I’m fine! I’m fine!
I did a post last night, but didn’t hit PUBLISH on it before I went to bed, I guess. Looks like. Then I had monitor troubles today and got so wadded up about that, I didn’t notice.
My main monitor keeps fading to white. Last time that happened — couple of years ago — I bought a new card. Now the new card is doing it. Is my motherboard a card killer?
Anyway.
Sorry.
Have to go out, but I’ll put up last night’s post when I get back.
It wasn’t very good, but I did have a question.
June 27, 2018 — 1:38 pm
Comments: 6
Dead Monkey
If you hoped to pick Koko the Signing Gorilla in the Dead Pool tomorrow, you’re out of luck. She daid. Also, she was a monkey.
Oh, don’t give me that ‘gorillas aren’t monkeys’ crap. Who are you, Gregor Mendel?
I’ll be honest, fam — I’m pretty seriously monkey phobic. (Long story. Has to do with a childhood friend of my mother’s who had a circus act).
So I’m prejudiced, I admit. But I don’t buy for a minute that she had an IQ of 85 and a vocabulary of…however many words she’s supposed to have had a vocabulary of. Without her ‘interpreters’, I’m not convinced she could consistently sign “ook ook banana.”
Also, of all the dozens of pictures of Koko with kittens, have you ever noticed how unhappy the cats look? And how it’s always baby kittens? What happened to them…? Just sayin’.
Well, whatever. Back here tomorrow, 6 WBT. Dead Pool 110!
June 21, 2018 — 9:31 pm
Comments: 18
Let the bee puns commence!
I’m on three blood pressure meds and I haven’t had a meds check in years; got a note in my last packet of drugs telling me I have to go in or they’re cutting me off.
So. Doctor’s appointment today. Just putting on my shoes to leave the house and…I step on a bumblebee. This answers two burning questions: 1. Yes. Bumblebees sting. 2. No, they don’t shed their whole backend and die like honey bees.
At least, this guy looked okay afterwards. I scooped him up in a jar and took him outside, which I thought was damn decent of me, all things considered.
I didn’t get too much of a dose, I guess. I didn’t smush him, and — unexpectedly, I must say — my bp was a very calm and collected 120/70.
June 19, 2018 — 7:58 pm
Comments: 15
My face when…
…I realize I’m following a Twitter account called @whoresofyore. And using my own @realname account, too. Why?
Sorry. Still chasing deadlines this week. I swore I wouldn’t fall back into ‘chasing deadlines’ mode after I left my corporate gig, but once people find out you own a copy of Photoshop and you know how to drive it, your fate is sealed.
Oh, yeah…I assumed ‘carll’ is ‘carl’, and I further assume he has won another Dead Pool. Oh, carl, carll, carlllll. You’re going to make me dream up a ‘carl’s rule’, aren’t you?
Now would be a really excellent time for Rich Rostrom to chime in with one of his meticulous spreadsheets of historic Dick Winners.
June 18, 2018 — 10:23 pm
Comments: 14
Beer tragedies
A view looking across Tottenham Court Road towards the Horse Shoe Brewery, premises of Meux’s Brewery Company Limited. 20 Feb 1906.
The Horse Shoe Brewery was the source of the 1814 London Beer Flood when a huge vat within the brewery failed, resulting in over 323,000 imperial gallons of porter spilling into the surrounding streets. Nine people died as a result of the flood. Eight of these deaths were caused by drowning or the effects of falling debris from damaged buildings. One person died the following day from alcohol poisoning.
It is National Beer Day in Britain!
I bought one of those mini kegs of a nice beer to celebrate and somehow buggered up the opening. I can’t get any beer out of it. I twist the thing, it makes a gentle farty noise and a little dribble of bubbles sizzles out the top.
I will persevere.
You, on the other hand, can probably stand down. National Beer Day in the US is April 7 (anniversary of the signing of the Cullen–Harrison Act, which legalized the sale of weak beer. First crack in Prohibition). The day before is known as New Beer’s Eve.
