Tick another box, pls
Please pardon my ruinous neglect of the blog in the past few days; I’ve been cramming for an exam.
At my age. The shame.
Before I get my next (and final) visa, I had to pass a thing called the Life in the UK Test — a Brit trivia test that (by common consent) most Brits couldn’t pass.
It’s only 24 questions (and you only have to get 18 right), but it’s pulled (randomly, by computer, when you sit down to take the exam) from a pool of a thousand possible questions. I had to Hoover up a lot of material in a short time (because if I tried it over a longer time, I’d just freaking forget everything. I remember that much from school). Given that the test was invented under a Labour government, it’s a lot of women’s rights and ethnic issues and how to apply for benefits and what to do with all the reliably Labour-voting babies you’ll be popping out as a new citizen.
So I took the train to Maidstone all by myself today and sat for my exam. I got 24 ones I knew, blew through them in 4 minutes and got 100%. I think. They don’t actually give you a score, just pass/fail.
Anyhoo, now I drink! I’ve got a hell of a lot of statistics to forget…
May 10, 2011 — 9:47 pm
Comments: 37
I wore gaiters to church!
Our parish did the Rogation walk yesterday. Not, technically, Rogation Sunday (that would be April 25), but this service is one of the many that wadded up Roman customs with pagan rituals, put a little Jesus sauce on it and called it a Christian festival…so punctilious observance seems unnecessary.
“Rogation” comes from the Latin rogare — to ask. In rural areas (like what we are) the priest asks a blessing on the fields and the animals. It’s also associated with the ancient custom of beating the bounds — a ritual in which all the boys were marched along the parish boundaries while the men threw them into ponds and briar patches and slammed their heads on boundary rocks and markers.
Hey, no Google Earth. It was the best way to ensure they never, ever, ever forgot the property line.
Sadly, we didn’t have any boys. We didn’t even walk the whole boundary line. We did lead a whole herd of bluehairs across a good few fields of sheep (also, unexpectedly, cows) and we blessed the bejesus out of the lot.
We recited the Benedicite Omnia Opera at them.
Yeah. It was one wand short of a Harry Potter.
May 9, 2011 — 8:11 pm
Comments: 19
ROUND THIRTEEN: will not be as cool as Round 12
Never have I been so delighted to fork over a dick. Never will the Dead Pool sparkle with such joy. All hail Montenegro who sailed to the win with Osama bin Laden.
Let the anticlimactic Round 13 begin:
1. Pick a celebrity. Any celebrity — though I reserve the right to nix picks I never heard of.
2. We start from scratch every time. No matter who you had last time, or who you may have called between rounds, you have to turn up on this very thread and stake your claim.
3. Poaching and other dirty tricks positively encouraged.
4. Your first choice sticks. Don’t just blurt something out, m’kay?
5. It’s up to you to search the thread and make sure your choice is unique. I’m waayyyy too lazy. Popular picks go fast.
6. The pool stays open until somebody on the list dies. Feel free to jump in any time. Noobs, strangers, drive-bys and one-comment-wonders — all are welcome.
7. If you want your fabulous prize, you have to entrust me with a mailing address. If you don’t want the fabulous prize, you’re too smart to be a regular. It takes me forever to put them in the mail, packages go by slow boat, typically take minimum eight to ten weeks and lose the will to live along the way.
8. The new DeadPool will begin 6pm WBT (Weasel’s Blog Time) the Friday after the last round is concluded.
The fabulous prize? Aunty’s Spotted Dick! Dick — it’s what’s for dessert!
May 6, 2011 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 102
Funny — it’s not mentioned in the real estate listing
Great news — H.P. Lovecraft’s Shunned House (AKA 135 Benefit Street, Providence) is for sale! And for less than a million bucks!
Benefit Street is the oldest residential street in the US of A (Williamsburg is older, but is no longer residential); most of the houses along it are 18th Century. So I was surprised to read — if this article is correct — that the street was widened and a whole row of even earlier houses razed to build the current street.
Ol’ 135 really did have a creepy history from the get go. It was built over the graves of a couple Huguenots who had lived on the earlier site. A subsequent mistress of the house went mad and babbled in French — a language she didn’t know. Pesky dead Huguenots — didn’t these people see Poltergeist?
Benefit Street was a dangerous slum for most of the 20th Century. It was just pulling itself up in the late Seventies, when I moved to Providence to go to the Rhode Island School of Design. My apartment was a block from the Shunned House, up a little blind side street called Bowen Street. It was a row of three or four Depression-era houses, each with three identical flats, one above the other. If you got drunk at a party in one, it was the very devil trying to work out where you were.
The whole street is very done-up and posh now, so I’m sure #135 is very nice. Plus — learn French without studying!
Dead Pool is all set up and ready to autopost tomorrow at 6 sharp, Weasel Blog Time. Be there or…don’t be there, I guess.
