bit o’ fun
This is fun: auto mechanics recreate famous paintings. The last one is my favorite; it’s based on one of my favorite Rembrandts, the Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp.
Rembrandt was my favorite painter when I was a kid. Then I made the mistake of reading a biography of him and decided he was kind of a jerk. And he thought those lumpy potato women he painted were beautiful, because they were based on his wife and mistress. All the other Dutch painters snickered at his bovine nudes.
Never hit the ‘learn more’ button on your heroes. Thanks to can’t hark for the link.
Changing the subject, the South Park guys are coming out with a new game in December: The Fractured but Whole. I guess it’s a riff on the Marvel superhero movies. As part of the schtick, they’re claiming to have developed a peripheral device called the Nosulus Rift that allows you to smell farts as they happen in the game. The Making of videos are pretty fun.
I haven’t quite finished their first game, Stick of Truth. It’s a cross between an RPG and an episode of South Park, but it has wrung a few genuine guffaws out of me.
Finally: rooster in pants! Or cockerel in trousers, for my British readers. For reasons unfathomable, it is seriously funny. He looks like your grandpa.
It came across my FaceBook feed from one of the chikken groups I follow. When I went to YouTube to find a non-FB link, I discovered chickens in pants are a thing. This one has a kind of bigfoot quality. This guy’s laugh is infectious. Wait, is this the same guy, or do all redneck yards look alike? (I love the way that rooster keeps looking down at his pants, like The Hell?). Won’t even start on the chicken diapers.
We’ve got some fun stuff on the calendar for this weekend, but the weather isn’t predicted to cooperate. Cross your fingers. Have a good one!
August 19, 2016 — 6:51 pm
Comments: 5
Chikken science
You know I’ve always told you that a chicken’s position in the flock is signaled by the size of her comb? Well, I found me a gat-dang scholarly article about it.
The question of whether attributes of the combs of laying hens have any consistent relationship with dominance behaviour has yet to be answered unequivocally.
Nonsense! I told you it did, didn’t I?
Pullets (n = 120, Hy-line® Variety Brown) were allocated randomly to eight groups of 15 hens for 32 weeks. Over this period the length and height of each hen’s comb was measured regularly to estimate the total comb area and hens were weighed. In weeks 3–10 the aggressive interactions between hens in each group were observed to calculate a behavioural dominance score (David’s score) for each hen.
David’s score is a measure of the dominance of a single member of any group of animals using the formula DS(interactionmatrix, prop=c(“Pij”, “Dij”)). No, I’m not shitting you. No, I don’t have a clue. Google if you math.
The luminance, purity and dominant wavelength of the colour of each hen’s comb was measured in week 27 using a telespectroradiometer.
What would you give — WHAT WOULD YOU GIVE — to watch an actual scientist apply a telespectroradiometer to a chicken’s floopy red hat?
There was no association between body weight and dominance score but there was a significant inverse relationship between dominance score and the dominant wavelength of the comb (gradient of slope = −0.067 ± 0.023, P < 0.01).
I buy this. My dominant hen is the smallest in the flock. She’s a fearsome little beast. Though I’m not entirely sure about the gradient of the slope of the dominant wavelength of her headgear, TBH.
This indicated that hens with combs perceived by humans as more yellow-red than pure red were generally more successful competitors. Further research is required to ascertain whether or not hens utilise this information on comb size and the underexplored area of comb colour to assess the competitive ability of their opponents.
“Stay away from Edna today, fam — she’s looking a little orange, iykwim.”
The underexplored area of comb colour. Hoo! Why didn’t I go into chikken science for reals? Oh, yeah…I can’t math.
Anyway, there you have Violence the Chicken as a young layer and three years later as Boss Lady.
Two of the three new girls are laying for sure. Possibly all three, but I haven’t caught Colette on the nest yet. When I stuck my head in the coop this morning, Rosie was on the nest and she shrieked at me. It really is like walking in on a teenager in the bathroom.
