Who’s been writing on my damn furniture?
This great walnut rhinoceros is from my grandparents’ bedroom. My grandfather died when I was a baby, so it’s kind of nice to have something personal of his: it’s striped with cigarette burns on his side.
“Morning, Grampa…you slob.”
I don’t know where it came from before that. I don’t know any stories about it or which side of the family it came from or anything. Grampy Weasel’s family was from Virginia; Granny Weasel’s were from Maryland. I think it’s Regency. I’m not good with furniture, but I think those thumping huge feet mean Regency.
The floor guys — a pair of wiry little scrawny dudes — took one look at it and shoved it in the bathroom door rather than carry it downstairs, completely blocking same. I didn’t get a real shower for a week (ha! ha! sun-ripened weasel!).
Anyhow, that’s the first time I got a look at the back of it. It’s been signed! In large letters with black paint and a soft brush. Writing with a brush like that means most characters take at least two strokes, all down-strokes. I can’t quite make out what it says.
The Col on the left is distinct, then possibly a second l, though there’s a raggedy glue stain down the middle there obscuring it. The next few strokes are hard: m or w most likely, but could be…something else. Then i or ii (which makes no sense) and rr, with the second r all long and weird like they used to do with double-f (just a guess, maybe it IS a double-f). Then…ord? Or maybe or and some symbol that’s not a letter?
Collmirrord. Collwiirord. Collmirford. Collwifford. Coll mirror’d. Coll wirrar D. The only hit I got was Colliford, which is a town in Cornwall on the edge of Bodmin Moor (as in the Beast of Bodmin), but that is so not Colliford.
Any ideas?
April 15, 2008 — 1:20 pm
Comments: 38
A Farewell to Arse: Charlton Heston’s Buttocks 1924-2008
Those of you who missed the theatrical release may not know this, but the original Planet of the Apes starred Charlton Heston’s ass. Oh, there were other characters in it — the rest of Mr Heston, for example — but the 44-year-old Heston bottom stole the show. It left round, bi-lobal smoochies all over that movie.
I was eight years old in 1968 when Planet of the Apes was released. I had never seen male ass before, not counting the brief flash of white as my father dove behind the dresser the morning I walked into the parents’ room unannounced. I imprinted on the Heston brand instantly.
“Yes,” I thought, “that is correct. That is what one of those looks like.”
Women are, as a rule, not moved by visuals the way men are. Men will react to a mere silhouette, which is why so many of them drive right off the road chasing the Mudflap Girl, Silent Killer of America’s Highways.
Women are turned on by the backstory. Will he wrestle a bear? Does he like kittens? Is he the unacknowledged illigitimate son of the Earl of Wessex? There’s a bit of hairy chest and heaving bosom in there, sure, but it’s mostly about personal history. Women can get the vapors from A&E’s Biography.
It’s a true but seldom-acknowledged fact that Harlequin romance novels are hard-core porn for women.
So I’m not being cute when I tell you you my fascination with the Heston ‘tocks is not an especially sexual thing. It’s more like…recognizing an archetype. Like finding the Golden Mean of bottoms. Oh, sure, there are plenty more muscular asses out there, but I hate gym bodies. Heston had a splendid ordinary guy physique. I went to art school a decade later and paid large money to stare intently for hours at various specimens of naked humanity: no ass ever truly measured up. Not one.
Charlton Heston died on Saturday at the age of 84. Of Alzheimer’s, which is a shit disease because it kills you years before it kills you.
He was by all accounts that matter a good and genuine man: a real outdoorsman, a great father, happily married to the same woman for sixty something years.
Lefties snark that the causes he supported in his lifetime show a philosophical change for the worse, if not plain old intellectual confusion: from his strong pro-civil rights and anti-McCarthy stands in the 1960s to his later prominent support for Reagan and the NRA. But it’s all of a piece: it’s about people minding their own damn business, getting out of the way and leaving each other the hell alone.
Good man. Great movies. But, oh dear, what an exceptionally fine ass.
April 7, 2008 — 5:43 am
Comments: 66
Kids! Be the first one on your block…!
Sometimes, listening to NPR pays off.
