Again, not very original
This is part of my mad scheme to make Grok do some of the heavy lifting for me. I asked it for a toddler sitting on a pile of cash. For some reason, it kept adding British things, like the Houses of Parliament in the background. Which is weird, because my VPN has set itself to the Netherlands tonight.
What I’m saying is, I have to spend time scrubbing the AI out of it, but it’s still so much faster than starting from scratch.
p.s. if you want to know if someone has done a careful P’shop job, look to the edges where two layers meet. I’m sporting some pretty sloppy edges here, though fortunately I think it’s too small to see.
March 3, 2025 — 7:24 pm
Comments: 5
I hate these stinking things
Are they doing this over there yet? Used to be, they didn’t want you recycling the lids with the bottles. Now they do. And to make the point, after you unscrew the lid, there’s a little tag of plastic that still connects it to the bottle.
Which is stupid because OF COURSE I recycle the lid along with the bottle. The only way I don’t overfill my recycling bin before they take it (every two weeks) is to burp the air out of the bottle and then screw the lid on tight.
After getting the lid off, you pull and twist and pull and twist until it pops loose suddenly and showers everything with tonic.
What? Yes, my life is that boring today.
February 27, 2025 — 7:24 pm
Comments: 9
Haven’t made up my mind
I’m test driving this news aggregator at the moment: ground.news. Its gimmick is that it gives you the headlines, and each one has a little graph underneath to show how many outlets have reported it and, of them, which were on the left, which are in the middle and which are on the right.
No, I haven’t done a deep dive into what they call the middle. Precious few news sources I would call centrist, but hey ho.
Their real gimmick is a feature called Blind Spot that highlights stories almost exclusively covered by one side or the other. Interesting.
Main downside: you have to pay. The three tiers are $9.96, $29.88 and $99.96 a year. I figured for less than ten quid, I’d give it a year.
No, I don’t know the difference between the three tiers. I know I get to see a limited number of Blind Spots is all.
The joke is, their analysis of my reading habits says I’m reading more left wing sources. Of course I am – I get my right wing news in dozens of places. I’m here to find out what lefties are saying.
I love news aggregators and I’ve always wanted one that told me what the left was saying without making me subscribe to the Guardian. I’ll let you know how it goes.
February 25, 2025 — 6:48 pm
Comments: 6
A Monday kind of a day, really
Kind of a weird story. The van full of fireworks belonged to the man who owns the home it was parked in front of. There doesn’t seem to be a sense that he’s the one who set it on fire, though there’s nearly nothing about him at all in the article.
If you knew it was a van full of fireworks (and how would you know that?), what method would you use to set it on fire (unless it was unlocked, maybe?).
A slim white man was seen fleeing and neighbors have apparently been complaining about ‘anti social behavior’ lately.
Reading BBC news is weird. You always get the sense there’s a lot more to the story and the BBC knows it and is by-god not going to tell you about it.
Like this one: Teenager dies after car overturns at petrol station. What…? How do you even…? He had a front seat passenger with no injuries.
February 24, 2025 — 6:38 pm
Comments: 3
It’s tumbling like a tumbleweed
I can’t resist stopping to look every day now.
In the thread below, Pupster called me up on using the Britishism “rubbish”. When I first moved here, I swore I’d never shift my American vocabulary. British words sound so awful coming out of American mouths.
But some things you have to adopt. If you tell people over here you’re going for gas, they’ll think you mean propane.
Rubbish I picked up because I like it, but when I say it out loud, I roll the R. Rrrrrrrubish! Try it. It’s fun!
Uncle B and I had some terrible arguments over language, back in the day. Did you know the British meaning of “slut” is “an unclean or slovenly woman”? Yeah. That was fun.
Fans of American hegemony will be happy to hear that Microsoft applications quietly change British Spellings to American ones without asking (I figured out how to turn that off once, but it keeps coming back).
