The week in review
I’m embarrassed to admit how long I stared at my blood pressure meds wondering why on earth the packet would say to take it NOW.
To recap:
There’s another headless bunny on the back doorstep. I’ve nearly stepped in it several times today.
Icecream is still not one word.
I’m pretty sure we have rooklets. I watched her for a long time this afternoon and she fidgeted. She once left the nest for a few minutes and then came back, probably feeding the little peckerheads (when she’s incubating, the father keeps her fed, Wikipedia tells me).
The chickens had another blissy day in the sun, though it all changes for the weekend, alas. Showers both days. (I hope it clears a little while at night; the Lyrid meteor showers peak this weekend).
And I have managed to skate through another week on the leanest of content. Story of my life, really. Good weekend, everyone!
April 21, 2023 — 7:03 pm
Comments: 11
The bunny beheader hisself
A picture Uncle B took this week of Fatcat in his favorite spot in the greenhouse.
For all the demands he places on his servants and for all his bold bunny hunting, he becomes 100% feral when a stranger appears. He skedaddles when we get a grocery delivery.
Which, pardon me, we have just gotten. I better go put the icecream away.
p.s. Hm. The wavy red line tells me icecream is not all one word. This displeases me.
April 18, 2023 — 7:33 pm
Comments: 11
Crunch
Today was about the fourth time Uncle B has opened to the backdoor to find a headless baby bunny on the doorstep. He thinks it’s a charming gesture of love from our great fat tomcat. An offering of breakfast.
Me, I think that boy just like to crunch up bunny heads.
p.s. yes, I’m crunching up the Lindt bunny head as I type.
April 17, 2023 — 6:08 pm
Comments: 6
Sea moncster
“Weird animal washed up on the beach” is another perennial local story, but this one is weird. It washed up on a Sussex beach – last year, if you read the article. Which is a pity; someone should have gotten a tissue sample.
I don’t know if those are nostrils or eyes toward the big end, but it’s got spines sticking out of the thin end and a couple of flippers – two different sizes – sticking out of the little bulge. No, the fish experts weren’t any help.
Perhaps it’s an alien.
No really. Have you seen that weird Tucker Carlson clip where he talks about UFOs coming up out of the sea? No idea what to make of that.
Have a good weekend!
April 14, 2023 — 6:30 pm
Comments: 6
Happy Good Friday!
I have today and Monday off, because England is an explicitly Christian country. Nominally.
To kick off the long weekend, we’re going to watch Dr Zhivago tonight. Wish me luck.
The image is Craiyon’s notion of “weasel watching television seen from behind”. I had to try this prompt twice. Each try yields nine images; most of them were real nightmare fodder.
I know the picture the AI pinched for this – it’s an image of a weasel licking its nose. The tongue has rather gotten away from the AI here and appears as a sort of white growth, but this was the most explicable and least disturbing of the eighteen pictures.
I’ve got to elbow my way into the MidJourney beta somehow.
April 7, 2023 — 5:19 pm
Comments: 4
Outdoor chocolate
The town was called Bunny, you see. It’s in Nottinghamshire.
So Nestlé snuck in in the middle of the night and renamed it Easter Bunny and built this ten-foot-tall chocolate rabbit. Yes, it’s all chocolate. Upwards of a hundred pounds of the stufff. The basket – also chocolate – has 698 treats in it, one for each person in the village.
The article describes it as a surprise to the village, but surely the mayor or someone was in on it. I feel like you have to have permission.
I mean, this is a nice story and all, but something about outdoor chocolate bothers me. I mean, won’t it…melt or get stuff stuck in it or the seagulls and rats and vandals will eat it and shit all over everything. It seems big unsanitary.
Oh, well. Bunny gets a park bench out of it – not made from chocolate.
March 28, 2023 — 6:35 pm
Comments: 5
It’s the Equinox, y’all!
Hoo boy, that illustration does not work in black and white at all. I stole it from this article. From the article:
The equinox happens at the same moment worldwide, although our clock times reflect a different time zone…Interestingly, due to time zone differences, there isn’t a March 21 equinox in mainland U.S. during the entire 21st century! We won’t see a March 21 equinox again until 2101.
I’m going to post that paragraph just as if I understood it.
It well and truly felt like Spring over the weekend, but we’re back to damp and miserable today and for the foreseeable.
Changing the subject, I enjoyed this video: man demonstrates the ten types of magic. This guy is a brilliant stop-motion animator, so that’s probably a clue. If you want to know how he did #10, it’s not the obvious. I watched it a bajillion times to work it out.
If you don’t feel like watching it a bajillion times, I’ll spoil it in the comments.
March 20, 2023 — 7:25 pm
Comments: 10
Happy St Patrick’s Day!
I didn’t think I had any Irish forebears at all, but during my free two weeks of Ancestry.com I did discover some of my people left from Irish ports. Who knows?
Also, I didn’t find any evidence my mother’s mother was French, as per legend, except for the French-sounding last name. I traced her line all the way back to a Texas home for imbeciles and decided that was enough genealogy for me.
Have a good weekend!
March 17, 2023 — 6:55 pm
Comments: 5
Paging Dr Pepper
Huh. I didn’t know New Scientist came up with the term. They certainly didn’t come up with the concept. I read a whole book about it, years before 1994. The author phoned people up whose names lined up with their professions.
Some people were like, “how dare you, sir! I chose my profession for the most serious of grownup reasons!” And some were like, “why yes, being born Lester Buttpeep did influence my decision to become a proctologist.”
My favorite personal example was the kitten I rescued on 6/6/06. Naturally, I named him Damian. The vet was like “lady, are you sure you want to do that?”
I’m confident Damian would have grown up to be a hellcat even if I named him Princess Pinkie Fluffybunny, but he was every inch a Damian.
Today, I ran across a real corker of an example in, of all places, New Scientist:
A few months ago, Dr Organ – Dr Jason Organ – was named the new editor-in-chief of the journal Anatomical Sciences Education. This added flesh to the nominative determinism tradition that is occasionally evident in body-parts-centric medical journals, starting (as far as Feedback is aware) with the publication Brain. Henry Head and Russell Brain were each its editor, at different times, Head from 1905 to 1923, Brain from 1954 to 1967.
Those heads of Brain achieved a sort of medico-literary ecstasy in the December 1961 issue of Brain. Readers could savour an article there titled “Henry Head: The man and his ideas”, authored by Russell Brain. It was Brain head Brain on Brain head Head, in Brain.
I almost had to draw a sentence diagram.
March 16, 2023 — 6:50 pm
Comments: 12
Trap streets, easter eggs and Mountweazels
Speaking of maps without copyright, when I were a young corporate art drudge, it was beaten into me that I must never, ever steal art. Not for any moral principle, you understand, but because I worked for a big company with a lot of money and my boss would nail my ass to the wall if I got sued for copyright infringement.
To this day, I experience whole-body cringe when someone hands me a book and says, “here, you can use this picture.” Which has happened to me, I swear, hundreds of times.
Maps were always a particular problem, because we always needed good maps and who the hell can develop a map from scratch? Oh, the lengths I went to to steal maps without stealing maps.
I was schooled in the fear of trap streets. They’re fake roads put on maps so the copyright holder can spot when someone has traced their map. Here’s an article about trap streets in London. I pinched the picture at the top from that article, because I thought that would be meta.
Sometimes, the solution would be to put trap streets and easter eggs into a bit of traced topography. Or remove bits. Or stretch or shrink it along an axis. The point being, when one bit of art is overlaid on another, they shouldn’t match.
I have written about trap streets before. See also Mountweazel.
March 15, 2023 — 8:03 pm
Comments: 1