Got $200M to spare?
Check down the back of the couch cushions, will you? On the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, they’re going to auction off over 5,000 items recovered therefrom, and a judge has ruled they all have to go in one, big lot to someone who will put them on public display. I’m not quite clear how a Virginia judge got jurisdiction, but good on her, anyhow.
I’m a Titanicophile — or was, until the discovery of the wreck, and the movie and the salvage and the whole Titanic industry. I have some deeply conflicted feelings about this whole business.
On the one hand, there’s no moral high ground in letting it all rot away and cease to be. I’m all for preserving as much of the past as we possibly can, up to and including digging up the ancestors. The wreck was two and a half miles down — finding it and salvaging any part of it took significant investment and significant risk — of money and real, live bodily harm.
On the other hand, the owner and profiteer is Premier Exhibitions, an organization with an ethical compass stolen from the vest pocket of PT Barnum’s stinking corpse. Their other main claim to fame is Bodies, a creepier rip-off of the sufficiently creepy Gunther von Hagens‘ Body Worlds Exhibition. Er, let’s just say, they felt compelled to put this disclaimer on the Bodies show:
This exhibit displays full body cadavers as well as human body parts, organs, fetuses and embryos that come from cadavers of Chinese citizens or residents. With respect to the human parts, organs, fetuses and embryos you are viewing, Premier relies solely on the representations of its Chinese partners and cannot independently verify that they do not belong to persons executed while incarcerated in Chinese prisons.
So. Huh.
Anyhow, the Telegraph has a great slide show of some of the stuff up for auction.
Happy thoughts, happy thoughts.
January 5, 2012 — 10:51 pm
Comments: 24
Yep, that’s a banjo
So, this is an indie band from Beijing called Shan Ren. It means “Mountain Men” but they have a lot of different, mostly modern Western, influences. This playlist will give you a taste (huh. Amazing how much an electric guitar through a wah-wah pedal sounds Chinese).
Last year, they traveled across Yunnan province filming the locals and recording music. Turns out, most folk music is about drinking moonshine. How strangely familiar.
In honor of that, they recorded this Drinking Song, which I thought was lots of fun. Based on a local folk song, the main chorus means, “you have to drink, whether you want to or not.”
What? Oh, no. If politics wants me to pay attention to it again, it’s going to have to stop sucking so hard.
January 4, 2012 — 11:24 pm
Comments: 21
The United Kingdom of Generally Bonkers
British architect Sir Bertram Clough Williams-Ellis loved the Italian Riviera so much that he built his very own entire Italian fishing village. In Wales.
It took him fifty years (1925 – 1975). You’ve probably seen it — it’s been used as a TV and movie set a gazillion times, most memorably as ‘The Village’ in The Prisoner. When old Sir Bertram died, he had hisself cremated and made into a rocket, which burst over Portmeirion twenty years later in a fireworks display.
But that’s not what I want to talk about.
Four years ago, groundskeepers at the (genuine) 12th Century castle at Portemeirion felled a tree to widen a path and left the dead tree there. Within months, persons unknown had hammered it full of coins. Mostly modern two pence pieces. Like, taken a rock and smashed it against a coin until it was deeply embedded in the trunk. Or, rather, thousands of them.
There are now seven trees on the grounds similarly encrusted in copper.
The estate manager swears he didn’t start it, hasn’t advertised it and has no idea who’s doing it. He did some digging around, though, and discovered there’s a British tradition of ‘wishing trees’ — kind of like wishing wells — dating back at least to the 18th Century.
So. Huh.
January 3, 2012 — 10:53 pm
Comments: 39
One of pre-history’s great WTFs
Okay, so the Orknies are those islands on the North coast of Scotland. Bleak, tiny and cold as witch titty. And eight years ago, archeologists discovered a gigantic Neolithic building complex up there. Presumably a temple complex, because the thing is so huge and weird.
How huge? Well the site — smack between two well-known stone circles — is (I believe they said) the size of four football fields end-to-end (presumably they meant soccer fields, which are even bigger than real football fields). They’ve only excavated a tiny part of it, but scans say there are about a hundred buildings total.
And by buildings, I mean dressed stone buildings with slate rooves and weirdly curvy walls fifteen feet thick. Some evidence of carving and painting on the walls, lots of tools and bits of pottery. Whatever they were doing up there in the ass end of nowhere, they were doing it for a thousand years, somehow keeping themselves amply supplied with workmen, man-hours and quarried stone. Peat for the fires and food for the priests.
Oh, and they found a pit full of beef bones. Testing showed the cattle were raised on fodder with a high nitrogen content — in other words, raised by farmers who used sophisticated fertilizer, presumably manure-based. But — get this — these cattle were all slaughtered at the same, or about the same, time.
They had a beef feast for 10,000 and smashed the whole place up, deliberately. Probably not invaders, because another similarly-constructed hall was then built on the ruins.
And this five hundred years before Stonehenge was assembled.