In 1933, Leo Szilard patented the idea of a nuclear chain reaction. Szilard was a physicist and his patent was highly theoretical, but he tried to use it to gain clout in the Manhatten Project later. The government faced him down, but the issue was worrying. What if other scientists tried to control the project through the patent office? What about scientists in other countries?
So the government decided to file patents on the components of the bomb in the name of the individual inventors as the project progressed.
That presented a different set of problems. The whole project was extra-super-double-dog secret. Plutonium was called “copper,” the bomb was called “the gadget.” But patent applications are as clear and as explicit as the applicant can make them.
So the government invoked an obscure rule already in place: an application marked “secret” would be looked at by no-one in the patent office and filed away in a vault un-approved, forever pending.
Harvard grad student Alex Wellerstein has been looking up these old patents. Turns out, as individual components are de-classified, the individual patents have been granted and published. A lot of it is still secret, but thousands of techniques and methods and bits of hardware are now public.
One patent was issued 60 years after the application; that’s the longest he’s found so far. The applications are still reviewed annually. A lawyer for the Department of Energy told Wellerstein:
“Our feeling has been that a significant taxpayer investment was made to create the inventions and to prosecute the patents so that payment of the issue fee finalizes the effort to provide a property right arising from the government funding. Of equal merit is the recognition provided to the inventors. When the patent issues we make a small good faith effort to find the inventor or a surviving spouse and notify them of the issuance of the patent. When notify someone, they are usually deeply moved by the recognition provided for their long ago secret efforts.”
That’s kind of…touching. Of course, a lot of the old coots are dead now, but a tribute is a tribute.
You know what else is kind of touching? Right in the middle of the Big One, dubya-dubya-deuce, the government didn’t write any special laws or invoke any extra-legal war powers. The department that makes war knuckles under to the rules of the department that files papers. They’re building this huge fucking doomsday weapon in the middle of the bloodiest war in the history of man, and they’re worried about violating international patent law.
I don’t care what the lefties say, the American government makes a lousy supervillain.
March 28, 2008 — 9:23 am
Comments: 11
Peace at last
Alec Wildenstein died last month. He was the husband of famous side-show freak Jocelyn Wildenstein AKA the Bride of Wildenstein AKA the Tiger Lady.
The Wildenstein family is worth about $10 billion, give or take a billion, acquired through several generations of shady art trading. The bulk of their collection is hidden in a former nuclear bunker in upstate New York. A French art critic was once allowed in and reported that it contained “a Fra Angelico, two Botticellis, eight Rembrandts, as many Rubens, three rare Velázquezes, nine El Grecos, five Tintorettos . . . four Titians, 12 Poussins and 79 Fragonards”. Shoot, I didn’t know there were 79 Fragonards.
Alec and Jocelyn were married in 1978, within a year of their first meeting, at a lion hunt. (That thing I just did there? That’s called ‘foreshadowing’). They had a reasonably successful marriage for a reasonably long time…for insanely rich people. Most of their time was spent at their 66,000-acre estate in Kenya. After about twenty years, however, Alec got de restless leg syndrome.
Jocelyn had a few facial tuneups, which staved off the inevitable for a while. Until the day she came home unexpectedly to find him in bed with a 19-year-old Russian model. He pulled a gun and everyone got arrested. Alec closed Jocelyn’s bank accounts next day and instructed the staff not to feed her — which was a problem, she said later, as she did not know how to make toast. The judge awarded her millions, and recommended she use some of it to buy a microwave. I don’t think a microwave makes very good toast.
Back she goes to the cosmetic surgeon. If looking good won’t do it, how about if he transformed her into one of Alec’s beloved big cats?
Ow. No.
Shock, horror…bitter divorce…more surgery…blah blah blah. They did eventually get back together in 2000, at least for a while. Despite her face and everything. There must’ve been something to their marriage beyond joint custody of the monkey.
Anyhow, prostate cancer got him in February. Rest in peace.
I hope she’s learned to make toast. I hope she stops doing that to herself. You, get yourself over to AwfulPlasticSurgery.com and spend an afternoon contemplating the face your mama gave you.
March 13, 2008 — 2:12 pm
Comments: 22
Only $339.80* per megabyte!
