Wherein Weasel applies for the Mark of the Beast
On 25 November 2008, certain foreign nationals who apply for further leave to remain (FLR) will be required to have an identity card. The identity cards will contain the following information:
■ a digital photograph of the holder
■ a unique identification number
■ the holder’s name
■ the card expiration date
■ the place and date of issue
■ the holder’s immigration category
■ the holder’s signature
■ a list of restrictions and entitlements for the holder’s immigration category
■ the holder’s fingerprints (on a biometric chip)
■ the holder’s date and place of birth
■ the holder’s gender
■ the holder’s nationality
■ a codification of all of the above into a machine readable formatBiometric appointments will be made using a call centre. Each call centre will use a pool of slots to allocate on a first-come, first-served basis. The appointment itself will require a maximum of 30 minutes. For those who have previously enrolled, an appointment is still required in order to re-check the fingerprints and facial image. A local-rate telephone number will be available for employers and universities to verify that a given ID card is valid. The ID card is not a valid travel document.
If you didn’t guess from the retarded spelling of “center” this does NOT mean that the Bush administration is cracking down on illegals (though, FYI, the US is famously hard on our LEGAL immigrants.). No, this is one more thing to look forward to in Jollye Olde.
In theory, I’m all in favor of countries keeping a close eye on their resident ferriners. But you know what? There is no longer ANY sort of immigration control or restriction of movement or settlement on anyone from within the EU.
So, say for example your daddy was in the Luftwaffe and dropped shit on London for a living. Why, it’s all Willkommen, Freund, enjoy your new life in England. But if Papa was a Yank, Canuck or Aussie snoozing in the poppy fields of Normandy, it’s vere are your papers?
Sucks, is what that right there does.
This is in addition the biometrics that I will have to supply with my Fiancée Visa application, by the way. And guess what? The computer in London that processes those biometrics just shit the bed, moving the average application approval back two weeks. Plus, my buyer needs another week for mortgage confirmation.
So I didn’t make a big deal of the dates. Did you notice that? The ID policy goes into effect on November 25, my ETA was November 26? Hahaha…very funny, Yer Worship. Still hatin’ on a weasel. But that November 26 date is looking increasingly unlikely now, anyway.
And yes…I really do wear a watch with a standing weasel on it.
October 22, 2008 — 11:59 am
Comments: 46
Fasten your seatbelts; here we go!
Right! It’s on. I’ve got a whole fuckwad* of things to do in the next eight weeks if I’m going to pull this off. I’ll be totally boring and self-absorbed — when I bother to show up at all. That’s my promise to you.
Still, the process by which an American woman and her cat legally emigrate to another country might prove instructive. Think of my journey as a public service. Like Katie Couric’s on-air colonoscopy.
And fifty-eight days from today, if all goes according to plan (ha, ha) we’ll all sit down together (metaphorically) for champers and spotted dick before a roaring coal fire.
Toodle pip, and other gay British stuff!
*Fuckwad: a unit of measurement equivalent to three or more shitloads.
September 29, 2008 — 11:15 am
Comments: 85
There ain’t no God but Allah, y’all
Workers at the Tyson chicken plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee get eight paid holidays a year. Under the new contract they just signed, Labor Day is no longer one of them. Instead, they traded it for Eid al-Fitr — the last day of Ramadan, when Muslims break fast.
That’s because more than half the workforce (700 out of 1,200) is Muslim. Mostly Somali.
Shelbyville. That’s like Bugtussle, folks. Possum Holler. East Dawgtesticle. Shelbyville makes Mayberry look like Gotham City. Or did.
Somalis. Aren’t they the guys that dragged our dead soldiers through the streets? Why are we importing them? In quantity? To little bitty towns in Tennessee? Seriously, WTF?
August 4, 2008 — 8:23 am
Comments: 69
Eva Braun’s nightdress
I find the weirdest stuff doing Google Images searches (though why I was doing a search for ‘nightdress’ I’ll never tell). This one is indeed Eva Braun’s — and, yes, it is embroidered all over with tiny swastikas. No shit.
It’s from a year old article in the Daily Mail about one particularly eccentric British family and their collection of stuff. I recommend it (really. It’s pretty funny).
I hate myself for reading the Mail, but I read it anyway. The Telegraph was once my favorite newspaper, but they’ve slid inexorably toward “lifestyle” pieces and the British equivalent of political RINOism. It’s so boring.
The Mail is impossibly low-rent, but at least they still get pissed off about things. Not always the right amount of pissed off at the right things, maybe, but I’ll take what I can get. Even if I have to go past baby bumps, trout pouts and ‘what’s that up Amy Winehouse’s nose today?’ to get there.
July 11, 2008 — 1:46 pm
Comments: 18
Here, kid — go play with a nut on a string
Behold, conkers. Horse chestnuts. Allen brought them up. British schoolchildren once played a game where they threaded chestnuts on a string and took turns swinging one against another until one or the other cracked.
Apparently, the main thrill was getting your knuckles rapped with a near miss. Which is why I say “played” — HealthNSafety Nazis have outlawed them in many school jurisdictions. Or mandated — yes — safety glasses.
Wikipedia (where I nicked these nifty photos) has a surprisingly interesting article on the game, including trivia. Which is how you know a Brit must have written the article: International Conker Championship trivia. More lily-gilding than most Americans can manage.
Go read it. It’s too hot in here to excerpt.
Incidentally, sending me home with a pocket full of conkers every Fall, as Uncle B does, is muy illegal. You’re not supposed to smuggle nuts across international borders. I told him he’d made me an accidental scofflaw. And he said, “what’s a scofflaw?” And I had to explain that scofflaw is a bogus, make-believe word for people who broke a bogus, make-believe law.
