Happy Thanksgiving from Stinky and the whole flock!
With the colder weather, the older chooks have gotten really crabby. Much chasing and pecking, most of it falling on poor, gormless Vita. So I bought some anti-pecking spray, which is supposed to stop pecking and feather plucking, mostly by tasting bitter.
I figured I’d try it out on Violet first — that’s the off-white one — because she gets a share of the pecks, but she’s utterly fearless. Experiment on the bold chicken, not the shy one. I had no idea — anti-pecking spray is brown, gummy and smells awful. She looks filthy and smells like an old-fashioned BandAid.
So now I have a brown, gummy, stinky chicken. It’s hard to see how that’s going to help. Hell, I was tempted to peck her myself.
Of course we do Thanksgiving in this household. It’s my favorite holiday, and Uncle B didn’t take much persuasion to adopt an extra turkey feast. We do it as an evening meal, though, so I’m still wrapped up pre-mashing sweet potatoes and pre-baking rolls.
Then — let the gluttony begin!
Have a great Thanksgiving, y’all. Don’t strangle any aunties or brain your brother-in-law.
November 24, 2011 — 5:19 pm
Comments: 37
Important sheep update
Sorry for the crappy cellphone pic, but you’re looking at something extremely rare. One of our neighbors woke up to a newborn lamb in September. I asked him how often that happens. “It never happens,” he said.
That’s not, obviously, because sheep are biologically incapable of reproducing at other times of year. It’s because farmers carefully control when rams have access to ewes, so the lambs all come at the same time. In fact, the gentlemen are out doing their duty at this moment.
Rule of thumb, in case you ever need to know: one ram for 50 ewes. Any more than that and the rams fight. Any fewer than that and some ladies get left out. How the rams keep track is anyone’s guess.
Sheep are moved by truck from field to field over the year, everybody in together. So there’s your answer – one of the ewes that didn’t ‘take’ in the Fall got a second chance in the Spring, bumping along in the back of a transport lorry.
I hope they keep this little girl.
Oh, also, we’ve had our first Satanic ritual sheep killing. At least, that’s what the police think. At least, I guess it’s the first.
One of our other neighbors found a ewe in the field, decapitated. Head missing — cleanly removed with one stroke — body (you know, the part that’s worth money) still there. No blood.
Of course, that’s the neighbor with badger troubles.
<shrug>
November 23, 2011 — 11:37 pm
Comments: 20
I don’t usually like sequels…
…but I am LOVING Climategate 2.0.
Yep, it’s the anniversary of Climategate 2009, and the anonymous benefactor who released the first batch of purloined emails has released another 5,000. Also, he’s put a zip file of 250,000 more into the public domain encrypted with a strong password which he claims he won’t release — an insurance policy, a piñata for hackers and the Sword of Damocles, all in one delightful package. (Note to Julian Assange: anonymous leakers not in jail). Same deal as before: dropped on a Russian server linked to comment threads on well-known skeptical blogs.
Follow along, won’t you? The four blogs who were the recipients of largesse:
Watts Up With That
Tall Bloke
Climate Audit
Air Vent
The BBC is already spinning it like a very spinny thing indeed.
I confess, I have a weakness for Scientists Behaving Badly stories. This one is my favorite.
November 22, 2011 — 8:36 pm
Comments: 35
Can’t talk. New banjo.
Huh. First time I’ve ever gotten overnight service on an eBay purchase (turns out the seller has a relative in the courier business).
Yep, this is the banjo I bought by accident. I watch interesting banjos and put in a bid if I think they’re underpriced. It’s usually harmless fun; an underpriced instrument always goes through the roof in the last seconds of the auction.
Not this time. I was all on my ownsome bidding on this one. Oh, well…I got a great instrument at a great price.
It’s such a buyer’s market, I’d put all my dough in underpriced banjos. If I had any dough.
This is an English banjo of the Twenties. It was played in a dance orchestra. As it happens, the seller was able to tell me quite a bit about it and its first owner, which is really weird because he didn’t until I asked. Today. After the sale.
