Oh, sweet fancy Moses!
Did you follow the link Wolfus Aurelius dropped in the last comment thread? Kate Clark: Taxidermist of your Nightmares. She combines taxidermy animals with clay models of the faces of her friends to give you a walloping serious case of the jimm-jamms.
Oh, well. She’s in collections all over the world, while I squat on the internet pretending to be a weasel. How fine a nartist am I?
As I have brought work home, I shall leave you to stare into the abyss (one that is definitely staring back this time).
April 13, 2016 — 8:16 pm
Comments: 13
Say no to racial stereotyping of weasels
Snuck out of work to catch a matinee performance of Zootopia today, Disney’s latest kids flick. It was purty and fun.
It tried to be a message flick, and the message was that predators and prey animals can live together in harmony if they overcome their prejudices. But the message was ruined by the fact that…no. They can’t. Really.
I doubt even eight-year-olds are buyin’ it.
Not quite as dumb as the one where dinosaurs were socialist environmentalists. What was that, Land Before Time? You could go nutty trying to analyze the messages in Disney flicks, most of which are charmingly dumb and harmless.
Anyway, we see above more of the typical Hollywood anti-mustelid prejudice.
April 12, 2016 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 13
Hey kids, what time is it?
There are certainly flocks around the country that lamb earlier, but our local fields all come alive in early April. We are surrounded on three sides by the little bleaters, my favorite harbinger of Spring.
And on that happy note, I shall wish you a good weekend. Ours will be full of beeeehhhhhhhh, BEEEEEHHHHHHHH, beeeehhhhhhhh.
April 8, 2016 — 9:16 pm
Comments: 12
Godzilla is a friend to whisky
Did you know the Far East is a huge growth market for whisky? Friend of mine’s son is a liquor retailer in Singapore. Or Hong Kong. I forget which.
Anyhoo, I don’t want to talk about that, I want to talk about this ice cube. These ice cubes. The article calls them 3D printed, but that’s a little misleading. They’re carved using a CNC router.
Though I suppose the practical difference between a computer-controlled additive process and a computer-controlled subtractive process is neither here nor there.
These were created for an ad campaign, so I don’t suppose they’re really available to buy, though the technology is not totally impractical. There are a lot of CNC machines out there.
And the article mentions coupling CNC with Autodesk’s 123D Catch. I’ve mentioned this program in passing. It’s a free phone app that makes 3D models from your snapshots. It actually does a scary good job.
You have to take as many pictures as you can from as many angles as you can. They recommend a minimum of twenty. I think I did twelve or thirteen of a simple object and it worked fine. The stitching together process takes a long time — for my simple object, about an hour. But the end result is good enough to boggle someone who has invested a lot to learn how to squeeze out 3D models.
That would be me. I’m talking about me.
April 7, 2016 — 9:03 pm
Comments: 12
What’s next, selfies?
Oh, the mirror was a big hit. There was all kinds of peeping and pecking. I can’t leave it in the box unsupervised on account of it has sharp edges (and vets are expensive) but tomorrow I’m going shopping for bird toys. Preferably ones without small bits that can be pecked off and eaten. Chickens will swallow anything, and these don’t have grit in their diet yet.
It’s still too cold for them to be outside most of the time, so they’re inside in a big cardboard box getting really bored. Yes, chickens are smart enough to get bored, even little ones.
Oh, as promised: the story of the chicken fart.
April 6, 2016 — 6:56 pm
Comments: 14
You can get one for £5 in Tesco
So Rosie has a runny eye. She has from the beginning. Not at all uncommon in chickens, it could mean any number of things, serious and not so serious. As she was happy and lively and eating well, I chose to ignore it…until it finally got pretty gunky and awful. Field trip!
Every time we go to our local veterinary practice, it’s a different guy. Or woman. Usually a foreigner. This fella seemed English, though — and, even better, he declared he loves chickens and doesn’t see enough of them in his practice. Good start.
He thinks it’s a scratch that got infected, so he took her in the back and cleaned her up (I could hear her screaming bloody murder) and gave me eye drops.
I’m putting drops in a chicken’s eye twice a day. FML.
If it graduates to a sinus infection, though, it means an operation. He took great pleasure describing said operation in the most graphic of terms, until he seemed to realize he was being creepy. I’ll spare you the details — unless she actually has the operation. In which case, for all that money, I’m by-god getting a post out of it.
There it is, though — the bad eye all cleaned up. And it only cost me a little more than it cost to buy all three chickens.
April 5, 2016 — 6:23 pm
Comments: 14
How historians troll…
This is a nice architectural detail I ran across. It’s from the roof of the Abbey Church of Saint Foy in Conques, France. It might mean God is always listening, or it might just be a bit of fun. Them Medieval types did a surprising amount of the latter.
Speaking of which, do you know how historians troll their underlings? They do things like call out, “Weasel, will you do an images search of ‘sheela na gig’ for me, please?” *quiet snickering heard in the background*
Go on. Hit the button. You know you want to.
April 4, 2016 — 8:30 pm
Comments: 10
Too meta for me…
Okay, this was my Google Doodle today. And yes, when I click it, it takes me to a Google+ happy birthday page.
Needless to say, it’s not my birthday, but it *is* April 1st. Did anybody else get this today? Because I usually don’t lie on the birthday question, on account of you occasionally need to know what you told them and I never remember a fake one.
I suppose I’ll remember this one, anyhow.
Punt. Weekend!
April 1, 2016 — 8:30 pm
Comments: 13
Thundercats, HO!
This is de Löwenmensch, the Lion Man. He’s about a foot tall, carved out of a single mammoth tusk (which explains his pose, to some extent). The head is a cave lion, a creature from before the last Ice Age. Actually, Löwenmensch translates more to “lion person” — there’s some dispute whether the figure is male or female.
He was found in a cave in Germany in 1939 and, owing to some little distractions in the country at the time, forgotten for thirty years. More bits (including the head) were found in the same cave in the Nineties and a thorough restoration was undertaken in 2012/13.
Dude is forty thousand years old, the oldest undisputed representational sculpture found to date. If he looks stylistically familiar, he was made (probably) by the same people who did some of the better cave paintings found in France. The known territory of his makers — the Aurignacian culture — extends right through Europe into Asia.
More pics. He’s in a museum in Ulm and his official page is here (Google translate does a surprisingly good job with these pages).
Yeah, that’s right. I’m doing neolithic pinups now.
March 31, 2016 — 9:12 pm
Comments: 16
I want to decide who lives and who dies
I have no idea where I saw this, but today is National I Am In Control Day. It’s said to date from the day Reagan was shot, before Bush was sworn in, and Sec’y of State Al Haig declared, “As of now, I am in control here in the White House.”
Then they go on to ruin it by suggesting we celebrate by making lists and using a daily planner.
Pff! Please.
I want the ability to administer small, painful, non-lethal electric shocks with my mind. So when my boss says, “I suppose next time you’ll remember to order a backup printer cartridge,” the next thing she says is, “oh, OW! Wow, what the…?”
I want to be able to reverse the energy coming out of a car stereo, so the signal bounces back and blows it up. In proportion to the strength of the sound, so that guy with the thumping bass lit’rally sees his stereo explode in a shower of metal and sparks all over the inside of his hoopty.
I want prescription drugs legalized, so I can do my own research, decide what (for example) blood pressure meds I should try and prescribe them for myself. And if I screw it up…well, I’m a grownup. I’ll take responsibility. (Okay, this one’s boring, but I really want it).
I want a lot of other things I can’t say out loud. Anything mentionable on your wish list?
March 30, 2016 — 8:47 pm
Comments: 18