watch so much of each other’s television, share so much of each other’s history, that we forget the 200 years and 3,500 miles that separate us.
It’s inevitable — for some months, anyway — that this blog will be about an American houseweasel in darkest Britain. The trivial, pointless shite on which I thrive.
But what the hell. You don’t really want to read any more blogs about politics right about now…do you?
November 28, 2008 — 8:40 pm
Comments: 86
The Taj Mahkitteh
Today’s Hair Across Weasel’s Ass: plane-legal pet carriers. A regular, take-her-to-the-vet-sized pet carrier will not do (never mind that mine is 30 years old, solid as a brick shit-house and served perfectly well to fly a bigger cat than Charlotte from Tennessee to Rhode Island). If the airline doesn’t turn the cat away, there are grievous fines on the UK end for shipping an animal in a container they consider too small.
And so, of course, they provide really precise instructions for choosing the appropriate carrier.
Ha ha! Just woofin’ you. Every document describes the requirements s-lightly differently. It should be the height of the cat standing, the height of the cat sitting or two inches above the ears of the cat standing. There has to be ventilation in all four sides, or it doesn’t matter as long as it’s 13% open to air. The animal has to be able to stand up turn around and lie down again (which makes jump down turn around pick a bale of cotton spin up on my mental Wurlitzer). The problem is the confluence of airline regs, US government regs and UK government regs.
I particularly liked this instruction from DEFRA:
Containers for cats should have litter trays which are either heavy enough not to move around or fixed to stop them moving.
Litter trays! Holy pooperscooper! Charlotte needs at least a five foot radius to operate a box properly. She’s a sweet girl, but stupid. She stands with all four feet inside, hangs her ass over the side and pees on the floor.
Whatevs. I bought her the biggest carrier that’ll fit in the Weaselmobile. And it occurs to me I never told you what needs to be done to bring a dog, cat or ferret into the UK. It’s a hell of a deal, but I won’t complain — they don’t have to go through six months of kennel quarantine on the British side now. They essentially allowing the pet to serve out quarantine at home. Zo! In this precise order:
■ Spay and microchip. (Very important — that microchip is checked before every stage of the process. Some people drop a couple hundred bucks for their own chip reader, just to be sure).
■ Vaccinate for rabies.
■ Some time later — twenty days is recommended — draw a blood sample and have your vet send it to Kansas State University.
■ They send back a document certifying presence of rabies antibodies (my documentation didn’t have the official seal, so I had to chase them to send another one).
■ Six months after this date, the travel documents can be applied for. If the rabies booster comes due before you’re ready (ours did), booster and documentation.
■ When the time comes, gather all the documentation and FedEx it to the nearest USDA veterinary office. They FedEx the docs and the stamped travel permit back. This document is good for four months.
■ Not less than 24 nor more than 48 hours before Puss gets on the plane, one last vet’s appointment. She gets de-ticked, wormed (must contain Praziquatel!) and the vet makes a final entry on the USDA and airline forms.
■ Show up at the approved airline’s freight service six hours before the flight. There are, incidentally, one or two government-approved cat-flying airlines for each city that flies to London.
■ After going through People Customs at Heathrow, hop a taxi and drive four miles (oh, the cabby’s going to love me!) to the Animal Reception Center. They say it takes 3-4 hours to process a cat through. Why? I don’t know!
And…umm…ta-dum, I guess. All for the filthy little crooked-tailed, squint-eyed, bug-eating feral Goblin Princess I trapped in my garage five years ago.
Oh, well. One good thing I’ve gotten out of this: pee pads! They’re giant Kotexes for bed-wetters. You put one in the bottom of the travel kennel to mop up accidents. I got a ten-pack of 30×36″ pee pads for six bucks at Wal*Mart.
So that right there is nine wonderful, lazy Sunday mornings I can say to myself, “nah. I don’t feel like getting up yet…”
November 18, 2008 — 1:12 pm
Comments: 36
Boo!
Good morning, Halloweenies! (Okay, that’s not original. They’re serving halloweenies in the company cafeteria today).
I am as psychic as a potato. I itch to see something I can’t explain, but I am utterly blind to auras, cold spots, vibes, premonitions and heebie jeebies.
I thought I saw a UFO once. I stood in the side yard at the farm one night watching these strange lights moving far off in the sky…until the sun came up and I saw it was actually a nearby badly insulated electrical wire arcing when it slapped against the pole. I had a touch of heebie-jeebies — call it a heebie — before I knew what I was looking at. I’m apparently capable of the creeps, but my life has been sadly bereft of them.