More brain-hurty goodness from my \misc_images directory. I’m not sure when this is, but it references CP/M and Z80, so…1983, maybe? I bet that thing was the size of a cement block.
January 17, 2008 — 7:50 pm
Comments: 16
Three old coots and a big hole
About three months ago, the old coot on the left, whose family owned Badger House once upon a time, met up with the old coot on the right, who lived in it during the war. You know, The War. They fell to talking, as coots are wont, and Coot #2 asked who was living up at the old Badger place and whether anybody had “found the machine gun.”
!
Seems Coot the Second, who was a teenager during the war, watched an American Dakota bomber go down in the field behind the house, then crept out and nicked one of its machine guns. He balanced the barrel against our back fence and popped a few rounds across the field, to make sure it was in good working order, then wrapped the whole business in an oilcloth bag and buried it beside the hedge.
I shit you not.
Given the heartbreak of Tulsarama, I wasn’t hopeful there would be anything left, but I’m damned if I’ll wantonly crush the dreams of old coots. So we invited them both ’round for tea and hole digging.
No, we didn’t find it. Not yet, anyway. My nice new metal detector was no use at all; the whole yard lights up like a Christmas tree when I ask it to find iron. That’s what four centuries of tossing stuff out the back will do. An experienced bloke with a bigger metal detector and awesome hole-digging skills is coming out next.
Still, we had merry tales of the old days. At the turn of the (Nineteenth to the Twentieth) Century, Badger House was so derelict the shepherds refused to stay in it. It was nearly knocked down, but somebody driving by spotted it and offered Coot #1’s dad £200 for it. By WWII, the house still had no electricity or indoor plumbing (the tall roof is to maximize collection of rainwater). It sounds as though it has stood empty and overgrown much of the time. We’ll have a lot of tightening up to do.
Coot #3 is, of course, Uncle B…who stands just off camera, shamed by the hole-digging prowess of Coot #2. And you would be, too, if an 81 year old coot KICKED YOUR ASS.
EDIT: Uncle B says the Dakota was a transport plane. The bomber that went down in the lower forty was a Boston. Also, he adds that he is wounded in the arm, so there!
January 2, 2008 — 7:19 pm
Comments: 72
Happy Thanksgiving!
I give you this slideshow of 39 people, mostly celebrities, and their odd deaths. Many are too recent or too well known to be interesting. But how did I miss Christine Chubbuck, the Florida newsreader who committed suicide on-air in 1974? The Wikipedia article about her contains the greatest sentence in the English language:
She placed a .38 revolver in her bag of puppets and put it beneath her desk.
I definitely didn’t know Tennessee Williams choked to death on a bottle cap. He used to hold the cap in his teeth while he administered eyedrops. I think I knew that author Sherwood Anderson died of peritonitis after swallowing a toothpick. And everybody knows Isadora Duncan strangled to death in a tragic wardrobe malfunction when her silk scarf wrapped around the wheel of her convertible.
Shucks, here are a few more ways to die.
There! Now you have something to be grateful for! Happy Thanksgiving!
November 22, 2007 — 7:05 am
Comments: 24
Nashville: blame it on the weasels
Nashville! It’s not a bad city, really. If you stay away from the touristy bits and avoid Summers, it’s a nice enough town.
My great great great great great grandparents led the first wave of white families to settle along the Cumberland River around the stockade fort pictured above (the original, not that replica) in 1779. Fort Nashborough was named after Francis Nash, a brigadier general killed in the Revolutionary War two years earlier. He and my grandfather were both North Carolinians and veterans of the War of the Regulators. Otherwise, the place would probably be called Weaselville, and that would have made it really hard to market as a vacation spot.
The next few decades, the story is all about clashes between the settlers and the Chickamauga band of Cherokees, so we’re hopelessly unable to talk sense about it. But, hey, Thanksgiving is the time for injun stories.
So here’s my great great great great grandmother. One day, a Cherokee band fired a single musket volley at the fort and fled, luring the men out into an ambush. Two hundred Indians got between twenty settlers and the fort. The settlers dismounted, and the Indians chased after their horses. Grandma saw an opportunity, opened the gates and set the dogs on them, buying enough time for the men to get back inside.
