Balls!
Here, Uncle Badger holds out the traditional New Year’s Day Balls of…oh, screw it, I forgot to post something, didn’t I? Hope y’all had a splendid first day of 2008. We spent ours as we mean to go on: sleeping, eating and a-drinking of alcoholic beverages.
We slunk down to the Adolph and Eva Memorial Recycling Center with our empties after dark tonight, and it took both of us to lift the box. Hooray for the noble mustelids!
And tomorrow afternoon, if all goes according to plan, several elderly persons of the district are coming to help us exhume a fifty year old veteran from the back garden.
Sweet dreams!
January 1, 2008 — 7:05 pm
Comments: 23
Gimme a ‘T’!
Traditionally, I take one last photograph of the very last sunset of the year, just as the light goes out on New Year’s Eve. Tonight I was putting away the groceries and…ummm …forgot (but, on the up side, Asda had fountain pens for 79p each! w00t!).
So this is a photo of the penultimate sundown of 2007, shot yesterday during a sprightly walk along the Channel. The big T is a navigation aid of some kind. <shrug>
New Year’s Eve is a time for looking back on the old year — because, let’s face it, coming up with bullet lists is a hell of a lot easier than pulling original content out of your ass before Champagne Time. Me, I didn’t actually get around to compiling my lists, but here are some topics I considered posting about:
· The ten vilest smells of 2007
· Killing adorable small animals wounded by my cats; a retrospective
· The top seven remarks I blurted out and then instantly regretted
· What hurts: a musculoskeletal year in review
· 2007: Be fair, it sucked less than 2006
· Movies, music, television, books: things I didn’t pay the slightest attention to this year
I could go on, but then I wouldn’t be drinking, would I? Forty five minutes to the new year in Jollye Olde. Happy 2008, Minions!
December 31, 2007 — 7:17 pm
Comments: 29
A dyer dying here has died and thus dyed for the last time
The military ones are the BEST. Here’s Mark Steyn recalling a few of his favorites:
Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Sanders, who accepted an invitation to lunch from the same Waziri tribesman who a few days earlier had blown him up and cost him his right arm; Bunny Roger, the Mayfair “aesthete” who marched through German lines brandishing a rolled-up copy of Vogue; Warrant Officer “Muscles” Strong, who interrupted his Chinese captors’ lectures on western imperialism with cries of “Bollocks!”; Sir “Honker” Henniker, Bt., an Indian Army brigadier who enjoyed being saluted by his elephants; Charles Upham, the New Zealander who charged two German machine-gun nests singlehanded and is one of only three men in history to be awarded two Victoria Crosses. When my wife’s uncle died, the paper noted that, before leaving for Normandy by glider on D-Day to seize the bridges over the River Orne, he purchased a newsboy’s entire supply of the first edition of the London Evening Standard so that the men who’d landed before dawn would be able to read press accounts of their exploits on the very same day. The Telegraph’s anthologies of military obituaries (edited by David Twiston-Davies) are highly recommended, and a very moving parade of astonishing courage punctuated by dotty elan.
On further search, though, it turns out the one I remember best wasn’t an obit at all. It’s an excerpt from the journal of Capt Robert McLaren, who operated behind Japanese lines in the second World War, and it appeared in the health section under do-it-yourself-appendectomy:
“Made incision through skin, spread the muscle layers with the end of the spoon, bared the appendix, tied off and buried the stump. Healed in three days. Japs pushed in. Took to the hills.”
Some people make you feel like a COMPLETE waste of human skin,
don’t they?
December 28, 2007 — 9:56 am
Comments: 9
Being a foreigner: harder than it looks
Uncle B and I were out grocery shopping today and I noticed something I guess I’m going to have to get used to. At the sound of my foreign accent, people start and turn to look at me (if nothing else, that tells you how far out of London we are).
It’s not so bad; when they realize what they just did, most people give me a sheepish smile.
