Fishing for tarts
Lots and lots of things have been fished out of the Seine. This was one of them. Maybe. If you want the long version, ask Google and spend an afternoon at it. Or go with the short version:
No-one knows who she was, really. She is called l’Inconnue de la Seine. The usual story is that she was drawn from the river in the late 1880s and the morgue attendant was so taken with her beauty and poignant expression that he called for a mask to be made.
I’m going to call bullshit on that bit, anyhow. No way this is the face of a dead woman. In fact, it would be difficult to take a cast of a living woman and catch a smile. Plaster is heavy and the dead seriously lack muscle tone. If this thing started life as the mask of a woman, it was heavily recarved afterwards (which is not at all uncommon with casts).
Anyhow, the story continues, she was put on display (in the 1880s, unclaimed bodies — up to fourteen at a time — were put in a chilled room at the morgue, fronted by plate glass. It was the most popular shop window in Paris). No-one claimed her.
Then somehow the mask escaped into the population. It was a sensation. Factories were contracted to churn out copies (in fact, one story I find plausible is that l’Inconnue was actually an entrepreneurial mask-maker’s daughter, alive and well at the time). No salon or filthy bohemian garret was complete without one. She appeared in poems, novels, baudy limericks (I’m just guessing on that last one). She was an icon of feminine beauty for decades, well into the 20th Century.
And then she really got popular. In 1958, emergency docs Peter Safar and Asmund Laerdal chose l’Inconnue for the face of the original Resusci Annie (Snopes says oui to this story). Making her, officially, the most kissed woman of all time.
Thought a little creepy story might not go amiss today, this being Hallowe’en week and everybody being utterly sick to death of poltics and all.
October 29, 2008 — 2:11 pm
Comments: 37
It’s NaNoWriMo time again!
Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.
Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.
I tried it several years ago. I got several days and six hundred words in before I gave up. But the experience sure taught me something: I suck. I write incredibly worthless fiction. I pretty much knew that, but some lessons you don’t learn on the first try. Pity, because I’d’ve liked to be a novelist.
NaBloPoMo is really more my style. Not that I plan to squeeze out a
blog post every day in November, either. I like it because it sounds like
“blow me” when I say it in my head.
October 28, 2008 — 1:04 pm
Comments: 59
My groat. Let me show you it.
This is my groat. There are many groats like it, but this one is mine.
My groat came up in conversation here last week, so I figured I’d give you a peep at it. This is my groat. Specifically, it is a Maundy groat of Charles II. The obverse says CAROLUS II DEI GRATIA and the reverse says MAG BR FRA ET HIB REX. Which means “Hix Nix Stix Pix.” Heh heh. Jes’ kidding. The real translation is: “HEY CROMWELL, how does my ass taste?”
A groat is a little silver coin worth four English pennies, also called a fourpence. The first was minted in the 13th Century and the last (for actual circulation — more on that in a moment) in 1888. The date on this one is 1679, but it wasn’t necessarily made in that year. They weren’t all that fastidious about minting coins every year, or changing the dies when they did. Early in Charles II’s reign, they were still producing most coins by hammering, but they switched to milling in his lifetime. This is a milled coin.
The Maundy ceremony, confusingly, happens on Thursday. Specifically, the Thursday before Easter. “Maundy” is a corruption of Mandatum Nuvum — the ‘new commandment’ to love one another and, umm…wash feet. British monarchs have observed some sort of Maundy ritual since 600AD — which sometimes included foot washing, but nearly always involved giving silver coins to the poor. The coins were known as Maundy money.
Regular old coins were used at first, but beginning with Charles II, special coins were minted, in sets of four: 1p, 2p, 3p and 4p. And still are. Despite decimalization (in 1971, Britain utterly fucked its wonderful but brain-hurty old currency scheme and lost many a beautiful coin) Maundy money is still legal tender.
Today, the Queen gives out Maundy money to worthy old persons, as many old coots as she is years old. The foot-washin’ part was quietly dropped centuries ago, until the current Archbishop of Canterbury — a very strange man — revived the custom in 2003.
Because it is a Maundy coin, Charles II his own self may have handled this groat. But probably not. And now you can tell all your friends, “I have seen Weasel’s groat.”