August 18, 2016 — 8:53 pm
Comments: 7
Oh, Japan!
I honestly do not know what I was doing when I found myself in this place today. I only know it scared me. Japan Trend Shop is superficially one of those silly gadget shops, like Brookstone, but being Japanese…somewhat more horrifying.
Like, in the cosmetics section, you can buy horse oil. Which, if you read the description, is clearly made from actual horses (“Son Bahyu also breeds only quality horses, so its creams do not contain oil from former racing horses or other steads that are no longer healthy.”).
You can spend $24 on a cardboard box for your cat to sleep in. An ordinary cardboard box, though I suppose it is “designed to look just like the boxes used to send and transport large bottles of soy sauce in Japan.” So there’s that.
Earplugs in the shape of tiny colorful dachshunds ($42). A plastic vase you can scream into to muffle your angsty cries $52 (reduced from $80). A machine that makes perfectly spherical balls of ice in seconds, $1,281 (I won’t lie, I really want one of these). Cotton Wife and Husband Hug Pillows (“We’ve seen plenty of hug pillows in Japan before but these have the most attractive and, well, huggable designs so far.”). $180.
None of those objects brought me to the site, though. I decided I just couldn’t bear to post a picture of the thing that caught my eye: the Bigan Beauty Face Expander. It’s supposed to be for exercising your cheek muscles. And there are other horrifying-looking beauty apparatuses in that section, but I just. No. No, I don’t believe it.
August 17, 2016 — 8:26 pm
Comments: 13
Long weasel is long
And on Sunday we went to a country fair and I mauled somebody else’s weasel (“no, ma’am, that’s a ferret,” said the woman). That’s a fully grown ferret. It’s a female. Big size differential.
Sadly, chickens and ferrets are like matter and anti-matter. Plus, the cats would kill me.
Oh, and.
Ummmm.
I bought another Spong mincer. Uncle B was like, “you’re going to convert the house into the Museum of Spong, aren’t you?”
No, silly. I’m only interested in tabletop Spong mincers with the asymmetrical base. My fetishes are highly specific.
It’ll be the Museum of Tabletop Spong Mincers with the Asymmetrical Base.
August 16, 2016 — 8:59 pm
Comments: 17
chicken problems
Not original. I pinched this off one of the many chicken groups of which I am an unashamed member.
I think all the eggs I’m getting from the new girls are coming from Jenny. She’s the only one I ever see on the nest. But damn, she churns one out almost every day. She’s the one that looks most like Lucia, too, so it’s no surprise she’s a superstar.
All my little peckerheads are doing well and loving the Summer.
Another weekend of good stuff lined up. I’ll report back next week. Have a good one!
August 12, 2016 — 8:33 pm
Comments: 3
Ooo…pretty!
Perseid meteor showers peak tonight; they’re my favorite! It’s supposed to be an especially good one this year. I can’t stay out for long, though — we’ve got skeeters the size of buzzards at the moment. Uncle B is a lumpy mess.
British skeeters don’t appear to have much of a taste for weasel, happy to say.
You know, I’m sure I’ve posted this exact picture before. But I’ve looked through the last four Augusts, and no. Anyway, Google Images identifies this as a picture from 2015, so it must be a different but similar diagram. Maybe from that meteor shower in December that I never see because it’s too freaking cold. Geminids. That’s it.
Hey ho, forget the celestial pageantry — I got thirty comments out of you people for a question about eating out of tiny cardboard cereal boxes.
August 11, 2016 — 9:08 pm
Comments: 15
I’m super cereal
I had a silly day today. I was going to stay home and do some chores, but I got a call that the phone was out at work. This is bad because the phone is tied to the security system, so I had to go in (so I could look up the customer number from our last bill) and navigate the help system of British Telecom. The hardest part of that is finding a live human. They’d rather open a vein than give you a phone number.
Anyway. Boring.
