Now we’ll lick ’em for sure!
Bill (still the .00358% of my traffic that’s from Iraq) T sent me this snapshot. It’s the personal insignia for the Mobile Transition Team based near him and somebody will be out soon with the crayons to color it in.
Thanks, Bill (blah de blah de blah) T!
That’s it. Don’t want to step on the thread below (which you’re welcome to keep adding to). Have a good weekend, everyone!
June 25, 2010 — 10:24 pm
Comments: 10
Badge of honor
Over at the excellent Watts Up With That blog (which I read and would surely put on my blogroll if I weren’t such a banana about updating my blogroll), they’ve got a thread going on a recently published ‘blacklist’ of climate skeptics.
General opinion in the comment thread: it’s an honor to be on the list, rather irritating to be left off of it and, on the whole, it would be awfully gratifying to have some kind of actual badge that one could wear signifying one is a member of the skeptocracy. A blacklistophile.
That’s when my name came up.
I agreed to take some of the rough ideas and smooth them off a bit. And then we’re going to…umm…I’m not sure, actually. Take the best and put them on buttons? Take all the damn things and put them on buttons?
I don’t know. We can work that out later. For now, let’s kick around some ideas. In this thread, I’ll post pics of some of the stuff I’ve done from some of the suggestions from WUWT. Feel free to chime in and claim your idea, if you spot it — it was a long thread and I didn’t take names. If you’ve created artwork to illustrate your idea, email it to stoaty@ (I wish you could post pictures into the thread yourselves, but WordPress won’t allow it).
If you want to create artwork that’ll actually be usable, it needs to be about 900 by 900 pixels for a 3″ button and more like 2400 pixels for a t-shirt. I know what you’re thinking — it looks great on my screen and it’s only 150 pixels! — well, it won’t look great in print without all them extra pixels. I swears.
Ready? Begin.
June 24, 2010 — 10:28 pm
Comments: 79
Field trip!
Today we went to Scotney Castle (click the pic to embiggen and becolor), which is actually two houses. This one, which is mostly a ruin, is Medieval. And up the hill, the family built a new, modern manse in 1837.
The last residents were childless. He left the house to the National Trust on his death, thirty years ago. His wife decided she was going to live to 99. So the gardens have been open to visitors for years, but the house only for three. Hence there’s an eerie sense of her about the place.
The last survivor is her cat, who was provided for in the will and still skulks about the place (but makes herself scarce during visiting hours).
And I thought Charlotte was spoiled!
June 23, 2010 — 10:47 pm
Comments: 17
What it probably feels like to him…
Poor Barack. He’s not having a very good time of it these days. Sometimes, it sucks to be the most powerful man in the free world. Folks won’t let you alone to enjoy your damn waffle.
And now Drudge is leading with this.
Which is just mean.
And petty.
Hilariously, delightfully mean and petty.
June 22, 2010 — 9:47 pm
Comments: 21
Happy Summer Solstice!
I stole the pic from these people.
It’s the Solstice!
We grabbed a bottle, fired up the chimenea and spent the evening in the garden staring up at the stars. It was light, I swears, at eleven. Magic!
It’s all downhill from here.
In now. Not sober. G’night!
— 12:27 am
Comments: 11
Because there’s so gosh darned much demand for the Segway
Michael at IB posted this gem. It’s a more portable take on the Segway idea — and if you think these trim young ladies look ridiculous on it, imagine how your scraggy ass would look.
The doohickey is clever: it’s a wheel made of cylinders. The wheel takes you forward and back, the cylinders side to side, and combinations of the two move you diagonally. “Clever” being an engineering term for “unreliable pain in the ass.”
Incidentally, mobility scooters are street legal here. And man are there a lot of them about. The scooter vendors turn up at local fairs and markets and have shiny showrooms on the high street. I get the impression the NHS gives them out like candy.
And why not? Stop moving around on your own, and there goes your life expectancy. When you pass your contributing to the system years and reach your consuming resources at an alarming clip years, a socialist healthcare system can’t get you off the planet fast enough.
