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
Goodbye, Mister Clean
In an effort to help McGoo scrub Barney Frank off his eyeballs before his manly bits run away from home, I give you — House Peters, Jr. Peters died in the night. He was 92.
He starred in a fair bit of movie and TV between 1930-something and 1960-something, but he will be forever remembered as the original Mr. Clean.
Was he the one that came whooshing out of the bottle when you opened it, like a big, bald genie? Must be; how else would you explain a dude with an earring in 1958? Or am I confusing him with the White Tornado…?
The world of unconvincing early advertising mascots reels from another blow. First Mrs Olson, then the Maytag repairman, then Madge, then Mr Whipple. Now this. I may never buy stupid household shit for no good reason again.
October 2, 2008 — 3:01 pm
Comments: 36
But this one’s for reals
Click the graph for explanation. Not a deep thought — it hurts too much when I laugh — I was just farting around online, saw this and thought, “hey…that looks familiar!”
September 24, 2008 — 12:26 pm
Comments: 46
Stay mad
September 11. This fucking day again.
My boss went to ground zero about a week later. Yeah, you wouldn’t think so, but the art department is among the second responders. Somebody has to take pictures of the damage and make PowerPoint presentations about where the bodies were found.
I kid, I kid. There were no bodies. The ‘morgue’ was a bunch of five-gallon buckets under a tarp. As workers filled them with gobbets of meat, they were taken away to the geneticists and new buckets were brought in.
The scene was heavily controlled. Access credentials were placards they wore around their necks, like backstage passes. My boss said the hardest thing was walking the blocks from the inhabited parts of the city to the cordoned area wearing his pass, knowing what he knew. Hundreds of people desperate for news mobbed him, pressing bubblejet prints into his hands. Graduations pictures. Wedding pictures. Smiling, blurry faces. Secretaries, janitors, junior managers.
Yeah, the fatcats aren’t in at eight in the morning. The dead were working doofuses like you and me. In fact, a bunch of our guys were in the building that morning for a meeting; a few didn’t make it out (nobody I knew; I’m not trying to horn in on that kind of celebrity).
He’s a stoical, Scandihoovian type, my boss. I was surprised a few months ago when he told me he still has nightmares. The smoke and the stink and the thick, pervasive, clinging dust of burned paperwork and vaporized modular cubicle furniture and office worker. There was paper, perfectly intact, everywhere. Like drifts of snow.
He brought back thousands of pictures (including some he wouldn’t let us see). I didn’t know about emergency worker graffiti. There was a symbol for “plane parts found here” and another for “body parts found here” and another for “unsafe inside” — warning marks and numbers left on all the buildings that had been searched (and they all had to be; bits were scattered far and wide) in colorful spraypaint.
That stupid fat cunt up there is a bzillion times more likely to die a ghastly terrorist martyr’s death than I am, and yet she celebrates this thing. That’s fucked up. That’s too fucked up to learn better. That’s fucked up beyond all fixing.
Why do they hate us? It’s what they do. It’s what they are. It’s all they have. They don’t have the adult temperament and the simple skills required to be office workers, so they kill and die and dip their hands in the blood and ululate in the streets. Savages.
They have to go, every last one of them that can’t learn better.
Stay mad. We aren’t finished.
September 11, 2008 — 8:09 am
Comments: 13
Heels on the move…
“Shoot for the moon – if you miss, you may hit a star.”
– Walter “Killer” Kowalski
Eh. So astrophysics was not Walter “Killer” Kowalski’s strong suit. He was an electrical engineer for a while, though, before turning to professional wrestling. Kowalski spent thirty years rassling as a professional heel, or bad guy (though he doesn’t appear to have been one, really). He spent the last thirty running a rassling school in Massachusetts (yeah…you don’t think they just take guys off the street and let them whale away on each other, do you? There’s education involved).
Kowalski died Saturday at the age of 81. Pretty good for a big dude (6’7″ in his yoof).
Speaking of heels and frauds, Jeremiah Wright has resurfaced in the US. He preached a sermon at a black church in Houston on Sunday that MSNBC bizarrely called “conciliatory.” (For a preview of the ugly we have in store in the next few weeks, cruise MSNBC’s comments sections).
“Twenty years ago, a scrawny little kid with a pointed nose and big ears — mama from Kansas and daddy from Kenya,” he began. “An ordinary black boy raised in a single-parent home. The boy walked into my office 20 years ago to talk about his dream for a community that concentrated on things that we could achieve in common, things that united us rather than to focus on all the problems and the issues in the community about which we disagree or the things that divided us.”
Yep. Still taking credit for Obama. I loved this observation: “This ordinary boy just might be the first president in the history of the United States to have a black woman sleeping at 1600 Pennsylvania, legally.”
What does that even mean? Seriously? When was it illegal for a black woman to sleep in the White House? Wright is going to be SO much fun, if he sticks around.
