Let the cock jokes commence
I got a bit jammed up tonight, so here’s a lady shopping at Home Depot with her rooster. As you do.
I belong to a Facebook group called “Crazy House Chicken Lady and Friends” — and, yes, it’s about people who keep pet chooks in the house. And you thought I was nuts about chikkens.
Although, you know, my favorite chicken turns seven this year. If she starts to look doddery…
March 9, 2017 — 10:45 pm
Comments: 9
That’s entertainment
Watching, amazed, the latest Wikileaks kerfuffle unfold this evening. I don’t usually follow news stories through Twitter, but sometimes it’s more fun than straight news on a fast-moving topic. May I recommend the Vault 7 hashtag?
Speaking of Twitter, my bank tweeted this picture at me. I like that picture. That’s the kind of picture they use when they want my business.
When they want to virtue-signal, they use this imagery. Lest you think I’m just a grumpy old bigot, they’ve been hammering that picture since before Christmas. It’s on multiple banners hanging from the ceiling of our local branch. It’s the main image on the sign-in page of their online banking site. We get it already.
I like businesses (and politicians) better when they’re pandering to me, not trying to teach me Very Special life lessons or give me my medicine.
Eh. Back to Twitter. And watch your mouth — the TV is listening.
March 7, 2017 — 10:24 pm
Comments: 11
Let’s end the week on a dog
Lookit that face! He’s a healthy dog, apparently. Just has a nasty congenital jaw deformity. I confess: I only love this story because of this dog’s name.
Picasso. His name is Picasso.
Abandoned by his breeder, he went onto the euthanasia list right away. Duh. Somebody dumped his (normal looking) brother off, too, and they sat on Death Row together.
Then some guy put him on Instagram and now he’s one of the most-requested adoptees in California. Feelgood story ugly mutt.
It’s going to rain all weekend here, so I’m’onna paint. I need a beret and one of those big white smocks with the bow. Good weekend, everyone!
March 3, 2017 — 9:23 pm
Comments: 15
Hang in there – it’s coming!
I had real trouble with the Winters here, at first. They aren’t all that cold — not by New England standards — but they’re just relentless and miserable and gray and (usually) wet. Mizzle, not snow. They seem to go on forever.
But the slide from Winter to Spring is incredibly measured. It has firm landmarks. If you can hang on through January, you can see the path to better times day after day.
First a few snowdrops. Then daffodils and crocuses. Then BABY LAMBS! Then all the hedges and trees turn white with blossom. Then it’s straight into the Month of Birthday and the Summer fete season and everything is concentrated awesomeness until September.
Maybe the signs were there in Rhode Island, too, and I was just too busy driving up and down I-95 to a gray cubicle.
I heard the voice of a lamb the other morning, but I think he must have been driving by in a truck. In the back, not actually driving. Ours aren’t due for another few weeks. Still — look! Crocuses!
Yeah, I know. Flowers look shit in black and white.
March 2, 2017 — 10:37 pm
Comments: 16
News you can use
Someone is killing the famous Swimming Pigs of the Bahamas. Yes, there is apparently a herd of feral but friendly pigs that like to swim with the tourists. Mostly because the tourists have delicious food, and pigs is pigs.
Only, they think maybe someone is giving them booze, because about half the herd of twenty have floated to shore dead. Honestly, they could wait for the autopsy.
Mystery pigs. Not native to the Bahamas and nobody really knows where and when they arrived. Possibly with sailors hoping to come back for them.
Donald Trump Jr. took a snapshot of his family with the pigs last Summer. I’m surprised nobody’s blamed his dad yet.
February 27, 2017 — 7:27 pm
Comments: 11
Physics. Huh.
Here’s an article about the physics of the banjo. Specifically, why it twangs.
It starts thusly: “Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of David Politzer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who in his spare time, is a Nobel prize-winning theoretical physicist.” Call me crazy, but I’m guessing theoretical physicist is his day job and this banjo thing is something he does in his spare time, but that’s about the last thing I understood.
It’s fucking physics, man. Of course I didn’t understand it.
This I got. I think. If a sound vibration is matched with a vibration that is similar and several tens of hertz higher, it sounds plinky. You can (apparently) make this happen in Audacity by making a sound and screwing with it. It doesn’t apply to things like guitars and violins because wood tops aren’t as springy as a banjo head.
But I got all tangled up in the difference between the frequency of the sound and the frequency of the vibration. And that made me feel stupid. And that made me sad.
Don’t be sad, Weasel! It’s the weekend!
February 24, 2017 — 8:41 pm
Comments: 18
Doris Day
The remnants of tropical storm Doris hit us today. The news called it Doris Day, because of course they did. Gusts to 50-something miles an hour.
I tried cycling into work in it. I’ve been out in blows that strong before, no problem – bike and me together are pretty heavy. But a gust caught me just right and knocked me over at speed.