Have a good weekend!
June 15, 2018 — 7:39 pm
Comments: 17
Lego of the Gods
Tweet from the British Museum says: “This 2,300-year-old #MysteryObject has a modern equivalent – what do you think it might have been used for?”
Eh. No idea. No associated article and no idea of scale, so I really could not say, BM.
…chasing a deadline tonight…
June 14, 2018 — 9:31 pm
Comments: 24
Huh.
So, I was talking to an arty friend today about printmaking, and how I was taking an interest again. And she’s all, like, “Oh! You must go to the current show at Rye Art Gallery. It’s by a printmaker named Norman Ackroyd.”
No lie. Look at the image they’re advertising it with.
Weird coincidence? Maybe I saw the ad somewhere and didn’t consciously remember…?
I dunno.
And I missed it!
June 13, 2018 — 10:32 pm
Comments: 4
Oh, I like this
Norman Ackroyd. I like his stuff.
He’s a printmaker who works mainly in mezzotint — a kind of etching where you essentially ‘rough up’ the plate to hold ink in shades of gray. I found him on YouTube when I was looking for techniques of inking plates. With intaglio, that’s the hard part — inking up the plate.
Surface prints, like wood or linoleum cuts, you run an inky roller over the surface for the black and the stuff you’ve cut away are the whites. Easy peasy. Kind of.
Intaglio, where lines are etched or engraved into a plate, you have to force the ink down into those lines for the darks, then wipe it off the surface for the lights. This is tricky as hell. Wipe too much, and you pull the link out of the lines. Don’t wipe enough and the print looks dirty.
You ink up, then you wipe and wipe and wipe, usually with wipery things that aren’t very absorbent. Inky rags, starched muslin, newsprint. It’s what gives intaglio that soft, dream-like quality sometimes. (Ackryod’s technique is the fastest I’ve ever seen, btw).
Properly done, every print is exactly like every other in the run. When the plate starts to deteriorate (because of all the wiping and pressing) and the last print doesn’t look like the first, you halt the series, ruin the plate (by gouging a line through it, for example) and pull a print with the ruined plate. It’s so hard to do a whole run to a proper standard, even seasoned printmakers usually hire a professional pressman.
That’s the tradition, and traditional traditionalists are super strict about it. I’m beginning to question how traditionalist I am.
June 12, 2018 — 10:18 pm
Comments: 11
Well, I’ll be damned
Jerry Maren, last of the Munchkins, has died aged 98. I didn’t think little people lived that long!
He was the middle of the Lollipop Guild trio. The one who handed the lollipop to Dorothy. He had kind of an interesting life, if you follow the link to the not-very-well-written Wikipedia article.
According to the article, “A small number of anonymous female extras are also reported to survive; as they were technically dwarves and not midgets, they are not counted as Munchkins.” Which I think is pretty darned ableist.
He died May 24. When someone pointed out (thank you, bogie) that he was a pick in the Dead Pool, I was sure there was last minute hanky panky. Who would’a thunk, after all?
But no, spunkus picked him fair and square on April 22. Step forward, spunkus, and claim your dick!
You know what that means: Tomorrow. 6WBT. Dead Pool Round 109. Getcher stiff, getcher stiff right here!
p.s. if you’re at all into YouTube, I recommend you give Cecil of D.I.C.K. and Comics a listen. It started as a piss-take of Diversity & Comics, but he’s funny in his own right. His last review was of the Wizard of Oz, which he described as “three bitches fighting over a hot pair of shoes.”
June 7, 2018 — 9:32 pm
Comments: 9
Here come the weather!
Thunderboomers off the coast of France. Heading: weaselwards.
It’s okay; I didn’t have anything to report today. I’m’a go take a bath and wait for it to blow over.
June 6, 2018 — 9:26 pm
Comments: 5