Right! That’s it! It’s Labor Day and I’m still officially restesing. It’s going to be another gorgeous day in New England, and I’m going to do today what I did yesterday — pop the top on the Weaselmobile and cruise the backroads into Connecticut farm country.
Did I mention the pie? There was pie!
September 1, 2008 — 6:31 am
Comments: 30
Happy Alevromoutzouromata!
Yup! Yesterday was Alevromoutzouromata already! We missed it. Although, you know, once you get to Underpants Day, you know Alevromoutzouromata can’t be far behind.
Alevromoutzouromata is Greek for “people throw flour at each other.” Kidding? Der Spiegel says nein. People of the little village of Galaxidi in Greece celebrate the end of Carnival and the beginning of Greek Orthodox Lent by dancing and throwing 3,000 pounds of colorfully dyed flour at each other. The day is known, brain-hurtingly, as Clean Monday. (Click for pictures).
It all got started, quoth the Tourist Bureau, at the beginning of the 19th Century, when the Ottoman occupiers (read: killjoy Muslims) forbade the celebration of Christian holidays. In protest, the men of Galaxni painted their faces with ash and danced solemnly in the village square on the Monday before Lent. And then when the Muzzies were gone, it was all, like, ‘FOOD FIGHT!’
Weird? Pff! Not even the weirdest Clean Monday celebration on the Island of Greece. That would have to be the Penis Festival of Tyrnavos. There, once a year, you may dress up like a winkie and eat things that look like peens, drink strong beverages from tallywhacker-shaped cups through straws shaped like weiners, stir the spinach soup with unthinkable utensils and sing songs about boners.
I knew about this one. One of my roommates in art school was Greek — a city girl from Athens. She described how her family drove across the island one year on Clean Monday and unwittingly drove into the middle of Peckerfest. In a convertible.
Traumatized for life, poor girl. “Huge penises! They were…all around the car. Pressing against us…dancing…singing…waving things. Oh, it was horrible!”
Despite the timing, this is an explicitly Dionysian festival — another big fat Olde Worlde religion mash-up. Let us hope Galaxidi and Tyrnavos never get together for this one.
August 19, 2008 — 12:45 pm
Comments: 28
Clown wars
“When she was arrested in Afghanistan last month, Aafia Siddique allegedly had in her possession maps of New York, a list of potential targets that included the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, the subway system and the animal disease center on Plum Island, detailed chemical, biological and radiological weapon information that has been seen only in a handful of terrorist cases, as well as a thumb drive packed with emails, ABC News has learned.”
Seriously? She was carrying all that around in her purse? Was the thumb drive labeled “Shhhh…Super Secret al Qaeda Plan to Take Over the World”? Was she wearing a little black mask and pants and a striped shirt with “TERRORIST” written on it? Has any nation ever faced an enemy more cartoonishly slap-dash, underripe and just plain bug-fuck crazy?
Let’s take just one datum and think it through a little. The Statue of Liberty has symbolic importance to Americans, so I’ll give them that. But it’s on an island and access is controlled by the Parks Service. A search is involved, so you couldn’t carry much in the way of explosives. Not sure what explosives would do, anyway; the statue itself is a thin skin of copper stretched over a steel framework. Hard to damage. Maybe you could fly a plane into it (I accidentally did that all the time with Microsoft Flight Simulator). Might or might not work. Plus, small body count. In sum, not a very good target. So why even put it on a list, let alone walk around with it?
These fuckers are always being picked up with “maps of the subway system” or “lists of targets” — stuff that’s easily Googlable, perfectly innocent in isolation and make NO sense to be carrying around, unless the whole purpose is to buy yourself a world of hurt and look menacing in a headline. Honestly, when you’re just blue-skying your evil plans, it’s really, really not a good idea to write it all down and carry it on your person.
An earlier ABC News article quoted the Afghanistan National Police as saying she was carrying materials from the “Anarchist’s Arsenal” — bet you anything that’s our old friend the Anarchist’s Cookbook, helping angry Americans blow themselves up since 1971. How terrorized am I supposed to be by a pack of bozos getting their doomsday weapons out of a book you can buy on Amazon for twenty bucks? I think MIT ripped this chick off.
Staunch righty that I am, it would cross my mind that the government is making all this stupid shit up, until I remember how much of it there is. Like, remember this guy? Mohammed Taheri-Azar, former University of North Carolina student. Pleaded guilty yesterday to nine counts of attempted murder. Avenged Muslim deaths around the world by driving his SUV into a crowd of UNC students. Really, Mo? That’s your evil plan?
You know, you can give ’em all the education you want, but someday they’ll break loose and fly off down the road waving their arms and going “ULULULULULULULU!”
It’s like we’re fighting the Global War against Angry Pinwheeling Retards.
August 13, 2008 — 9:57 am
Comments: 21
Happy Victory Over Japan Day, y’all!
Okay, it’s not literally VJ Day. That would either be August 15-ish, when Japan actually surrendered in dubya-dubya-eye-eye, or September 2, when they filled out the paperwork. But as Rhode Island is the last state to observe the holiday, we figure we can do it any time we like. So we do it on the second Monday in August.
