Really, REALLY unfortunate wedding announcements
Or, When NOT to Hyphenate Your Name. What’s my favorite? Best Lay? Wang Holder? Weener Whipple? Peters Rising? No, I can’t choose. Go see them all for yourself.
Speaking of names, I am inevitably going to have to become Mrs Uncle Badger or they won’t let me stay across the pond or get access to the wonderful National Health Service. I am, of course, proud and delighted to wear a family name associated with thousands of years of smelly, lice-ridden, bad tempered mustelids who live down holes and eat worms, but this does present me with a problem.
See, in the UK, a woman typically exchanges her husband’s last name for her own, keeping her same old given first and middle name. In the US, she takes his last name, drops her middle name and her own last name shifts over and becomes her new middle name. So I have a choice here.
To complicate matters, I have TWO middle names, and they’re corkers. My mama approached baby names and dog names in a similar spirit of mad hijinks and good clean fun. If I’d been born ten years later, in her commune days, I’m convinced I would have ended up Lemondrop Polythene Snickerdoodle Weasel. As it is, I got a melange of cornpone polysyllabic family names, something very like Stoaty Terwilliger Rothschild Weasel.
So do I follow the Brit tradition — Stoaty Terwilliger Rothschild Badger — and continue to sound like something that wandered boozily out of a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon to piss down your leg? Or do I go with the alternate, Stoaty Weasel Badger, and sound all classy and shit, like some kind of a fucking duchess already? (Don’t even suggest hyphenating the two. Stoaty don’t play that. I think that’s getting married with your fingers crossed behind your back).
I know y’all are going to be disappointed in me, but I’m leaning toward “duchess.” I’ve enjoyed my stupid name very much, but enough’s enough. I think I’ll play grownup for a while. I’m sick of being unable to fill out forms (try fitting “Terwilliger Rothschild” in the little space they leave for middle names) and having to spell it out for people.
But, man, would I ever love to be Crystal Butts McCracken.
September 20, 2007 — 8:20 am
Comments: 26
Shiver me timbers! It’s Talk Like a Pirate Day!
Ahoy, landlubbers! Sure an’ it be Talk Like a Pirate Day again. Sneaks up on on a weasel every year! Them Limey knaves be doin’ it, too! Yarrr!
So talk like a pirate this day, ye scurvy dogs, or ye’ll be walkin’ the plank!
Or, you know, be doin’ it for a while and then be quittin’. Because if I have to listen to it all day long, it’s really going to get on my tits after a while, you know?
September 19, 2007 — 9:03 am
Comments: 24
“If I’m still alive tomorrow morning, we’ll eat my balls.”
Remember Armin Meiwes, the “Cannibal of Rotenburg”? No? He’s the German computer technician who advertised on the internet for a willing human sacrifice and found kindred spirit Bernd Brandes, another computer geek, in 2002.
Manfred Risse, the forensic scientist called in to identify the various neatly-packaged frozen parcels of meat in Meiwes’ freezer, has just written a book about it — “Last Supper of the Murderers,” due to go on sale in Germany September 20. No word yet on an English translation.
Risse (and the court) had to watch all four and a half hours of video of the death and subsequent butchery of Brandes, who actually gasped out that mind-twisty aspiration about his own balls while already horrifically (and fatally) injured.
Alas! He didn’t make it to breakfast. No balls-on-toast for you!
Germans. Foiled again by meticulous record-keeping.
— 6:19 am
Comments: 6
You know what’s enigmatic? How people can be such BONEHEADS
Augh! Some days I think the world exist to make a maniac outta me! So Deutche Welle does this little video feature about analzying Mona Lisa’s smile using computer programs designed to read human emotions. You know, in order to figure out what she was thinking while she was sitting for her portrait.
Hey, I can tell you what Mona Lisa was thinking. She was thinking, “Shit! That doesn’t look a thing like me! How much are we paying this old geezer?”
See, folks, Leonardo only knew how to draw one lady mouth, and you’re looking at it. Thirteen times. I went to the Artchive and grabbed every single smiling woman’s mouth drawn by LdV that I could find, and here they are.
As sure as the Simpsons are yellow…
September 18, 2007 — 1:22 pm
Comments: 18
Hieronymous Bosch Action Figures!
Cough. Right. Apologies. I didn’t mean to leave that ‘weasel in a farty prock’ thing hanging at the top of the page all day, sucking up attention. First thing this morning, I’m staring blearily at the Drudge Report and it suddenly comes back to me: I was handed a rush job last Friday that absolutely had to be done by Monday afternoon. So I’ve been doing that.
It involved faking up stupid marketing slogans on billboards, so my first stop was a Google images search for highway photos. Don’t ask me what the connection is, but these neato action figures turned up on some French site a few pages in. These things are almost as creepy as Pokémon. I find some of the strangest things through image searches.
When I tried to right click and save the images right off the browser, a dialogue box popped up that said “ATTENTION ! Tout contenu de ce site est soumis aux directives concernant let droits d’auteurs. Reproduction interdite.” This is français for “I’m a socialist Eurotard who doesn’t understand the first thing about marketing or I would realize spreading pictures
of my crap would probably help me sell it.”
