Dang it, we missed Þrettándinn again
I have a thing about Iceland. Nobody can say if their present culture is ancient Northern Europe trapped in amber, or three hundred thousand blonde people abandoned on a rock in the North Atlantic to go mad. Bit of both, probably. Interesting either way.
Iceland’s version of Twelfth Night is called Þrettándinn, and it’s so much more than the day they take the tree down.
Tradition says it’s moving day for household fairies (moving out or moving in, either way you’d best be nice to them). If you wait at the crossroads, you might con some good stuff out of the fairies, too. Seals cast off their sealskin coats and dance, as naked ladies, on the beach. Water turns to wine.
It’s your last day to catch one of the Yule lads — the guys in the picture up top. The whole list is here . They arrive one by one at Christmas, and leave one by one. Last out is Kertasníkir the Candle Beggar.
Cows speak. In nonsense verse. In rhyming couplets. In Hebrew. Okay, I’m kind of leaning toward ‘abandoned on a rock in the North Atlantic to go mad’ now.
It’s a day of bonfires and fireworks. But — and this is the part I really think we should adopt — it’s a last celebratory hurrah!. You finish all the nice holiday food, drink up the liquor, burn up the candles, binge watch Downton on iPlayer.
Also, you take your Christmas tree down. No, we haven’t yet.
January 7, 2016 — 10:23 pm
Comments: 8
Huh. Not immortal after all
Richard Sapper, mastermind of the first IBM Thinkpad, croaked on New Year’s Eve. I had one of these and loved it to bits. Mine was the classic and bestselling — I think it was the T43 — and it was bombproof.
Reading the obit, I might have knowed he was a German working in Italy. You can see both those influences in the Thinkpad.
Well, the early Thinkpads, anyway. Uncle B paid a flippin’ fortune for one of the last models, and it was a dog.
January 6, 2016 — 11:04 pm
Comments: 11
Jesus already knows, honey
So, this guy apparently walked naked through St Peter’s Basilica yesterday. Judging from his tiny, out-of-focus junk, I think I know the miracle he was praying for.
b-dum-tss
January 5, 2016 — 10:46 pm
Comments: 13
Tea break over, back on your heads
Boo! Not Christmas any more. BOO!
In the absence of anything cleverer to say, that there is my new bicycle. It’s this one. No, I didn’t pay that much for it. Yes, it has a basket. No, I’m not going to put it on. Makes it too unwieldy in tight places.
It’ll do 15mph without touching the pedals. Illegal to sell electric bikes with a hand throttle like that in the UK since the first of Jan (thank you, EU regs!), so me and half of England rushed to get a grandfathered one before the hammer came down.
I love it. But it’s been windy or rainy (or both) every day since I started riding it to work, so it’s a real baptism by…ummm….water. Hm.
Say, that’s just a regular baptism, isn’t it?
January 4, 2016 — 11:35 pm
Comments: 20
Eat yer beans
I stole the picture and the link from rdbrewer at Ace‘s. The link goes to a vidya of some grandma and a gay guy discussing why Southerners traditionally eat black eyed peas on New Year’s Day. Some bullshit thing about Sherman’s March to the Sea. Never heard it before. Article doesn’t even know it’s “collard” not “collared” greens, so I wouldn’t pay it much mind.
My grandfather — my mother’s father — was absolutely insistent on eating blackeyed peas on New Year’s ‘for luck.’ Never missed. He even had them specially brought to him in the hospital before he died.
Then he died. How lucky can they be?
My mother mailed me a can of beans at Christmas every year for years and years so I’d be ready. They ended up collecting in the back of my canned goods cabinet. I freaking hate blackeyed peas. Nasty, waxy, tasteless little bastards.
Happy, happy y’all. Hope nobody’s too dreadful hungover.
January 1, 2016 — 7:53 pm
Comments: 29
HNY, y’all
Not my favorite holiday, New Year. Passage of time, reminders thereof…I don’t like it. And this year, the host we usually Auld Lang Syne wit’ has come down with a nasty cold and begged off. So it’s drinking in front of the television again!