May 5, 2011 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 15
We wuz robbed
Do you still doubt Obama’s genius? Could anyone else take the greatest PR coup in a century and turn it to shit in three days?
Not releasing the photos. And giving some sanctimonious bullshit waffle about why — before he goes to stand at Ground Zero for his 2012 election photo op.
He doesn’t own those photos. We do. We were wronged as a people and we have the right to see justice done. We watched office workers jump off the top floor of a skyscraper — jump rather than burn — and we have a right to see the dead face of the monster who ordered it.
This viewing of dead monsters has a long tradition. That’s Dillinger up there. My grandmother was one of the thousands who filed past the bodies of Bonnie and Clyde (she said they were dirty — old dirt, like people who hadn’t washed in a very long time).
Call it primitive, but it’s way down in our DNA. Things won’t be right until we see his face. Dead on a slab.
I thought that was the whole point of sending in the SEALs instead of bombing the complex flat.
May 4, 2011 — 9:05 pm
Comments: 46
This is boring
I was going to post about something else tonight, but you just know the moment I do, the feckless White House will release that snuff video and ruin my fun.
May 3, 2011 — 10:21 pm
Comments: 35
Osama be Coolin’
Aw, now, everybody is saying such ugly things today…I guess it’s up to me to post something pretty.
You know what? Today only — nothing but praise for the president. It was a tough, risky call and he made the right choice.
I’ve never been so pleased to lose a dick. Congratulations, Montenegro. Y’all know what this means — new Deadpool starts Friday!
May 2, 2011 — 6:43 pm
Comments: 40
The lovely couple
Okay, when did I morph into the crazy bird lady? The neighbors brought these two over this afternoon; they chopped down a tree, and a nest tumbled out. Near as I can figure, these’re Eurasian Collared Doves, maybe two weeks old.
The internet’s best advice was to put the nest back as close to original site as possible and trust their parents. I did that and sat a discreet distance away hoping for a happy ending. The garden was full of hoo-hoo-hooing doves, but nobody came near the nest.
Then night fell and a nasty storm blew up and…well. Couldn’t leave them to hypothermiate, could I? So they’re tucked up in a box upstairs with a hot water bottle and a cropful of warm chick crumb.
I’ll put them back in the nest tomorrow, and if that doesn’t work…not sure. Find a dove rescue, maybe. I don’t think I’m getting enough food in them to raise them up myself.
As for the other lovely couple, I thought the royal wedding was charming. And if you don’t agree, you’re a poop.
Good weekend, everyone!
April 29, 2011 — 9:48 pm
Comments: 45
In defense of the royals…
Nah, I’m not really into it. Don’t plan to watch tomorrow. Well, maybe the hilight reel.
But my Twitter stream is full of Yanqui sarcasm about the Royal Wedding and I have one invariable rule in life — find out what all the cool kids are doing, and do something else.
Truly, the Brits have an astonishing ability to pull off these huge aristocratic spectacles with military precision, mostly because they let the military handle them. It’s a holdover from the days of empire, I suppose.
Weddings, state funerals coronations…if you watch any of it tomorrow, think of the logistics of putting together all those soldiers and horses and antiquated whatnots and whoozits, and bringing it all off without a hitch.
I post this tonight in case it all goes horribly wrong tomorrow; you can show up back here to point and laugh.
It’s only fair.
April 28, 2011 — 9:59 pm
Comments: 30
FWIW
True story: for several years of my employment (circa 1994 – 2004), my main job responsibility was to convert many thousands of pages of our core tech doc to .pdf and publish them to our field staff, thrice a year. I went to school for it and everything. They useta call me the PDF Lady. Oh, if only I were kidding.
To this day, if Uncle B downloads a particularly awkward Adobe file, he fixes me with a cold and bitter stare.
So here’s what I think is going on. This thing looks to have been created by taking a scan of the original document as it was bound in a book (hence the falloff on the lefthand side)…that scan was then was sharpened — either over-sharpened or converted to black-and-white, fax-style — giving the type terrible black jaggies and a white halo. Note some letters (particularly where typed letters touch parts of the printed form) are grayer. The result was then superimposed over the green patterned background. I’m at a loss to explain the soft gray pencil marks; perhaps they were too pale to trigger the sharpening.
My best guess is that this image was produced by some antiquated, stupid but perfectly legitimate automated document storage and retrieval system. Godnose we in the corporate world were bombarded by startups trying to sell shit like this, particularly in the early years, so there’s no telling how much grossly expensive bad ware was hawked to the government. It was probably intended to “enhance” a scan and superimpose it over a state seal or other legitimizing watermark.
In the absence of any new information, I’m going to say: legitimate and official. Also crude, ugly and utterly uninspiring of confidence. Like an electronic vote divorced from its original paper counterpart, it’s probably real but SO easily could be effed with.
Eh…almost like they don’t want the controversy to die down.
April 27, 2011 — 9:29 pm
Comments: 47