Eh. I was wearing yellow slicker pants that I couldn’t move properly in and I couldn’t catch myself. Didn’t knock me up and over, as in the picture, it knocked me sideways into a ploughed field. I’m fine, bike’s fine. I stalked home, muddy and soaking wet, and called in. There was nothing that really needed me today.
Went back to bed, slept until quarter to one.
True story.
February 23, 2017 — 9:50 pm
Comments: 19
No, not this one
I think this would be a difficult piece of furniture to live with. “Twin moons stare down one-eyed space aliens fresh off the mothership, 1769” we’ll call it. It’s got a certain…mmm…I dunno.
For our anniversary this year, Uncle B bought a beautiful 17th C coffer to replace the Ikea entertainment center eyesore in the living room. It arrived today, and it’s spectacular. It’s the first thing you see when you walk in and it’s perfect (and, yes, it has the set-top box on it, but somehow it still manages to look dignified).
We’ve been meaning to buy one for that spot, like, forever. When this house was built (sometime between 1500 and 1610), oak coffers like this would have been the one for sure piece of furniture they would have had; probably a number of them. The chair was a newfangled contraption (at least in terms of furnishing a humble household), so these things would have served as storage, seating, working surfaces. We had no lack of ones to choose from — Britain is lousy with them, still.
Anyway, I found our friends the moon-aliens while looking for a picture of a coffer similar to ours to show you, on account of I’m too lazy to try and get the difficult shot of ours in situ. Mostly, though, I wanted to tease you guys with the sort of antiques easily available here. Tease, tease.
Oh, and thanks to Brexit jitters, the pound is nearing parity with the dollar. You can buy a whole English £ for $1.20 today.
February 22, 2017 — 10:10 pm
Comments: 8
The Oven Roaster of Turin
Went to put the Sunday roast pan in the dishwasher — and behold was revealed unto me in the grease thereof the divine image of…a roast chicken, basically. Look at it.
In one of my (many, many) Facebook chicken groups, someone posted that she’d bought two chickens from a local small breeder. A couple of months later, she bought another from the same breeder. The third chicken was the chick of one of the first two and she was astounded when mother and daughter recognized each other and were happy to see each other.
I swear, I’ll end up vegan. Or a Jain.
If only chicken weren’t so gosh darned delicious.
February 20, 2017 — 8:08 pm
Comments: 21
Art geekery
When I was a teenager, I was the spergiest art geek EVER. Art lends itself to geekery. It has so many moving parts.
One of the coolest is pigments and colors. All that ancient boogidy-boogidy alchemy survived as (among other things) paint chemistry – some of the experiments they did on the way to the philosopher’s stone resulted in paints and dyes that we still use.
In art terms, at least, a paint is made up of little particles of colored pigment, often mineral, that don’t dissolve in the medium. A dye is made of a colored stuff, often vegetable, that does dissolve in its medium. So, proper oil paints are a paint but most ink is dye. Dye is inherently fugitive (but often gorgeously colorful).
Between the two are the lake pigments, which are organic dyes that are stained onto an inert material making them kinda sorta pigments, more stable than most dyes. The best are just acceptable to use in an artist’s palette. My favorite color, Alizarin crimson, is a lake; it was the very first natural pigment (madder) to be synthesized in a lab in the 19th C. It’s usually regarded as the least permanent of the acceptably permanent pigments.
Folks, I could burble like this for hours.
Anyway, I made my own oil paints for a few years. They refer to this as “grinding” paint, but it’s a misnomer — you don’t grind the pigment particles into smaller pigment particles, you spread them out as thinly as possible to make sure each little particle is surrounded by oil. To do this, you use a sheet of glass and the thing in the picture, a muller (that’s a purty one, available here). A little pigment, a drop of oil, and you go round and round and round and round. It was the shitty job given to the newest apprentice in the studio.
Over and over again, you’ll read that modern paints are far better than this. That machine methods ‘grind’ paint better than any snot-nosed apprentice ever could. That the old masters would die for the kind of paint we have now.
I read it for years before it dawned on me what they were clearly, obviously, blatantly saying — modern paint is TOTALLY DIFFERENT from the stuff the masters used.
Okay, maybe that doesn’t sound like an all-caps moment to you, but I assure you it was one of the stonking thinks of my lifetime. I felt like flinging off my clothes and running down the road yelling “URETHRA!”
And it’s true: you have a better chance of reproducing some of the masters’ techniques with paint that is slightly less well ground. In fact, some of that beautiful, globby lace that Rembrandt painted wasn’t even ground at all, it was just pigment lightly folded with a drop of oil. Turns out, though, that it only really matters in the bright opaque colors, particularly white.
I’m not going anywhere with this. I’m just happy to be playing with my paint box again.
Good weekend, all!
February 17, 2017 — 9:07 pm
Comments: 21