I shall go mad…MAD, I tell you!
October 20, 2007 — 6:52 am
Comments: 14
Wish us luck
October 19, 2007 — 11:50 am
Comments: 16
I seldom feel fresh
The packing should be more or less done by the time I get here. I was thinking my contribution would be cleaning the house afterwards, but Uncle B has hired a cleaning service to sweep through after we’re gone.
So I guess it’s just “look beautiful and make cups of tea” then.
October 18, 2007 — 6:47 am
Comments: 48
That’s right! It’s LOLstoats!
Huh. Whaddya know? You can actually hear it when people delete your bookmark!
October 17, 2007 — 7:28 am
Comments: 24
Whee!
Okay, folks, this is it. I mean, it’s not it it…it’s Stage One of Operation Weasel Move. This is where we move the London house to the new house on the coast. The new, ancient house on the coast. But more about that when I get back.
For I shall be unplugged! The house won’t be broadbanded for another month. I hope to get a chance to check mail occasionally, but that’s about it. This’ll be the longest I go without the Internet since there was an Internet.
I’ll probably go out of my skin.
But don’t despair, minions. Through the miracle of the WordPress check-is-in-the-mail post-dating system, I’ve queued up an entry for every day I’m away. Yes, including weekends! It’ll be like Hanukkah in October!
See you in a few, if nobody drops a refrigerator on me.
October 16, 2007 — 6:09 am
Comments: 54
A special weekend happy birthday to Dawn and the Camden Town Murder
So Dawn mentions it’s her birthday. So I think about what sort of graphic goes with “Dawn” and, naturally, the first thing that pops into my head is this little guy, above.
It was drawn by Robert Wood, a young commercial artist, in 1907. It’s a postcard mailed from Belgium inviting a woman named Phyllis Dimmock to a pub called the Rising Sun in the North London neighborhood of Camden Town. Phyllis was described at trial as a prostitute, but she may simply have been extraordinarily liberal with her favors. Also, she collected postcards. Isn’t that nice?
It is signed “Yours to a cinder, Alice.”
On the morning of September 12, Phyllis was found by her common-law husband lying in bed with her throat cut from ear to ear. There was blood in the basin and a straight razor beside it. Her postcard collection was strewn about the room, as if the murderer had tried unsuccessfully to find something. Or really hated postcards.
Later, this card turned up in the back of a drawer. When it was reproduced in the papers, an old girlfriend identified Robert Woods as the author. He talked her out of going to the police and asked her to give him an alibi. She couldn’t resist running her mouth about it, though, and word got out. He eventually admitted being the last person seen with Phyllis on the night of the 11th.
Long story short: tried and acquitted.
His case was argued by Edward Marshall Hall, who went on to be become one of the most famous British barristers, evah. Wood was the first criminal defendant in Britain to give evidence at his own trial and still be acquitted (despite the fact that he didn’t make a very good impression). The case became known as the Camden Town Murder.
The execrable painter Walter Sickert lived in Camden Town at the time and painted several enigmatic, crap pictures of the Camden Town Murder. Several writers — most recently and famously Patricia Cornwell — think Sickert was Jack the Ripper. Which is tosh, rubbish and bullshit.
That makes Wednesday before last the hundredth anniversary of the Camden Town Murder. Happy birthday, Dawn!
September 22, 2007 — 2:39 pm
Comments: 14
Really, REALLY unfortunate wedding announcements
Or, When NOT to Hyphenate Your Name. What’s my favorite? Best Lay? Wang Holder? Weener Whipple? Peters Rising? No, I can’t choose. Go see them all for yourself.
Speaking of names, I am inevitably going to have to become Mrs Uncle Badger or they won’t let me stay across the pond or get access to the wonderful National Health Service. I am, of course, proud and delighted to wear a family name associated with thousands of years of smelly, lice-ridden, bad tempered mustelids who live down holes and eat worms, but this does present me with a problem.