Not a complaint. Roaring fire, pair of pussycats, some silly film or other. There are worse ways to pass an evening. And 2015 was a pretty okay year for us personally. Out in the big wide, that’s another thing, but inside Mustelid Towers: no complaints. More of the same, please.
December 31, 2015 — 9:53 pm
Comments: 13
In case you missed it…
Down in the sleigh ride thread, I pointed to this charming story: Sweden, asked to take in the highest per-capita number of refugees, has had to stuff six hundred of the buggers into an empty ski resort in the far North of Lapland. This time of year, the temp is 14°F and the sun never shines. Like, ever.
All the stories about it obviously derive from the same source story (this particular one is from the National Post of Canada). I strongly suspect the whining has been dialed down several notches. Also LOL at the one refugee who worries this will queer his hopes of studying physics at university. That right there encapsulates the hopes and dreams of migrants everywhere, I’m sure.
The weather here, meanwhile. Well. Horrifying pictures coming from the North, and now the West. Our little sunny corner of the motherland is the only part of the country to escape, though we’ve had wind and rain and unseasonable warmth aplenty.
And wind from odd quarters, which means leaks in odd places.
That looks like something that should be cross-stitched on a sampler.
December 30, 2015 — 10:41 pm
Comments: 10
Best Christmas special ever
The surprise BBC hit of the holiday season was two hours of a woman leading reindeer through the snow. In realtime. No dialogue, no music. The occasional caption. Boots crunching in snow.
We sat mesmerized through every minute of it, and we weren’t alone.
It was the latest installment of a phenomenon known as ‘slow tv’ popularized by the Norwegian Broadcast Company (though you could trace its lineage to Andy Warhol and the Sixties if you’d’a mind to; Wikipedia did). Their first effort was a seven hour train ride.
The reindeer lady is a Sami (the people we used to call Lapps), the natives of the far North. The route is an old postal route inland from the coast. Along the way, she meets up and parts company with another lady and some guys and they shake hands and mutter things in an unknown language. But mostly it’s just the backend of the reindeer. The reindeer have bells on.
And that’s it. That’s the whole thing.
You can watch the first two minutes of it here. Or you can just watch my header loop for two hours.
December 28, 2015 — 10:25 pm
Comments: 16
The gift of passive-aggression
I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve lost interest in websites that don’t allow comments. Especially news sites. Especially news sites that I’m are going to piss me off royally (I’m looking at you, Daily Telegraph).
The comments are my favorite part. I don’t want to swallow a load of bullshit without the antidote handy.
Or, if the comment system is too onerous (I’m looking at you, Daily Mail), at the very least let me take out my passive-aggression with a rating system.
To that end — and Merry Christmas! — I’m test-driving a ratings plugin for the blog. It’s got all kinds of nifty options: stars, thumbs, vote once or vote infinite times. You can have a look at the possibilities here.
I think I’ve got it set to vote once a day, stars on the post and thumbs on the comments. For now. Honestly, they weren’t all that monochrome-friendly in their options (she harrumphed).
Let’s play around with it for a couple of weeks over the holidays, and then I’ll nail it down and stop clearing the cache.
The Official Merry Ho Ho Open Threadapaloozala
I was going to squeeze out a few more posts this week, but my heart’s not in it. G’wan witcha, knock yourselves out in this one.
To get the conversation re-rolling, have you seen this Telegraph bit? Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s white paper proposing a thing he called the World Wide Web. He said it was going to be a place where all sorts of people posted a bunch of content totally for free and let other people link to it totally for free. True story: I read that paper when it came out and thought it was the stupidest pile of implausible fantasy hippie crap I ever heard.
Don’t ever take investment advice from me.
December 21, 2015 — 8:04 pm
Comments: 83
Good weekend (and beyond!)
Okay, youse guys, I obviously checked out a couple of miles back. I got a stitch in my give-a-shit somewhere around Wednesday. I’ll be around all week and looking in, but the political class can go to hell without me for a couple of weeks.
Let the festivities begin!
December 18, 2015 — 11:22 pm
Comments: 17