Getting gay with the Freemasons
Oh, way to secret society, you guys.
Yeah, the Freemasons had a booth at a fete we went to this weekend. You can’t tell, but their logo is rainbow handprints, turned outward like a flower. Somebody done gayed up the Masons.
The slogan in the panel on the left says “honesty, kindness, respect, compassion, tolerance, benevolence, family.” Those five things in the middle are mighty close to the same thing, aren’t they? According to their English website, “Members are expected to be of high moral standing and are encouraged to speak openly about Freemasonry.” Huh. Since when?
I mean, “secret handshake” came from these guys.
I did not know this. Wikipedia says, “While the number is not accurately known, it is estimated that between 80,000 and 200,000 Freemasons were killed under the Nazi regime. Masonic concentration camp inmates were graded as political prisoners and wore an inverted red triangle.” But ‘pedia doesn’t say when they stepped out of the shadows.
Anyway, I know all the old societies and clubs are having a hell of a time maintaining any kind of membership. Several of our retired neighbors are Rotarians, whom we’ve had to rebuff (noooo thank yoooo). It’s just weird seeing the Masons hand out flyers.
They better not have jettisoned all that secret symbolic shit, or they’ll be just another boring wasteful charitable organization.
August 4, 2016 — 9:36 pm
Comments: 12
I can’t stop saying Spong
A “Spong mincer” sounds like a particularly unpleasant homosexual. Or a serial killer with a fetish for one very particular body part.
I bought a Spong over the weekend, and it is neither. It’s a mincer, but unlike the one I have already (and the Spong in the picture), it doesn’t clamp to a table edge, it just stands on the surface. Much easier to set up, then clean.
I like to take leftover pork roast or the ass-end of a ham and grind them into ham salad.
Spong was a brand to be reckoned with. Have a look at an eBay search. Mine is a Fifties model in green enamel. But the old black ones with gold accents are really beautiful.
James Osborn Spong was born in 1839. Yes, yes…it’s one of those remarkable Victorian stories. He founded Spong and Co. at the age of 16, and made heaps of domestic shit. The company wasn’t 100% completely wound up until 1985 and the retirement of the last Spong (a great-grandson).
Oddly enough, there isn’t a Wikipedia entry for Spong. Damned Americans. Though ‘pedia informed me that Spong is a surname in multiple Germanic-speaking cultures. In England, it is an archaic term for a narrow strip of land.
The place I found out more about Spong is my gift to you this day: Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History.
Grace’s Guide is the leading source of historical information on industry and manufacturing in Britain. This web publication contains 118,799 pages of information and 172,070 images on early companies, their products and the people who designed and built them.
If you like to read about industrial history — and, let’s face it, who doesn’t? — you’re welcome.
August 3, 2016 — 7:04 pm
Comments: 23
I got to see Jack’s rage-face
Jack got into a cat fight the other night. This is unprecedented as a) Jack’s generally a cheerful, easygoing little chap and b) at the moment, there aren’t any other cats in the neighborhood.
Not counting Charlotte. They fight, or rather ‘fight’ — he gets too close, she hisses and wallops him one. Fight over.
But this was a proper screaming cat set-to. Charlotte was in the house, so we knew it was an intruder of some kind — from the horrible shrieking, possibly a fox. Or a werefox. Or a cat being skinned alive slowly. By a werefox.
But no, it was the typical cat thing: Jack and the stranger were ten feet apart, shouting at each other. The other guy was a big ginger and white fluffy boy. Twice Jack’s size. Don’t know if he’s new in the neighborhood or has come a long distance. He ran off into the hedge and I didn’t think more of it.
Hours passed, though, and we didn’t see Jack. This is highly unusual, so we went looking. Found him under a bush, staring into the gap in the hedge where the stranger fled.
I bent down to speak to him and he flipped his shit, shrieking and hissing and drooling so hard his chin was dripping. I honest to god thought he had rabies or a mortal injury or something.
Then I realized I had shone a flashlight in his eyes, blinding him. He had probably been on a knife edge, waiting for the intruder by the gap for hours, then suddenly blinded. I turned the flashlight onto my face and talked him down, got him into the house. Once he composed himself, he’s been super sweet and needy ever since.
