Mmmm-mmm! That sure is a fine-looking big black bag
A Bahraini man has filed a complaint against a Saudi who assaulted him and used abusive language at Seef Mall. The accused started beating the Bahraini after he claimed the man had stared at his wife who for the record was completely covered. The accused apologised during interrogation claiming that
he had got jealous after he thought he saw the man stare at his wife.
The Bahraini dropped the case against him.
July 19, 2007 — 1:33 pm
Comments: 34
The Gathering o’ the Mustelids
So, why does Clan Weasel gather here every year? This is why: the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games, the largest Scottish games outside Scotland. It started in 1956, about the same time my father and grandfather built the original hunting cabin on the side of the mountain. My dad hasn’t missed the games since.
He hasn’t been to the actual games in years (and neither have I, for that matter). But he wears the tartan hat with the ribbons and deedly-ball on, and stumps around rolling his R’s and saying “wha hae!” and drinking whiskey.
The joke is, as far as anyone knows, there’s not a drop of Scots blood in my dad. He descends from a line of pasty English people who were deported to Virginia in the 18th Century for either religious nutcasery or poaching, depending on who you ask.
My mother’s family traces its origins to a Scot, however. Clan MacStoat will be there. I think our clan motto is “another wee dram won’t kill me.”
When I were a puppy, some damn fool bought me the whole suit, with the jacket and the knee socks and everything. I loved that thing. I swaggered around in it long after I’d outgrown it. By the end, I bobbled out of the seams like some obscene tartan sausage.
There will be ALL KINDS of merchandise on offer up the mountain. If you’re bored some day, pick a Scots surname and Google for the original version of the family coat of arms, and compare it to the Americanized version. The American version always has twice as much shit on it, with extra tinsel and sparklies and unicorns and orcs. Like it came out of the Society for Creative Anachronism’s prom decoration committee.
And that’s what we’re not doing Tuesday.
July 10, 2007 — 1:18 am
Comments: 49
Islamic Rage Boy: the interview
Look what JW found: an interview with Shakeel Bhat, the Islamic Rage Boy. Who is, in fact, 31 and a “full-time demonstrator” (how do you say “lives in moms’ basement” in…whatever dialect they speak in Kashmir?)
Apart from drawing ridicule from bloggers, Bhat has even inspired one American neoconservative website to push “Rage Boy” merchandise — including T-shirts, beer mugs, mouse pads.
“I don’t believe this! I have no knowledge about all this. Why do they do it?” demanded Bhat, who says he has no idea how to use a computer and the Internet. [You don’t say? – ed]
Bhat also shrugged off his rather unflattering “Rage Boy” nickname.
“I don’t need any titles. I am a simple Muslim. Yes, I get enraged if someone, somewhere makes derogatory remarks about our religion or Prophet,” he said.
“Titles”? I wonder if he thinks he’s being honored in some way. It would really mean a lot to me if I knew he knew we were laughing at him.
Update: Oooo! And look at the cool picture Dawn found. Which I might possibly have tweaked just a little teeny bit. How does one get a nostril injury, anyhow?
July 5, 2007 — 3:27 pm
Comments: 54
gdbye crl wrld
A recent change in inheritance legislation will allow people who are dying due to an accident or other emergency to compose their will on a mobile phone, send it by e-mail or leave a voice message, reported MetroXpress newspaper.
Current regulations require that an emergency will must be written by hand or told to two witnesses in order for it to be valid. Relaxing the requirements is intended as a way to make it easier for the dying to ensure that their estate goes to the proper heir.
beeeeeep Hello. I’m not home at the moment, but sweet Jesus
I’m going to die!!!!
June 25, 2007 — 5:20 am
Comments: 18
Bringing brown to the masses
The HP Foods that brings you Omelette ‘n’ Chips is most famous in the UK for HP Sauce, the empire’s leading brand of brown sauce. You’re at least as likely to find a bottle of HP Sauce as a bottle of ketchup on your table in the local cafe. I’m not sure what people put it on. I’ve never seen anyone eat it.
It tastes…brown.
