Mmmm…spiritual
That, my friends, is a batter-dipped and deep-fried Cadbury creme egg. Available from a fish and chip shop (know colloquially as a “chippy”) in Deal, next door in Kent. As the news site put it “Walmer Fish & Chips, in The Strand, near Deal, have begun battering Creme Eggs for the very first time to celebrate the rebirth of Jesus.”
A deeply spiritual people.
And don’t miss the sister article: the day the Cadbury Creme Egg Bus visited Kent.
Oh, and I’m sure you’ve heard — Don Rickles is dead. And, in a final insult to you all, nobody had him in the Dead Pool.
April 6, 2017 — 8:20 pm
Comments: 21
Tinklegate
A long-time activist against Trump’s golf course in Scotland (courses, actually. He apparently has several), walked across the green, dropped trou and took a whiz. She says she got caught short and hid discreetly in the dunes, but was filmed doing it by three men including the groundskeeper. The latter, having every right to think some kind of crime was happening before him, called the cops. Money quote:
She added she was “shocked” to be told by police she had been filmed, leaving her “slightly paranoid” about urinating outside.
Dear Scottish woman: I would like you to be very paranoid about peeing outside. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t pee outside at all. Thanks.
She sued him because the course was not registered with the Information Officer. Yes, that’s a thing. You have to do it if your business takes pictures of the public. I had to register our little historical society because we have CCTV.
Trump could have found the £3,000 she sought in the folds of his cardigan — I’m sure he does laps in his money pool like Scrooge McDuck — but then the next publicity-hungry activist would probably have taken a poo in the clubhouse. Oh, and she lost.
I’m not sure why the opposition is not getting it. If they keep REEEEing at every little thing Trump does, but the time he makes a serious error (and, let’s face it, the chances of that are non-zero), nobody will be listening. Age of wonders, folks.
April 5, 2017 — 8:58 pm
Comments: 5
Let me just make a note of that
I promise you, I do not read, follow or subscribe to The Daily Undertaker. It’s just, I cannot find a more respectable website for this story: artist Nadine Jarvis, who makes stuff out of dead people. Bird houses, stuff like that.
Not unusual. Lots of people are making stuff with cremains. Vinyl records, cubic zirconia. We live in an age of wonders.
But Nadine’s special trick is, she makes pencils out of dead people. The graphite part in the middle, anyway. Each inscribed with your name and dates in gold, with an attractive wooden box.
My favorite thing, while I was banging around looking for a good website for this — several bloggers remarked on how many pencils you get. Something like 250. And how that made it easier to use them and not be precious about them. I’d imagine that would go something like this:
Person: “Oh my god! You had your mother’s remains made into pencils???”
Other person: “But there are so many of them!”
I don’t know if it’s a real production thing she’s actually doing, or just an arty one-off. She’s clearly lost control of nadinejarvis.com, which goes to a general directory of funeral goods. Plenty of people buzzing about it, though, so…art accomplished, I guess.
April 4, 2017 — 9:11 pm
Comments: 15
I can’t quite talk him into it
That’s the Stoer Head Lighthouse in Scotland, and it’s for sale. They’re asking £367,000 (about $450K), which sounds a lot, but isn’t really for here. Well, it is for Scotland, but not for a 19th Century lighthouse built by Robert Louis Stevenson’s dad (who was bitterly disappointed his boy didn’t go into engineering).
It’s on the mainland, so no tiresome ferries, but it’s a fairly long hop to a pack of cigarettes. Two complete apartments and a bothy (sort of a liveable shed). The article says it gets 10,000 visitors a year (almost certainly birdwatchers). I reckon you could spin a tidy little business out of it.
Whatever. Sometimes, stuff comes on the market here that makes me write whole novels in my head.
April 3, 2017 — 8:32 pm
Comments: 16
Blacker than a very black thing indeed
You’ve probably seen this stuff in the news: Vantablack. It’s called “the blackest black.” It’s a coating developed by a company called Surrey Nanosystems made out of teeny nanotubes (I mean, I realize there are no big nanotubes, but bear with me). The thing about these little pigment fragment things is that they’re something like five times longer than they are wide and this, somehow, makes a nest that traps upwards of 98% of the light that falls on them. It gets closer to 100% with every generation.
In practical terms, it means things painted with Vantablack throw back so little light that we simply cannot perceive them as three dimensional. In the still above (taken from this video) a spherical lollipop shape is dragged across a flat shape, both coated in Vantablack, and your eyeballs just cannot deal. Follow the link and look at some of the other videos. It’s very cool.
This has obvious military applications, which is what funded the development, I feel sure. But it has obvious artistic applications, too. And here follows a fun bit of drama.