Jack naturally has the crazy-eye — his eyes are slightly asymmetrical, out of focus. Makes him look unsettling. But holy shit I’ve never seen a cat as scary as Jack’s rage-face. For a terrible minute, I was frightened what he might do.
It’s always the little ‘uns.
August 2, 2016 — 6:49 pm
Comments: 16
Huh.
Huh. Well, tompfrompv wasn’t kidding with the link: chicken glasses were a thing. You can tell from the tone of the article at right that they were always a subject of fun.
They sold millions of them, though, under several patents. One of them had rose-tinted lenses on a hinge, so when the chicken looked down, the lenses swung away and her vision was normal, but when she raised her head the tinted ones fell into place. A complex solution to a simple problem.
Not pecking each other’s eyes out. Jesus. I never heard of such a thing.
Feather pecking and cannibalism. Chickens go a little coocoo at the sight of blood and can peck at a wounded chook, sometimes unto death. These days, you either separate the injured bird until it’s all better again, or you spray an antiseptic on the wound that also hides the color.
As for feather pecking, that’s an odd one. They taught me in Chikken School that feather pecking is never a hostile act, it’s a displacement activity. If a chicken can’t scratch and forage, it’ll peck at the feathers of other chickens instead.
But that’s a problem of big factory flocks in overcrowded barns, and that’s a phenomenon that began in the Fifties. Back when these things were invented — the patent in the article is from 1903 — all chickens were more or less free range. So I dunno.
They fight feather pecking with beak trimming these days. Beaks aren’t quite like toenails; they do have a blood supply and feeling. Some of the methods used in the past to trim beaks were pretty ghastly. These days, at least in Britain, trained chikken technicians swiftly run a laser across the end of their beaks when the birds are quite tiny. This kills the blood vessels, painlessly they think, and the tip of the beak just falls off later. Losing the pointy end is enough to discourage bad beak behavior.
Brits are so soft about animals, I’m happy to say, I really did feel much better about commercial chicken practices after learning more. Even the big cage operations aren’t as awful as you might think from that YouTube your cousin linked you to on FaceBook.
And to expand on my announcement below, Jenny has indeed laid her first egg. And then angrily attacked it. It frightened her. I think it’s a case of this weird object just came out of my bottom and it hurt. None of the little girls like being handled, but she let me pick her up and stroke her for a while after this most upsetting experience.
And then she did it again today. Two days, two eggs. I guess we know who the superstar is going to be.
August 1, 2016 — 8:27 pm
Comments: 11
Friday Chikken Update
The new girls in the onion bed (I can’t call them the little girls any more; they’re as big or bigger than the old girls). Pic horribly out of focus, sorry — I don’t know what my camera was focusing on, but I took a whole bunch of these today and they’re all bad.
Funny thing. I was sitting out in the garden playing the banjo this afternoon, as you do, with the chickens happily pecking around me in the grass. All six of them suddenly leapt up, tear-assed across the lawn and gathered together in one spot, someplace behind me. After a minute, they slowly dispersed. This happened three or four times before I got up and turned my chair around to face The Spot.
We’d left the casement window in the kitchen unlatched — the window I throw chicken treats from. Periodically, a gust of wind would catch the window and blow it wide and they’d dash over hopefully. With me sitting there. All praise the generous and mighty Window.
God bless them, chickens are stupid. And greedy.
Ektually, the news is that there’s no news. Chickens come in to lay between 20 and 24 months weeks, and the new ones are 21 and a bit. I stare forlornly into their nest box every day. Their faces are all red, though — that’s how biology tells roosters it’s Go Time.
Yes, the two speckledy hens (who are biological sisters) interact with each other more, often leaving the lavender Odd Chicken Out. Yes, the old girls are still picking on the new girls. Well, all except Head Chicken — such things are generally beneath the dignity of her office.
I’ll let you know when I finally get an egg from a noob. Good weekend!