Oh, so very brown. Like steak sauce, but without the kick. It’s made out of vinegar and dates and…brown.
Meat sauces and chutneys were popular in England in the 19th Century. Making them was time-consuming and required exotic ingredients, so they were out of the reach of most households.
In the 1890s, grocer Frederick Gibson Garton hawked his own sauces from a hand cart. He registered the name HP in 1896, after he heard a rumor his sauce was served in the dining room of the Houses of Parliament. He sold the name and the recipe to vinegar mogul Edwin Samson Moore, who brought brown to the people in 1903. The launch was delayed in deference to the death of Queen Victoria.
You couldn’t get more British than that if you tattoo’d the Union Jack on your arse while whistling Rule Britannia.
Sadly, HP Sauce has fallen in with Johnny Foreigner in latter days. First the French (Danone) and then the Americans (Heinz). Under Heinz’s’z ownership, production was moved to the Netherlands. Enraged Brits (ha ha! Just kidding. Somewhat shirty Brits) tried to organize a boycott in response, but, thanks to their supine neighbors, HP still accounts for more than 70% of the brown market.
Brown trivia
· At one time, a motorway cut through the middle of the Aston factory, necessitating a vinegar pipeline over the highway
· HP Sauce was known as “Wilson’s Gravy” during the tenure of Labour PM Harold Wilson, after his wife told the Times “If Harold has a fault, it is that he will drown everything with HP Sauce”
· Wilson later admitted it was Worcestershire sauce he slathered on everything
· Which makes much more sense
· Who came up with the slogan “what can brown do for you?”? Seriously, is UPS retarded?
· Between HP Sauce, Daddies Favorite and Heinz 57, the Heinz Corporation has a perilous stranglehold on the British brown trade
· Heinz also makes the most popular and ubiquitous British baked beans
· On their web site, they infuriatingly spell it “baked beanz”
· Ohmigod! I just phoned Britain and got a bean check. They spell it “baked beanz” on the cans, too! How the hell could I have missed that all these years?!
· By never drawing a sober breath in Britain, that’s how
June 6, 2007 — 4:56 am
Comments: 12
Omelette ‘n’ Chips
A client came into my cube today and was frightened by this object. Take a close look. Do you know what this is? It’s scrambled eggs, french fries and baked beans.
In a can.
He paled. “What sort of people would eat something like that?”
“English people.” I said, “over toast.”
This thing reaffirms by belief that foods with ‘n’ in them are not fit for human consumption. Also my belief that god is, at best, indifferent to human suffering.
It sits on top of my filing cabinet. I tucked it away out of the sight of visitors once, but Mike from the other side of Cubicle Row said, “you can’t do that! It’s kind of our…department mascot.”
So there you have it. A living reminder that not everything invented by WASPs has been a boon to mankind.
June 5, 2007 — 4:41 pm
Comments: 15
Eighteen hundred and froze to death
I’ve heard that expression all my life without realizing it was a real year. 1816. Also known as “the Year Without a Summer” and “the Poverty Year.”
“February, according to old records, was rather warm and spring-like, but cold and storms held away in March. Vegetation had gotten well underway in April when the real cold weather set in. Snow and sleet fell on 17 different days in May.
In June there was either frost or snow every day but three. July was cold and frosty. In August there was an ice storm, the formation being nearly an inch thick, killing every green thing in the United States. In the spring of 1817, corn kept over from 1815, sold from $5 to $10 a bushel for seed only.”
That was in New England. It wasn’t relentlessly cold; there were terrible temperature shifts, from normal or above to far below. From nearly 100 degrees to nearly freezing in hours.
In hindsight, climatologists think it was down to three things. Volcanic activity, especially one particular eruption in Indonesia in 1815. The “Dalton Minimum” — a time of low sunspot activity that lasted from 1795 to 1823. And the peculiar dance the sun does around the center of the solar system, thanks mostly to the gravitational pull of Jupiter and Saturn.
It hit worst in the US Northeast, Northern Europe and China. There was widespread famine. Europe, still smarting from the Napoleonic wars, had food riots. Americans hitched their wagons and moved West.