October 27, 2008 — 10:13 am
Comments: 104
Dear lord, forgettest thou not a Weasel in this terrible hour
‘Fart gas’ link to blood pressure
Small amounts of hydrogen sulphide – a toxic gas generated by bacteria living in the human gut – are responsible for the foul odour of flatulence. But it seems the gas is also produced by an enzyme in blood vessels where it relaxes them and lowers blood pressure.
[…]
Researcher Dr Solomon Snyder said: “Now we know hydrogen sulphide’s role in regulating blood pressure, it may be possible to design drug therapies that enhance its formation as an alternative to the current methods of treatment for hypertension.”
[…]
“We know hydrogen sulphide is not good for us at high levels but it seems that at the lower levels in the body it is essential.”
No, no…that’s not the scary part.
The scary part is Uncle Badger sent me this.
AND HE HAS HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE.
October 25, 2008 — 4:55 pm
Comments: 53
Junk!
Ohhhhhh. Ohhhhhh, yeah. That’s the schadenfreude. The New York Times is bleeding so hard, Standard & Poor cut them down to junk bond status yesterday. (You can play with the graphs yourself here. Slu was on this one, too).
I’ve been savoring this situation since I read this NewsBusters post from P.J. Gladnick a few weeks ago. It’s sweeter than it looks. It’s sweeter than Scott Tenorman‘s tears. Much as we’d all like to think the Times is dying due to egregious liberal bias, that’s only a part of the dynamic. Behold — Clusterfuck, the Bullet List:
■The Ochs/Sulzberger family is in its fifth generation. Twenty-seven people hold the controlling interest and live off the proceeds of the Times.
■’Pinch’ Sulzberger, editor and heir, has made many grievously bad business decisions. Good old-fashioned bad business decisions, like real estate and investments. This is a horrible time for print media anyway, so his incompetence is just a big fat cherry on top of the shit sundae.
■To keep the family happy, Sulzberger has been raising the dividend paid to family members even as profits have slid.
■BAM. Junk bonds. Now he’s sinking in debt and he can’t raise money. But he can’t lower the dividend or all hell will break loose.
Why is this so very, very tasty? Because the Ochs/Sulzberger family has a collective terminal case of WeAreSoVeryFuckingImportant-itis and it’s totally funded by the Times.
“Sulzberger has said that his clan starts going to family meetings when they’re 10 years old and by 15 they understand their roles as caretakers of the New York Times. There’s also a one-day orientation session for kids turning 18 or 21—or people marrying into the family—to learn about the legacy of the Ochs-Sulzbergers.”
[…]
“Younger members of the family are also inculcated in the beliefs of the Sulzbergers on private annual retreats to places like Hawaii. One Timesman compares the indoctrination to Skull and Bones, but it seems more the stuff of summer camp. They sing songs together like “We Are Family” and keep abreast of each other’s lives through a newsletter called The Lookout.”
What have these golden people done with their subsidized lives? Zoo keeping. Novel writing. Protecting lighthouses and the rights of native Americans. Folk music. Folk music.
Dave Golden couldn’t stay at the paper mill forever. It was too tied to the family business, too laden with expectations. So he set off to find himself “in the tango halls of Argentina, on the snow-covered Berkshire border of Vermont and Massachusetts, in the halls of Oxford, in the jungles of Guatemala and even in Asia on a Fulbright,” according to his Website. In the Berkshires, he studied mountain music, and in 2004, the 26-year-old released a well-received folk record, with songs drawing from life experiences, as in “All I Never Wanted”: “I coulda been a CEO, they told me / If I could just stop holdin’ on to this ol’ dream.”
Oh. OH. My violence gland is throbbing like a buffalo-skin tom-tom from a native drum circle of the Great Plains. I suppose it’s too much to hope that individual branches of the family have been so incompetent that they will be left with nothing when the Times goes under. I doubt any of them will have to get a real job or anything. They’ll probably even walk away with a tidy sum after the fire sale.
But it’s going to hurt. And on that happy day, I want you to stop, think of this grinning douchenozzle with his frayed straw hat and his ol’ dream and share a warm schadenfreudean virtual hug with me. Sometimes, it is good to be a weasel.
