Happy World Toilet Day
Happy World Toilet Day! Yeah, it’s another stupid made-up UN holiday. I think we’re supposed to spend the day feeling bad that brown people shit in holes. And then send money. But, hey, am I supposed to ignore something called World Toilet Day? Heh. Nah.
Hey, does anybody know if I’ve screwed up? We have Office 2007 at work (speaking of shit). I’m working on a long publication in Publisher *spit* and I wanted to bring it home for the weekend, so I’ve just installed Publisher using our serial number on my home machine.
Is that kosher? If not, am I likely to go in tomorrow and find our whole Office is buggered? I want to do everything clean and legal, but Microsoft is so damned opaque.
It’s an academic license — perfectly appropriate for us — and I tried and failed to find out if I’m allowed to use it on more than one seat. Their help files are useless about licensing issues.
Turns out, no other desktop publishing software will open Publisher files. Publisher itself — even an academic license of an old version via eBay — is more money than I felt like spending. InDesign (still the leader, it seems) has gone to that hateful monthly fee model, like all Adobe products. QuarkXpress is £800. I didn’t like the open source alternatives.
Really, the desktop publishing world seems to have contracted and ossified since I stopped doing it professionally, like, a decade ago. What gives?
November 19, 2015 — 8:26 pm
Comments: 14
do YOU believe in fairies?
I’ve unfollowed so many people on FaceBook lately, all the news I get any more is local For Sale and some beer I like.
The prevailing opinion seems to be that terrorism happens when the West doesn’t lurv Muslims hard enough. God, how do I know so many stupid people?
The worst are the committed Christians, quoting scripture and arranging visas. Christians, deliberately importing Muslims. Some fucking crusade this is turning out to be.
No, actually, the worst are the Imagine-singin’ hippie-types. They have a do-you-believe-in-fairies? attitude to the whole thing: it’s not enough that they believe. Any time even one cynical bastard out there says he doesn’t like Muslims, a terrorist is born.
I don’t like Jehovah’s Witnesses, and nobody’s getting on my tits about it.
November 18, 2015 — 10:50 pm
Comments: 17
oh, HELL no!
This just hit my inbucket. Ten bucks gets you early access on Steam.
I could be wrong. This could be super clever and funny. But if that adorable chibi is supposed to be Hillary! Clinton, I’m thinking…not.
November 17, 2015 — 10:36 pm
Comments: 11
No. More. TEDDYBEARS.
Within 24 hours, the people of Paris had jammed the blood donation centers and within 48, Hollande launched massive bombing attacks on IS targets. Give them their due; that was just right.
But, holy shit, when I saw the soft toys and the candlelight vigils roll out (especially across the US) before the bodies were even cold, I wanted to punch something. And don’t get me started on social media.
I understand people want to do something, and there ain’t much you can do from thousands of miles away. But that display of mawkishness, the déjà vu of useless gestures…honest to god, if the first thing you felt after the attack on Paris was sadness and not blazing anger, we’ve got a problem.
November 16, 2015 — 11:26 pm
Comments: 28
Begak.
Running late tonight, so I shall leave you with this lovely picture of Violence, which I believe Uncle B took a couple of weeks ago. She looks so coy, and her feathery feet are shown to especial advantage here.
She doesn’t actually look like this at the moment. They’re all molting. They look half plucked. They’re crabby as hell and they look like shit. It’s kind of late in the year for this, but we’re having an unseasonably warm November, so I think their little internal chikken clocks are all messed up.
I try to cheer them up with chikken treats, but if I stick my hand near this one, the pecking starts. We don’t call her Violence for nothing.
Looks like there was a pillow fight with casualties in the hen house.
November 12, 2015 — 11:13 pm
Comments: 10
Ew.
Man, I do this every year — carve pumpkin and then forget about it. These two bad boys were pretty ripe before Onkle B pointed them out to me.
Pity. Dude on the left was one of my better efforts. Carving pumpkins is one of the many things I think I ought to be good at, and I amn’t.
I wish I’d gotten a picture with the candle lit. As it is, it was all I could do to roll him into a trash bag without getting any on me.
Ooooo…spooky!
November 11, 2015 — 10:11 pm
Comments: 11
‘tsha!
Joel Hodgson has opened a kickstarter to get MST3K going again. They’re up to $227,898 of the minimum $2.2 million they hope to raise in a month. Five and a half million will fund a whole season. And
Finally, if we raise $1 BILLION – stay with me on this one – we’re going to adopt a real live teenage boy and “Truman Show” him into believing he is the Pumaman!
Bonus points if you know how to pronounce “Pumaman.”
Eh. I’ll kick in ten bucks. Don’t laugh; I have to work almost an hour down the history mine to make that.
November 10, 2015 — 6:36 pm
Comments: 4
Speak to me, Puff!
Wow. I hope this is just an art fail, because it looks for all the world like a dishful of decapitated cat’s head with ornamental greenery growing out his ears. If I’m reading the credits right, it’s from the Sforza Book of Hours, circa 1490.
I’m leafing through old Books of Hours because I got it in my thick head I’d like to have a Tudor housewife’s costume. You know, like the first lady of Badger House.
She would probably have been the wife of a prosperous peasant farmer, possibly the overseer of a rich man’s farm. Sheep, probably. Like this lady. Or this lady (in the background, slopping the hogs).
So, a kirtle, an apron and a wimple ought to do it.
Now, all I got to do is learn how to sew.
Damn. I knew there was a flaw in my plan. I can’t sew for shit.
November 9, 2015 — 9:22 pm
Comments: 20
Huh.
I was looking for a picture of a Medieval embroidered glove tonight (don’t judge me!) and I ran across the Worshipful Company of Glovers of London.
Well, of course there’s a Worshipful Company of Glovers of London.
They have a very fun antique glove collection to browse. Surprised to see, though, they only go back to the Seventeenth Century.
If you liked that, you’d probably also like the museum attached to Dents, Her Maj’s glove maker.
Never did find what I was looking for, though.
Have a good weekend, y’all. Don’t get blowed up!
November 6, 2015 — 9:52 pm
Comments: 10
Remember, remember
Happy November 5, y’all. As I’ve explained in years past, Sussex takes its Bonfire Night very, very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that a single night won’t do it. The villages across the county take turns hosting bonfires, parades and fireworks right through the Fall, from September to December.
Somebody out there observed it tonight, though. I’m not sure which village. ‘Twas a dark and stormy night and we thought at first we were hearing thunder, but we could just make out a flash of fireworks far away on the horizon. The finale, though — holy shit, that rumbled through the earth like the apocalypse. I hope nobody got blowed up for real.
It’s a hoot that Anonymous has adopted Guy Fawkes. It’s never smart to dabble in somebody else’s civil war, and Fawkes was all about knocking over the Protestant government and replacing it with a Catholic one. Bonfire Night is written into law as a celebration of hatin’ on the Catholics. Thusly:
‘An Acte for a publique Thancksgiving to Almighty God everie yeere of the Fifte day of November’ ‘be held in a perpetual Remembrance’ and that the day be ‘a holiday for ever in thankfulness to God for the deliverance and detestation of the Papists’.
Heh. Lub dat spellynge.
If you ever have the chance to interrogate a Fawkes-mask-wearing anarcho-trustafundian, ask him why he loves the Pope so.
p.s. The identity of the year’s effigies is always a closely guarded secret. Lewes (site of the largest celebration, as it was site of the most Protestant martyrs) has six of them. One is usually the Pope. Another this year looks to be David Cameron with a pig’s head.
November 5, 2015 — 9:17 pm
Comments: 16