Happy Solstice!
‘Tis the Solstice! And you know what that means — Cosplay for Seniors at Stonehenge. Please enjoy the Daily Mail‘s photo essay on same. Now don’t you feel more dignified?
Also in the Mail, Are Chickens Smarter than Toddlers? I take their point that chickens are not stupid, I surely do, but I think describing them as having an innate grasp of structural engineering is a bit rich (this because chickens prefer diagrams of workable machines over ones that violate the laws of physics, would you believe). I’ll leave you to decide if you’d cross a bridge design as approved by Mapp.
First day of Summer was damp and cold here, but next week it’s going to be…damper and colder. Stupid global warming.
Enjoy the weekend, folks!
June 21, 2013 — 8:54 pm
Comments: 25
My chicken has fleas
I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned it before, but Mapp has gone broody again this year. Like every year. Right on schedule. Laying season comes, she squeezes out half a dozen, and then locks herself in her room, screams at everybody and won’t come out for three months.
A couple of times a day, I take her out and put her in the grass and make her eat something. I had a neighbor over this afternoon to gawp at the babies. When I pulled Mapp off the nest, neighbor peered into the nest box and said, “it’s crawling with fleas!” And it was.
Chicken fleas. Who knew?
Time for some diatomaceous earth.
Diatoms, for those who have long ago forgotten middle school life sciences class, are microscopic, aquatic algae with beautiful silicate exoskeletons, like tiny crystal paperweights. (Paperweights! Not very poetic, but I’m going with it).
In some places in the world, old busted dead diatom skeletons have settled together to form a soft sedimentary rock that crumbles into a fine floury powder. This is diatomaceous earth, and it has a number of interesting uses.
One of which is insect control. You can sprinkle it around the chicken house, the perch, the run, even the grass and it will kill tiny bugs. It’s perfectly safe for the birds — in fact, it’s recommended to put up to 10% food grade DE into their feeds for intestinal parasite control — but it’s hell on insects. I’ve heard different descriptions of how it works. Some say it abrades the outside of the bug, causing it to dehydrate. Other say they swallow it and it cuts up their little innards.
Which is why I haven’t used any before. It’s one thing to poison a flea, it’s another to feed your local bugs broken glass and razorblades.
June 20, 2013 — 11:08 pm
Comments: 28
Royalty, then and now
Not trying to make any profound point here, I just happened to see these two pictures within the hour.
The bottom shows our lords and masters at the G8 summit today, looking every inch the shabby mediocrities we know them to be.
The top shows nine inbred show ponies gathered for the funeral of Edward VII in 1910. Standing, King Haakon VII of Norway, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, King Manoel of Portugal, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, King George I of Greece, King Albert of the Belgians. Seated: King Alfonso XIII of Spain, King George V, King Frederik VIII of Denmark. They probably share more genetic material than Stepford wives.
Not sure I have a preference. On the one hand, if you’re going to lord it over me, it helps if you treat me to a little theater. Shiny boots, awesome whiskers. On the other hand, no. No, I want to take each of these swaggering hams by the back of the neck and slam his or her face repeatedly into a giant pile of mashed potatoes while chanting You. Are. Not. Special.
Whoo-pah! I think I might be a republican.
June 19, 2013 — 10:34 pm
Comments: 33
Backing into the news
Aw, Vlad and Barry don’t look like BFFs, do they? I love this picture. Lifted as is from this Telegraph article on the dress code for the G8. ‘Smart casual.’ Shit thee? I do not.
The news (including the punditry), still making me crazy mad at the moment. I avoid things that piss me off, especially if I’m helpless to do anything about them. But I don’t want to ignore news completely, lest something important sneak up behind me and smack me upside the head. So I basically go to all my old news sites and scan the headlines, but I don’t read the text unless it promises to offer me a crumb of comfort. A scintilla of schadenfreude. A fragment of fuck right off.
So, what about youse guys? Anyone want to share news-ignoring strategies, or perhaps links to some especially uplifting reads?
June 18, 2013 — 9:45 pm
Comments: 45
So, we got buzzed by this thing on Saturday
Last airworthy Vulcan bomber. After the Trooping of the Colour, where members of the armed forces drop by to wish Her Maj a happy birthday, this little number (XH558 to his friends) zoomed down to Hastings and then up the coast and right over our heads.
It was billed as the last flight of the Vulcan, but engineers have since found a way to strengthen the part of the structure they were worried about. So, not the last, but it doesn’t have a whole lot of juice left.
Not RAF. It’s in private hands. It was built in 1960 (like me!), decommissioned in the Nineties and bought by a private family, in unflyable condition. Since restored entirely by private donations. First flight after restoration: 2007. It takes eye-watering money and volunteer work to keep this thing going, so it stands a real tribute to the love Brits have for their feats of engineering.