There’s a London-based artist named Anish Kapoor who works with architects to make those big dreary public sculptures that are, like, simple shapes supposed to be chock full of meaning or some shit. The mirror finish ones are okay; at least they reflect things around them in an interesting way. Anyway, he stepped in and bought the license to Vantablack for art. In other words, only artist Anish Kapoor may use Vantablack.
I can’t imagine many artists would have a use for this stuff, outside the kind of people who paint bullfighters and Elvises on velvet, but that’s just the sort of dick move that pisses off ‘the art community’ to no end.
So there’s this other London artist named Stuart Semple (his art sucks too, by the way) who worked with paint chemists to develop what he calls “the pinkest pink.” Anybody can buy it, except Anish Kapoor. You have to tick a little box that says I am not Anish Kapoor before you can check out.
As security goes, that’s not the strongest, and it wasn’t long before Anish Kapoor posted a picture of his middle finger coated in the pinkest pink.
So yesterday, Semple fired back. He went to his pet paint chemists and they developed what he calls Black 2.0 — not quite as black as Vantablack, but much cheaper, needs no special handling and, most important, available to people who are not Anish Kapoor.
I’m trying to talk myself into buying some (he’s selling it for what it costs to make, in a mad frenzy of virtue signaling). But I can’t imagine I have a use for it. I hated Elvis.
Good weekend, everyone!
March 31, 2017 — 7:58 pm
Comments: 30
Now I’m the Vampire Meow
Little bastard bit me this morning. Jack the Cat, not Uncle B. I was putting him out for attacking the other cat and he decided he really, really didn’t want to go out.
Broke the skin and everything. Yes, yes…I know. Cat mouths are chock full of bacteria. My hand is swollen and sore, but it’s not yet hot and red. I’m keeping an eye on it.
But we have confirmed the problem: there is a strange cat in his territory. A much bigger cat, naturally, as Jack is a little squirt. Uncle B apparently stalked the garden making like a gorilla at Stupid O’Clock last night to scare off the trespasser (and called the next door neighbor to explain today, just in case she caught the performance live).
My hand hurts and I’m sulky. I’m’a go drink now.
March 30, 2017 — 9:16 pm
Comments: 13
Local boy makes bad
Huh. I said I had no local knowledge of the Westminster knife attacker. I was wrong. He was a local boy, and the local papers are full of it.
He was born in Kent (the county next door to the East) and spent time in prison in both East Sussex and West Sussex. A lot of time in prison. He was a very bad dude.
I had coffee with a neighbor this morning who lived in the same little town as he did for some years. She was livid that the BBC (I think it was) ran an article with a headline something like, “One of only two black men in this picturesque village, Masood never felt accepted.” Implying (but not quite daring to say) evil English racists drove him to violence.
He was a violent thug with a long arrest record and a history of knife crime and intimidation. The kind of guy, you scooped up your kids and went inside when you saw him walking down the street. Of course he was never accepted! She was seriously buttmad to be called a racist.
“The other black man in the village,” she said, “he was lovely.”
It was good to see her get a taste of the MSM, anyhow. She’s the most liberally liberal in the village.
Meanwhile, token Muslim peer ‘Baroness’ Warsi said of Masood “he was a violent Christian before he was a violent Muslim.” Which is true. He converted in prison and picked that Muslimy name. But then you have to ask, what attracts violent men to Islam, and why does it make them more violent?
Finally, our Home Secretary and local dimbulb MP, Amber Rudd, made some off-the-cuff remark on the day after the attack to the effect that Londoners going about their business proved that the terrorists will never win. Standard post-attack fare, right? Only, I have just now worked out what our leaders mean when they say that. They mean, “we don’t have to do anything, we don’t have to change anything, we don’t have to react in any way to what just happened; we’ll go on just exactly as before and that will show those old terrorists we’re not scared.”
But we are scared, fam. If you have a brain in your head, you’re scared. And they goddamn good and well better do something about it.
March 29, 2017 — 9:40 pm
Comments: 16
Rage Face II: the Hissening
I went to pick up Jack to feed him this morning, and he came unstrung. Hissing, yowling, giving me the rage eye. Terrifying.
He’s usually a happy, good-natured little chap (I’ve seen his rage face once before, but he had a pretty good excuse). So we booked him into the vet.
Slight fever and what look like vampire bites on his neck, though the vet thought they could be deep claw marks. If it’s Charlotte, it has to be claws – she’s had all her teeth pulled. Anyway, the wounds are slightly infected. They gave him a broad-spectrum antibiotic and an anti-inflammatory (which I’ll have to repeat for a week. Giving medicine to cats – so much fun!). The vet thinks it was pain causing him to go nuts.