If you’re in the UK, you can catch a program about it on the iPlayer for another week (sorry, fellow Yanks — I can’t watch Hulu, you can’t watch BBC). If not, you can follow the dig’s own site (excavation ended in August and will begin again in June, but there’s lots of background information). Oh, if you must, here’s an overview from the Daily Mail
January 2, 2012 — 9:15 pm
Comments: 30
I have it on reliable authority that this is poison
I suppose Tic-Tacs are poison if you eat enough of them, but this stuff is made of cherry pits and thus has a bit of cyanide in it (as do most members of the rosaceae family — thenk yew Uncle B for this information). It’s supposed to deaden the nerves at the back of my throat and deliver me from the horrible, racking cough that’s been keeping me up nights for eight weeks now. Got it from a medical herbalist.
Yes, I did see a proper doctor first — with the diploma and the white coat and the cold listen-y tube and all. No fluid in my lungs, so she wasn’t impressed (which makes me wonder why I keep waking up making squeak-toy noises).
Eh. Sometimes, it’s just easier to buy hobbit medicine.
One of these days, I owe you a real post about the NHS. It isn’t nearly as bad as the Daily Mail tells you it is. It’s just not good enough for what it costs.
But not today. I’m still on holiday slowdown. If I don’t see you before Sunday — Happy New Year! Get really drunk and do something you regret!
December 30, 2011 — 11:19 pm
Comments: 67
Another internet myth, exploded
Oh, man…I don’t believe I forgot to tell you this story. It was damp on Christmas Eve, so I let the chickens into the kitchen while I made rolls. I threw a towel over an old chair, and they sat on it, burbling happily, while I kneaded dough.
And then one of them farted.
It wasn’t a prolonged, nuanced affair, but it was a definite blaart. And no, it wasn’t a poop that coincidentally made a noise. This is significant, because the topic has come up on this blog before. You’ll get over a million and a half returns on the Google query “do chickens fart?”
(My favorite is from Google Answers. The question was “Do chickens Fart? if so can you light the fart on fire?” And the answer voted #1 is “your father doesn’t beat you enough.”)
Anyhoo, the definitive answer is NO, chickens do not fart. The site Farting Chickens put the question to 22 professors and got a bunch of blah-blah-blah about incompletely digested carbohydrates and short colons and…well. No, they cried. Chickens do not fart!
Well, Poindexters, there were only the five of us in that room, and SOMEbody cut the cheese. Let rip. Played the butt trumpet. Fired a retro rocket. Popped a fluffy. Stepped on a duck. Baked an ass biscuit. Fill in your favorite euphemism.
I didn’t see who, but my money is on Mapp. She’s the Eric Cartman of chickens.
December 29, 2011 — 10:33 pm
Comments: 62
And this marvelous bird is called a what, now?
It’s official. We’re all turkeyed out for the season.
Here’s Asbo, our outside cat, enjoying a well-deserved leftover. Poor old boy; it was so delicious, it frightened him. He was sure we were giving him the good stuff by mistake and he was going to have an old shoe pitched at him any minute.
Oh, must tell you a chicken story. This time of year — if I let them out at all — the girls put themselves to bed about four in the afternoon. Evening comes, they trundle off, hop up on the perch and I come out a few minutes later and lock everything up.
Well, two days ago, I looked out around 4:15, the two younger girls weren’t anywhere to be seen and the two older girls were milling around outside the hutch. They caught sight of me at the window and came running up, all excited.
So I shoo’d everybody into the run, where I found the two little girls sitting on the floor of the henhouse, miserable. Someone had managed to knock the wooden slat down and there was nowhere to perch. And so the big girls came to get me to fix it.
No shit. It was a total, “what’s that? Little Timmy fell down the well?” moment.
I’m telling you, those damn chickens are smarter than Lassie.
December 28, 2011 — 10:01 pm
Comments: 37
Doom. DOOOOOOOMMMMM…!
Holy shit, have you dipped a toe in the papers since Christmas? I haven’t seen such a doomfest since my Great Aunt Ruth was alive (to the extent she was ever alive).
You know, Uncle B has this theory that everyone is holding it together by brute force until Christmas is over, at which point the whole global financial doo-dah will shriek, burst its corset and spontaneously combust. I’m putting that out there in case he’s right, so he gets the bragging rights (and if he’s wrong, we can all rag on him together).
We’ve got cash, canned goods and armed farmers for neighbors. We’re positioned about as well as anyone can be, comes the shitstorm.
Graphic nicked from The Telegraph, on account of I am doing my best to squeeze a whole week out of the Christmas spirit — which, to me, involves equal parts gluttony and sloth (with a soupçon of dipsomania).
December 27, 2011 — 11:07 pm
Comments: 40
Oooo…I always wanted one of these…!
Uncle B got me a soft new seat cushion, a trackball mouse and three games (Witcher, Deus Ex and Skyrim). I think it’s pretty obvious: he never wants to speak to me again.
Oh, also some enticing bath products, because if I’m going to be a permanent piece of kinetic livingroom sculpture, probably best if I don’t stink too bad.
And this thing, which is one of those wacky plasma orb things. I have ALWAYS wanted one of these, but could never justify buying it. Only, this one’s USB powered! w00t! (I really, really miss being a stoner).
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m sure there’s something I have to…kill or…drink…or rescue from ghouls. Or something.
December 26, 2011 — 11:33 pm
Comments: 35
Merry Ho Ho, y’all!
Midnight in Old Blighty. Uncle B wanted to wish you all a Merry Christmas, but he felt funny doing it in the Dead Pool thread.
So I made him this here post.
December 25, 2011 — 12:22 am
Comments: 60