Not my week, really
Eh. Now I’ve picked up a virus on my principal laptop. One of those cutesy deals that drops itself into the system tray and pretends to be a virus checker. I think I’ve managed to scrape it out of my system without too much fuss, but now I’m having to run all the inevitable scans and checks.
If I didn’t have this trusty old Linux box, I’d be gefukt.
Especially on account of my increasingly erratic desktop computer has now ceased booting at all. For months, I could wobble the heat sink and get it going after a few resets — so, building on that logically, I took it apart this morning, cleaned all the bits and put it back together again. Now it’s a paperweight.
What gripes me about that is the money I don’t have, of course, and the fact that I’m going to have to learn stuff. It’s been a long, long time since I spec’ed a machine — godnose what the current state of play is with motherboards and processors and RAM and sech. It’s been a much, much longer time since I actually found hardware interesting.
Oh, well. I checked my records and I built this machine in March of 2004, so it sure as hell doesn’t owe me anything.
August 11, 2010 — 10:23 pm
Comments: 30
Just one of those days…
If I ever finish this drawing, I think I’ll call it “Gratitude.”
Recycling an old junk drawing today; we had One Of Those. Uncle B had to go see somebody several towns over and on the way back the exhaust system kind of…fell off. Disconnected somewhere under the driver’s seat. That’s when we discovered he’d left his cell phone where we were just at.
Fortunately, we weren’t far from home, so we could put on the emergency flashers and drag that sparking bad boy back to the house, but Uncle B can’t live without his cellphone for long because apparently it doubles as a life support system. I think he uses it to reoxygenate red blood cells or something. So we had to saddle up the Weaselmobile and go back for it.
So not a lot got done today. Run, Al!
August 10, 2010 — 10:07 pm
Comments: 10
It’s a fifty-foot cyborg Scalia. Why?
The reader formerly known as Skeptic wrote to tell me that Frank J. over at IMAO had posted about a fifty foot cyborg Scalia and he — the reader formerly known as Skeptic — could not rest until he had seen a P’shop representation of this wondrous machine.
Now, I generally don’t do requests — not because y’all don’t come up with some corking ideas, but because I’m lousy at visualizing somebody else’s pictures. This is why I gave up on freelance illustration after a couple of angry, drunken years.
But a fifty-foot rampaging cyborg Antonin Scalia? Well, who doesn’t fantasize about that?
Click the picture to embiggen and becolor.
August 9, 2010 — 11:41 pm
Comments: 27
Oh, and there was this seagull, too
Today, we dug up all the potatoes — got a good haul, too — and braided the onions together to dry. The kitchen smells distinctly French.
Then I sat in the garden, reading a book and feeding bits of my lunch to the chickens. They’re partial to meat, god help us all. Suddenly Lucia — who still makes peeping noises like a baby chick, as a rule — let out two thumping great grown-up BE-GACKs.
Not twelve feet away was a great handsome fox, padding steadily toward us. I said something intelligent like, “whoa, dude — you’re a fox,” but he wasn’t impressed. Not until I got up and headed toward him did he turn and saunter away, waving that bushy red tail.
Funny she recognized the threat. The chooks don’t seem the least bothered by cats, including that feral lad who would happily take a swipe at them if I turned my back.
Anyway — have a good weekend, all. I leave you with this lovely sentiment, what Uncle B ran across while shopping online for new tires. Engrish is the ranguage of ruv.
The Kumho KH 31 is in the four fragrances orange blossom, rosemary, lavender and jasmine. The tyres are not well known to smell is one thing that is not only with a car and thicknesses much hp under the hood can specify, is the other thing. How about times with the opposite sex instead of roses, with beguiling smells of jasmine or orange on points. Let simply Kumho KH 31 and assemble a balance of fresh scent.
August 6, 2010 — 9:38 pm
Comments: 21
Happy International Beer Day!
No, really.
My first homebrewing experiment was a huge success. So big a success, in fact, that I drank most of it last week. It wasn’t supposed to be ready until this week. Cloudy, mayhap, but very tasty.
The process feels kind of dopey. You open a couple of cans, add water and yeast and wait. Brewing for morons.
On the other hand — really excellent beer for 40p a pint! How dopey can that be? So I think I’ll do a few more kits before I try malting and hopping and doing it old school.
Currently in production: that fake vodka stuff with the high-yield yeast.
Next up: a cider kit. Cider here is hard. Very, very hard.
