This is my uke. There are others like it, but this one is mine.
This is my ukulele. My sexy, sexy ukulele.
I shall call him Weenus.
It’s a proper musical instrument (though short of a $5,000 Martin uke). It has a surprisingly sweet tone (short audio clip of it here).
Fun fact: the uke is tuned like the bottom four strings of the guitar (well, it’s not. It’s gcea not dgbe, but the relationship is the same). So if you know any guitar chords, you can play it right away.
And, actually, it’s gCEA, meaning the top string is an octave higher. When the strings don’t go in order from lowest to highest, it’s called reentrant tuning (the five string banjo is tuned thusly, as well). It gives the chords an unexpected quality. You can *try* to make a horrible discordant sound with the uke, but somehow the result still sounds fun.
I hope you had as jaunty and deelightful a Christmas as we did!
December 26, 2012 — 5:23 pm
Comments: 25
Ho ho ho!
Meet up later and compare loot…!
December 25, 2012 — 12:00 pm
Comments: 36
ching-ching-ching-ching
Oh, for heaven’s sake people, they’re JINGLE BELLS.
They’re not butts. They’re not penises. They’re not testicles. They’re jingle bells.
December 24, 2012 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 32
Weasel of Turin
Pff, obviously. Just ran across this in my documents folder. It’s from an old website I did ages ago and then accidentally lost control of the domain name for.
Don’t diagram that sentence. I think you’d have to divide by zero.
December 21, 2012 — 11:02 pm
Comments: 43
Apple tree sex
We watched a program about apples last night. And it was interesting. The British are whoop-de-gaga about apples. They eat billions of them every year, in hundreds of varieties.
So. If you eat a Granny Smith for lunch and then you plant the seeds, the resulting trees will bear apples that are not a Granny Smith. In fact, each pip will grow into a unique tree.
Why is this? For the same reason your second child is probably not a lot like your first and neither of them are exactly like you: apples are genetically complicated. They’re the most genetically complicated fruit of all. There’s a mommy tree and a daddy tree and they each contribute genes in near infinite combination. There are more than 7,000 recognized varieties of apple, which doesn’t count all the unrecognized apple varieties that sucked.
Now, I am a complete horticultural illiterate, so y’all probably knew this already, but I didn’t.
So every single Red Delicious or Pink Lady is grown from cuttings off one tree (or, you know, cuttings off of cuttings off of cuttings) grafted onto a different rootstock. Turns out, we figured out how to graft plants back in the days of the Pharaohs.
The program visited the old lady with the original Bramley in her back yard (Bramley is the most popular cooking apple in Britain). Upwards of two hundred years old and still going strong (the tree, not the lady). When she realized the tree was actually growing in the garden next door, she bought the house next door.
The original Granny Smith, by the way, was discovered by Mrs Smith of New South Wales growing at a garbage dump. Word.
And then there’s the dude who found the Next Big Apple growing on the shoulder of the interstate (well, the A4260. They don’t have interstates here). Somebody cruising down the highway eating an apple, tossed the core and — walla — honking great apple tree with especially nice fruit.
Britons: potty about apples.
December 20, 2012 — 11:37 pm
Comments: 37
Postcards from the Renaissance
Look, it’s me! Freerunning across the rooftops of Renaissance Florence!
Yup, I’m playing my way through the Assassin’s Creed series, now that the first few are older and cheaper. The first one was a little brain-hurty, offing all those Crusaders. But it was awesome to parkour my way through Jerusalem and Acre.
Also, I discovered if you grab a beggar woman by the front of the robe and give her a shove, she falls down and you get to see her underpants. As to why I might want to see a beggar woman’s underpants, this chick was the most irritating indigent ever. “But you don’t understand, sir, I haven’t any munnay!”
Wham! Underpants!