It snowed brown in Hungary. It snowed red in Italy. It rained so much, Mary Shelley couldn’t go out to play, so she stayed in and wrote Frankenstein. Joseph Smith had crop failures, moved to New York and turned religious, leading inevitably to the Book of Mormon. There were vivid sunsets, leading inevitably to Turner.
Oh, it was a terrible thing.
June 1, 2007 — 4:57 am
Comments: 33
Day of Suck
Right. Here we go. This is an absolute asshole of a journey, on so many levels.
I am not a happy bunny. I am, in fact, a pretty hungover and sad bunny. My plane doesn’t leave until 6, so we can have a leisurely morning of it, but that makes everything all the later out the other end.
Heathrow is a multiculti snake pit. The gate is miles from the check in. The moving walkways are a sort of Möbius strip; you walk and walk without getting where you’re going. And somehow keep bumping into that bastard MC Escher coming back the other way.
The brisk tail wind that wafts me gently into England is a head wind going back, adding an hour at least to the flight. By the time I arrive and make it through customs, I will just miss one bus and wait an hour for the next. Then it’s a short cab ride home. Have you ever grabbed a cab for a short hop? They don’t thank you for it.
By then, it’s midnight local time. Five a.m. in my head. Shuffle through two weeks worth of voice messages and bills and into bed. I have to go to work bright and early tomorrow. No, really.
And that’s if everything goes as well as it can.
I suppose I’ve ruined my intercession prospects with Saints Buttelf and Rumpswab. If you have anything interesting you pray to, a weasel would be grateful for the thought.
May 29, 2007 — 6:57 am
Comments: 10
Steam-powered Britannia
Once and sometimes twice a year, on Hope Farm in Sellindge, Kent, Britain comes out to play. The old Britain. The steam powered one.
There are vintage cars and motorcycles and tractors and musical automatons and, older still, shire horses pulling the plough. There are people selling old screwdrivers and thumbplanes and tires (or tyres, if you prefer) and cakes and teacups and books. There was a Magic Accordeola playing Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”
And there are steam engines. Steam tractors, steam motorcycles, steam rollers.
We ate a good Dutch cheeseburger and listened to a bad garage band. Mostly, though, we looked at, listened to, smelled the bitumenous exhalations of and otherwise enjoyed keeping company with steam engines.
It was a happy end to a happy two weeks. And then the rains came. And the weather, which had been sunny and fine the whole time, turned mizzly and cold and entirely appropriate to my mood. London tonight in the drizzle, Boston tomorrow night in the…whatever.
Oh, well. That’s tomorrow.
May 28, 2007 — 6:44 pm
Comments: 6
Special bonus weekend report: Mr Brain’s Faggots
Because if you can’t trust a weasel to keep a promise, what is this world coming to?
When I first saw Mr Brain’s fine product, I’m sure it was labeled “Mr Brain’s Frozen Faggots.” I can’t work out if “pork faggots” is more or less funny than “frozen faggots.” Anyhow, of all the absurd things in the British supermarket that make an American fall to the floor and bark like a hound, Mr Brain’s offering takes the prize.
I’ve always meant to try them. I almost left it too late; we had to visit several supermarkets before finding one down-market enough for MBPF’s.
I was pretty sure I was going to be okay with the pork balls, but the “rich west country sauce” worried me a good deal. Looks like some unholy mash-up of moose testicles and Shoney’s strawberry pie filling. Frozen, it was a symphony of shit brown and ice crystals.
Cook from frozen, 30 to 40 minutes at 230 Eurodegrees.
On the whole…not bad. Tasted very strongly of sage and onion, like country sausage but less firm. Subsequent research has turned up worrying information about the traditional composition of faggots, but it looks like the Brain variety involves nothing more terrifying than pig liver. Ugh. Liver.
I ate all four. I’d do it again on a bet, but I won’t crave them in the middle of the night. Just as well, really.
I leave you with this classic BBC news item about the Doody family and their famous love of the British faggot.
If I die in the night, tell the weasels I love them.
May 26, 2007 — 7:13 pm
Comments: 10