If you close your eyes, you can hear the hangover…
August 5, 2010 — 11:06 pm
Comments: 28
Oh, Pooh!
We drove home by an odd, roundabout route yesterday, trying to avoid a certain traffic bottleneck out of London. This took us into the Ashdown Forest, where I have never been (and where there doesn’t appear to be much forest, at least where we were).
When we got to the little town of Hartfield, I said, “look at that — there’s a tea room called Pooh Corner!”
And Uncle B said, “no, that’s probably the actual Pooh Corner.”
And I’m like, “fuck off!”
And he’s like, “no, really!”
Turns out, we’re both right. The Milnes lived at Cotchford Farmhouse, which is about a mile outside Hartfield. But Hartfield was the town they came into and it looks like this cottage — the website is a bit ambiguous on this point — might have been the shop Christopher Robin and his nanny always stopped into for sweeties.
Anyhow, they sell souvenirs. And tea. And maps to all the local landmarks which feature in the Pooh stories.
Meh. Not a big Pooh fan, me.
August 4, 2010 — 9:58 pm
Comments: 27
More pig uterus, Vicar?
Uncle B had a business appointment in London today. I went with, so we could visit the happiest place on earth — I mean, of course, Wing Yip.
These are the guys who supply all the Chinese restaurants in the UK, pretty much. Here you can buy hundredweight sacks of rice, gallons of soy sauce, great sawn tree-rings to use for chopping blocks, wicked sharp cleavers engraved all down the blade with Chinese characters. There are iron woks from omelette size to great rice boats.
There’s one whole long aisle of nothing but ramen noodles.
Oh, I love Wing Yip. Most of our day-to-day cups, plates and bowls are Wing Yip-ware — if it’s good enough for the chinko on the corner, it’s good enough for mustelids. The staff is friendly, even if we are reduced to communication via squeaks and gestures, and they have everything. Where else are you going to get frozen pig uterus?
We dropped nigh on a hundred quid today — which, let me tell you, is a hell of a lot of pot noodles.
August 3, 2010 — 10:03 pm
Comments: 15
Ummm…laughing goat-horned devil pelvis?
I never took the Rorshach inkblot test. My mother took it in college. She did a lot of psych courses. The only thing she remembered was getting the brain freeze when the inkblots went from black and white to color.
It’s a phenomenon known as “color shock” — I don’t know what it means. “Bugshit crazy” at a guess.
Anyhow, Wikipedia has gefuct the Rorshach by publishing the ten classic inkblots along with the most common responses to them. Even though the blots have technically been in the public domain for many years, psychologists have guarded the images carefully. Once they’re out, the test is essentially useless. Assuming it was useful before.
For what it’s worth, I suspect it did have some use as a diagnostic. It ain’t science, but it’s a way for a pshrink to make conversation with a fruitcake without asking him to be insightful about anything.
Anyhow, I advise you to bone up on the ‘normal’ responses. You never know if your next insanity plea might hinge on an Old School psych.
August 2, 2010 — 10:12 pm
Comments: 25
Rose hips!
That’s what those are — the edible fruit of the wild rose. The books say you should harvest in September, after the first frost, but the rose in our hedge ripened this time last year, too. In fact, it caught me off guard last time and I didn’t make anything more interesting than cups of rose hip tea.
This year, I caught them in time and I’ve candied a bunch. Mmmmmm. I love the flavor of rose hips — something between an orange and a tomato.
During the war, my mother-in-law and other young women were sent out to collect rose hips to make syrup. Shipping had been terribly disrupted, citrus fruit was in short supply, and rose hips are incredibly high in vitamin C. Like, forty times an orange or something.
Next year, I think I’ll make syrup. You can crush whole fruit to make syrup. To make anything else, you have to cut them open and empty the seed pod — a highly painintheassical operation. Besides all the fiddly little seeds, the pods are lined with tiny hairs — he only known use for which is making novelty itching powder. No fooling.
You know, I haven’t eaten so much shit out of the yard since I was raised by wild hippies.
UPDATE: oh, right…almost forgot. Tomorrow. Dead Pool. Six p.m. Weasel Blog Time. Be there, or somebody else is going to get Zsa Zsa. And sherlock? If you want your dick, you need to shout out…
July 29, 2010 — 11:07 pm
Comments: 17
you know…
We need to make some friends who DON’T drink wine in the daytime, because it’s incumbent on me as hosestessssszzzzzzz….
July 28, 2010 — 9:01 pm
Comments: 13