Oh, second Winter, you utter bastard
Oh, I am so tired of this. Ohhhhhh, I am so tired of this. The long range forecast? Wetter and colder.
I have generally liked the weather in Britain. Our little corner of the island is drier and sunnier than the rest. But this year, Summer ended early for us and it’s been this — that there up there in the picture — for months and months.
The chickens are filthy and miserable, the garden is a muckhole, the chicken lady isn’t hatching any interesting chicks until it warms up and I’m wearing wellies everywhere.
Enough. Stahp. Go away.
It’s the weekend, I haven’t anything in particular to say for myself, so…how’s the weather?
March 22, 2013 — 11:38 pm
Comments: 49
Because I’m trying to give you fits, is why
Heh. Sorry to do this to you two posts in a row, but I’ve been screwing around with Photoshop’s .gif animation tools. I’ve resolved to learn all I can about CS6, since paying for it gave me a nosebleed. They changed the interface a little between CS3 and CS6.
This, for those who haven’t been hanging out on my blog for years, is Damien. Isn’t he cute? Gosh, he was an evil fucker.
He disappeared when he was about two, causing my nice blog to go all emo and angsty for a while. Thing is, people all over the neighborhood said they’d spotted him. One lady even took him in and fed for a few days.
Anyway, here’s His Wickedness waking up from a nap when he was just a tiny wee slip of an evil fucker.
March 21, 2013 — 11:35 pm
Comments: 12
Keep this up and he’ll lose weight
Still playing with Blender. Sorry for the longer-than-usual download. And the fact the ball is turning the wrong way. And I messed up the front legs part of his walk cycle.
But the ears, they’re awesome!
March 20, 2013 — 11:13 pm
Comments: 26
This again…
Not my graphic. That’s the Cat Signal from the Internet Defense League. The beacon is lit because that pack of puffed up mediocrities on Capitol Hill are once again taking up The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a steaming pile of legislation that would essentially open up your emails and other data to anyone who could come up with a plausible reason for wanting them. It got knocked down last year, but — like so many dreadful ideas — refuses to die.
The EFF has a good explanation of what it does here. Contact information is here.
I have every faith that the pack of howler monkeys that is the internet will make this bad bill die again. But our lords and masters are so dim, they need to learn this lesson good and hard every time they try.
While we’re a-geeking, I blinked and missed what happened with this one. This morning, Drudge was all over the hacker that supposedly got his mitts on some of Sid Blumenthal’s emails to Hillary about Benghazi. Infuriatingly, the linked was totally about the hack, with nothing at all about the content of the emails.
Now those leaks are gone, and all I get is this Forbes article that says the only people publishing the content are Russian sources that (it strongly implies) aren’t to be trusted. FT said it’s trying to validate the authenticity before it publishes anything, and I haven’t heard a peep out of any other news outlets that were given the material. Hmmmm.
Oh, and if you’re into this story at all, you’ll surely know this already — but the individual who leaked the emails that came to be known as Climategate I and Climategate II has released the password for the whole 220,000 rest of the purloined emails, detonating Climategate III.
None of the new emails I’ve seen are all that interesting, but the cover letter was fascinating. The leaker is apparently an individual and an insider who did this because climate hysteria is racking up a body count. I wanted to stand up and cheer.
I know people in my little community who have gone without heat because they couldn’t afford oil. If that’s happening in my prosperous corner of the world, what is expensive energy doing to the miserable places?
March 19, 2013 — 11:55 pm
Comments: 30
There’s one in every flock
You remember Mapp, right? The crazy chicken? The one with chicken Tourette’s? The one that lays a couple of eggs every Spring and then goes broody, sits on the nest and won’t come off for the whole rest of the Summer?
Welp, there she is. I found her there this afternoon, away from the rest of the flock. Yes, that’s an old flowerpot. It had a lily in it last, I think.
Mapp is no lily. I laughed at her. Then I fetched Uncle B and he laughed at her. Then we took pictures of her. I stroked her and poked her and tried to sweet talk her off, but she stubbornly hunkered down in the flowerpot.