Something about this guy gives me a heebie, though. Usually, ‘ghost’ photos are meh. Obvious double exposures. Flash noise.
This spooky dude turned up on surveillance photos at Hampton Court Palace. That’s one of Henry VIII’s haunts (ho, ho) about ten miles West of Central London. It’s mostly a tourist attraction now.
In December of ’03, a pair of fire doors in a seldom-used area of the palace blipped the security panel three days running. The third time, the guard checked the nearest camera, and these images turned up.
It doesn’t match anyone authorized to be in the area, or any of the Tudor costumes sometimes used by staff. Security in palaces isn’t infallable, but it’s generally good. Nobody ‘fessed up, nor tried to make hay afterwards.
Britain has a tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas (that’s why A Christmas Carol is one), and this looks an awful lot like Zombie Father Christmas. So…probable hooey.
But we drove past Hampton Court not long after, and Uncle B pointed it out to me. And it was kind of brrrr.
October 31, 2008 — 10:11 am
Comments: 62
Today’s Fun British Fact
It is illegal to mail horror comics to the UK.
For reals. I tried to find an online citation for that, but I couldn’t. It’s true, though. The lady at the Post Office showed me the regulation sheet.
I wasn’t trying to do that. I was trying to mail Uncle B an air pistol. A BB gun. PO Lady wouldn’t let me, on account of it’s “a weapon.” And I say, “a reproduction weapon.” And she says, “well you could hurt somebody with it.” And I say, “I could hurt you with this Customs Declaration form if I tried hard enough.”
I lost. Of course I did. Nobody ever argues the regulations and wins.
My real guns are going in the shop (most of them, anyway). But I have a couple of CO2 pistols I’d like to keep. They’re perfectly legal in the UK, but one looks exactly like a Glock and the other looks like a Walther PPK. I figured I didn’t want to pack them in with my household stuff, on the off-chance they turn up on an x-ray or something and get everything confiscated. So I decided to mail them on ahead.
I’m sure the comic regulation is some fusty old thing left over from the pre-Code comics era. Like the comic I stole this header graphic from. Which is in my horror comic collection.
Which is packed with my stuff.
Oh, piffle.
October 30, 2008 — 2:41 pm
Comments: 39
My groat. Let me show you it.
This is my groat. There are many groats like it, but this one is mine.
My groat came up in conversation here last week, so I figured I’d give you a peep at it. This is my groat. Specifically, it is a Maundy groat of Charles II. The obverse says CAROLUS II DEI GRATIA and the reverse says MAG BR FRA ET HIB REX. Which means “Hix Nix Stix Pix.” Heh heh. Jes’ kidding. The real translation is: “HEY CROMWELL, how does my ass taste?”
A groat is a little silver coin worth four English pennies, also called a fourpence. The first was minted in the 13th Century and the last (for actual circulation — more on that in a moment) in 1888. The date on this one is 1679, but it wasn’t necessarily made in that year. They weren’t all that fastidious about minting coins every year, or changing the dies when they did. Early in Charles II’s reign, they were still producing most coins by hammering, but they switched to milling in his lifetime. This is a milled coin.
The Maundy ceremony, confusingly, happens on Thursday. Specifically, the Thursday before Easter. “Maundy” is a corruption of Mandatum Nuvum — the ‘new commandment’ to love one another and, umm…wash feet. British monarchs have observed some sort of Maundy ritual since 600AD — which sometimes included foot washing, but nearly always involved giving silver coins to the poor. The coins were known as Maundy money.
Regular old coins were used at first, but beginning with Charles II, special coins were minted, in sets of four: 1p, 2p, 3p and 4p. And still are. Despite decimalization (in 1971, Britain utterly fucked its wonderful but brain-hurty old currency scheme and lost many a beautiful coin) Maundy money is still legal tender.
Today, the Queen gives out Maundy money to worthy old persons, as many old coots as she is years old. The foot-washin’ part was quietly dropped centuries ago, until the current Archbishop of Canterbury — a very strange man — revived the custom in 2003.
Because it is a Maundy coin, Charles II his own self may have handled this groat. But probably not. And now you can tell all your friends, “I have seen Weasel’s groat.”
October 27, 2008 — 10:13 am
Comments: 104