June 18, 2010 — 10:12 pm
Comments: 40
Not a happy bunny
Meet my alarm clock. I was all set for a lie-in, when I woke to the most horrific screaming and squealing.
The cat let go of him as I came downstairs and we played bunny ping-pong for a while. It’s always interesting to me how docile little wild animals and birds are once you get them in hand. You’d think it would be in their evolutionary interest to bite and kick and claw for that one in a zillion chance of breaking free, but they mostly don’t.
I won’t test this theory on a wolverine any time soon.
Oh, he’s okay. He scampered away in the hedge when I let him loose (to munch Uncle B’s lettuce another day). Charlotte’s had her teeth removed except the four pointy ones.
That said, I saw her dreamily chewing on a little dead mouse the other day, and the next thing I knew its tail was vanishing through her lips like a pasketti.
June 17, 2010 — 11:11 pm
Comments: 20
And a czar, too!
Yeah. Somehow, this was funnier in my head. Oh, well.
You can go back to talking coins. I’ve been trying to disentangle copyright issues surrounding currency all day. You’d think I’d be safe putting hundred year old coins on junk, but Zazzle is an absolute pain in the ass on intellectual property issues, so I’m not using anything until I find official statements from the relevant mint first.
Anyhow, in the course of that, I found this interesting article. It claims that, per US case law, you don’t hold copyright on your photo of a coin or painting, provided it’s simply a faithful copy of the original. Huh. I did not know that.
I guess it means when I run out of coins, I can go around the internet pinching other people’s junk.
Pinching people’s junk. That did not come out right.
June 16, 2010 — 10:50 pm
Comments: 16
Nice thrup’nies
Shit. I was going to post about the “Mercury” dime tonight, but I see I’ve already done that. So how about a threepence?
It’s not as interesting, although it is Cockney rhyming slang for tits (thrup’ny bit = tit).
Thruppences were minted irregularly between about 1540 and decimalisation in 1971, in a number of metals and designs. Three pence equals a third of a shilling or an eightieth of a pound. The old British currency was sort of base twelve. Which is cool because twelve is divisible by two, three, four and six, giving lots and lots of different possible coin denominations.
This particular reverse was designed for Edward VIII before he abdicated, and was used throughout the reign of his brother, George VI. It’s nickel-brass and was produced simultaneously with the silver theepence for a while.
The flowers are thrift, also known as sea thrift or sea pinks. Thrift? Money? Get it? The designer was Frances Madge Kitchener.
Boring. Told you. So what’s with all this? I finally got around to putting some of my coin collection on merchandise today.
No, no…I’m not trying to sell more of my shit to you longsuffering bastards. Blog links make Google think my merchandise is swell (in fact, I really ought to be linking much more often to suck up to the search engines). And, frankly, I’ve been looking this stuff up all day and I’m WAY too lazy to come up with something else to blog about.
June 15, 2010 — 10:09 pm
Comments: 47
My mother smelled of what, now?
There’s an elder by our front door (and two in the drive) that is now in full flower. I wonder how long it’s been there. Elder trees were commonly planted beside English cottage doors to ward off witches (only one of many, many magical beliefs and herbal medicines associated with the elder).
More to our purposes, however, a quick-fermenting sort of champagne can be made from the flowers.
20 elderflower heads
1 kg sugar
2 lemons (juice and zest)
10 liters of water
2 tablespoons of vinegar
Sorry about the liters and kilos — it’s all I get any more, stupid Euro-measurements.
Mix it all together in a bucket. Don’t wash the elderflowers; they have a natural yeast that will begin fermentation (or not. If it’s not bubbling in 24 hours, add some yeast).
Stir occasionally for six days, and then strain it through muslin into bottles. Most recipes recommend plastic bottles, on account of the stuff keeps fermenting (like champagne) and is subject to violent explosion. Even in plastic bottles, watch for bulging and let off some gases if needed. Putting the bottles in a bathtub and covering with an old duvet is another suggestoin, to contain damage in the case of rupture.
Eight days(!) after bottling, it’s ready to drink.
What’s it like? Ask me in two weeks; I’ve just made a batch.
June 14, 2010 — 10:09 pm
Comments: 31