ATTENTION – ATTENTION – ATTENTION: Jenny has laid her first egg! When I let the girls out this morning, she was sitting on the nest, so I waited in the garden. Glad I did – after she laid it, she was pecking at it hard. Probably a case of WTF IS THIS?, but if she’d penetrated to the delicious innards, I’d have a real problem on my hands.
July 29, 2016 — 6:46 pm
Comments: 8
I love this
This isn’t mine. The caption, I mean. I did the artwork, but someone else — I know not who — put the words on it, and now that’s the most common version you’ll find on the web.
I cannot tell you how much that tickles me.
Sometime commenter bikeboy wrote me last night looking for the Hillary! poster I did. Turns out, the ‘steal my art’ button broke when I moved the blog. It didn’t even occur to me until that moment that NOW-NOW-NOW is the very last chance to recycle my Hillary! campaign art (and I devoutly hope I will not be making President Hillary! art, ever).
So I figured I’d gather it all together for you. Feel free to steal, alter, recaption, get a tattoo, eat a piece of cake, scratch your butt. Honestly, I don’t care. Have fun.
The original hag (there’s a bigger version of that somewhere, used in the picture above, but I can’t find it), the one for the election poster, the election poster, big and in color (this is the only one I have in a much higher res version, if you want it for anything), with a walker, derping, as Kang (of Kang and Kodos), as Queen Elizabeth I, as Humpty Dumpty, more derping, with a beard, taking a bite out of her blackberry, Hillary Clinton.Δ16, lizard woman.
There may be more, but that’s all I could find in a Google images search (anything but fire up Adobe Bridge).
July 28, 2016 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 9
Thou sank’st my longboat!
There’s a paper out by Mark Hall of Perth Museum exploring the 36 ancient Northern European burials that have included board games. Two of the game burials were in the Orkneys, which were under Norwegian rule until Tudor times. I tried (and failed) to find the source paper online, not least because the article about it in the Scotsman was behaving oddly in my browser. Fair warning.
Two reasons, they speculate (I remind myself that any discussion of the reasons our pre-literate ancestors did things is always speculation). First, there was such a thing as gamer cred. Prowess at strategy games was regarded as a warrior skill.
Secondly, they wanted to keep the ghost entertained so he wouldn’t come back and mess with the living.
Eh. Who knows? The delightful chess pieces in the picture are real, by the way. They’re called the Lewis chessmen because they were found on a beach in Lewis, Scotland in 1831. Late 12th, early 13th C., carved from walrus ivory. There were 93 pieces found. It’s well worth following the link to read more and see them up close.
And with that, I’m off to play the vidya!
July 27, 2016 — 7:21 pm
Comments: 14
A cheerful ditty to brighten your Tuesday
We just finished watching the BBC’s six part The Living and the Dead. It was meh. Pretty to look at, couple of interesting plot devices, ran too long, took itself too seriously.
The theme song was a version of a very ancient song known as the Lyke Wake Dirge. Most Brits know it from this version made popular by the folk-rock band Pentangle. But I like this slightly older version better. Common consensus is that it predates Christianity by a long way, and the Jesusy bits were tacked on later. It’s spooky as shit.
“Lyke” is an old word for corpse, of the same origin as lich, a few of which you might have slewn with smitings, if you are a gamer. It also survives in the term lychgate, which is the thing in the picture: a covered walkway at the entrance of a church. They used to lay out the corpse under the lychgate at the beginning of funeral proceedings.
Anyhoo, here are the lyrics as they survive today:
This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule.When thou from hence away art past,
Every nighte and alle,
To Whinny-muir thou com’st at last;
And Christe receive thy saule.If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon,
Every nighte and alle,
Sit thee down and put them on;
And Christe receive thy saule.If hosen and shoon thou ne’er gav’st nane
Every nighte and alle,
The whinnes sall prick thee to the bare bane;
And Christe receive thy saule.From Whinny-muir whence thou may’st pass,
Every nighte and alle,
To Brig o’ Dread thou com’st at last;
And Christe receive thy saule.If ever thou gav’st silver and gold,
Every nighte and alle,
At t’ Brig o’ Dread thou’lt find foothold,
And Christe receive thy saule.But if silver and gold thou never gav’st nane,
Every nighte and alle,
Down thou tumblest to Hell flame,
And Christe receive thy saule.From Brig o’ Dread whence thou may’st pass, Every nighte and alle,
To Purgatory fire thou com’st at last;
And Christe receive thy saule.If ever thou gav’st meat or drink,
Every nighte and alle,
The fire sall never make thee shrink;
And Christe receive thy saule.If meat or drink thou ne’er gav’st nane,
Every nighte and alle,
The fire will burn thee to the bare bane;
And Christe receive thy saule.This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule.