See, in the UK, a woman typically exchanges her husband’s last name for her own, keeping her same old given first and middle name. In the US, she takes his last name, drops her middle name and her own last name shifts over and becomes her new middle name. So I have a choice here.
To complicate matters, I have TWO middle names, and they’re corkers. My mama approached baby names and dog names in a similar spirit of mad hijinks and good clean fun. If I’d been born ten years later, in her commune days, I’m convinced I would have ended up Lemondrop Polythene Snickerdoodle Weasel. As it is, I got a melange of cornpone polysyllabic family names, something very like Stoaty Terwilliger Rothschild Weasel.
So do I follow the Brit tradition — Stoaty Terwilliger Rothschild Badger — and continue to sound like something that wandered boozily out of a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon to piss down your leg? Or do I go with the alternate, Stoaty Weasel Badger, and sound all classy and shit, like some kind of a fucking duchess already? (Don’t even suggest hyphenating the two. Stoaty don’t play that. I think that’s getting married with your fingers crossed behind your back).
I know y’all are going to be disappointed in me, but I’m leaning toward “duchess.” I’ve enjoyed my stupid name very much, but enough’s enough. I think I’ll play grownup for a while. I’m sick of being unable to fill out forms (try fitting “Terwilliger Rothschild” in the little space they leave for middle names) and having to spell it out for people.
But, man, would I ever love to be Crystal Butts McCracken.
September 20, 2007 — 8:20 am
Comments: 26
Shiver me timbers! It’s Talk Like a Pirate Day!
Ahoy, landlubbers! Sure an’ it be Talk Like a Pirate Day again. Sneaks up on on a weasel every year! Them Limey knaves be doin’ it, too! Yarrr!
So talk like a pirate this day, ye scurvy dogs, or ye’ll be walkin’ the plank!
Or, you know, be doin’ it for a while and then be quittin’. Because if I have to listen to it all day long, it’s really going to get on my tits after a while, you know?
September 19, 2007 — 9:03 am
Comments: 24
Happy belated birthday, Mad Jack
John ‘Mad Jack’ Fuller (1757 — 1834) was an impossibly rich, batshit crazy English squire from Brightling on the South coast. He preferred to be called “Honest John” — but that didn’t happen, for reasons that will shortly become obvious. He is famous for building a slew of follies — a tower, a pyramid, a greek temple, an obelisk and other assorted wonders — in improbable, not to say stupid, locations. Like mostly, out in the middle of sheep fields.
His motivations were reckoned to be everything from legacy building, to creating ‘jobs for the boys’ to settling bets. I’m guessing that batshit crazy thing was a factor, too.
But he also built a lighthouse, funded the local lifeboats and saved beautiful Bodiam Castle from demolition. So, you know, it was a good crazy.
We tried to visit all his follies in a day, one beautiful September day last year. Nearly managed it, too. We missed the Greek temple for sure (which was WAY off the road, and we couldn’t see an obvious place to park) and maybe one or two others. It was a fine adventure..
His actual birthday is in February, but next Saturday, Brightling is observing his 250th birthday. I’ll just miss it.
The Sussex Bell Ringing Association will go up against Brightling’s own bell ringers in a head to head contest of…umm…bell ringing. Plus, there will be a barrel organ and a drumming band. And dancing, liquor and barbecue.
And y’all wonder what the attraction is…
September 14, 2007 — 5:55 pm
Comments: 4
And what would their costumes look like?
Incidentally, that “Dingo baby mum says she’ll support McCanns” is the actual headline from the Daily Mail. British newspapers — even the very good ones — frequently describe people using that formula: <thing they’re famous for> + <appropriate noun>.
So British papers are full of characters like dingo baby mum, wrong kidney doctor, knife in forehead boy, spastic colon girl.
To an American, they sound like pointless and terrifying superheroes.
September 13, 2007 — 5:43 pm
Comments: 23