About an hour later, I heard an almighty beGAKking, ran out back and found Mapp happily pecking away with the other chickens, and a fresh egg in the flowerpot.
That’s right, we spent the afternoon taunting a poor chicken trying desperately to lay an egg. Heroes!
Oh, hey, housekeeping issue: I’ve gotten something like a fifty-fold increase in comment spam in the last few days. So much that I no longer screen the spam filter, I just flush it a few times a day. If you posted something that Akismet took issue with, I’ll never know. Apologies.
March 18, 2013 — 10:34 pm
Comments: 20
Another week, another interesting corpse
That’s what I love about Britain — scratch the surface, find an interesting corpse. Or, in this case, dig down eight feet and find fifty thousand plague riddled corpses.
Yes! The Crossrail Project has dug up a plague pit! Well, they think so. They’ve only uncovered thirteen bodies so far, but if it’s the one they’re thinking of (really, they have so many 14th C plague pits to keep track of. What’s a capital city to do?) there are as many as 50,000 bodies to go.
Eight feet down. That really doesn’t seem good enough, does it? It’s in a part of the city that has seen relatively little development (no skyscrapers or anything), which is how it’s remained lost for so long.
It was all over the news tonight. Plague doesn’t survive long in the soil, but they think they may be able to isolate some Yersinia pestis specimens in the tooth dentin. Which doesn’t strike me as very bright, even if they do manage to sequence its genome.
This isn’t the first cemetery this rail project has accidentally dug up. They also unearthed three hundred former guests at Bedlam. Oh, and not long after construction dug up Richard III in a parking lot in Leicester, they’ve dug up a knight in a parking lot in Edinburgh.
It’s like some really twisted game show.
Have a good weekend! Sweet dreams, and don’t dig any holes!
March 15, 2013 — 11:32 pm
Comments: 46
Oh, Amsterdam
Amsterdam’s oldest prostitutes. They’re seventy. They’re twins. And their name is Fokkens. Of course it is.
After fifty years, seven children and and 355,000 men between them, they’re retiring. Of course they are.
Arthritis comes to us all.
— 12:00 am
Comments: 26
Well, there goes my post for tonight
Boo. Looks like that hilarious new North Korean propaganda video about Americans living in tents and cups of coffee made out of snow was, in fact, deliberately written as comedy by something calling itself the North Korea Comedy Show. Who or what that may be is not clear.
I do know they’ve spent the evening talking with lawyers, trying to make their suddenly viral video go un-viral again. So there’s that. You can watch it here. It’s still pretty funny.
Also, Googling around trying to find out who the North Korean Comedy Show is, I found this old article. Which is funny, in a sad North Korean way.
Oh, also – ¡Ay, caramba! We have a new pope! I, for one, am looking forward to saying, “lighten up, Francis” every time he issues a papal edict.
March 13, 2013 — 11:42 pm
Comments: 25
Sheep in a wheelchair
Ladies and gentlemen, sheep in a wheelchair. There you go.
Oh, hey, for some reason, the Freedom of the Press Foundation would like to spread these recordings of Bradley Manning reading a prepared statement, smuggled out of his first hearing. Um, okay!
Not sure what they’re hoping to accomplish. He sounds like an unrepentant, self-absorbed whiny little bitch whose motive for breaking his oath and betraying his country was something like, “because war is H – E – Double hockeysticks.” Particularly when you watch it on a monitor from a comfy office Stateside, apparently.
It’s going to be hard going, making a hero out of this little wiggler.
— 12:00 am
Comments: 56
Wait, I…what? blog?
I just leaned out the kitchen window and took this snapshot. This, actually, is a big improvement. Most of the day, it’s been total blizzard whiteout sideways snow. I could barely make out the poor ewes in the field behind, heavy with lamb. Not really all that much snow, but the wind!
And I’m on Day 2 — right at the misery point — of that cold all the cool kids are coming down with.
If you’ll excuse me, I have drinking to do…
March 11, 2013 — 11:50 pm
Comments: 40