Why not put it all the interesting bits in the description? Might’ve fetched a few more quid. People are so weird.
The pre-War Gibsons beloved of bluegrass players were also originally sold for this market, the orchestral and dance band market of the Twenties and Thirties. They’re loud as hell, because they had to be to hold their own against the brass section.
Which is why the bluegrass boys love them. Earl Scruggs played a Gibson Granada in the Forties which set the standard for what a banjo should sound like. An especially good Gibson with all its original bits will easily sail over $200K.
This one…didn’t cost anything like that, but I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a louder banjo. It is, in the terminology of banjophiles, a hoss.
November 21, 2011 — 9:07 pm
Comments: 41
It’s Crazy Bitch Friday!
Did you see this thing on Drudge? A baby doll that says something that sounds remarkably like “hey, crazy bitch!”
It does, too — but the story is a bit of a put-up job. They play it to shoppers and ask them if they’re outrageously outraged, which the dutifully try to pretend to be for the camera. Except this lady right at the end, who is clearly the crazy bitch they’re talking about.
Many years ago, there was a Po the Teletubby doll that said something suspiciously like unto “bite my butt!” Closest I’ve ever come to soiling myself in public, I was in a department store in downtown London, gave Po a poke, and sure enough…
Oh, also…film has surfaced of the guy who took a couple of shots at the White House. It was taken back in September and he’s wangling for a spot on Oprah. He claims to be Jesus and all kinds of crazy shit, but — funny thing — he doesn’t peg my crazy meter. Usually I have pretty good schitz-dar. I wonder if he’s more Hinckley than M’Naghten.
Oh, also, there’s this crazy dude, who forges works of art and then gives them to museums for free. Just a garden variety crazy dude, apparently.
And finally, from those crazy bitches at the European Food Standards Authority: EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration. They picked a bad time to land themselves on the front page doing something retarded again.
Good weekend, all!
November 18, 2011 — 9:09 pm
Comments: 51
We are building something ever so strange…
Look, it’s me! I’m a naked acid-puking necromorph!
This is the multiplayer Dead Space 2, which is played on servers belonging to Electronic Arts. It’s a fairly long wait before enough people jump in to make up a game (it’s played in two teams, humans versus aliens; you need a good 6-8 people to start) so I listen in on the the chatter of players who’ve left their microphones open.
Now, I realize I’m in Britain, so the closest servers are probably in Europe somewhere, but I’m gob-smacked at the range of voices I hear. Not just European languages…there are quite a few from further afield. Russians and Chinese. Indians, I think. I’m not the best at identifying languages. The voices belong to older people than I would have guessed (or maybe it’s just older people who are dumb enough to leave their mics on). I often hear children and TV in the background.
Thing is, this mirrors my observations in art and music forums: thanks to the internet, we’re cobbling together a weird international monoculture. It’s heavily but not exclusively American. Anime and Manga are powerful influences in the visual arts, for example. Chinese martial arts in gaming.
In many countries, it can only be a tiny minority who have access to broadband and gaming-spec computers. But among those people, we are all sharing a single culture: music, movies, comics, animation…and especially video games. I have no idea what this means, but I’m sure it’s important. And weird. And completely unprecedented.
There are kids in Beijing and Bangalore playing rock and roll, and you would recognize the song.
— 12:06 am
Comments: 20
Hey, how about a tall, frosty glass of…
What the hell…?
Angina?
Mangina?
Well, actually, it’s Orangina (and very nice it is, too), but I have to stop and remember that whenever I open the fridge.
Wednesday is Life Drawing class, so I’ve been spending the last few hours staring at a naked lady. The model was a couple of minutes late, and she swept in with a little old blue-haired lady in tow.
“I have my mother with me tonight. She can just sit in the back, if that’s okay.”
The whole class froze. The embarrassment threshold of British people is generally set somewhere well below sea level. Then a little voice to my right piped, “I’m just going down the pub. See you in a couple of hours!”