As today was screwed, we decided to get the weekly shop out of the way. Aldi had a special on a block of those little miniature cereals, so we bought one for nostalgia. And then the clash of cultures began.
I’m like, “these aren’t scored in the middle so you can use them as a bowl.”
And he’s like, “What?”
And I go, “you used to open them up and fold the sides back and the cereal was in a wax paper bag so you could pour the milk right in.”
And he goes, “didn’t you have bowls where you grew up?”
And I say, “sure, but these were for camping and, like, being in the woods and stuff.”
Long story short, he doesn’t believe me. Do you remember this? Was it really a thing? All I could find was that one picture, from a long-defunct breakfast blog.
August 10, 2016 — 7:36 pm
Comments: 35
Mister, Kipling
Nice day. Field trip!
We went to Burwash, to Rudyard Kipling’s house, Bateman’s, the farthest away of our regular National Trust jaunts. We’ve been there many times before (in fact, we first signed up to the National Trust there). Big, big Kipling fans, us.
It’s a desperately cool Jacobean house but, even better, his daughter left the whole thing — furniture, knick-knacks and all — to the Trust. So it’s as near exactly the way it was in Kipling’s lifetime, including all the shit on the desk and his trash can full of first drafts. The latter was emptied twice a day by a housemaid, who burned the contents. He was very, very controlling of his work and image.
Today, unexpectedly, they had a Kipling historian who was lucky enough to look a bit like Kipling (probably not a coincidence, that) giving a one-man show in the garden, telling the story of Kipling’s life. It was very well done.
It was full of fun Kipling facts. Like, he was born nine months after his parents took an enjoyable holiday at Rudyard Lake, Staffordshire. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.
He was a kind of a pre-movie movie star. Before he moved to the country, a local pub landlord organized tours past his house. He wrote three times to complain about it before he learned the landlord was selling his complaint letters for cash.
In fact, toward the end of his life, tradesmen stopped cashing his checks (cheques here) — the autograph on it was worth more than the amount written.
We hope to do more of this, now it’s warmed up a bit. But it’s still very cold at night, like in the low fifties. It’s been such a miserable, cold Summer, even one of our dimmer acquaintances was heard to say, “I know they say the earth is warming, but…”
August 9, 2016 — 8:26 pm
Comments: 13
Whoo whoo!
Good lord, that was a huge steam rally! All traction engines (steam vehicles that don’t run on tracks, for you non steam geeks). We’ve not been to this one before.
I wouldn’t like to say how many engines were there. Thirty? Fifty? I like the two in the picture because the size difference. The one in the back is a German engine. Probably the biggest one at the show, but it was broken down for the whole day. Poor bastards; I don’t know how they’re going to move it out of there if they can’t get it going.
The one in front isn’t anything like the smallest, though.
There were so many of them zooming around, I’m amazed nobody got squashed. At the end, they tried to gather them all together in the arena. It was a sight to behold, but completely unphotographable.
At least, with the little camera I took with me. I’m holding out hope Uncle B’s came out better.
Happy Monday – here we go!
August 8, 2016 — 9:57 pm
Comments: 9
‘Merica intensifies
Yes, that’s a bald eagle. No, I don’t suppose most falconers are allowed to keep one, but these guys breed all kinds of endangered hunting birds. Though I’m happy to report that old baldy is no longer endangered.
Another pic from the fete over the weekend; a falconry exhibit. Cool stuff, but I realize these things are repetitious. That’s partly what I like about them; they’re the same every year.
This was the fete that has the miniature horses and the guy who herds Indian runner ducks with border collies. If that rings a bell, this one always happens on the same day as the one with the really good boot sale (read: flea market) and we dash to get to both of them.
It was followed on Sunday by a music festival we’ve never been to, and we haven’t been to it again. We got there and the whole village was full up. No place to park.
This weekend we have a steam rally and an event in aid of the RNLI. Can I take the pace? Good weekend, all!
August 5, 2016 — 9:36 pm
Comments: 10