note bien
The Kaiju Movie Marathon returns with Gamera’s Revenge on Saturday, October 17th, starting at 8:00AM ET (5:00AM PT). Prepare yourselves for something monstrous! Tune in for the utmost destruction, and live tweet with #gamera.
Their free web-based stream is here. There’s also an app called PlutoTV, but I don’t see the Shout! Factory channel on it (probably an international licensing thing).
Gamera is a friend to all children!
October 17, 2015 — 10:56 am
Comments: 6
These pretty little things
I don’t know how I wasn’t aware of these when I was in the States (they’re originally South American, after all) but I love them. Physalis. AKA uchuva, Cape gooseberry, Inca berry, Aztec berry, golden berry, giant ground cherry, African ground cherry, Peruvian ground cherry, Peruvian cherry, amour en cage (love in a cage, which is rather wonderful). Little sweet and tart orange fruits in a sweet little paper lantern.
Seeing as I was so fond of them (and they are so expensive), Uncle B reckoned he could grow me some. And so he did. Aren’t these awesome? Do check them out in color.
See? There are advantages to being a gardener’s moll.
Good weekend, everyone!
October 16, 2015 — 10:22 pm
Comments: 13
Mmmm…chemicals!
This ugly hobgoblin floated up in my FaceBook feed today. Not horrified yet? He comes with an earworm. (I swear that video gets more pixelated every time I see it. By next time, it’ll be downright cubist).
I listened to this stupid jingle all my life, but my version doesn’t include Mr Odom’s formula. That one predates me and you can tell it’s Fifties because they’re bragging about putting mystery chemicals in your food.
“We add a dash of X, and a pinch of Z, and for flavor and taste we add Y-9D!”
I wonder if there ever really was a Y-9D?
Anyway, I miss country sausage. There’s nothing really special about it, it’s just very peppery sausage patties, but ubiquitous where I grew up. The nearest it got to nationwide was Jimmy Dean’s Pork Sausage, which was a pretty adequate country sausage. Not like the homemade stuff, but not bad.
Bangers and mash tonight. Okay, bangers and fried potatoes, but close enough.
October 15, 2015 — 10:07 pm
Comments: 14
plus ça change, huh?
I’ve been browsing editorial cartoons tonight (gosh, I’ve wasted an improbable chunk of my life staring at Google Images). Made me fink.
You have to go back a hundred years before the ideas and the artwork strike me as worthy. Like this one, from 1919 (who doesn’t revile “the mad notions of Europe”? Amirite?). Of course, these days you find these old gems mostly in course syllabi for How Our Ancestors Were, Like, Totally Retarded 101.
Editorial cartoons from about the mid-20th C onward are mostly lefty. And ugly. (One exception would be Michael Ramirez, who I think is a flipping editorial cartoon conservative mad genius).
And at some point they stopped trying to persuade the other side (me, IOW) and went straight for enrage. Ideas were replaced with ciphers. Like if they could hang a label on something (“red scare” or “McCarthyism”), they didn’t have to address the issue (whether the government ever was really and truly infested with commies and whether that’s done us any favors).
I don’t know. Maybe cartoons always made somebody mad. You’d have to ask a lefty whether Ramirez cartoons make him irrationally angry. But the modern stuff just seems awfully heavy on snark and ridicule. And they punch down (or at least sideways) more often than they punch up.
October 14, 2015 — 10:28 pm
Comments: 8
Hit by a Buick
The news today has been full of the untimely arrival of the Buicks, which confused me mightily until I saw it in print. Bewick. As in Bewick’s Swan.
Every year, a few hundred of the feathery bastards flee Siberia to balmy England in Fall. Their arrival is a herald of the start of Winter.
A herald. I haven’t checked the woolly caterpillar forecast yet.
Anyhoo, this year they arrived earlier than ever, which everyone agrees is a sign of Deep Shit. It’s one of several Bad Signs for the coming Winter, not least of which that it is effing cold already.
Meh. Not ready.
I sometimes wonder if this is why global warming was such an easy sell in the UK: wishful thinking.
October 13, 2015 — 9:17 pm
Comments: 18
Never let ’em know you Photoshop
I usually get my revenge: instead of letting them run off the flyer (brochure/ad/letterhead) on a home inkjet I take it to the local printer and run it off proper-like, which isn’t so cheap. It cuts down on casually-repeated business.
