…and then came home again…
Last day, but this one’s going to hurt.
Booking flights via little airports means the occasional bad connection day like this one: five hours sitting in the airport in Memphis. If I’m lucky, there will be free broadband and you and me can catch up and shoot the shit and stuff. I don’t feel lucky. Boston Logan charges for wifi; I have to assume it’s a trend.
Between the layover and the change in times zone, it’s going to be late-late-late when I get home.
Memphis. Feh. I once got kicked out of boarding school in Memphis, you may recall.
I’m not even getting fed on this flight. Nothing at all at stage one, and something called a $5 snack on stage two. According to the (surprisingly interesting) website airlinemeals.net, this is an example of the $5 snack.
You know what, though? I totally don’t mind buying food, if it means a major reduction in ticket price. I’ve often wondered how much it costs to provide those absurd and unpleasant hot meals, what with the ovens and the carts and the logistics and everything. On the upside, though, I suppose it gives the flight attendants an excuse to walk up and down checking on us, in case somebody goes all loop-de-loo at 35,000 feet.
See you in the morning, Insha’Allah.
July 11, 2007 — 1:26 am
Comments: 40
The Gathering o’ the Mustelids
So, why does Clan Weasel gather here every year? This is why: the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games, the largest Scottish games outside Scotland. It started in 1956, about the same time my father and grandfather built the original hunting cabin on the side of the mountain. My dad hasn’t missed the games since.
He hasn’t been to the actual games in years (and neither have I, for that matter). But he wears the tartan hat with the ribbons and deedly-ball on, and stumps around rolling his R’s and saying “wha hae!” and drinking whiskey.
The joke is, as far as anyone knows, there’s not a drop of Scots blood in my dad. He descends from a line of pasty English people who were deported to Virginia in the 18th Century for either religious nutcasery or poaching, depending on who you ask.
My mother’s family traces its origins to a Scot, however. Clan MacStoat will be there. I think our clan motto is “another wee dram won’t kill me.”
When I were a puppy, some damn fool bought me the whole suit, with the jacket and the knee socks and everything. I loved that thing. I swaggered around in it long after I’d outgrown it. By the end, I bobbled out of the seams like some obscene tartan sausage.
There will be ALL KINDS of merchandise on offer up the mountain. If you’re bored some day, pick a Scots surname and Google for the original version of the family coat of arms, and compare it to the Americanized version. The American version always has twice as much shit on it, with extra tinsel and sparklies and unicorns and orcs. Like it came out of the Society for Creative Anachronism’s prom decoration committee.
And that’s what we’re not doing Tuesday.
July 10, 2007 — 1:18 am
Comments: 49
Escaped!
Hello! I am not here! I was here when I wrote this, but now you’re reading it, so I must be gone! Yes, through the miracle of deferred posting, I can communicate with you, my minions, even though I’m four days in the past and/or nowhere near a wifi access point!
“Nowhere near a wifi access point!?” you exclaim, wetting yourself with terror and confusion. “Wherever can that be in this modern age of instantaneous digital communication?”
I am at the family cabin, way, way back in the hills. If I visit the folks while they’re here, I can wear nothing but jeans and t-shirts and they don’t make that “L is for Loser” sign at me.
So four days from now, which will be yesterday by today, I flew into the Tri-Cities airport and met my cousin, who drove up from Alabama. We do this every year, so I can tell you exactly how it went (will go) down.
We drove into the tanktown where I was born to visit my grandparents’ house. We agreed that it looked quite small compared to our memories of it, but that the current owners are taking good care of it. Only, they really shouldn’t have cut that tree down.
Then we went and stood on my grave and I said, “ha ha! Get me! I’m standing on my own grave!” My grandfather sold the old family farm to a cemetary and got a family plot and first dibs on the location as part of the deal. He chose a hillside he used to plow when he was a teenager. He and my grandmother and assorted Weasels are there, but somehow their headstones are jammed up against the headstones of the neighbors, so it looks like they were buried standing up. I hope they don’t bury me standing up; I suspect I’ll be awfully tired.
Finally, we head up into the mountains. Along the way, we stop and buy liquor. It’s not that there won’t be liquor at the cabin. There will be a very great deal of liquor at the cabin. But if you bring your own, nobody can tell how much you drink. Plus, I can get Jack Daniel’s Green Label here, and I can’t back home. I like it. It hurts.