July 8, 2008 — 3:42 pm
Comments: 9
I did not know that
This dude? Uncle Sam. No shit.
He was Samuel Wilson (1766 — 1854), a meat packer from Troy, New York. During the War of 1812, he won a contract to supply meat to the army. The barrels were market “U.S.” and the soldiers joked that it stood for “Uncle Sam.”
It stuck.
When he got the little beard and the kicky star-spangled weskit, I do not know. I found this by following McGoo’s link to an article about James Mongomery Flagg. You know: the guy who painted the I Want You poster with finger-waggin’ Sam on it.
It’s the day before a holiday and my boss is out, so I have no intention of doing anything that even vaguely resembles work today.
And tomorrow? I’ll celebrate the Fourth the way I always do: ringing up Uncle Badger and yelling “Hey Limey — you suck!” and hanging up.
Got to be careful. One of these days, he’s going to figure out it’s me.
July 3, 2008 — 10:41 am
Comments: 27
God Bless America
Say ‘allo to my leetle fren’, Shockwave. He’s a Peterbilt mounted with three Pratt & Whitney J34-48 jet engines (angled slightly downward so it doesn’t launch itself directly into the stratosphere). Zero to 300 mph in 11 seconds and burns 400 gallons of fuel per mile on a speed run. And THIS, my friends, is why we simply must drill in ANWR.
Yep. I went to the RI Air Show this Saturday. The British Red Arrows (the RAF’s version of the Blue Angels) were there. They got here by hopping from England to Scotland to Iceland to Greenland to Northern Canada to the civilized world. Uncle B sent me a Red Arrows t-shirt last year, so I had to wear it. Turned out to be a collosal mistake, since they weren’t selling Red Arrow merchandice at the show (pff! Brits!). I nearly got mugged for it, when I wasn’t being mistaken for Red Arrow support staff.
There were some fantastic stunt pilots there, but Weasel’s into the milporn. And there was plenty and plenty of it. Quonset was once our main Navy pilot training base (it’s a peninsula, and the wind from the ocean apparently simulates a deck landing especially well). It’s an aviation museum now, so it’s all over the place with the decommissioned aircraft.
Sadly, the planes on the ground were covered in children, and the ones in the air were too fast or too far away for me to catch properly (a few pics on my Flickr page. Please to ignore all the typos and sorting errors I just noticed).
It was awesome.
At one point, a stunt pilot flew in low, raised the nose until the belly of the plane faced the crowd, and waggled it side to side in a maneuver I cannot begin to wrap my head around the aerowotsis of. The woman next to me said, “wow! But…I can’t help thinking about all that wasted fuel.”
Liberalism really is a mental disease, isn’t it?
June 30, 2008 — 2:57 pm
Comments: 40
Friendly neighborhood runnybabbit assassins
Last post I’ll milk out of Uncle B’s day at the village fête. He was most taken with these dudes from the itinerate ferret rescue.
Please not to be laughing, these are serious working weasels. They earn their keep a-rabbitin’. They’re going to come out to Badger House and give Uncle B a hand with his little bunny problem (yes, sadly, Uncle B has little bunnies. But on a happier note, he also has great tits).
The theory is, you put nets across the rabbit holes and send a ferret down one of them, then when bunnies pop out you sack ’em up and…do something unspeakable.
In practice, an inexperienced ferret will occasionally eat a bunny on the spot, curl up in a stinky ball underground and sleep it off. But, in this case, the purpose of the bunnies is to feed the ferrets, so no harm.
They sell bunny in supermarkets there, by the way. And pheasant and other game. There’s a sign on the case warning about the possibility of lead shot in their little bodies. This somewhat harshes my belief that meat is grown in vast tanks in clean modern laboratories.
I’ll end up a vegetarian some day. You watch.
June 12, 2008 — 2:52 pm
Comments: 78
Delights of the village fête, continued
Deadly serious.
June 11, 2008 — 10:54 pm
Comments: 21
A delightful morning of murder and buggery
Oh, man, I love the internet. They’ve put the proceedings of the Old Bailey online! And it’s searchable!
It’s an excellent website, too: in addition to the 200,000+ documents (both scans and transcriptions) covering trials from 1674 to 1913, there’s a ton of good London history (and not much more politically correct than it absolutely has to be).
The Old Bailey is London’s Central Criminal Court and has been since…forever, amen. The current building (built in 1902) is on the site of the old Newgate Prison, but the two were originally side by side for the sake of convenience.
There is no better primary source of information about the lives ordinary people than trial transcripts. Where else can you learn what a murder victim had in his pockets in 1810, what a Victorian innkeeper keeps in the till, what timeless drunken ladies of the evening shout as they whale away on each other with a rum bottle and a tin teapot? Treasure, I tell you!
Naturally, murder trials are the besteses (the advanced search helpfully allows you to sort by crime). But permit me to draw your attention to sodomy offenses prior to 1790, where you will encounter what the site describes as “a vibrant, even joyful, world of men who pursued both homosexual experiences and a distinct lifestyle” — i.e. lots and lots of cross-dressing and buggery. (After 1790 the courts got squeamish and censored the transcripts).
If you have any pasty English genes floating around in your gene pool, I highly recommend plugging your surname into the thingie and seeing what your ancestors got up to. Hey, it’s England! There’s probably a coat of arms for cross-dressers!
See also: the complete Newgate Calendar, London’s Past Online. You can still visit the Old Bailey and attend a trial. I’ve always wanted to. But I made Uncle B take me to the Houses of Detention, the Old Operating Theatre and a fancy rat show so I’m not pushing my luck. I’d just as soon not be the subject of a trial at the Old Bailey, thenkyewverymuch.
June 10, 2008 — 10:23 am
Comments: 79