it’s incredibly worrying when the bedbird tucks you in
Very funny. Two monks invent a bestiary. Well, I laughed.
Technically still holiday here. I slept past noon all four days of the long weekend. And you know what? I totally threw my back out doing it. Lying around in bed and sitting around in front of the computer too much.
How in the heck am I going to get up early and hoof it to work tomorrow?
April 6, 2015 — 8:05 pm
Comments: 3
Guess who!
Recognize this monster? No? This is a statue of Lucille Ball in her birth town of Celoron, N.Y. A thing to frighten naughty children with.
See, this is what happens when you stop giving art students years of rigorous drawing instruction and then demand realism from them.
Easter is a major holiday here; four day weekend and everything. So it’s back to loafing for me!
Good weekend and happy Easter!
April 3, 2015 — 7:49 pm
Comments: 19
Well, the SS would take me
And there it is. It’s a color-coded pie chart showing the different components of my ancestry. The charts come in three flavors: conservative (90% confidence, but boringly generic), standard (75% confidence and a little more detail) and speculative (51% confidence but breaks it out by country as best it can).
This bit is wobbly science at the moment. They have to decide at the outset the time period they’re trying to tweeze out of the data. 23andme concentrates on what of your DNA dates from the last 500 years. Other services (and, yes, you can submit your raw data to many other services, some free) looks at ancient DNA, or specifically European DNA, or…well, lots of things. These filters are evolving (and, one hopes, improving constantly).
Anyway, I am (more or less) 99.7% European, of which 46.5% British. A little less Brit than I thought, but I did have a German great grandfather and a French one. Also, apparently, their specific model for British/Irish and French/German is not very good (hence the way all four are lumped together).
What’s that? The other 3%? Those little strips of different color at noon? Um, one each of Ashkenazi, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. That’s, um, not necessarily what it looks like. It may mean 3% of the DNA was too old to slot into a European framework and so pointed to older DNA from nearer the human diaspora. Or it could mean my great-great-great grandmother slept with a mixed race field hand.
You choose!
April 2, 2015 — 9:46 pm
Comments: 11
adorbs
That there is a rescue badger being raised by a retired farmer. She’s raising three on milk and custard creams. Custard creams are a kind of vanilla cookie — when you get ‘tea and biscuits’ here, the biscuit is likely to be a custard cream (or a digestive).
I knew an old man in the mountains many years ago. He was very nearly pure Cherokee Indian, and he surely looked it. He found a baby groundhog once and raised it as a pet.
He fed it nothing but Little Debbie’s Oatmeal Creme Pies. Nothing. But. Because the groundhog loved them so. After two years, it had a seizure and died.
Like, no shit. I think about this whenever confronted with the numinous red man, the archetypal Indian with his spiritual connection to nature and the land. Even a Neanderthal like me knows a groundhog needs to eat a fucking vegetable now and then.
There were more interesting stories in the news, but it’s April 1, so I didn’t trust any of them to be true.
April 1, 2015 — 8:47 pm
Comments: 18
Ook ook
Welp, there it is. My DNA results are just now dribbling in (it’ll be a few days before I have everything), but that’s the number I was waiting for. A bit below the European average of 2.7%, actually. Kind of disappointed. I’ve seen it reported as high as 3.5% in the genetic forums and I was hoping to be Neanderthal as hell.
Other than this, I only have my raw data. But that’s cool — you can take the raw data and upload it to tons of third party analyst programs — places like Nutrahacker, GEDmatch and Promethease — and they’ll sift it for all sorts of shit.
A lot of the results are very weak correlations (a 1.2-fold increase in the likelihood of somethingorother) and very preliminary connections, but they’re updating what they know all the time, so your results are fluid. It’s exciting.
They absolutely nailed the things I already know — eye color, hair color, skin color, high blood pressure, psoriasis. Male pattern baldness (sorry, bro). Many of the things I worried about don’t look as bad as I feared.
More ancestry analysis comes next. I’ll keep you posted.
March 31, 2015 — 9:44 pm
Comments: 21
Any tips, you miserable cheerful bastards?