My folks won’t get here until tomorrow, which is today now. I’ll tell you about that in a minute, four days ago, which will be tomorrow by then.
July 9, 2007 — 1:11 am
Comments: 38
What, Friday again?
July 6, 2007 — 10:02 pm
Comments: 34
Excuse me, there’s a weasel in the ballpit
That’s what the web reminds me of. It’s nothing like a super highway, it doesn’t hugely feel like an interconnected web. The way I do it, it’s more like swimming in a big, colorful, bobbly pit of information balls.
I’ve never actually been in a ballpit, for I am old. Wikipedia tells me they have hygeine issues — they’re full of children and unwashed balls. Bad stuff floats to the bottom and stays there. So, see, the comparison is perfect.
Anyhow…like so: click on a link in your own blogroll, then click on a link in his blogroll, then click on a link in her blogroll…and keep clicking links until you find yourself someplace utterly strange. I do that a lot. I was hoping to come up with a cool name for this activity, but I failed.
I am also (you may have noticed) a gigantic consumer of Wikipedia (not everything hippies do is stupid). I frequent link collecting sites like Fazed and Portent. I keep a whole page of international newspaper links that I add to (and occasionally remove from).
Here’s the problem: I use Opera, the original tabbed browser. And I drink. And I leave my desktop machine on all the time. So when I come down most mornings, I am confronted with twenty cool open Web pages and no earthly idea how I got to any of them. I think it’s important to attribute stuff properly. But then, life is full of important things I don’t do.
So please, share some of my colorful balls of unknown provenance…
Did you know there was a Daily Photo Blog community? Here’s a map of current participants. I got in through Milano Daily Photo. Bath and Budapest were good, too. I only really got to the B’s before I began to skip around. Some are better about updating than others, but I enjoyed the lot of ’em.
I really love ideas like this. They feed my sick delusional yearning for godlike powers of vision and…eavesdropping. Oh, yeah, like you wouldn’t eavesdrop if you were a god.
And so continues our proven interest in all things deer anus — behold, the Butt Out Tool.
This tool is the fastest, easiest way to disconnect the anal alimentary canal from deer or similar-sized game. Immediately after harvesting game, insert the Butt-Out Tool into the anal canal and twist until it grabs the membrane. Continue twisting another half turn, then steadily pull the Butt-Out Tool out of the canal. Extract 10″ of membrane, tie the membrane off and cut.
There’s video. (I definitely got this one from Fazed).
This tattoo artist apparently specializes in bulldogs and serial killers. Okay, I don’t recognize that very last one, but the one before that is Albert Fish, Eater of Children, and the one before that is Richard Ramirez. Not just serial killers, but badly drawn, especially losery serial killers. Would it be better if these tats were all on one guy, or spread out among several scary people with bad taste? I can’t make up my mind.
This one’s almost a year old, so you’ve probably seen it if you’re into gaming. I’m not and I hadn’t. It’s 1K Project II, a thousand cars racing through a game called Trackmania. I tried a couple of different addresses for the kid who made it, in case he had any remarks, with no luck. Then I found a page explaining how he did it — in French. My French, she is not so good — but I gather he cut together multiple walkthroughs to achieve the effect. This explains why the cars seem to have collision detection in some cases and not in others.
It’s very well done and seriously cool. Sometimes they look like shoals of fish and sometimes flocks of birds and sometimes swarms of bugs and sometimes bitchin’ cars.
Finally, this guy: Tim Knowles. He’s an artist in London of the kind that does stupid shit like ink up pine trees and put paper under them and let them draw pictures in the breeze. I know, I know…I can’t help myself. I went to a poncy art school. They polluted my mind.
Like, check out this drawing, which was made by this huge seismography thing in the back of a station wagon on the way to its own exhibition. Or the slideshow he made by mailing a box rigged with a digital camera to take a picture of its journey every ten seconds for 6,994 pictures (sadly, the whole slideshow is not online). Or these surprisingly evocative pictures of the full moon reflected in water.
Or you could, you know, bite me.