So I did a screen capture.
I love Bosch. Ship of Fools and Death of a Miser are in the National Gallery in Washington and they were part of my regular tour, back when I hit the Smithsonian once a year. There really is something deeply spooky about his stuff.
A friend of mine tried to ruin Bosch for me by pointing out that these weren’t just fever dreams; all of these objects were specific religious symbols. Maybe. But, outside Breughel the Elder (who was a conscious imitator), nobody has ever painted anything REMOTELY like this stuff. So how universal could these symbols have been?
September 17, 2007 — 2:06 pm
Comments: 43
Ummm…I’ll explain later
But, yes, I’m a chick.
Or, more accurately, a broad.
Short version: I just didn’t want to deal with it. I’ve been around the innertubes a long, long time. I’ve posted with a recognizably feminine handle and I’ve posted as a generic and there’s a difference and I don’t like it. So I opted to go neutral when I took to commenting on blogs.
Apologies, minions. I release you, my pretties. Fly! Fly like the wind!
September 16, 2007 — 1:20 am
Comments: 76
Oh! Almost forgot Weekend Weasel
September 14, 2007 — 11:47 pm
Comments: 33
Happy belated birthday, Mad Jack
John ‘Mad Jack’ Fuller (1757 — 1834) was an impossibly rich, batshit crazy English squire from Brightling on the South coast. He preferred to be called “Honest John” — but that didn’t happen, for reasons that will shortly become obvious. He is famous for building a slew of follies — a tower, a pyramid, a greek temple, an obelisk and other assorted wonders — in improbable, not to say stupid, locations. Like mostly, out in the middle of sheep fields.
His motivations were reckoned to be everything from legacy building, to creating ‘jobs for the boys’ to settling bets. I’m guessing that batshit crazy thing was a factor, too.
But he also built a lighthouse, funded the local lifeboats and saved beautiful Bodiam Castle from demolition. So, you know, it was a good crazy.
We tried to visit all his follies in a day, one beautiful September day last year. Nearly managed it, too. We missed the Greek temple for sure (which was WAY off the road, and we couldn’t see an obvious place to park) and maybe one or two others. It was a fine adventure..
His actual birthday is in February, but next Saturday, Brightling is observing his 250th birthday. I’ll just miss it.
The Sussex Bell Ringing Association will go up against Brightling’s own bell ringers in a head to head contest of…umm…bell ringing. Plus, there will be a barrel organ and a drumming band. And dancing, liquor and barbecue.
And y’all wonder what the attraction is…
— 5:55 pm
Comments: 4
And what would their costumes look like?
Incidentally, that “Dingo baby mum says she’ll support McCanns” is the actual headline from the Daily Mail. British newspapers — even the very good ones — frequently describe people using that formula: <thing they’re famous for> + <appropriate noun>.
So British papers are full of characters like dingo baby mum, wrong kidney doctor, knife in forehead boy, spastic colon girl.
To an American, they sound like pointless and terrifying superheroes.
September 13, 2007 — 5:43 pm
Comments: 23
And now for something cheerful and stupid
Must…lighten up…top…page. Too…depressing. Ah, here we go. Daily Mail to the rescue. Here are some images from the Cloud Appreciation Society. For a nominal fee, you too can join the society like 9,613 of your fellow cloud starer-atters. They have a manifesto and certificates and buttons and everything.
Back to the Mail, here’s my favorite headline of the week: Dingo baby mum says she’ll support McCanns. Thanks, but…ummm…
There’s a cat at Downing Street again: meet Sybil (named after Sybil Fawlty). Her predecessor, Humphrey, was evicted during the Blair years. Rumors Cherie had him offed were so pervasive that she was forced to call a press conference and have herself photographed smiling and holding the beast. That didn’t stem the impression that she had him evicted (or worse), so Humphrey was periodically photographed in his secret London home standing on the day’s newspaper. He died last year, age 18.
Doofuses Wed. The Society for Creative Anachronism doesn’t have a branch in the UK, but chubby people everywhere seem inexorably drawn to period costume. I feel for the horses. Though at least these people had a real live castle to get married in.
Man shoots honkin’ big pig. Sad story, actually. He’s a farmer in Devon and he was raising a herd of wild boar. Animal rights activists destroyed his fence and set a hundred of them free (including many pregnant sows), so hunters are having to track them down and kill them. I fail to see how this is a victory for the animals.
Thank you, Mail. And now let us turn to the BBC, where Mighty Weasel Brings Beeb to its Knees. This article about Muslims fasting during Ramadan began with “Thirty-one-year-old Sumaya Amra is just one of the billions of Muslims who takes part in the holy month of Ramadan by fasting in daylight hours, each day for 30 days.” Oh, I don’t think so, Auntie. I left a comment (which didn’t get published), but it was corrected to “billion or so” not long after. I don’t for a moment think the original was an accident. Reminder: the BBC pulls this shit all the time, and you can track it at BBC-Biased.
September 12, 2007 — 11:09 am
Comments: 25