Happy St Paddy’s Day, peeps!
I didn’t think I had any Irish ancestry at all, but then I spent a couple of weeks digging around in ancestry.co.uk and found a branch of the family that set sail from Ireland. So probably there go the Irish jokes.
On a happier note, my French great-grandfather wasn’t. He had a French-sounding name (in the most common spelling) but I never managed to find any of his line outside Texas. So, French jokes back in the repertoire.
I managed to get the main branches of my family back to the 18th C (when they emigrated — early adopters, us). But grandpa French-sounding-name’s line petered out in the Nineteenth. With somebody in a Texas Home for Imbeciles.
Yee-haw and pass the green beer!
ADDENDUM: Carl wins the Dead Pool with magician Paul Daniels. I had no idea who he was, but Uncle B tells me he was super famous, so it’s a fair win. I think we have enough time to queue up another one for tomorrow, yes? Meet me here at 6 for Dead Pool Round 84! (Notez bien: Weasel Blog Time is the same as GMT — it doesn’t take any notice of the clock change).
March 17, 2016 — 9:48 pm
Comments: 9
Meow.
Happy World Cat Day (not to be confused International Cat Day) (or, for that matter, National Cat Day, National Feral Cat Day, National Black Cat Day or any of the other silly made up cat holidays). Yes, you have guessed — this sad excuse for a post means I still feel like shit, though I did go into work for an hour today.
Whoever warned me to be careful of whisky and ginger wine, you were right. I was wrong. I have paid for my foolishness.
I’m hoping to post a miraculous recovery from here; there’s a seminar I really, really want to go to on Friday. But it will involve getting up at the crack of dawn and walking to the train station, just for starters.
Gin and tonic never hurt anyone, right?
February 17, 2016 — 11:11 pm
Comments: 13
Yes, thanks
Shrove Tuesday — wot today is — is known as Pancake Day here in Jollye Olde. They make pancakes, traditionally, to use up flour and eggs before Lent.
Which makes no damn sense, if you ask me. Flour keeps forever (if it’s dry) and eggs is laid by chickens, who will presumably continue to do so despite anyone’s position in the liturgical calendar.
Anyway, you don’t see them eating pancakes here so much as running races where everyone dashes down the high street flipping one in a pan. And they aren’t pancakes, they’re crêpes.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with a nice crêpe, except if a certain hypothetical weasel went into a Little Chef and ordered pancakes expecting to get the IHOP Big Breakfast. That was a sad, sad hypothetical weasel.
The English also traditionally had enormous football matches on Pancake Day, ruleless affairs in which the flower of each little town’s manhood turn up to kick the shit out of each other while a football looks on helplessly. A few towns maintain the tradition.
If you’re interested, Brit papers are full of pancake articles today, most of them illustrated by photos of American-style flapjacks oozing maple syrup. Which made Uncle B cross. Teehee.
NB: Zsa Zsa is spending her 99th birthday in the hospital. Is another longstanding Dead Pool favorite about to fall? Don’t count on it; that is one tough old broad.
February 9, 2016 — 9:07 pm
Comments: 16
Oh, dear
Oh, dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. In what’s being called “the design fail of the year,” San Fran designer Lehu Zhang apparently really and truly didn’t mean this minimalist monkey to look like a Communist propaganda poster for gay sex.
Eh. Well. Gong Hey Fat Choy, y’all. Happy Year of the Fire Monkey. Here’s a better article about Chinese New Year, what am today.
February 8, 2016 — 9:11 pm
Comments: 19
HNY, y’all
Not my favorite holiday, New Year. Passage of time, reminders thereof…I don’t like it. And this year, the host we usually Auld Lang Syne wit’ has come down with a nasty cold and begged off. So it’s drinking in front of the television again!
Not a complaint. Roaring fire, pair of pussycats, some silly film or other. There are worse ways to pass an evening. And 2015 was a pretty okay year for us personally. Out in the big wide, that’s another thing, but inside Mustelid Towers: no complaints. More of the same, please.
December 31, 2015 — 9:53 pm
Comments: 13
Good weekend (and beyond!)
Okay, youse guys, I obviously checked out a couple of miles back. I got a stitch in my give-a-shit somewhere around Wednesday. I’ll be around all week and looking in, but the political class can go to hell without me for a couple of weeks.
Let the festivities begin!
December 18, 2015 — 11:22 pm
Comments: 17
Twinkling lights are on, but nobody’s home
Sorry, youse guys — I’m clearly already in Holiday Slacker Mode already. Tonight was the Sorting of the Christmas cards, one of my least favorite jobs.
On a happier note, though, I finally did custom cards this year. I thought it was too late, but I got a half price offer in email, and damme if they didn’t turn the whole thing around in two days.
Now we get to see if my boss appreciates my sense of humor.
December 16, 2015 — 11:11 pm
Comments: 8
Dovahkiin, Dovahkiin, naal ok zin los vahriin…
We’re doing the tree tonight. I got to pick the music from YouTube.
You guys, Uncle B doesn’t think the Skyrim theme is all that Christmassy!!11!!
December 14, 2015 — 11:34 pm
Comments: 11
Happy World Toilet Day
Happy World Toilet Day! Yeah, it’s another stupid made-up UN holiday. I think we’re supposed to spend the day feeling bad that brown people shit in holes. And then send money. But, hey, am I supposed to ignore something called World Toilet Day? Heh. Nah.
Hey, does anybody know if I’ve screwed up? We have Office 2007 at work (speaking of shit). I’m working on a long publication in Publisher *spit* and I wanted to bring it home for the weekend, so I’ve just installed Publisher using our serial number on my home machine.
Is that kosher? If not, am I likely to go in tomorrow and find our whole Office is buggered? I want to do everything clean and legal, but Microsoft is so damned opaque.
It’s an academic license — perfectly appropriate for us — and I tried and failed to find out if I’m allowed to use it on more than one seat. Their help files are useless about licensing issues.
Turns out, no other desktop publishing software will open Publisher files. Publisher itself — even an academic license of an old version via eBay — is more money than I felt like spending. InDesign (still the leader, it seems) has gone to that hateful monthly fee model, like all Adobe products. QuarkXpress is £800. I didn’t like the open source alternatives.
Really, the desktop publishing world seems to have contracted and ossified since I stopped doing it professionally, like, a decade ago. What gives?
November 19, 2015 — 8:26 pm
Comments: 14
Ew.
Man, I do this every year — carve pumpkin and then forget about it. These two bad boys were pretty ripe before Onkle B pointed them out to me.
Pity. Dude on the left was one of my better efforts. Carving pumpkins is one of the many things I think I ought to be good at, and I amn’t.
I wish I’d gotten a picture with the candle lit. As it is, it was all I could do to roll him into a trash bag without getting any on me.
Ooooo…spooky!
November 11, 2015 — 10:11 pm
Comments: 11