As someone remarked later, “thank God indians love horses and hate dogs” or no-one would have come home that day. My great great great great grandfather was born in that fort some time later. So, on the whole, hooray.
November 21, 2007 — 7:30 am
Comments: 11
Because government is evil, that’s why
In times like these, when there’s so much bustle and turmoil and upheavel in my life, I often think, “hey, what the hell happened to the Dionne quintuplets, anyhow?” Because, let’s face it, my head isn’t wired up too good.
The Dionne quints were born on May 28, 1934 on a little farm outside of Moosetesticle, Ontario. They were the first identical quintuplets known to survive infancy, and it was a close run thing. They were two months premature. Their father was a poor man with five children already and suddenly found himself with ten of the hungry little bastards in the thick of the Great Depression.
There was a world’s fair going on in Chicago at that moment — the Century of Progress Exhibition — and Dionne (reluctantly, says Wikipedia) signed a contract to exhibit the quints, as soon as they were strong enough, in a special pavilion. The Canuckian public howled with outrage and the Ontario government took custody the following year, to protect the babies from exploitation.
Then they built a special amusement park called Quintland for the girls and their caretakers, so visitors could come watch them play behind mesh screens. I shitteth thee not. Six thousand people a day filed past to watch five little girls not get exploited by their parents. Viewing was free, but the gift shop (!) and general flow of visitors to Ontario netted an estimated revenue take of $51 million over the years. Then there were the movies and newsreels and product endorsements.
Their mother never gave up fighting to get them back. And I damn well don’t blame her. If I blew five watermelons out my hoo-hoo one dark and stormy night, I would expect ALL MANNER of earthly reward. She won custody eventually, but by this time they were nine years old.
Nine. They’d never gone to school or done chores or played with other children or seen a member of the family. They’d barely left their little wire mesh freak show at all. They’d known nothing but nurses and the noisy shadows moving in the darkened space behind the wire.
Not surprisingly, it didn’t work out too good. Nothing did, ever after. I’m guessing, considering B.F. Skinner and all, they were just this side of squirrel-poop crazy.
They never adjusted to family. One by one, the quints died. All the ones who lived long enough developed epilepsy. They were desperately poor when the surviving three finally won a settlement of $4 million Canuckian, in 1998. It’s down to Cecile and Annette now.
Isn’t that a heartwarming tale of government stewardship?
November 15, 2007 — 7:46 pm
Comments: 27
Yea it is nitty, and verily it is gritty also
Okay, here’s where it all becomes a lucky happy pink fluffy buttload of playtime joy. The real estate lady looked upon my Mighty Pile and instantly decided it would be quicker if I picked out the few things worth keeping and then turned the ragpickers loose.
I’ve never liked throwing things away (which is how we got here). I’ve never been one for new beginnings and fresh starts. But it’s finally dawning on me that nobody’s waiting to compose my hagiography; that my every post-it note and snotrag is not a precious relic; that rubbing my adolescent journals on lepers will not make them clean. In fact — on the whole — I would rather the world not remember what a spoiled, whiny, self-absorbed unpleasant little proto-emo toe-rag I was at sixteen.
So here we go. I guess it says something not-flattering about me that the idea of throwing out my first computer is a whole lot harder to bear than the idea of throwing away letters from my first serious boyfriend.
After all, that computer is an XT clone with a Phoenix BIOS — the first proper cloned PC. “Phoenix” because the company rose anew from the ashes of its lawsuit with IBM. Ironically, IBM’s loss is what tilted the nascent PC market toward IBM and away from Apple, since there were cheap clones of the former and not (still not) of the latter. “Cheap” is relative, of course: I had to take out a loan for $2,500 to buy it — a very serious chunk of change in 1985 weaselbucks. Still, it ran at 9.44 MHz (as opposed to the 4.77 MHz for a genuine IBM XT), had an RGB monitor, a 20 meg hard drive AND two floppies (one of which was double density). I combed Computer Shopper for months before I picked this one out.
And the boyfriend was just some lovesick twit I grew up with.
November 14, 2007 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 19