Slappy Bumday, Spilliam Wooner!
What’s that you say? Royal behbeh? No, no, no…much more important: today is the 169th birthday of the man who gave a name to getting your murds wixed.
Reverend William Archibald Spooner was born in London in 1844. He was an albino. That doesn’t have anything to do with anything, but I bet you’re thinking, “holy shit — Reverend Spooner was an albino!” So I led with that. I aim to please.
Spooner was an Anglican priest and a lecturer at Oxford for 60 years. So, a clever man. Which is probably why when he misspoke he didn’t speak gibberish, like you and me. He made a horrible, twisted kind of sense. Like, “it is kisstomary to cuss the bride”. Although the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations contends there is only one confirmed Spoonerism and the rest were made up by his students.
Stupid Oxford Dictionaries. Forever shitting in my oatmeal. Screw ’em, here’s some of my favorites (whoever really said them):
■ A toast to “our queer old dean” instead of “our dear old Queen”
■ He also supposedly informed her majesty that he had in his bosom a “half-warmed fish” for which he meant “half-formed wish”
■ Calling farmers “ye noble tons of soil”
■ “A well-boiled icicle” for “well-oiled bicycle”
■ “Blushing crow” for “crushing blow”
■ And then there’s this: “Mardon me padom, you are occupewing my pie. May I sew you to another sheet?”
Oh, and the title graphic? Our Lord is a loving shepherd.
Also, you can talk about that other obscure British birthday if you want.
July 22, 2013 — 9:50 pm
Comments: 34
We’re having a heat wave
I suppose you’ve all read about Britain’s killer heat wave, the one with a body count of over 700? Look up. That’s it. That’s the real thing. That’s our actual weather forecast for the week.
Last week, it was in the mid-70s and sunny every day, clear and in the mid-50s at night. Or, as we used to call that in Tennessee, “April.”
To be fair, it’s been hotter in other parts of the country that are even less used to it than we are (it is *always* snowing somewhere in Scotland), but I don’t think it’s broken 90 anywhere. Most of the fatalities are swimming related.
So, as we slide into the weekend, what’s the hottest you’ve endured? We used to visit my grandmother every August. She lived in the bayou, on the banks of the Amite River in Baton Rouge. Stepping out of the air conditioning was like being sucked violently into Satan’s armpit.
p.s. What, you thought I was going to go with Barack Obama in a hoodie? Noo thenk yew. I’ve already disrespected an iconic African saint this week.
July 19, 2013 — 10:44 pm
Comments: 48
Vlad the Inhaler
So here’s Putin’s latest photo op: descending into the Bay of Finland in a bathyscaphe to eyeball the wreck of a 19th Century Russian frigate. Because I guess he’s decided that what the Russian people really want in a president is a Bond villain.
Here a sampling of his bizarre macho performances. I did not realize — if the hippies at the link can be believed — that the Siberian tiger he supposedly shot with a tranquilizer dart at a nature reserve was actually a zoo animal that subsequently died of an overdose of anesthetic. Sad, if true.
Can we go back to the days of rule by inbred show ponies, please? At least they were brought up with a sense of tradition and decorum.
July 17, 2013 — 10:48 pm
Comments: 20
Wait a second, *I’m* Neighborhood Watch
Yes, I joined the Neighborhood Watch! I guess that makes me a G. Zimmerman wannabe. Pretty much the whole parish joined up when PC Plod started one last month. We were promised gossipy emails about our neighbors, which have been pretty boring so far, to be honest.
I know what you’re thinking — da fuq? Yes, truly, a Bobby smiling benevolently over Bonnie Franklin, Duke Ellington and a Child of the Corn is really the official logo of the UK Neighborhood Watch. Or was; I think the more recent one is houses with eyes.
I know what else you’re thinking — how much crime can there be, out there in leafy rural England, with the sheep and the chickens and rosebushes? Well, that just goes to show how much YOU know, Mr/Mrs/Miss/Mz Smartypants. We have quite a lot of crime in our sleepy parish, mostly drive-by theft.
Sheep stealing. Gate stealing (scrap metal is very hot here at the mo’). Fuel oil stealing. Equipment stealing. We had a ritual ewe decapitation last Hallowe’en eve. *shakes fist* pesky Satanists!
Some years ago, one of the dimmer sons of the parish kidnapped a local elderly Duchess. Threw her over his shoulder and ran into the night, hoping for…no-one’s quite sure, actually. Whatever it was, he got a custodial sentence instead.
And then there was the fleeing bank robber who rolled his car into the ditch at our notorious bad corner. He ran to the nearest farmhouse soaking wet, pulled some dry clothes off the line, and appeared at the kitchen door in a sun dress demanding breakfast, quite forgetting that farmers are often armed. The daughter of the house chased him across the fields with daddy’s shotgun, screaming, “come back or I’ll blow your balls off!”
Sadly, they won’t let me go on patrol with anything more powerful than bitter sarcasm. I may get to man a speed trap, though!
July 16, 2013 — 10:42 pm
Comments: 45
Don’t despair, my imaginary friends on the internet!
Y’all know I have been down on politics lately. I despair of the weakness and mediocrity of ‘our guys’ as much as the duplicity and overreach of ‘the other guys.’ Well, I read an article in the Weekly Standard this morning that cheered me up a little.