I’m not a morning person. Mostly, I’m a sulky, sullen sort of person first thing, though I’m occasionally a if you clink that spoon against that cup one more time I’ll rip your goddam head off kind of gal. Usually, it’s not an issue — nobody sees me for an hour at least, by which time I’ve pulled myself together into the adorable friendly creature you all know and love.
Well, Uncle B sees me early, but he tiptoes real good.
Here’s the thing: I’ve got to be at work an hour early tomorrow, with my boss, to learn from a very expensive engineer how to do something complicated on the computer. Worse: our clocks changed Sunday, so I’m an hour behind as it is. So that’s two hours sleep deficit already.
I’ve got a choice between getting up three hours earlier, but having my usual hour to get a grip on myself, or getting up two hours earlier but inflicting myself on the world rabies and all. Also, I’ll be real stupid.
Yes, yes…I’m going to bed early tonight. Any other ideas that don’t involve getting hopped up on goofballs? How *do* you cheerful bastards do it?
March 30, 2015 — 7:54 pm
Comments: 25
Okay, kids — Grandma’s #ready!
Thanks to Wolfus Aurelius for the idea. And thanks to Some Vegetable for “Hillary is the Bob Dole of the Democratic Party!”
Have a good weekend!
March 27, 2015 — 10:11 pm
Comments: 21
Trying to be helpful
You must have seen this today: the words journalists aren’t allowed to use when talking about Hillary. On account of they are sexist or something. This per an unofficial group of Hillary supporters, who may or may not by now realize what a shit-awful mistake it was.
The words are: polarizing, calculating, disingenuous, insincere, ambitious, inevitable, entitled, over confident, secretive, “will do anything to win”, “represents the past”, “out of touch”.
Could they have offered a more obvious list of what they see as their candidate’s most glaring weaknesses? Jesus, people are stupid.
But not us. We’re smart. And helpful. I’ll be we can come up with a lot lot more words and phrases journalists need to eschew when describing Hillary. I’ll start.
Castrating bitch. Butch. Crusty pantsuit. Cankles. Dessicated hag. Lying piece of shit. Harpy. Hambeast. Shrew. Battleaxe.
C’mon — it’s fun!
p.s. Soon as she throws that tattered hat in the ring, I’m’onna try again to make one of my Hillary! posters go viral. This is my hour. I can feel it!
March 26, 2015 — 11:06 pm
Comments: 21
Action Jack!
I am a merciful weasel. No more beards. Have a cat.
We took Jack for his annual checkup and shots. (Aside — do y’all think that’s really necessary? Annual boosters, I mean? It’s one thing to give him his baby shots, but I’m not sure it’s worth hauling him in once a year, he hates it so).
According to the medico, his weight is exactly the same as last time. So, that’s it. He’s not growing. He’s going to be a runty little boy 4eva. With a sweet little pink kitteny face and mad unfocused psychotic eyes.
He’s still a friendly little beast, though. He has a bad habit of making love to strangers and trying to crawl into their cars. Bad enough with the UPS man, but people stop at the end of our drive to make phone calls and exchange drivers and such, so there’s a real worry he might get in somebody’s ride and drive off one day.
So, weird story: we had a tree guy over to look at our drive (we’re overdue for a pollarding) and Jack wouldn’t go anywhere near him. Really, obviously shunned him. Not like Jack at all.
The tree guy tells us animals used to love him. People’s dogs and cats would crawl into his lap and they’d be all, like, “Mister Tibbles has never done that before!” and he’d be all, like, “shucks — happens to me all the time.”
Then, about five years ago, it stopped abruptly. Animals began to avoid him. No idea why. It obviously made him sad.
If it happened more recently, I’d tell him to get a complete checkup right away. But five years is ample time for a serious, personal-smell-changing disease to do him in.
March 25, 2015 — 10:31 pm
Comments: 19
Okay, tell me THIS isn’t an improvement
Looks good on her. She’s got kind of an elderly Jesus thing going.
March 24, 2015 — 9:20 pm
Comments: 16