I work with a man who is missing the littlest two fingers of his right hand. I didn’t know it until I shook his hand and then — it was completely involuntary — I started and stared down at our handshake. It felt so indefinably…wrong. He must get tired of that look, day after day. Me, I just get grinned at.
Many and high-larious are the zany miscommunications between Weasel and Badger. Like this here thing. The sign up there. It was part of my Christmas loot.
B: It’s Chinese, I guess.
S: What?
B: Weasel zhing.
S: You’re pulling my leg, right?
B: Well, I thought it might be pronounced Weasel ching, but I looked up all the variations I could think of and didn’t find it.
He thought it was a slogan, like “grrl power” or “ban the bomb” or “weasels rule, badgers drool.” Poor bastard; he’ll buy me anything with a weasel on it. Most of which seems to come from California.
For the record, they spell it out here: Crossing. It’s all part of their “use more stuff than strictly necessary on signage” campaign. Way Out for Exit. Give Way for Yield.
December 27, 2007 — 7:41 pm
Comments: 15
Happy Boxing Day!
Happy Boxing Day, everyone! I was all excited until Uncle Badger told me Boxing Day doesn’t mean what I thought it did.
Huh. That’s what he thinks.
December 26, 2007 — 7:21 pm
Comments: 13
Math with Stoaty!
Hiho, minions! Let’s play the Merry Christmas Exchangemathemohoogical drinking game!
One kilogram = 2.20462262 pounds
One gallon = 3.7853118 liters
Today’s exchange rate is $1.98440 to £1
Calculators ready? That turkey up there weighs 18.2432521805 pounds. It costs $8.09197722blahblahblah per pound. So the price tag on that bad boy is $147.619516.
Merry Christmas! Take a swig!
Okay! Petrol (isn’t that a charming word?) is £1.03 a liter (I’ll give ’em the .9 for free). That’s $2.04932 per liter. Which works out to $7.7371243blahblahjesuschristouchthat hurts per gallon.
Merry Christmas! Take a swig!
People wonder why Britons drink. I haven’t even made it to the parsnips and I’m pissed as a newt.
I wouldn’t dream of living here if I could do math in my head.
December 21, 2007 — 8:09 pm
Comments: 34
She’s off!
Here I go! Going to be the red eye this time, which I haven’t done in years, but it’s better to fly into Gatwick Airport now, and all the flights into LGW arrive in the morning. This means jet lag, another thing I haven’t done in years. Expect me grumpy tomorrow. Uncle B says we have a innernets at Badger House now. I wonder what Old Skullcracker thinks of that!
Oh, and I have a driver, just like those monumental public figures Madonna and Paris Hilton! I hope he holds a sign that says Stoaty Weasel, so my fans know to congregate and squeal.
December 19, 2007 — 8:34 am
Comments: 57
But I don’t wanna marry Kevin!
So I had this dream. I dreamed there was this ratfaced dude with long, limp brown hair and they were like, “right. This is Kevin. You’re going to marry him.”
And I’m like, “wait…what?!”
And they go, “you promised you’d move to England and get married, didn’t you?”
And I’m like, “uhhh…yes. I guess.”
And they go, “well, the regular guy can’t make it, so you’ll have to marry Kevin.”
And I wail, “but I don’t wanna marry Kevin!”
That’s going to be my personal catchphrase for a while. You’d appreciate the power of this dream more fully if you had any idea how many suicidally stupid things I’ve done in my life because I felt like I’d promised somebody something.
And don’t get me going on the irresistible power of the dare!
Okay, so this here is what I laughingly call my studio. Actually, it was a proper artist’s studio for years, but then I raised three baby squirrels to robust adulthood in it. Squirrels are a genetically-engineered cross between rats and psychotic trapeze artists.
It was my task this weekend to pull out everything I want from this great tottery pile of squirrel-tainted weasel poo so the Garbage Fairies can come over the holidays and whisk the rest away to Santa’s Landfill. This was what it looked like on Friday. I took one look and wailed, “but I don’t wanna marry Kevin!”