It was a beautiful thing. It circled over our heads for a while and then took off up the coast with a roar like the last judgment, the kind of sound you feel in your breastbone.
Oh, the poor sheep.
June 17, 2013 — 10:30 pm
Comments: 35
Herro!
First day allowed out in the grass. +1. Loved it lots. Would recommend to other chickens.
Carefully supervised, of course. They got lunged at a few times, pecked once or twice. Mostly ignored.
Yes, Vita got her licks in, I’m happy to say. It was great to see her stick up for her position at last. Nobody was hurt, just lots of squeaking and flapping. And peeping and burbling and scratching and pecking. A good time was had by all. There will be video here, as soon as it’s done uploading. Which will be, like, another hour even though it’s just a minute long, because our upload speed sucks.
Yes, fuck it, I went with chickens again. Good weekend, folks!
June 14, 2013 — 9:56 pm
Comments: 31
Chicken drama
That bird on the other side of the mesh is Vita, the most beautiful chicken in the whole parish. She is also, no doubt about it, the very bottom of the pecking order. All the other chickens (including the tiny black one in the corner) pecked and belly-bumped and fought their quarter to claim their spot in the poultry hierarchy. It’s a somewhat fluid thing, the pecking order — except for Lucia (top hen) and Vita (bottom hen).
Vita never tried. She never fought. She gave up from day one. I looked out the window one day to see her lying motionless, beak-down in the grass, the top two chickens taking turns giving her a good hard peck. I though she’d died and they were trying to revive her, but no…she was just lying there letting them demonstrate her position on the social scale.
Sometimes, she goes off by herself for a little wallow in the sunshine, solo. Although these days, her role is so firmly established, nobody much bothers to give her a hard time any more. She’s kind of Invisible Vita, bottom chicken. She breaks my heart, that chicken.
Until the new babies. They’re in their own run in the daytime now, so the other chickens can see them and get used to them, but not get at them. Oh, Vita is very interested in the babies. Yes indeed. She’ll stare at the chicks for a few minutes, then bang give the mesh a peck and make them jump. I think Vita doesn’t want to be bottom hen any more. But the piebald, Maggie, and the little black bird, Coco, are feisty little so-and-sos and won’t give up without a fight.
It’s going to be an interesting Summer.
June 13, 2013 — 11:14 pm
Comments: 17
I came here to post stupid Photoshops and chicken blog, and I’m all out of stupid Photoshops
That’s it. It’s official. My brain has vapor-locked. I am now so full of rage and despair I am literally incapable of tweezing out a single off-pissing outrage to post about today.
Some think A scandal was released to distract from B scandal, and C scandal was leaked to kill B scandal, and D scandal was…what the hell are we up to now, N scandal? I think, probably not. Because they all boil down to one scandal: the government has grown incalculably huge, mighty, incompetent, partisan and, apparently, invulnerable and we — you and I, dear readers — are its natural enemies.
Most of the foot soldiers on our side of the fight are acting like the NSA is holding something juicy over their heads and demanding they act stupid.
That’s not a real accusation.
Well, except Lindsey Graham. I bet they have an awesome file on Miss Lindsey.
So I’m going to sit over here and chicken blog until the fog clears a little. Join me, won’t you? Or pick a scandal and bitch about it. Either one is good.
June 12, 2013 — 10:53 pm
Comments: 31
Ow.
Houston couple had tequila, argued before man fatally stabbed by stiletto heel
Yeah, I got nothing. Only, I cannot beLIEVE anyone on the right wants to debate whether or not Snowden is an asshole. I so totally don’t care. Don’t care. Is the government hoovering up domestic phone metadata or not? All else is noise.
June 11, 2013 — 10:18 pm
Comments: 15
If only there was a way to narrow the search down a little
I know, I know…we’ve known forever the spooks were data-mining. But not on this scale. If nothing else, I didn’t think private companies would cooperate with the government so happily. If nothing else, the technology wasn’t there to store and sift the sheer volume of data. Not until recently.
To hear Jim Sensenbrenner tell it, if the Feds were interested in somebody, they were supposed to get a warrant for his phone records (he wrote the Patriot Act, he should know). What they did instead was get a warrant for everybody’s records, so the records would be around in case they get interested in somebody later.
I have no words.
How carefully the higher ups have explained to us that no-one is listening in on phone conversations. Maybe, but the metadata is plenty bad enough. No, it is not okay for the government to know who’s calling a shrink or a clap clinic. I remind you, leaking shit is Obama’s signature move. In future, all of our candidates may have to be Mormons – nobody else is clean enough.
And for all that technological hoo-ha, they missed the Tsarnaev brothers – and Major Hasan – who should have rung more alarm bells than Quasimodo. I guess two hundred billion data points a month isn’t the same things as intelligence.
On a happier note, if you lose somebody’s phone number, you can file an FOIA request.
June 10, 2013 — 8:35 pm
Comments: 35