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
GAH!
We’ve let the hedge at the back of the house grow up the whole time we’ve lived here. This is a very dark old house, and that just made it darker. When we noticed brambles were trying to grow up into the fabric of the building we knew we had to cut it back, and OH MY GOD IS IT EVER BRIGHT IN HERE.
Well, I mean, not now. It’s night now. But we wandered around the house all day going LOOK AT THOSE COBWEBS! and LOOK AT THE DUST! It’ll grow up pretty fast, but I feel curiously naked.
The illustration is…meh. When I couldn’t get Grok to give me a picture of a moleman flinching away from a beam of bright light, I decided to ask it for a mole and then ask it for a man on all fours and then cut them together in Photoshop.
I don’t think I’ll try the experiment again. I would have been better off ordering my parts off Google Images.
That first prompt? The complicated one? To my surprise, it gave me that same four racially diverse headshots. I think Grok’s instructions are “when you can’t understand the prompt, give ’em the Burger King Kids’ Club.”
February 12, 2025 — 6:36 pm
Comments: 7
Rats, rats and more rats
Smithfield Market. There’s been a meat market on this spot for over 800 years. The current Smithfield Market – I mean the buildings – are lovely old Victorian spaces. Still selling meat and fish.
We watched a TV program about it once. It’s one of those businesses that work all night to be ready for trade in the morning. It’s a whole overnight ecosystem.
I read somewhere it was closing down after all this time, but there’s no hint of it on the website.
The London Museum has shut for a year in order to move to Smithfield, it looks like in the old poultry building. I couldn’t be bothered to look it up for sure.
In the course of renovating their new (old) building, workmen broke through a wall and discovered an 800-square-yard warren of Victorian tunnels. “The hidden space was rediscovered in 2019 during the early days of the £437m development project, when a building contractor broke through a wall to find a vast, rat-infested network of subterranean vaults.”
They kinda knew there were underground rooms, but they had no idea of the scale. It’s astonishing the things they’ve found walled off in London.
We went to the London Museum once, years ago, in the old building. Outside on a bench, we found a purse and called the police to collect it. The police opened it up and found the woman’s information and a pair of false teeth.
How do you leave your teeth on a park bench?
February 11, 2025 — 6:30 pm
Comments: 5
Didn’t anybody say it out loud first?
I bought a packet of styluses so I can operate my new touch screen computer without getting weasel grease all over the glass. In case you can’t make it out, the brand name is iSOUL.
That’s like, I always refused to join the Graphic Artists’ Guild. If they couldn’t be bothered to visualize the acronym, they couldn’t be very good graphic artists, could they?
February 10, 2025 — 7:29 pm
Comments: 5
Not bad, AI
I asked Grok to “make me an image of elon musk eating a pickle in comic book style” and this is what it gave me. Not bad at all.
Why the phrase “elon musk eating a pickle” popped into my head, I do not know. I’m kind of surprised Grok allowed it, in that it could easily be edited into something ruder.
I do know a whole lot of illustrators will be out of work.
Have a good weekend!
February 7, 2025 — 7:16 pm
Comments: 20