As a nodding aside to current events, of course violent games are dangerous for potentially murderous crazy people. And violent movies. And music. And the next-door neighbor’s barking dog. But particularly games. They’re like dress rehearsals for atrocity. But we don’t really want to live in a world where everyone’s entertainment is tailored for the one-in-a-hundred-million, undescended violent nutcase, do we?
No. We do not. Thank you.
Anyway, I’ve just started Assassin’s Creed II. Renaissance Italy. Leonardo da Vinci has repaired my spring-loaded assassination blade.
Say, who in the HECK thought it was a good idea to start a game with a realistic childbirth scene? I’m a woman of fifty-something, and that shit makes me cringe.
— 12:09 am
Comments: 26
This cracks me up
I don’t know. Maybe you have to live here. But I can totally see the monster pausing his rampage for a refreshing cup of tea and a slice of toast (from a Daily Mail feature on horror movies on break).
Christmas is a week from today. Feel free to be unserious!
Or, you know, feel free to continue being serious, if you’d rather. And if the unserious comments and the serious comments bump up against each other in an awkward, embarrassing way, we can deal with that. Together.
December 18, 2012 — 10:47 pm
Comments: 49
Whoa, hang on
All this talk about re-examining our mental health policy in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting is making me real uneasy. Sure, there’s lots wrong with our current mental health policy and we can talk about that sometime, if you like, but it doesn’t look like Adam Lanza even had a firm, official diagnosis or much of a psychiatric history at all. Only his mother could suspect what was going on in his head, and even she probably had no idea how fast he was sliding away until he emptied a clip in her face.
Without even thinking hard, I can come up with six people in my circle of acquaintance who show at least as much mental disorder as it appears Lanza did before he came unstrung.
Some have a psychiatric history, some don’t. I don’t think any of them have a police history. They all did well in school. They all have held jobs (if not for long, sometimes). Same for personal relationships. They can all drive a car, shop for groceries, pay a light bill. Some still live with their families, some are entirely independent. Several have easy access to guns.
They’re also, clearly, barking. They make my spidey sense jingle-jangle-jingle. I wouldn’t be surprised if they all lived out their lives — if not entirely smoothly, at least without dramatic incident. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see any of them on the news some day for a very bad reason.
But what do you do? They’re (mostly) functional adults. “He gives everybody the jim-jams” is not a diagnosis. There is no medication for “something ain’t right with that boy, but I can’t put my finger on it.” You can’t lock somebody up or take away her civil rights because she gives you the creeps.
By far the best take on the whole thing so far was in, believe it or not, the Daily Beast.
Feh. I hope we can get around to being all Christmassy some time this week.
December 17, 2012 — 11:33 pm
Comments: 31
Bleak
I was going to soldier on and post something in my usual vein, but that felt all kinds of wrong.
So. Shut up it is, then.
One thought. Ace is on about something that I’ve been saying for years: if you want less of this kind of thing, watch your language (I’m looking at you, media). Stop describing these shooters as evil and monsters. They love that shit. This is exactly what the mass-murderer wanted, and what his imitators want. To be a huge scary monster. To be a horrible, shocking beast.
Not a loser. Not somebody who couldn’t make friends or get a good job or keep a girl. Honest to god, these guys think what they do makes them rockstars. The dead kids are just props on his stage.
I guarantee you, there are people sitting home tonight watching the news and thinking, “yes. I want some of that. That’s just how I want to go out.”
December 14, 2012 — 10:30 pm
Comments: 63
Pucker up, Vicar
So we got a notice in our box to come help decorate the church for Christmas. It asked us to bring, “holly, ivy and evergreen fronds.”
Uncle B says, “did you notice what’s missing?”
And I’m, like, “no.”
And he says, “mistletoe.”
Mistletoe: not welcome in the Church of England. It was a big Druid thing, so the church is not cool with it.
Except York Minster, where the Dean hangs a sprig of mistletoe above the altar on noon, Christmas Eve.
Because, England.
December 13, 2012 — 11:59 pm
Comments: 27