— 4:36 pm
Comments: 10
Islamic Rage Boy: the interview
Look what JW found: an interview with Shakeel Bhat, the Islamic Rage Boy. Who is, in fact, 31 and a “full-time demonstrator” (how do you say “lives in moms’ basement” in…whatever dialect they speak in Kashmir?)
Apart from drawing ridicule from bloggers, Bhat has even inspired one American neoconservative website to push “Rage Boy” merchandise — including T-shirts, beer mugs, mouse pads.
“I don’t believe this! I have no knowledge about all this. Why do they do it?” demanded Bhat, who says he has no idea how to use a computer and the Internet. [You don’t say? – ed]
Bhat also shrugged off his rather unflattering “Rage Boy” nickname.
“I don’t need any titles. I am a simple Muslim. Yes, I get enraged if someone, somewhere makes derogatory remarks about our religion or Prophet,” he said.
“Titles”? I wonder if he thinks he’s being honored in some way. It would really mean a lot to me if I knew he knew we were laughing at him.
Update: Oooo! And look at the cool picture Dawn found. Which I might possibly have tweaked just a little teeny bit. How does one get a nostril injury, anyhow?
July 5, 2007 — 3:27 pm
Comments: 54
Farewell, Boots
Boots Randolph, who died in Nashville, Tennessee, on Tuesday aged 80, was the tenor saxophonist who made and co-composed the maddeningly catchy hit record Yakety Sax; after its first burst of pop success, the piece enjoyed a long second life as accompanying music to the manic chase routines in The Benny Hill Show.
Any guesses what they’ll play at the funeral?
— 11:21 am
Comments: 15
We the Weasels…
Yeah, the Fourth of July is not usually one of my big holidays. Too damn hot for me. But this year, it’s downright chilly around here. This has been the coldest Summer ever, so far. If it keeps up like this, they’ll have to talk about it — whether they have their hearts set on a warming trend or not.
Anyhoo, I’ve just finished a steak and a baked potato and slaw and a beer. The beer was British, which didn’t seem quite right, but it’s my favorite. Bite me, King George! Lush that I am, I never drink in the daytime, so I feel quite naughty. Lookit me! Drinking a beer! Before five!
Now for a nap. God bless America! (I said that just to confuse Dawn. And I didn’t get hit by lightning or any
July 4, 2007 — 2:07 pm
Comments: 9
“Everybody loves cats and banjos”
— Old Mama Weasel, deceased
Cats and banjos. Pure blogging gold.
It was the day before 4th of July, and the minions were frolicking, happy and congenial. I just couldn’t bear to post some angsty political think piece and ruin the mood.
Okay, you know what? I had nothing on my mind today. Enjoy!
July 3, 2007 — 5:00 pm
Comments: 10
Ladies of Spain, hm hm hm hm…
My dad plays Lady of Spain on the banjo. It’s my favorite. I told my mother that, and she said, “Yes, that is pretty funny.”
And I’m, like, “funny? What do you mean?”
And she said, “Honey, it’s a joke. Lady of Spain? On the banjo?”
And I go, “I don’t get it.”
And she’s like, “well…it’s not a song you associate with the banjo, is all.”
And I say, “I don’t see what’s so funny about that.”
I get it now. I guess. Anyhow, this lady of Spain is a large cast metal bust of a lady. From Spain. My grandfather picked it up somewhere and she’s been smirking in my livingroom ever since. When I was a child, her jewelry was touched with different colors of shiny enamel. My grandfather again. He had outbursts of taste and spasms of tacky. A real Renaissance man.
We call her Chastity. I didn’t get that joke for years, either. See, she’s destined to remain chaste. Because…no snootch. Her map doesn’t have the Netherlands on it, know’m saying?
Later, Mother had her bronzed. Turns out, the original casting material was…zinc or something.
Mother didn’t like Chastity. It’s that prim smile. Looks a touch judgmental for her comfort. Mother was no better than she should have been, as the saying goes. She couldn’t afford to have a lot of judgment aimed in her direction.
Chastity gets decorated at Christmas time. The rest of the year, she’s mostly a hat rack. Yep, I’m still Spring cleaning. I have a feeling y’all will get to meet a lot of my stuff.
July 2, 2007 — 3:52 pm
Comments: 119