Anyhoo, tonight I’m stuck putting together a program (or programme, if you’re gay) for work, thereby drastically reducing my chances of playing a couple of hours of Witcher 3.
Um, I mean composing a really meaningful and interesting blog post.
Yeah, that’s what I meant.
October 12, 2015 — 9:47 pm
Comments: 7
More holidays than a medieval monastery
Well, whaddya know? It’s National Poetry Day. Not as compelling as National Badger Day, but I’m home late tonight.
What do I know from poetry? Oh, it’s that impenetrable stuff I skip past when I’m reading a novel, is what. My personal taste runs to saucy limericks (I remind you I lived in Pawtucket for seven years).
I’ll get us started with my favorite:
There once was a woman from Exeter,
So beautiful, men craned their necks at her.
And then the more brave
Would smile and wave
…the distinguishing marks of their sex at her.
Beeyootiful! See you back here tomorrow, six sharp, for Dead Pool Round 78.
October 8, 2015 — 10:01 pm
Comments: 13
Good heavens! Is it National Badger Day *already*?
Well, lookit that. Tuesday, October 6 is National Badger Day (which I’m pretty sure is a totally made up fundraising holiday invented by the National Badger Trust).
In honor of this most artificial of celebrations, here are ten badger facts I totally lifted verbatim from today’s Express:
1. The earliest recorded use of the word “badger” for the animal was in 1523. Before that, it was called a “brock” or “bauson”.
2. “Badger” was originally (around 1500) a word for an itinerant trader.
3. The animal was probably called a “badger” from the badge-like white mark on its forehead.
4. Another theory it that is comes from the French word “bêcheur” meaning a digger.
5. Badgers feed mainly on earthworms of which they may eat hundreds every night.
6. According to an old belief, when a badger bites, it will not loosen its grip until its teeth meet.
7. A male badger is a boar, a female is a sow, the young are cubs and their system of underground burrows is a sett.
8. Interfering with a badger sett is an offence under the Protection of Badgers Act 1992. So is obstructing access to any entrance of a sett.
9. The honey badger, or ratel, is considered by many to be the world’s most ferocious and fearless animal.
10. The word “badger” does not appear in any Shakespeare play but Twelfth Night mentions “brock” once.
Must find out who does badger PR. Weasels could use a bit of that.
October 6, 2015 — 7:10 pm
Comments: 12
Today’s the day! Callooh callay!
This is the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this is the day supermarkets in Britain which have more than 250 employees are required by law to charge customers 5p for a shopping bag.
They can do what they like with the money they collect, provided it goes to a ‘worthy cause.’ One worthy cause might be a charity for providing free shopping bags to Britons pissed off by radical green legislation that keeps making it through Parliament somehow, even though they never win an election anywhere, ever (except Brighton, ’nuff said). Bets are, the Prime Minister’s bobble-headed soft-left wife is behind this one.
The papers have decided on a sarky approach to the general public disgruntlement. And the disgruntled general public is inclined to be sarky right back about the difference it’s gonna make to ‘the environment.’
See, when they did this in Wales, supermarket bag use was reduced by 71%. Which looks like a minor something useful until you reflect that those supermarket bags have been replaced by ‘bags for life’ — which, naturally, aren’t for life. Duh. They use roughly ten times the plastic, cost about ten times as much and last about ten times as long as regular bags. That’s what we call a wash. Except, if you reuse them enough, they pick up all sorts of nifty bugs from your raw food.
Today we went shopping, put our stuff in ‘bags for life’ — and bought a roll of small garbage bags for the kitchen messy bin, where recycled carrier bags used to do. Take that, gaia! Virtue signalling is my new favorite term of abuse.
Truth is, this is just one more pointless, pushy lefty inconvenience in a life made increasingly pinched and gray by neopuritan gesture politics.
October 5, 2015 — 10:03 pm
Comments: 15
Good for a laugh
The next Assassin’s Creed game is set in Victorian London, I guess, because they sent me this promotion tonight: The Nineteenth Century Search Engine.
Fun animation. Good for minutes of wholesome fun! The first search term I tried was “coal.”
Have a good weekend, everyone! We’re overdue for a weekend at home, not looking at any fine antiques but each other.
October 2, 2015 — 10:18 pm
Comments: 5