But I learned something, going through my old drawings and other artwork. I learned that, if I work hard and put my mind to it, I sure can suck. I also learned that ammonia dissolves india ink — good to know when you find a big crusty pool of dried ink with squirrel tracks radiating outwards in all directions on a hardwood floor. This happens to everyone some day, and now you’ll be prepared. You’re welcome. Also, I found many hidden caches of inky peanuts and dessicated broccoli, so you’ll be relieved to know I’ll be okay in the lean times, thanks to my beloved psychotic trapeze rats. Fare thee well, boys — wherever thou mightst be!
Wait! How long do gray squirrels live in the wild? Never mind…
December 18, 2007 — 7:09 pm
Comments: 12
Knitting up the ravell’d sleeve of broccoli
In case you’re not sure what you’re looking at there, it’s knitted potatoes and tomatoes and other garden vegetables. They represent a small part of an entire knitted garden dreamed up by some British biddies. That’s 300 people, fifty miles of yarn and four million stitches.
I’m not much into knitting, mind you (that would be my big brother), but Pupster sent me a link to the excellent Stitchy McYarnpants Museum of Kitschy Stitches a few days ago, so the topic just seemed… knitted in the stars or something.
I’m going to need all the cheap and easy blogfodder I can get for a while. A real estate agent had a look at Weasel Manor over the weekend and left me a To Do list that included items such as “douse livingroom in gasoline and light match” and “write ‘I Will Never Buy Another Knick-Knack In My Whole Stupid Miserable Life’ one hundred times — in own blood.”
If you haven’t figured it out on your own, I’m not a very good grownup. The process of hiring and directing workmen is not one I’m likely to do well. I was on the phone all day asking the important interview questions like, “would you like to see me hang a spoon on my nose?” and “recite three recent booger haiku you have written.”
I’m doomed.
November 12, 2007 — 6:40 pm
Comments: 26
C’mon-a my house
Have you ever had a break so lucky, you were actually afraid to brag about it for fear God would smite you? No, me neither. And it’s scaring the hell out of me. I’m sure the Acme safe is going to fall on my head any minute now.
Uncle B and I have been house hunting for a decade. We knew pretty much what we wanted, and where. We’ve pored through the listings nightly and looked at dozens of houses. We became known to the local real estate community as “Oh, them.”
We’ve looked at so many houses that were…almost right. But this one had no garden, and that one was in a crap neighborhood, and another one needed a hundred thousand pounds spent on it before you could flush the toilet. We put in a bid a couple of times, but I can’t say with much enthusiasm.
Incidentally, Britain is a fantastic place to be rich. If you have a million or more, you can still buy something that looks like it escaped from an Avenger’s episode. It’s a pretty good place to be poor, too, on account of all the socialism. It’s the mokes in the middle like us what get squeezed like…ummm…gonads in a pair of Levi’s.
Anyhow — long story short — Uncle B found this place that is Goldilocks all over. Set back from the road, decent garden. Walking distance from the town we wanted to live in, but surrounded by sheep fields. Decent size, recently done up (but tastefully, not by speculators). Checked over by a local architect ‘sympathetic to old buildings’ — as the saying goes. JUST inside our price range. Oh, hey, did I mention it’s a SIXTEENTH CENTURY FARMHOUSE?!?
If there’s really such a thing as feng shui, this house is soaking in it. I’ve never been in a warmer, more organic place. It chuckles to itself. It moans in the sun. It gurgles with plumbing. We keep plucking stranded newts off the living room floor. It’s alive with sheep and crows and spiders and little dickie birds.
To avoid distracting this blog from important subjects like penis enlargement spams and booger haiku, I have set up a separate Flickr site for Badger House. I didn’t take as many pictures as I thought, but I was Rather Busy.
Hey, check it out! I’m not colorblind!
November 5, 2007 — 7:24 pm
Comments: 27