Rockin’ that walker, granny
We went to see 10cc in Canterbury Saturday night. Canterbury is a long old haul for us, but it’s a great place and we don’t go often enough.
Remember 10cc? I’m Not in Love…Rubber Bullets…The Things We Do For Love. They were big in the Seventies.
They still had one member from the very first configuration, two who had been with them since the early Seventies, and two who have played with the band for a decade. It was a tight, impressive performance in a good sized auditorium that was very nearly sold out. Mucho recommendo, if you’re in the UK during the rest of their tour.
I don’t know why I was shocked — possibly because I’m stupid and innumerate — but I was pretty much the youngest person in the room. Blue hair and walking sticks as far as the eye could see.
Funny thing about that. By the end of the performance, every old crock in the auditorium was upstanding, clapping, stamping and rocking out. I think that had a leeetle something to do with the beer and wine they were selling in the lobby. I saw convoys of oldsters slipping off for reinforcements.
Still, it warmed my heart to see them newfangled mechanical hips working out so well.
February 9, 2015 — 11:45 pm
Comments: 11
Peppercorns, bitchez!
500 grams of Rye Spice Co’s finest Piper nigrum. This is what chemical dependency looks like, folks.
It takes me a couple of years to blast through one of these babies. This will be the third I’ve bought since I moved here. (FYI, the first was around £5, the second was £6-something, and this one was £8-something). My favorite peppermill was actually sold in a Turkish shop as a coffee mill — one of those cylindrical brass things — and it makes the coarsest pepper I’ve ever seen.
Pepper all the things!
February 5, 2015 — 11:18 pm
Comments: 38
Political correctness run ahhhh…oh. Hm.
So there’s this pub in Staffordshire called the Labour in Vain, and this is their sign. They’ve recently changed ownership and the new management is being asked to reconsider the signage.
If you turn your head to one side and squint, you can kind of see what the problem is. Though gramps is actually manning the pump handle and not a rubber hose, as I had originally thought.
Though Britain has more than its share of PC police, a fair bit of this kind of iconography is still around (see: golliwogs). Their history is so different from ours. I guess that explains it. Though there have been sub-Saharan Africans in Britain since Roman times (or at least one, anyway), they were uncommon until amazingly recently.
Britain began encouraging immigration from Jamaica in the Fifties, to help fill a shortage of bus drivers and construction workers. One old lady confided in me that she had never seen a black person until she was a teenager. A black man moved into her London neighborhood, and they would drive around and around the block hoping to catch a glimpse of him. That’s pretty much within my lifetime.
Though it was still too much for Liz the First:
There were so many black people in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, that in 1596 she demanded that they be expelled from the country.
There was a fear that they might be taking jobs away from English citizens and also a concern that they were ‘infidels’. Yet another edict from the Queen, at first it brought no action. However it was then followed up by a Royal Proclamation, issued in 1601, and a Lubeck merchant, Caspar van Senden, was licensed to remove all ‘negroes and blackamoores’.
And that, my homies, is quite enough of that.
February 4, 2015 — 11:16 pm
Comments: 6
hoo boy
So, Isis put that Jordanian pilot in a cage, poured gas on him and burned him alive with a good quality camera rolling?
Link goes to Breitbart London. There’s one still image showing a man standing in a cage with fire to his knees; nothing too traumatizing if you don’t think about it too much. I would recommend not following their outlinks to the actual video. Not that I’ve done it, but there are some images I’ve put it my head that I would really rather I hadn’t. Stupid internet.
These are people who attract new recruits with beheading videos. They’re looking for people who think “say, that’s for me!” when they watch a film of someone’s head being sawn off slowly.
Yeah, it’s not one clean whack with a sword. That’s one of those pictures I wish I hadn’t put in my head.
So, let’s face it: we’re looking at a bunch of guys who would be freelance serial killers if this whole ISIS thing hadn’t come along for them. Not that I’m letting Islam off the hook — it’s clearly a religion that lends itself to militancy — but it’s pretty obvious they are working to gather an army of perverts and sick fucks.
It seems pretty unlikely we’re going to go in and kill them all. But can we at least keep them bottled up over there until they start killing each other?
February 3, 2015 — 9:22 pm
Comments: 13
Okay, who woke up the Vikings?
Iceland is going to build its first temple to the Norse gods in a thousand years. Their high priest admits he doesn’t think his congregation believes in a one-eyed god on an eight-legged horse, it’s more about celebrating life’s rituals in a way that acknowledges their history. Weddings, comings of age. That sort of thing.
I can see this idea catching on. It’s more or less how I approach the church myself.
Oh, and I found this: some Aussie did analysis a few years ago on Viking bones dug up in the North of England and found half of them were women. Sadly, they probably weren’t warrior princesses. Though one woman was buried with weapons, most were not and it stands to reason they came in as settlers.
The most badass illegal immigrants EVAH.