November 16, 2011 — 11:23 pm
Comments: 37
When smart people go stupid
Okay, so why are the individual nations of Europe hanging onto the EU with white knuckles, throwing the last of their money down this dry hole? Two things underpin it, one sensible and one not.
They are absolutely terrified of another war. The last war still looms over everything here, fresh and vivid and awful in the minds of pretty much anyone old enough to be in government (all of them, when the EU was being cobbled together).
The not-so-sensible thing? A huge number of those people are convinced that what caused both World Wars was nationalism, by which they mean what an American would call patriotism. They are so sure of this, it’s not even an argument; it’s simply obvious to everyone.
They are horrified when Americans chant “USA! USA!” at sporting events. At best, it’s an appalling Neanderthal faux pas (much as if we were screaming racial slurs). At worst, ZOMG! ZOMG! Shut up with the nationalism, you’re going to get us all killed already!
Seriously. They think they can (and must) break people of being tribal. They think they can unite them all behind the United States of Vague Geographic Proximity. The pictures on Euro banknotes are of generic landmarks that don’t actually exist.
This is why Angela Merkel can survey the break up of European project and casually observe that peace cannot be taken for granted. It’s a perfectly sensible remark to her and her kind. This isn’t an economic union to them, it’s survival.
In reality, the technocrats of the EU have not banished human nature. You won’t stop a Brit poking fun at a Frenchman, or a German looking down his nose at a Greek. People who speak different languages, worship in different churches and have been raiding each other’s stuff since the Ice Age will not willingly pull together in harness for long.
Unless maybe aliens land and start shooting up the place.
November 15, 2011 — 10:55 pm
Comments: 50
…and the winner is…
So, the EU has deposed the democratically-elected leaders of Greece and Italy and replaced them with EU puppets. Um…that there’s called a coup d’état. It’s like the UN toppling George Bush and replacing him with Madeleine Albright.
Holy shit.
I’m speechless.
When Italy said, “excuse us, we’d like to hold an election to replace Berlusconi”, the president of the EU said “This country needs reforms, not elections.”
Criminy buckets.
The president of the EU would be Herman Van Rompuy, the moldy gray leprechaun in the picture, of whom Nigel Farage famously said “he has the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low grade bank clerk.” Never heard of him? Well, he’s the King of Europe now.
You have to remember, the veneer of democracy — even nationhood — is pretty thin over much of Europe. Despite its great age and long history, many of the modern nations of Europe were cobbled together from principalities and city-states, busted up or invented out of nothing quite recently. The switch from monarchy to democracy is a shaky and incomplete project.
Well, this new thing won’t last. It can’t. The math doesn’t work and neither does the human calculus.
The Germans want the Greeks to grow up and act like Germans. The Greeks want the Germans to shut up and keep signing the benefit checks. You can substitute “Northern Europe” for Germans and “Southern Europe” for Greeks throughout.
Oh, man. And I’m going to be standing next to it when it blows.
November 14, 2011 — 10:21 pm
Comments: 41
Just this once
This year, Remembrance Day is 11/11/11. Also, it’s the 90th observance (I can’t make the math work on that, but the nice man who sold me an enamel poppy with “90th” on it told me so).
When the clock strikes 11:00 anywhere near Flanders Fields, you’ll all be tucked in your warm American beds dreaming your dreamy American dreams. Wait — eleven o’clock in the morning? Yeah, I probably will be, too.
So, why poppies on Remembrance Day? The corn poppy (popaver rhoeas) naturally grows on torn earth. We see them along the edges of the ploughed fields around here. In the blasted earth of the Great War, sometimes poppies were all that grew.
Anyway. Yes. Friday (6pm Weasel Blog Time) we will begin the next round of Laughing at Death. I just didn’t want that to be the only thing up here on Armistice Day. Didn’t seem right.
November 10, 2011 — 11:24 pm
Comments: 49