But the vet also thinks he might be dealing with an emasculating territorial issue. Like an other cat issue. We haven’t seen a strange cat in the yard for a long time, but the weather’s been nice and cats are likely travelling farther. No fighting noises, but he has been showing anxieties about going out the front door.
He’s a little squirt, so territory fights would be pretty scary for him. That kind of othercat frustration could explain why he’s been attacking Charlotte a lot — but she’s an old lady who just wants to sleep on the sofa. If she cut him up, I’m on Team Charlotte (except for the vet bill).
And there he lies, curled up on his favorite chair, like butter wouldn’t melt in his hissy mouth.
March 28, 2017 — 7:50 pm
Comments: 11
New for 2017!
Though we’ve seen a few lambs in the villages around, this morning was the first I’d seen in ours. Two little ones on the way in and a bunch more on the way home. It was glorious today. It’s coming, at last!
This is a picture I took years ago, though. Because something else arrived over the weekend: British Summer Time. Our clocks went forward (we’re always later than you) and I hate it and I’m behind on everything.
It’ll be weeks before I stop bitching about the clocks and describing daily events as taking place in either “real time” or “clock time.”
March 27, 2017 — 8:16 pm
Comments: 18
#HWNDU – a play in four acts
Oh dear lord I enjoyed that! Did you enjoy that? I’m quite sure you groovy dudes have been following this thing as closely as I have, but I could do with a recap, as I find the timeline confusing. Herewith:
He Will Not Divide Us was a performance art project dreamed up by child actor Shia Labeouf and professional dim bulb Jaden Smith (who disappeared from the drama quickly). It was launched on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017 and intended to run the full four (sic) years of Trump’s presidency. It was a camera mounted outside the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York, into which the general public was invited to stand and chant “he will not divide us” in a not at all creepy and stupid way. This was streamed to the internet live.
General public. Streamed to the internet live, 24/7. What could possibly go wrong?
ACT ONE: New York. And while some people stood in front of the camera performed as expected, the stream almost immediately went to shit. Messages featured a rich assortment of goombahs, hoodrats, generic white males, garden variety trolls and — critically, it would turn out — merry pranksters from 4chan’s /pol/. The stream had an audience and some people got internet famous.
Shia lost his nut, and by Day 6 had been arrested for assaulting a participant (ironically, someone on his side). Day 8, the NYPD erected a wall (I ’bout died of irony poisoning) — one of those crowd barrier things — and Museum staff let people trickle through and say their lines. By February 10, the Museum had had enough and shut it down. Total elapsed time: 21 days.
ACT TWO: New Mexico. Eight days later, it pops up in New Mexico at the El Rey Theater in Albuquerque, along a busy urban street. This time, the performance instantly went to shit. It was taken down again February 23rd after shots were fired in the area. Total elapsed time: 6 days.
ACT THREE: Tennessee. On March 8th, the project was ‘back’ at an ‘undisclosed location.’ This time it had morphed into something entirely different: a livestream of a flag that read HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US. The camera pointed up to the flag in an empty sky.
In less than 48 hours, /pol/ had traced it to a farm in Tennessee. Legend has it, they analyzed times of day, weather patterns, star maps and flight paths, then drove around the general area honking car horns and listening for them on the stream. In truth, they really did those things, but they had a huge leg-up when a fan spotted Labeouf in a diner in Greenville, TN and posted a selfie with him. On March 9, the flag was spotted IRL. Our heroes stole the flag and replaced it with a Pepe shirt and a MAGA hat. Total elapsed time: 2 days.
It gets muddled after that. There were reports of drones flying in the area and somebody accidentally setting fire to a field with a roman candle. There’s a blurry picture said to be a drone shot of Shia guarding the empty flagpole at night armed with a baseball bat. Local police eventually got tired of his calls (!) and shut it down, though what ‘it’ was by that time, who could say?
ACT FOUR: Liverpool. Liverpool? “Events have shown that America is simply not safe enough for this artwork to exist” said Labeouf. Pff! He thinks we don’t have autists in England? The flag was located on the rooftop of FACT UK (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), a five-story building in downtown Liverpool. I have to wonder if anyone warned FACT what was headed their way. Everyone watched the stream and held their breath.
In just over a day — this afternoon — the explorers reached the flag via the building next door. They found it heavily zip-tied to the pole, took some pictures with it and made their escape, but it was only a matter of time.
On police advice, FACT and LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner have removed the installation HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US due to dangerous, illegal trespassing.
Mar. 23, 2017
Total elapsed time: 1 day and a bit.
Is it over? Probably. I hope not. I can’t see anyone willing to host it in a public space. I wonder if Elon Musk would take it up in his rocket ship? And if we would survive what /pol/ did next?
March 23, 2017 — 8:08 pm
Comments: 26