But over time, I forget which is which. Sometimes, when I hear a soft Irish accent on the radio, I think it’s an American (clearly where our modern dialect comes from). I’ve been here seventeen years, y’all.
Oh, y’all. I lost most of my Tennessee decades ago, but I admit I sometimes practice it when I’m alone. I’d hate to lose my ability to speak cornpone.
February 20, 2025 — 7:46 pm
Comments: 13
damn.
I hate my Google calendar. I’m also totally dependent on my Google calendar.
Excuse me. I have to go take the rubbish out.
February 19, 2025 — 7:21 pm
Comments: 12
I know him!
Same shopping cart, same bridge. The running water has flipped it over and it’s waving its little wheels in the air.
When I posted about finding a fridge in the crick yesterday, it put me in mind of a news article from years ago – some old Tennessee redneck saw the face of Jesus in a dead fridge on his porch.
I went looking for it, and – holy geez! – the number of things people have seen the face of Jesus on are astonishing. Mold. Toast. Several refrigerators. A dent in the side of a truck. Bacon and eggs.
Toward the top of the list was this article from Popular Mechanics. It’s about how a forensic science team recreated the face of Jesus by examining contemporary skulls from near Jerusalem. I remember reading it in 2002.
Reading it through, I thought – “hey, I know that guy!” No, not Jesus. Richard Neave, the leading facial reconstructionist on the team. He’s a member of my little local art club. Retired down to the coast. He looks considerably older and frailer than that now.
One of my true crime books from the Eighties described him as the foremost facial reconstructionist in the world. He was tickled that I knew that.
If you do an image search on “face of Jesus” you’ll get mostly serious links. For the funny stuff, Google “face of jesus on the side of a refrigerator” and it will call up other stuff, too.
p.s. You do not want more information on the miraculous chunk of blue ice that fell from heaven and landed in Tennessee. It was what you think it was.
February 18, 2025 — 6:50 pm
Comments: 4
The universal human impulse to throw shopping carts into running water
All kinds of garbage, actually, but particularly shopping carts. And bicycles.
When I hiked a lot, I was astonished at the things I used to find in the woods. Like way, way back in the woods. A whole-ass engine block was one.
We lived beside a creek for years and were forever finding garbage in it. I remember a refrigerator once. They could have dumped it anywhere along our backroad, but it was always into running water.
That’s got to be something deep in the human psyche.
Today, as I came over the bridge where I took this picture, there were two boys playing a line into the water.
“What on earth are you doing?” says I.
“Magnet fishing.”
“Oh! For scrap? What’s the best thing you’ve ever pulled up?”
The lead boy looked excited and said, “a bicycle wheel!”
February 17, 2025 — 6:13 pm
Comments: 10
Huzzah!
Happy Valentines, everyone! Long time readers will recall that February 14 is also our wedding anniversary (our 16th) and my blogaversary (my 18th). Sometimes we buy ourselves an antique to celebrate, but this house is currently so stuffed full of furniture (we inherited some) that we’re just going to go out and stuff our faces.
Image recycled from my tenth blogaversary post.
February 14, 2025 — 5:13 pm
Comments: 15
And the best bit is, we made it ourselves
See that happy, fluffy cloud in the upper right corner? That, my friends, is several years’ accumulation of piddle and wet toilet paper. Why yes, it did stink.
When our gardener hacked back the hedge yesterday, she found a drain cover. All the soil around was soaking wet. We got our friendly neighborhood drains man around and he found that, between the first drain cover and the next was this giant toilet roll boulder.
Between the two inspection ports is, like, thirty feet of straight pipe. No gravity feed + low flow toilet = what you see here.
That particular pipe only handles the upstairs toilet, sink and shower, so there wasn’t enough stuff to push it through. We’ve apparently been peeing on the ground outside our bedroom window for years.
We have instructions to pour a bucket of water down it from time to time.
This is probably a good time to promote one of my favorite YouTube channels again: Drain Cleaning AUSTRALIA.
February 13, 2025 — 4:38 pm
Comments: 8