Completely unrelated: Google Earth Pro is now free. Used to be a few hundred bucks a year. Pro gives you things like four times the print resolution and tools for measuring area. I just tried to sign up for a license, though, and got ‘technical error’ so they’re probably being hammered. I’m’a stick with it until I get it — I *love* Google Earth.
Happy Monday, y’all!
February 2, 2015 — 10:31 pm
Comments: 8
Brrrrr…
Ohhhhh…check out this little slice of toe-curling, butt-clinching shame. Mojo posted a link in the thread below; it’s from the White House’s blog. What your government thinks of you.
Is that the target demographic for Obamacare, or is it representative of the sort of people who work in Obama’s White House?
If you can’t make it out in reproduction, the artist is named Carolyn Belefski and she gives her website as carolynbelefski.com. The link goes to a blank BlueHost holding page. The forlorn wisdom of low expectations.
Good weekend, y’all!
January 30, 2015 — 9:41 pm
Comments: 26
Free Dippy
This is Dippy the Diplodocus — though whether anyone called him that before he was embroiled in controversy is a matter of, um…controversy. He’s been in London’s Natural History Museum since 1905, a gift from Andrew Carnegie to Edward VII. He was moved into the Wal*Mart greeter spot in 1979, where he has delighted and inspired school children for 35 years.
And he’s coming down.
The Museum is having a bit of clear up and the issue with Dippy is, he ain’t real. He’s a painstaking plaster cast (or as one Independent writer put it its ‘very existence is a malicious lie’) of a diplodocus skeleton that was dug up in Wyoming in 1898. The original is in Pittsburgh.
Haha, just kidding! The real reason is, they’re replacing him with the skeleton of a blue whale because gaia and shit.
The change is part of a ‘decade of transformation’ planned at the museum by its director, Sir Michael Dixon.
Explaining the decision, Sir Michael said: ‘As the largest known animal to have ever lived on Earth, the story of the blue whale reminds us of the scale of our responsibility to the planet.
Blahblahblah…challenge the way people think…never been more urgent…under threat…species and ecosystems are being destroyed…poignant reminder…make a real difference. Boo! Phooey! Bring back the plaster dinosaur!
There’s a hashtag and shit, but it’s hard to turn an ecowarrior. Dippy is doomed.
January 29, 2015 — 10:31 pm
Comments: 15
Fresh meat
I overheard somebody say this today: “we really need more energetic, younger people to join — people in their 50s and 60s.”
Amazingly, it was not being said about me nor by my employer. But I am in that magic demographic and I’m beginning to understand why my new boss was so chuffed to find me. For I am younger and energetic.
This is a county full of ancient things. It’s a great source of both scholarship and tourism, and hence our biggest moneymaker (next to sheep, of course). And the tending of ancient things is mostly done by ancient people. The local scene is run by a sort of geriocracy, people in their seventies and eighties. For the most part retired and, for the most part, volunteers.
Vital to this lifecycle is pulling in younger people and training them to take your place before you fall off the perch. It’s like a whole ecosystem. It’s the Circle of Life, Golden Years Division.
Docents in the museums. Guides in the National Trust houses. Local history researchers and writers. You mostly have to be of a certain age to be into those things, and you mostly have to be retired to have time to do them. And you mostly have to have a decent pension to afford to do them as a volunteer.
I’m not a volunteer, but I reckon I get paid one hour in three. And I’m what passes for a kid in this world. It’s kind of nice to be in the apprentice class again.
Oh, the picture? No idea. I did a Google images search of “old ladies” and those four Victorian dames brandishing bananas was on the first page.
January 28, 2015 — 11:22 pm
Comments: 16
D’awww…
These little dudes emerged for the first time today. There are three of them, leetle baby Sumatran tigers. They were born January 2 at Chester Zoo.
I’m fobbing you off with this cuteness on account of I am doing my taxes tonight. This is relatively easy, mostly because I make next to nothing, but it does include freelance monies from several different sources.
Math, in other words. Fucking math.
January 27, 2015 — 9:31 pm
Comments: 23
A small thing, but interesting
There was a demonstration in Dover today. A group turned out to support the truck drivers who have the extremely unfun job trying to move goods from Calais to Dover without arriving covered in illegal immigrants, like a mama ‘possum.
The group protesting illegal immigrants is described as “far right” for no obvious reason except they always are described that way. The counter protesters who turned up are always described as “anti fascist” — which is the way they choose to describe themselves. If those twits get to self describe, shouldn’t the ‘far right’ people get to do the same? They’d probably rather be described as patriots or something, don’t you think?
Unite Against Fascism (UAF) are a buncha Occupy-style peripatetic thugs, by the way. It looks like they outnumbered the righties, and it looks like the cops outnumbered them both. So this was not a big deal. A little deal. An interesting little deal that shows some of the cracks forming in our multicultural society.
The report speaks blandly of “arrests”. Eyewitnesses (scroll down to the comments) said all the violence and all the arrests were from the UAF types. Also note the way the votes are going on the comments.
Anyone can vote, by the way. You don’t have to register. Go on, try it! It’s fun!
January 26, 2015 — 10:42 pm
Comments: 16