October 24, 2008 — 10:09 am
Comments: 96
Wherein Weasel applies for the Mark of the Beast
On 25 November 2008, certain foreign nationals who apply for further leave to remain (FLR) will be required to have an identity card. The identity cards will contain the following information:
■ a digital photograph of the holder
■ a unique identification number
■ the holder’s name
■ the card expiration date
■ the place and date of issue
■ the holder’s immigration category
■ the holder’s signature
■ a list of restrictions and entitlements for the holder’s immigration category
■ the holder’s fingerprints (on a biometric chip)
■ the holder’s date and place of birth
■ the holder’s gender
■ the holder’s nationality
■ a codification of all of the above into a machine readable formatBiometric appointments will be made using a call centre. Each call centre will use a pool of slots to allocate on a first-come, first-served basis. The appointment itself will require a maximum of 30 minutes. For those who have previously enrolled, an appointment is still required in order to re-check the fingerprints and facial image. A local-rate telephone number will be available for employers and universities to verify that a given ID card is valid. The ID card is not a valid travel document.
If you didn’t guess from the retarded spelling of “center” this does NOT mean that the Bush administration is cracking down on illegals (though, FYI, the US is famously hard on our LEGAL immigrants.). No, this is one more thing to look forward to in Jollye Olde.
In theory, I’m all in favor of countries keeping a close eye on their resident ferriners. But you know what? There is no longer ANY sort of immigration control or restriction of movement or settlement on anyone from within the EU.
So, say for example your daddy was in the Luftwaffe and dropped shit on London for a living. Why, it’s all Willkommen, Freund, enjoy your new life in England. But if Papa was a Yank, Canuck or Aussie snoozing in the poppy fields of Normandy, it’s vere are your papers?
Sucks, is what that right there does.
This is in addition the biometrics that I will have to supply with my Fiancée Visa application, by the way. And guess what? The computer in London that processes those biometrics just shit the bed, moving the average application approval back two weeks. Plus, my buyer needs another week for mortgage confirmation.
So I didn’t make a big deal of the dates. Did you notice that? The ID policy goes into effect on November 25, my ETA was November 26? Hahaha…very funny, Yer Worship. Still hatin’ on a weasel. But that November 26 date is looking increasingly unlikely now, anyway.
And yes…I really do wear a watch with a standing weasel on it.
October 22, 2008 — 11:59 am
Comments: 46
Stand by: posting will be psychotic
<--- (Must give a shout-out to my man the Duct Tape Bandit, my go-to images search whenever I need to wad something up in a horrible Photoshopped ball of duct tape. You, sir, are my hero).
The closing on Weasel Manor is still tentatively set for November 25, and it looks good, but we haven’t gotten an official, can’t-back-out lockdown on the mortgage. Hence, I haven’t touched off the chain events that cost monies, mainly the movers and visas. Settlement visas are running about 20 days from the New York embassy, assuming there aren’t any problems. Which is an assumption you cannot assume without making an Ass of U and Me (one of my first acts as a corporate artiste was making a poster of that hideous slogan and, believe me, it made an ass of me for life).
With best of luck, we close on the 25th November, pussycat and I fly out on the 26th, and arrive in Jollye Olde on Thanksgiving Day, the 27th. Which would be impossibly cool.
Without luck, my visa won’t be approved when I sell the house and Charlotte and I will spend Thanksgiving sharing a Quiznos turkey sub in a hotel that isn’t fussy about pets.
Either way, between now and then stretches a vast desert plain of paperwork, lawyers, banks, cardboard boxes and assorted other scary grownup shit. Scary grownup shit isn’t really my strong suit. I have heretofore carefully crafted my life to include an absolute minimum of scary grownup shit. When scary grownup shit happens, little bits of junk start rattling off the weaselmachine.
So I’m going to keep up on sweasel.com as best I can in the next six to however-many weeks — it will no doubt be a tiny island of joy in a frothing sea of loose poopy — but I’m unlikely to maintain my usual frequency and high standard of low comedy.
I’d particularly like to apologize to my blogroll. I make a good faith effort to walk down that thing every day, check up on you guys, and comment where inappropriate. But much of my precious surfing time will be consumed by the aforementioned SGS. Also, people who have stumbled over this site and link to me — thank you! I always follow up and check your site out in return, and one day I will again. Just…not until Christmas.