And here is a version in modern English, I pinched from this interesting short essay:
On this night, on this night,
Every night and all,
Hearth and house and candle-light,
And Christ receive your soul.When from here away you pass
Every night and all,
To Thorny Moor you come at last;
And Christ receive your soul.If ever you gave hose and shoes,
Every night and all,
Sit then down and put them on;
And Christ receive your soul.But if hose and shoes you gave none
Every night and all,
The thorns shall prick you to the bare bone;
And Christ receive your soul.From Thorny Moor then you may pass,
Every night and all,
To Bridge of Dread you come at last;
And Christ receive your soul.If ever you gave silver and gold,
Every night and all,
At Bridge of Dread you’ll find foothold,
And Christ receive your soul.But if silver and gold you gave none
Every night and all:
You’ll tumble down into Hell’s flames
And Christ receive your soul.From Bridge of Dread then you may pass,
Every night and all,
To Purgatory fire you’ll come at last;
And Christ receive your soul.If ever you gave meat or drink,
Every night and all,
The fire will never make you shrink;
And Christ receive your soul.But if meat or drink you gave none,
Every night and all,
The fire will burn you to the bare bone;
And Christ receive your soul.On this night, on this night,
Every night and all,
Hearth and house and candle-light,
And Christ receive your soul.
It seems a little neener-neener to sing the instructions for getting to heaven over the body of someone who is dead and literally cannot do anything about it now, but there you go. Our ancestors, trolling their dead.
July 26, 2016 — 2:09 pm
Comments: 7
I don’t think this bun will recover
Why, yes, that is the ass-end of an adorable baby bunny. This one was good ‘n’ dead before he presented us with it, so I had no moral dilemma about taking his kill away.
He ate it up, every bite. It took him all day. By dusk, there was nothing left but a little fluffy cotton tail. I haven’t had the heart to go see if it’s still in the grass.
I would never scold him for this — it’s his proper job, and besides we need the bun control. But, eesh. I am mighty squeamish about it.
I have never cleaned a rabbit or gutted a fish. I ate a fair bit of game growing up, but I never learned to like it and I certainly never prepared any myself.
I remember standing in my kitchen in my twenties, staring at an uncooked steak and thinking about going vegetarian. I didn’t, of course, but I wont deny it has an appeal.
The day they learn to grow delicious filet mignon in a laboratory tank…
July 25, 2016 — 8:47 pm
Comments: 11
*groan*
Do those chickens look amused? No, they do not. Chickens probably have the least sense of humor of any animal I’ve ever dealt with. Chickens are serious birds.
I’m not taking credit for this stinker. It was sent to me by someone named Mad Ivan.
But the chicken article everyone is sending me is this one: mosquitoes hate the smell of chickens. They are almost never found with chicken blood in their systems, and putting a chicken in a room results in up to 80% fewer mosquitoes landing in the traps.
The BBC’s somewhat bizarre headline for this story is Chicken odour ‘prevents malaria’ research in Ethiopia finds. The Mail’s headline is the rather more jaunty (and accurate) Forget mosquito repellent! Sleeping next to a CHICKEN will keep the blood-sucking insects at bay.
I have not yet convinced Uncle B to try the experiment, even though he suffers horribly from mosquito bites such we have to sleep with all the windows closed and an insecticide plugin. I have made the case that chickens fall asleep instantly when the lights go out, but he’s made the counter-argument that my chickens burble volubly the moment the sun comes up. Stay tuned!
Good weekend, y’all.
July 22, 2016 — 9:38 pm
Comments: 18