The 25 Republican state Attorneys General are hunting in packs. They’re aggressive, they’re activist, they’re libertarian (whether they call it that or not), they have each other on speed dial and they’re banding together to block the worst excesses of the Obama administration.
The AGs are committed — “ruthlessly committed” is how Pruitt puts it — to obstructing the expansion of the federal government at the expense of the states. They are champions of federalism, the Tenth Amendment, states’ rights, and a defanged federal government. […] Republican AGs regard themselves as “the last line of defense” against Washington and its blob-like tendency to grow. It’s a conceit, but a defensible one.
It’s a trick they learned off Democrat AG’s, who (you may recall) would oft band together to turn companies upside down and shake them for $billions. Once in a while, I have to remind myself there are some very smart people in government, they just aren’t very visible.
Anyway, go read it. This is where Ted Cruz came from — he was one of the scrappy young lawyers in the Texas AG’s office. More like him, please.
The illustrator is Gary Locke. You may recognize his stuff; he’s done many covers for the Weekly Standard, among other clients. Drove me nuts squinting at the tiny thumbnails on the Standard’s site (if you click them, you don’t get a bigger picture, you get a subscription form) until I thought to Google Gary’s name.
Go look at purty art. He does a wicked good Barack Obama, and an excellent David Cameron.
July 15, 2013 — 10:12 pm
Comments: 12
Ridiculously photogenic pullet
Coco, this afternoon. She’s lost all her baby fluff and is starting to look like a proper little chicken. Isn’t she a beauty?
This one’s Uncle B’s. He’s always wanted a little black hen. He has something stuck in the back of his brain about a little black hen in folklore.
So I twiddled around the net for a while looking for little black hens. Turns out there are a lot of them in poems and images. My favorite was a song called Li’l Black Hen by a New Orleans bluesman. And the bluesman’s name was….wait for it…Coco Robicheaux.
He was singing a song about his grandmother’s – his Granmere Philomene’s – favorite chicken, La Petite Poule Noire. Her Little Black Hen. He says his grandma loved that hen, carried it around like a cat, because the tiny bird took on all the hoodoo, all the bad stuff that was floating around, absorbed it, reflected it, and protected the family. The chicken was the family’s talisman and guardian, and while it lived they felt safe.
Yeah. Huh. Uncle B just pulled the name Coco out of thin air and attached it to the chicken. As Monsieur Robicheaux was a medicine man and died in 2011, I am going to assume our bird is him reincarnated. Because, really, that’s the only explanation that makes any sense.
You know, I bet we have 20% less hoodoo already! Thanks, Coco!
Good weekend, folks.
July 12, 2013 — 11:10 pm
Comments: 37
The Steam Sale is here!
The Steam sale is here! The Steam sale is here!
Okay, this is kind of a dumb post, because anyone who cares surely knows and anyone who doesn’t know surely doesn’t care. But the Steam Sale is when they put games — sometimes quite new and expensive games — on a deep discount for a limited period of time. They do it a couple times a year, Christmas and Summer.
I kind of hate this, because I stock up on a shitload of games and then don’t play half of them because somehow I feel…bloated and overwhelmed. Back in my day (she said, hooking her thumbs in her lapels) you bought a game and you played it for, like, a year because that’s All You Had, Missy.
Now I have shit-tons of games and all’s I do is sit on a hillside in Skyrim and pick off bandits in the distance, because I love that place and I have mad crazy archery and stealth skills and I’ve finished all the quests.
Okay. Yes. I bought several games.
July 11, 2013 — 10:26 pm
Comments: 24
Let’s see if I can fob them off with a chicken picture
This girl has taken to laying her eggs in a lavender bush. It’s funny, because technically she is a color called lavender. Also, because she is completely invisible when she’s under there, so it looks as though the bush is shivering and going bok-bok-bok.
Eh, sorry about the lameness of posts lately. There’s a lot going on IRL, and current events still suck all kinds of ass.
Before the week is out, I’ll see if I can’t get a good picture of the babies. They’re starting to look like proper little chickens now. Which is what they are.
July 10, 2013 — 11:21 pm
Comments: 20
back yard artichoke
Well. Not to go all Pollyanna on your asses, but it would seem every variation in weather is ideal condition for something and our shit Winter has had some interesting side effects. Everyone’s roses are spectacular this year (we have…eight, I think). A whole patch of opium poppies have sprung up were they were not deliberately planted (it is legal to grow somniferum in the garden here, but not to harvest). The elder flower was especially impressive all over the county (meaning mucho elderberries in the Fall).
And this guy, my back yard artichoke. Made it through the Winter and is busy growing three heads (as you do). This sucker was at the optimum harvesting age, before the thistle begins to open. Not the biggest ‘choke ever, but sweet and tender.
The perks of marrying a gardener who likes a challenge.
July 9, 2013 — 9:51 pm
Comments: 21
Osama bin Laden in a cowboy hat
Because that happened, apparently.
I sometimes wonder if bin Laden — squatting in front of the TV in his dusty compound surrounded by quarreling wives — would do it all again, just so. That can’t have been the outcome he was hoping for.
Me, I’ve just come home from helping to create another chicken lady. The woman next door has given her chooks to the woman four doors down, and I went to assist the settling in. All went smoothly.
We’re taking over, we sisterhood of chicken ladies, and there’s not much you can do but sit back and b’GAK.
July 8, 2013 — 10:46 pm
Comments: 24