When I was in the Boston office, it used to piss me off that half my colleagues got the day off and I didn’t. But now I’m in the Providence office, I’m like “ha ha! Take that, you smelly Boston office losers!”
I think we chickened out and changed the name to Victory Day, though. Or We Love Our Little Yellow Friends Across the Sea Day. Or maybe it’s The Unions Never Give Up a Paid Holiday Day.
What do I care? Day off! 🙂
It’s raining. 🙁
August 11, 2008 — 8:56 am
Comments: 28
Danger: catblogging
Minion Scubafreak sent me pictures of Schroedinger the kitten on Friday, and I was struck by how much he looks like Damien at that age. “So what, Weasel?” you’re thinking. “Little gray stripey tabbies are as common as muck.”
Can I just take a second to tell you how very tired I am of reading your minds?
Anyhow, gray tabbies are different. Damien was my first and I observed him closely, after which I started paying attention to shelter tabbies and Cheezburger tabbies. It’s not just gray with black stripes and white highlights. Oh, no. There’s a whole constellation of unusual breed characteristics that go with: their paw pads and noses are a brick red. Their lips and the velvets of their paws are black. There’s a hint of brown undercoat around their muzzles and in other spots. Coarse fur, gray on the body (actually a side-by-side mixture of dark and light, like a badger). Long, wavy, blunt tails with black tips and a black dorsal stripe.
I could go on and on. In fact, I just did. Here, have some more.
There’s a tabby personality, too. They’re friendly, pushy, go-to-hell cats. Damien had a little hitch in his britches, a little trot in his trousers, a little wavey, jivey, slinky, shovy, hissy thing going. It was a cinch that boy would get into trouble; he probably invited an 18-wheeler to kiss his stripey ass. I have always believed he somehow bred true to some long ago wild pusso ancestor.
And I’m right, as usual. That lovely beast top left is a Near Eastern wildcat, Felis sylvestris lybica. Thanks to the miracle of mitochondrial DNA testing, they have recently discovered that animal and my boy had a common ancestor 130,000 years ago. Well, five common ancestors. In Eye-rack!
Dude. Read it in the Daily Mail. Must be true. (Okay, here it is in the NYTimes, Stuckup McSnooterson. And yes, it’s from last year).
They weren’t domesticated that long ago. They’re thinking maybe that happened maybe 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, but they used to think was 4,000 years and in Egypt, so this is pretty interesting. If you find this sort of thing interesting. Which I do and it’s my blog so you can cut it out or I’ll turn this thing around right now.
They found a cat buried, presumably with his owner, in a 9,500 year old grave in Cyprus. Which I thought was really sweet until I reflected that they undoubtedly killed the cat to accompany his owner into the afterlife. Unless the cat died first and they killed the man to keep the cat company in the afterlife, but I think that’s pretty unlikely.
Links to nice big color versions of the above: prototabby, Damien and Schroedinger.
Added: Did you see the thing Gabe linked at Ace’s, about how women bloggers aren’t popular because they post too much about their personal lives and their pets? Look, bud, there’s some shit about DNA in there, too. I didn’t really get that part, but it had some stuff with Latin words and everything, so ha ha on you. Jerkface.
July 28, 2008 — 10:07 am
Comments: 31
Not just any bozo…
Hey, kids! Bozo is dead!
Did y’all see this? Larry Harmon died in his home on the third of this month. He was 83.
He wasn’t Bozo’s creator (that would be Alan Livingston of Capitol Records), nor was he the first Bozo (that would be Pinto Colvig, the voice for Disney’s Goofy), but Harmon bought rights to the character in the Fifties and flogged that clown for a zillion bucks. Harmon trained and licensed over 200 Bozos to perform in local cities across the US.
I knew somebody who claimed to know the Nashville Bozo. Said he a pervert. I bet they say that about all the adult men who opt to dress up and play with children for a living. I was told this guy paid $30 grand to become a licensed Bozo.
According to Wikipedia’s list, there wasn’t a Nashville Bozo, so I’ve probably been had. Kids waited years for tickets to go on the program. My big brother was on once, but I don’t even know where. <insert funny anecdote and/or recollection here>
Many local Bozos went on to become local bozos. Weather men. That guy who used to introduced the afternoon movie on TV. Like that.
In 2004, controversy swirled when the International Clown Hall of Fame took down Harmon’s plaque, claiming that he had misrepresented his role in the Bozo legend. Geez. He carried that fool thing for fifty years. Give the man his plaque.
Snopes has some doubts about whether a child ever told Bozo to “cram it” live on-air. However, they did go out live, so I’m sure plenty of unsavory things snuck through. My mother said she saw an episode where some kids sitting in the bleachers got the giggles. When none of them would tell Bozo what was so funny, he asked one of them to whisper it to him while he stuck the microphone by his ear. “Jimmy farted.”
Yeah. Weasel’s back.
July 25, 2008 — 1:11 pm
Comments: 32