In closing, I’d like to say, OHMYFUCKINGGOD THISISSOMESCARYSHITRIGHTHERE AHHHHHHHHHH!!!
October 20, 2008 — 1:20 pm
Comments: 21
Somebody pleeeeease tell me what you’re looking for?!?
In the past week, I’ve gotten dozens if not hundreds of hits on a Google images search of “dionne quints.” I did a post on them about a year ago, at which time two were still alive. A news search doesn’t turn up anything.
If one of you Googlies happens to wander back to the top of the blog, would you please let me know what the Sam Hill you’re looking for and why?
Also, while you’re at it, who Sam Hill was. It’d be a load off McGoo’s mind.
October 18, 2008 — 4:15 pm
Comments: 53
Ya, you betcha!
In the Summer before the 2004 presidential election, Jon Stewart interviewed John Kerry and asked him ”Is it true that every time I use ketchup your wife gets a nickel?” Do you remember this? Remember his answer?
“Would that it were, would that it were” Kerry intoned, squeezing the four syllables out his nose in a lugubrious patrician drawl. Any normal person would have chirped, “I wish!” but no…John Kerry had to go all Thurston Howell III up in there.
I still have a bug up my ass about this. Christopher Buckley. Heather McDonald. Peggy Noonan. These avowed conservatives have embraced Obama and/or rejected Palin simply because he’s a “would that it were” kind of guy and she’s a definite “I wish!” kind of gal.
And the problem with that is that “would that it were” is stupid. It isn’t clever. It’s not le mot just. It conveys the exact same sentiment as “I wish!” but not as crisply. It’s the kind of empty gasbaggery that regularly leaks out of a second-rate intellect that has been dragged through a first-class education.
It’s dumb. And YOU’RE dumb if you get so hung up on accent you miss the underlying ideas.
Every day of the week, chatty Joe Biden utters a thing so shockingly stupid it makes milk come out of Dan Quayle’s nose. Barack Obama says “pie” fifteen times in 104 seconds and it’s like he just yanked Excalibur out of a rock. The governor of Alaska says “doggone it” and she’s a moron. The verdict of dimwits.
You know what I really hate about our elites? YOU GUYS ARE NOT ELITE. You’re ruthlessly average. You’re second-raters who went to good schools, and you know it. You’re desperately insecure about your gifts and social position or you wouldn’t use big words when little ones suffice or yowl like scalded cats when a lady with a Western twang gets a seat at the head of your table.
Feh. I went to prep school too, my fellow assholes. Alma mater is no guarantor of smarts or ability. Or success.
Would that it were, would that it were.
October 17, 2008 — 10:30 am
Comments: 75
Christopher Buckley is not a homosexual, but he sure is gay
Chris Buckley, son of William out of Pat, has just come out for Obama in a fluttery lace hanky of prose as silly as it is frilly. Jesus. I thought this guy was supposed to be a good writer.
Why Obama? Because he’s a Harvard man, and Sarah Palin…my dear, need I say more?
See, Obama wrote two books, his own self, which everyone knows makes him some kind of superhuman brainal powerhouse (I wonder if Buckley believes Bill Ayers would make a good president on the same grounds), while Sarah Palin is a hausfrau.
So there you go.
Barack Obama. He of the crunchy fig-eating aquatic apes. The Obama who says “we are the ones we have been waiting for.” And…
“I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington…I’m asking you to believe in yours.”
…sentiments so semi-literate, crassly populist and light-bendingly vapid that if Sarah Palin uttered any such twaddle, Chris Buckely would surely suggest she put her time to better use cross-stitching them on an eskimo’s socks.
Oh, Buckley knows Obama is a lefty. “But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves.” You got that? He thinks Obama is a pretend lefty who, when pressed, will acknowledge that leftism doesn’t actually work. That’s the kind of scary-smart analysis you can only learn at Yale, I guess.
Christopher Buckley (and David Brooks and Peggy Noonan and Charles Krauthammer and the rest of the inside-the-beltway brie-munching Republican cool kids) don’t know the difference between alma mater and smarts. They gots the Ivy League kidneys.
October 15, 2008 — 9:42 am
Comments: 80